FYW 1150 – Sugar and Spice

• By considering the networks that connect Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, this seminar traces the history of the globalization/localization of food, which students will study and write about through a series of guided writing assignments, peer critiques, and individual writing consultations.

FYW 1316 – Evolutionary Anthropology: Facts, Fantasy, Frauds 

• Students will develop critical thinking and argumentative writing skills through the lens of Evolutionary Anthropology by examining topics such as the history of evolution in the United States, famous forgeries and hoaxes, and even bigfoot.

FYW 1324 – Ghosts of Greenville

• Students will investigate how the ghosts of our pasts linger into our present by studying and practicing writing and research principles through the lens of ghost stories, specifically those highlighting ghosts and haunted locations in Greenville, SC. 

FYW 1167 – American Disaster Literature

• An introduction to college writing that focuses on disaster literature as a means to improve students’ interpretive, analytical, and argumentative writing skills.

FYW 1267 – Fairy Tales and Childhood

• In this course, students will critically examine fairy tales and the broader categories of folklore and children’s literature as ongoing cultural processes.

FYW 1111 – Haunted Mansions

• This course explores how Gothic conventions, as they appear in novels, short stories, and films, help authors to reflect on and reveal truths about the American experience.

FYW 1143 – Shakespeare in His Contexts

• Students will study and write about a particular group of ideas or topics relevant to Shakespeare’s plays or poems in order to develop interpretive, analytical, and argumentative writing skills appropriate for college-level work.  

FYW 1294 – America Through Baseball

• Studying American history through the lens of baseball, students will critically analyze historical figures and key events in the game and complete a research project on a topic related to baseball and issues such as media, globalism, race, and economics.

FYW 1322 – From Frankenstein to WandaVision

• Students will explore what it means to be human and what constitutes effective writing by engaging with a text-set anchored in literary or pop culture versions of the Frankenstein myth, covering dramatizations of reanimating humans, cyborgs and androids, and artificial intelligence.

FYW 1311 – Game On! Tabletop Play and Contemporary Culture

• Exploring tabletop games—board and card games, role-playing games, and others—serves as the ground for intellectual curiosity and engagement on which students will build a solid foundation of academic writing.

FYW 1227 – Quest for Meanings and Values through Theatre

• This course examines musicals, stage plays, and works of performance art that challenge core beliefs while driving social change within their communities.

FYW 1234 – Bird by Bird

• In this seminar, we read and discuss how our ideas about birds reflect changing ideas about nature and society.

FYW 1331-01 – Making Meaning at the Crossroads of Writing & Walking

• This seminar develops student writing skills using walking as an interdisciplinary lens intersecting literature, health, philosophy, and culture.

FYW 1202 – Medieval Forests in Literature and Law

• Engage contemporary ecological criticism to discover how historical representations of “wilderness” in English and French Arthurian romances, Robin Hood ballads, hunting treatises, and forest law can deepen our understanding of today’s environmental debates.

FYW 1148 – Southern Women: Black and White

• Through describing the culturally defined image of Southern women, tracing the effect of this definition on female behavior, defining how the realities of Southern women’s lives were often at odds with the ideal, and examining the struggle of black and white women to confront racism and cultural expectations and to find a way to achieve self-determination, this seminar will explore the experiences of Southern Women from 1800 to the present through the literature written by and about them.

FYW 1286 – Spanish in the United States

• Students will consider key notions of multilingualism, multiculturalism, and language ideologies as they relate to Spanish speakers in the United States. 

FYW 1127 – To Walk the Land

• We will examine connections between humans, community, culture, and the natural world, including through readings and by crafting our own observations and interpretations on walks and hikes in the upstate.

FYW 1329 – Choiceology: The Rational and Sometimes Irrational Ways We Make Decisions

• In this seminar, we will break down the human decision-making process and discuss how our approaches can be influenced by limited or biased access to information, while relating the process of writing to that of making decisions.

FYW 1137 – Freedom or Oppression: Human Rights in Asia

• Using the UN Declaration of Rights for Children as a backdrop, this course examines the interrelationships between biological, ecological, social, economic, political, and legal factors that influence the Human Rights of children in Asia.

FYW 1327 – Health Headlines

• In this writing course, students will analyze health news and media stories by comparing them to research articles to assess reporting accuracy and its health impact. 

FYW 1274 – Management Literacy

• This seminar examines the key issues associated with management literacy, with illustrations drawn from situations that confront today’s managers and leaders in their professions and everyday lives.

FYW 1156 – Who Speaks Bad English?: Language and Ideology

• Is “ain’t” a word? Are people who speak with Southern accents “uneducated” or people who speak with Northern accents “rude”? Students will be introduced to basic linguistics and use their knowledge to discuss issues from language identity to educational policy.

FYW 1280 – A Funny Business: Humor and Politics

• This course is about the intersection of politics and humor—what makes politics funny, how that may vary depending on the audience or messenger, the purposes humor serves in political communication, the forms it takes, and its effects.

FYW 1141 – Homer and History

• Follow the history of Homer’s great war-poem the Iliad from the Bronze Age and the invention of writing, through the tyranny and democracy of Athens, the library of Alexandria, to its rescue from the ruins of Constantinople in the 1400s.

FYW 1320 – Leadership, Leaders, and Writing

• This course examines the goals and actions of a diverse set of leaders in government, businesses, and non-profits and the ways communication strategies and practices help advance their causes. 

FYW 1180 – C.S. Lewis

• An introduction to college writing that explores the life, work, and theology of C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. 

FYW 1221 – God and Justice

• This course will explore the complicated relationship of religion and politics in a democratic context, including religious approaches to political activism and how such activism affects American public policy.

FYW 1245 – The Parables of Jesus

• Learning writing through a study of the parables of Jesus, canonical and non-canonical, through the lenses of social theory, folktale, and theological studies.

FYW 1300 – Politics and the Good Life

• In this seminar, students will examine basic questions of human life and political philosophy–What is happiness? What is good citizenship? Are the two compatible?– and will study the practice of college-level writing using an approach derived from classical rhetoric. 

FYW 1195 – Psychic Disorder and the Social Order

• By reading fiction in dialogue with both contemporary scientific accounts of mental function and its broader cultural context and by connecting modern health debates to their historical origins students examine the tension between freedom and restraint that characterizes debates about psychic disorder.

FYW 1282 – This is Your Brain on Drugs

• An introduction to college writing that focuses on the neurobiology of addiction and the stigmatization of addiction.