Academics

Academic Resources

First Year Writing Seminars

Our First Year Writing Seminars (FYWS) engage entering students in an intense examination of a topic. First Year Writing Seminars are required for every student enrolled in the College of Arts and Science. (Students in the other three undergraduate schools may enroll on a space-available basis, after consulting with their faculty adviser.) The small groups of 10 to 15 students in each seminar foster spirited exchanges with professors and set the tone for the participatory learning style that characterizes a Vanderbilt education. Seminars also focus on writing in the subject area or discipline.

» View a current list of First Year Writing Seminars.

Examples of recent First Year Writing Seminars include:

  • Neither Jezebel, Mammy, nor Sapphire: African American Women, 1691-1991
  • Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Reflections of Vision in Art
  • Biotechnology and the New GenEthics
  • New York, New York: Film and Literature
  • Spectacle in the Ancient World: Theatre and Sports
  • Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
  • The Arab-Israeli Conflict
  • Like Nowhere on Earth: Utopian Fictions
  • Science, Voodoo Science, and Democracy
  • Red v. Blue America: Perspectives on the “Culture Wars” in Recent American History
  • The Artificial Body: Alternative Representations of the Human in German Film and Fiction
  • Social History of American Medicine
  • Law, Literature, and Social Change
  • Radical Jews, from Karl Marx to Noam Chomsky
  • Bogus Science
  • The Examined Life
  • Treasure or Trash: Examining Theatrical Credibility
  • Mathematical Truth
  • Ethics of Life and Death
  • Music, Self, and Society
  • The Physics of Art and the Art of Physics: How Disparate Subjects are Profoundly Entangled
  • Courts in the Modern Age
  • Technology, Media, Culture, and Society
  • Womb to Tomb: The Life Course
  • The Border Identities