Instructor: Patricia Tarantello

Why are people so drawn to stories about ghosts, haunted houses, and supernatural beings? What do horror stories reveal about human nature, psychology, and morality? What taboo or controversial topics do Gothic writers explore through their chilling works? In this class, we will set out to answer these questions as we read, discuss, and do research about nineteenth-century American Gothic literature. In addition to learning about the conventions of the genre, we will examine the social and historical issues that writers used their dark, mysterious tales to expose and critique. We will read works by authors such as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Our analyses will touch upon race, gender, class, and religion as well as themes such as marginalization, imagination, and social injustice. Additionally, we’ll make connections between classic Gothic works and popular works today. We’ll also devise creative ways to introduce older Gothic texts to new audiences
 

Instructor: Safa Al-Saeedi

In this First Year Seminar course, we will learn about the ways in which media and politics intersect. We will examine how media platforms impact regimes’ ability to influence society and societies’ ability to articulate preferences, organize political action, and diffuse information. In so doing, discussions will explore different democratic and authoritarian contexts around the world. Part of the course will also engage with timely questions related to AI and its potential effects on the aforementioned regime-society dynamics.

By the end of the seminar, students will have a grounding in the key concepts in the political communication area of study. Students will also have the basic theoretical and empirical tools that enable them to engage critically with academic and journalistic conversations on technology and politics. Class assignments and discussions are designed to ensure that these learning objectives are achieved.

Instructor: Jessica Boscarino

There are many strands within the environmental movement, and even more opinions about who and what counts as an environmentalist. In this course, we will investigate the ways that this social movement is depicted in various media, by both outsiders and environmental activists themselves. Using literature, personal memoirs, journalism, and film, we will look at the history of the environmental movement and contemporary portrayals in popular culture (both supportive and skeptical). As we do so, we will consider how environmentalism relates to gender, class and race, and how it has evolved over time. Ultimately, we will reflect on ways these portrayals might affect citizen attitudes toward environmental issues, and the actions we take (or don’t take) to protect the natural world.
 

Instructor: Darren Cosgrove

In this course students will explore issues related to social inequity in the United States, and the ways in which groups of people have experienced marginalization and oppression within both a historical and contemporary context. As a class, we will utilize theoretical frameworks to understand the ways in which social, political and health disparities can be linked to systemic and structural oppression based upon race, gender, sexuality, class and ability. We will also learn about and discuss anti-oppressive social justice movements and consider the current and future implications of social justice work.
 

Instructor: Jeffrey Cannino

This section of FYS will explore topics and tales of the paranormal and supernatural. In reading, researching, and writing about subjects and stories that fall outside of scientific explanations of the natural world, students will be presented with the opportunity to encounter discourse communities outside of mainstream academia, evaluate questionable evidence, and determine the historical and cultural significance of our belief in things that go bump in the night. The first half of the semester will be dedicated to examining accounts, folktales, and critical histories of ghosts and hauntings throughout American culture (with a particular emphasis on New York and the Hudson Valley) and will culminate in projects that asks students to learn about and analyze local legends. The second half of the semester will find students engaged in a multi-part project that will allow them to research a paranormal or supernatural subject of their choice (Bigfoot and other cryptids, UFOs, ESP and psychic abilities, witchcraft, etc.)

Instructor: Joseph Campisi

In recent years, philosophers have focused a lot of attention on ethical questions regarding the food we eat. Is it ethical to eat animals? Is it ethical to genetically modify food? What obligations, if any, do we have to people who are starving? Do people have a right to things like water? Etc.

Apart from these kinds of ethical questions, however, there are other philosophical questions raised about food. These include aesthetic questions regarding judgments about what is delicious or “good” food and how such judgments can be justified. For example, when we say that this wine or cheese is “better” than that wine or cheese, is that claim valid in any universal sense or does it simply reflect one’s personal opinion? There are also metaphysical questions that philosophers ask about food. What is the meaning or significance of food in our lives? Is the purpose of food simply to meet our nutritional needs or does food have a contribution to make to how we understand ourselves as individuals and/or members of a culture?

It is these types of questions that we will be exploring during the course of this seminar. In asking these kinds of philosophical questions about food we will also inevitably touch upon other disciplines including science, history, anthropology, sociology, art and literature.
 

Instructor: Stephanie Conover

Since the birth of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, the relationship between fashion and popular music has been a culturally significant one. This course will explore the ways in which the constant intertwining of fashion and rock ‘n’ roll has shaped attitudes, taste, and consumption as well as the identity of the youth of the past seven decades. Looking at a variety of media including music, magazines, and videos, we will study this unique and exciting relationship while engaging critical college-level skills such as information literacy, research, public presentation, and writing.

Instructor: Malcolm Jones

While classical music is often stereotyped as a form of music that “only old people enjoy,” the music of composers like Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms is played every season in most major orchestra programs. If classical music is only popular with a limited audience, then why does it continue to be played so frequently throughout concert halls. This FYS will consider the place of classical music in today’s society. In addition to considering the style of music itself, the class will think about the contexts in which it is played, examining things like stage setups, orchestra attire, and audience attire. Ultimately, we will explore how orchestras have (or have not) adapted over time to consider changing musical interests, the impact of social media, the influence of the COVID pandemic, and more for modern audiences.
 

Instructor: Richard Feldman

In the course text Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer eloquently describes multiple strands of relationships that we can have with nature, creating tight bonds like in a braid. She also describes where and how the strands have frayed and how the symmetrical, reciprocal relationships between us and nature have weakened.

What does your braid look like? How do you connect with other species, to non-human life? How do your interests & activities influence how you perceive, use and safe-guard nature? We will explore various ways that people – including you - relate to the living and non-living natural world. We will delve into some essential knowledge about the natural world (the "Scientific Knowledge" part of her subtitle), becoming better informed on how to be responsible partners with our fellow species, to be stewards of life on earth. This will include observing species in Marist’s Fern Tor Nature Preserve, where you may also experience "the Teachings of Plants".

Through her story-telling and descriptions of what North American native peoples know, we gain appreciation for "Indigenous Wisdom". This opens a door for considering how different religions and belief systems relate to the natural world and address humanity’s responsibilities to it. Such consideration will broaden our learning and appreciation of many belief systems.
 

Instructor: Moira Fitzgibbons

In this FYS, you will develop your skills as a researcher, speaker, and writer by reading great comics and thinking about how mental and physical experiences are represented within them. Along the way, we will engage with scholarship in a variety of fields, including disability studies, comics history, and visual rhetoric.

Throughout the semester you will have the chance to work with the Cannavino Library's impressive and ever-growing collection of comics. As the semester progresses, you and your classmates will choose the comics we read as a class and will organize and moderate our class discussions of them. It will be great to see where your interests take us!
 

Instructor: Brian Loh

This religious studies and philosophy course is an exploration of the way in which our minds shape the realities in which we live, love, and pursue happiness. After examining why our knowledge of reality might not be reliable or complete, we will explore the ways in which personal and social imagination fill in the gaps in our knowledge. This is sometimes to our benefit and sometimes to our detriment, so we will also examine how to choose our lenses of perception so that we can steer our lives towards coherence, meaning, and flourishing. In this process, we may explore several types of games, parasocial relationships, fandom “head canon,” religious realities, the nature of empathy, the self, and our concepts of sameness and difference. Students in this class will be invited to participate in varied forms of experiential learning, including games and N4 storytelling.

Instructor: Nick Lu

This course uses anime as a medium to introduce students to some of the distinguishing values, phenomenon, and social dynamics in East Asian societies, particularly Japan and Taiwan. The anime shows and films we will use as entry points for discussion include Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Dan Da Dan, Chainsaw Man, Bakuman, and Evangelion. With these works, we will explore issues like economic miracles (and busts), human-nature relation, gender relation, social mores, (over)work culture, and the meaning of monsters and ghosts in East Asian cultures. Students can choose to work on a final project that is creative (making your own short anime), translation (making your own dubbing), or analytic (writing a theme-based analysis).
 

Instructor: Patrick Boylan

The intersection of faith and fashion reveals much about religion and society and how we tell our faith stories. This course aims to explore the function and ritual of apparel in faith practices while examining the influence of religion and spirituality on fashion and its cultural impact. Starting with the fig leaf in the Garden of Eden, students will trace the origins of fashion through the lens of religion. We will study how iconic designers and brands have both celebrated and misappropriated faith through fashion and how sacred garments and symbols have been used to promote propaganda and persecution throughout history. By exploring how fashion can be both sacred and profane, students will gain a greater understanding of the power of faith and fashion.
 

Instructor: Gregory Machacek

This class will consider the three listed modes of understanding selfhood (individualism, character, identity) by exploring three different periods of the Anglophone literary tradition. Our representative of “Renaissance Individualism” will be the seventeenth-century poet John Donne. We will explore “character” as understood by the Victorian novelist George Eliot. “Identity” will be presented in the essays of Emmanuel Acho. How does each of these authors conceive the self? Are the concepts complementary or incompatible? What does each, or what do they together, help us to understand about our selfhood?
 

Instructor: Nicholas Marshall

How do we understand ourselves and our place in the world? This course will look at the relationship between personal events/attitudes and the larger forces of culture and history that shape an individual's understanding of their experience. Americans have described themselves in many ways, through letters, diaries, journals, films, images, and formal autobiographies. The cast of characters for this class will include the famous and the ordinary, and stretch from the colonial period to the near present.
 

Instructor: Stephen Mercier

We will consider how a wide range of animals are represented in non-fiction essays, fictional short stories, fairy tales, films, and art. How do these forms of media shape our conceptions of animals? What cultural values are present as we engage with animals as pets (sometimes “exotic”), recreation (horse riding and goat yoga), and entertainment (aquariums and zoos)? How do humans utilize them for experimentation (rabbits and space monkeys), fashion (silkworms), and for food (factory farms)? How do we develop meaningful inter-species relationships? What are we learning about animal communication, such as chimpanzees’ vocalizations and birds’ and whales’ songs? What species demonstrate special intelligence in their behaviors on National Geographic and Disney Nature? What does the public glean about animals from famous figures, such as David Attenborough and Jane Goodall? How do elephants experience and display emotions? Why do more “beautiful” animals such as giant and red pandas become more cherished than the cephalopod vampire squid? What animals’ furs, feathers, and oil have we historically depended upon to supply the United States’ economy? Thus, the course will also confront animal rights and liberation. The texts we will analyze directly consider the relationship between human beings and animals over diverse habitats and places. In this skills-based class, you will perform research, give speeches, and construct essays based upon course materials and your classmates’ presentations.

Instructor: Fungisai Musoni

For some people, Africa is a country. For others, it is a country filled with poverty, diseases, warfare, and corruption. Some who identify Africa as a continent, including Welsh journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, have named it the “Dark Continent.” This FYS aims to disrupt these misconceptions, demonstrate what the continent is about, and highlight the dangers emanating from these misconceptions for Africans and non-Africans. We will watch films/documentaries and read readings (fictional and non-fictional) showing that (1) Africa has 54 countries with over 1.4 billion people who speak over 2,000 languages, and (2) the continent does not have a single narrative of pain. Ultimately, students who take this class will be challenged to engage with the African continent in a way that makes them emphatic citizens of the world in the twenty-first century.
 

Instructor: Cathleen Muller

We all have families – adoptive, biological, or chosen – and many consider having families in the future. Though we don’t always consider them, families raise many philosophical questions, which we will explore in this class. Through reading and discussion, along with your own research, this course will challenge and enrich your thoughts about parenthood and family. We will also focus on the development of skills that will be vital to your college career and beyond: writing, public presentation, and information literacy.
 

Instructor: Lisa Neilson

This seminar will focus on the recurring motif of madness and mental illness in literature, film, television and society in general, and address the question of how madness challenges traditional assumptions regarding individual identity. Through an interdisciplinary approach, we will explore the nature of the human mind and cultural representations of madness in a variety of contexts. Students in this course will consider how madness is a very ordinary human possibility which can be creative and/or destructive, which can be a breakdown and/or a breakthrough. We will examine the significant presence of madness in the stories we read and question how central madness is to human life.
 

Instructor: Malgorzata Oakes

In this creative course, students will analyze the artistic and historical context of the architecture and the landscape of Marist University along with its surroundings. Students will explore the cultural aspects of the Hudson Valley area, focusing on its past and the present. From recognizing and honoring the Indigenous people, their land, culture, and traditions, to spending time in different campus locations surrounded by nature that both inspire and impact the creativity of young individuals. Space for learning and engagement will create a welcoming atmosphere in the classroom (indoors and outdoors, within the campus grounds and the riverside area).

Throughout the course students will take part in lectures, discussions, presentations, perform their research, and attend field trips. They will draw on location at sites of historical significance and visual interest. Visits to the on-site Marist Archives and the library will take place. Writing components will be part of the course, in addition to the formal analysis assignments. Students will develop individual sketchbooks with the aim of interactive hands-on activities that challenge and engage in the cultural environment which will contribute to personal enrichment and growth.
 

Instructor: Jacqueline Reich

What is a star? What is a celebrity? We may not know how to define them exactly, but we can agree that we live in a world dominated by stars and celebrities, from media to fashion, to politics and beyond. In this course we will learn how stardom and celebrity developed, shaped, and altered American and Global culture from an interdisciplinary perspective. We will explore these issues through case studies of various stars and celebrities in cinema, television, digital media, and more. Our objects of analysis will range from films (fiction and documentary), TV series, social media, and critical essays to examine the role of stardom and celebrity today.

Instructor: Elizabeth Reid

Though we don't necessarily realize it, mathematics is all around us. We are constantly using math and logic when we watch the news, while we relax enjoying movies and TV shows, and even when we're hanging out with our friends for a game night. In this class we're going to discuss the analytical skills needed to navigate through everyday life and see how they can contribute to our knowledge of the world around us.

If you want to understand the pros and cons of different voting systems, watch and analyze math-related video clips from popular movies and TV shows, and consider optimal strategies in games, then this is the course for you.
 

Instructor: Robyn Rosen

In this course we will examine fiction as a tool for social reform and as a lens to understand conflict, marginalization, and activism in U.S. history. Specifically, we will be reading ‘speculative fiction’ written from the 20th century through the present, in which authors imagine and build worlds different from their own. While some writers imagine worlds where problems have been solved (utopian fiction) others offer cautionary tales about what might happen if current trends spin out of control (dystopian or apocalyptic fiction). We will consider the propaganda value of stories and connect their vision to actual events, people, and ideas at the time of their publication, moving chronologically through the most important social movements in our nation’s history, from women’s suffrage through Black Lives Matter.

Instructor: James Snyder

Over the course of our lives, many of us persistently ask ourselves questions about meaning, purpose, and the good life. What is happiness? What is the best possible life for me, and how do I go about achieving it? How am I to make sense of setbacks and challenges I will face throughout my life? This seminar will investigate a range of answers to these questions, drawing upon diverse philosophical frameworks and religious traditions. We will read and engage with texts from antiquity to today, and first-year students will explore these questions and answer them for themselves.  
 

Instructor: Joanna D’Avanzo

In this First Year Seminar course, we will read, discuss, and do research about creativity. Creativity is a fundamental skill for success in today’s rapidly evolving world. Traditionally, creativity has been seen as an innate trait, but we will challenge this notion by exploring how creativity can be nurtured and developed. You will learn to expand your creative potential through readings from various authors and engaging activities. We will explore the definition and importance of creativity in the 21st century, investigating its origins and the various factors that influence it. Techniques for enhancing creative thinking skills are introduced, along with strategies for overcoming barriers to creativity. Students will gain valuable insights into their creative abilities and develop strategies to unlock their creative potential. This course offers students the opportunity for self-discovery, as students embark on a journey to expand their creative capacities and apply them to academic and personal pursuits.
 

Instructor: Kimery Levering

How does a bat "see"? What does the world feel like through a dolphin's sonar or a bee’s ultraviolet vision? In this seminar, we explore perception in ourselves and other animals as a window into cognition, consciousness, and the limits of human understanding. Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, ethology, and philosophy of mind, we’ll investigate the strange and stunning ways that other creatures experience their world—and ask what that means for how we see our own.
 

Instructor: Goretti Benca

Why have fairytales maintained popular literary and cultural status over the centuries? How do these seemingly simple stories transcend time, geography, and culture? There are so many tales that continue to be a part of our social tapestry that influence our social constructs. Young and old, fairytales continue to be a favorite genre around the world. This class will explore the tales from a historical perspective as we trace the cultural evolution of this literary genre. 
 

Instructor: Melissa Chodziutko

Everything is technology, and everything we deal with uses technology at its core. But how does that technology impact us and society? How does society impact tech? How do we impact tech? How does tech serve us? How does tech hurt us? We'll be taking an unbiased (but enthusiastic!) view on the way we humans interact with this marvel of nature! We'll study how societies across the globe feel about/use technology while also studying our own laws, feelings, and impact on tech. 
 

Instructor: Mark Gildard

This course will explore the intersections of human anatomy with the arts, wellness, and culture. Anatomy has long served as an underpinning of societal progress, reaching new heights during the renaissance as great artists like Da Vinci and Michaelangelo dedicated years trying to gain a deeper understanding of the human form. Modern science continues to make new discoveries regarding the centuries-old study of the human body in an effort to advance our lives and well-being. Students in this class will discover how anatomical knowledge shapes contemporary perspectives on health, creativity, and social frameworks through research, writing, and creative work.