FSEM Courses

Frank Sinatra was a dominant figure in American culture for much of the twentieth century, embroiled in everything from music and film to politics and the mafia. He was an embodiment of American complexities, and he is worth talking about.

This seminar seeks to familiarize students with the study of literature and environment—Ecocriticism, or ecological literary criticism—and the idea that the study of literature can lead to environmental, as well as cultural, awareness.

This course will explore how an intensive immersion experience with cinematic and literary representations of autism might serve as a test case for how the neurodiversity perspective may not only help increase our awareness of popular attitudes toward disability but also even lead to acceptance and appreciation of autism as a natural form of human variation and difference.

  This section of FSEM is designated as an honors course and satisfies the requirements for students enrolled in the University Honors Program. This Honors first-year seminar will explore how southern literature of the twentieth and twenty-first c …

In this FSEM, we will examine the major directors and films of this movement, as well as the the themes and social issues that animate these works. We will explore how these films revolutionized film production, form, and the portrayal of political and social changes.

In this course, we will explore the life and work of James Farmer, an exemplary leader of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement who taught at Mary Washington during the 1990s. We will investigate the history of the concept of race and its impact on how we perceive ourselves and the world.

Are the 2,711 monumental concrete steles of the recently opened Holocaust Memorial in Berlin an appropriate way to remember the victims? This seminar will investigate the particular strengths and limits of a wide range of texts and images, facts and fictions, that each in its own way claims to represent some “truth” of the Holocaust.

In this FSEM we will explore the impact of environmental art through the perspective of art history and cultural history, and we will work with a local green space to create works that will be gifted to the organization.

This FSEM is an exploration of the modern history of human rights, humanitarianism, and war crimes, conducted through the examination of several cases of mass violence, some of which have come to be labeled “genocide.”

The origins of the Grail Legend are buried too deeply in our mythographic history to be clearly established. Students will examine how the Grail Legend takes on a life of its own in the literary history of Europe, and they will develop an independent project that reflects solid methodology appropriate to their topic.