First Year Seminar 2026

2026–27 Theme

“The Republic Revisited”

The current moment presents a historical juncture in which assumptions about government and public life, in the United States and beyond, are being challenged in renewed and disconcerting ways. Economic and political stability, once regarded as the dividend of the ending of the Cold War, can no longer be taken for granted even in the so-called mature liberal democracies of the North Atlantic region. Faith in democracy as a form of government, and in free speech, cosmopolitanism, and a separation of religion and politics as supporting pillars of such a government, are in decline. International challenges, associated with climate change and global public health, press a world system built upon independent nation-states. Against such a backdrop, students across the world are confronted with an urgent need to re-examine, articulate, and perhaps rejuvenate what it means to live together in a shared society.

This incarnation of First-Year Seminar explores the challenges that arise from membership of a democratic community, the obligations and possibilities of citizenship, and the very notion of a collective society. Students read important works from across history drawn from literature, philosophy, political theory, science, and the arts that have shaped how people think about citizenship and civic membership across time and space. In the process, students develop the core skills needed to succeed at Bard, from engaging in active, critical reading and conversation to writing original, thought-provoking, and persuasive essays. The fall semester takes Plato’s Republic as an anchoring text to focus on the idea of the Republic as a commitment to organizing society and political life as a shared endeavor. The spring semester will build from the constitutional documents of the United States and elsewhere to address the obligations and possibilities that arise for individuals as a consequence of membership of such a community. Authors including Aeschylus, Plato, Burke, Douglass, Wollstonecraft, Locke, Hobbes, Liang, Ellison, and Rousseau, as well as challenges to existing constitutional orders, such as those offered by the Suffragists, Native American groups, and others, will aid our thinking.

See the Required Texts for 2026–27 →

Photo by Chris Kayden

What is First-Year Seminar?

Acquiring a shared basis for conversation.

First-Year Seminar is a two-semester course taken by all first-years. Its goal is to create a basis for shared conversation among the first-year class and build foundational skills for success in college—attentive close reading of challenging texts; respectful and inclusive dialogue with others; the ability to ask profound and interesting questions about what you read; and developing your academic voice through writing. During First-Year Seminar, students develop a clearer sense of their own intellectual goals and priorities, which will inform their work during the rest of their time at Bard. A shared reading list addresses a specific theme for the year; recent themes include “What Is Freedom? Dialogues Ancient and Modern” and “What Is Enlightenment? The Science, Culture, and Politics of Reason.”

Welcome Letter for Students from the Co-Directors

Dear First-Year Students,

Welcome to your first semester at Bard!

Welcome Letter for Students from the Co-Directors

We’re the co-directors of First Year Seminar—your seminar. Over the course of this year, you’ll gather twice a week in a group of around sixteen to read your way through a syllabus that we have put together for you. As distinctive as your first-year experience will be from every other member of the class of 2030, one thing will be the same: you will share with your classmates, and with the students of the classes of 2029 and 2028, the experience of encountering these texts, in this order, in this environment. You will join a conversation of readers, thinkers, and writers that has, in the case of some of our texts, been ongoing for thousands of years. In this sense, FYSem is one way that Bard welcomes you into our community, and into the much older and larger community of people seeking to liberate themselves and their loved ones through education.

The hardest (and best) job of the co-directors is to choose what goes on your syllabus. We selected your reading list with an eye towards texts that take—and reward—effort. They take effort because FYSem is intended to challenge every student, regardless of their background with reading, writing, and discussing. All three of these are fundamental academic skills, skills that can be honed with effort and attention. FYSem is intended to be a place that facilitates this effort, and helps focus this attention. Our goal is for each student to leave FYSem with the tools and the confidence to be able to pick up any book written for any audience and meaningfully engage with it. Accordingly, the texts we’ve chosen are hard reads, works that can alienate because of their distant origins in time or space, and the alien fears and hopes of their authors.

We also believe that these texts reward effort. We chose them in part because the labor of understanding them will bring with it significant growth for any engaged reader. Despite their strangeness (and sometimes because of it), they address fundamental questions that still preoccupy many of us. Is it possible to live with others and still feel truly free? What happens to the self when one falls in love? And, centrally, how is it that people, individuals just like us, can constitute a unified and just political body? There are answers to be found, not only directly in the texts but also by noting within ourselves and among our peers where we resist them, push back, and find our own paths.

All this is to say that real engagement with this course is hard work—that’s by design—and we want to give you as much support as we can. Please keep in mind that:

1. We, your co-directors, offer Office Hours each week, where we hope you will come to us with your concerns, questions, challenges, or suggestions for the course. You can find us in Kline between 1 and 2pm on Tuesdays—look out for our sign! You can also email us at any time to meet by appointment at [email protected].

2. Once during the semester we will invite you to join us, along with your section, for a Reading Lab, in which we will simply read quietly together, tech free. If you find that working in this communal way with others is helpful, you are welcome to join us for any of our Reading Labs, which happen most Mondays in the Library from 5-6:30pm. You can do your FYSem assignment, or an assignment for another class, or bring a novel—we just want to read with you.

3. The library will be holding three FYSem Writers’ Room Sessions, where you will be invited to write your essays in community.

4. For those who want more support either with the texts or with the skills of reading, writing, and discussing that FYSem encourages you to develop, the Learning Commons is always available with tutors who can help with everything from revising an essay to developing better work habits. You can always drop in and someone will help match you with the support you need.

We hope we can be a resource for you this year! Please don’t hesitate to reach out. We’ll be rooting for you.

Rob Cioffi, Roosevelt Montás, and Katie Tabb

Welcome Letter from the Vice President and Dean of the College

Dear Members of the Class of 2030,

On behalf of the entire faculty and staff of Bard College, I am delighted to welcome each of you to Annandale.

Welcome Letter from the Vice President and Dean of the College

We are here to support you as you embark on your new life as an undergraduate, explore the campus, and encounter fellow students from across the country and around the world.

This is a year of great beginnings for you on every possible level. Bard’s curriculum recognizes the importance of shared, foundational beginnings with Language and Thinking (L&T), First-Year Seminar, and Citizen Science. I write to you now with particular excitement and pride about a tradition of collective engagement, dialogue, and inquiry that you and your cohort can look forward to as participants in First-Year Seminar.

First-Year Seminar is a year-long course, with shared readings and experiences, dedicated to the proposition that there is no work of politics, philosophy, literature, art, or science, no transformative text written over the span of centuries, to which undergraduate students should be denied access. FYSEM is pre-disciplinary, or non-disciplinary, in this sense: as educators, we reject the notion that the world of ideas should be considered off limits to non-specialists. You shouldn’t need to major in Philosophy to read Plato.

In fact, you will spend much of the fall in the company of your peers and teachers exploring Plato’s Republic, a text that opens with a deceptively simple question: What is Justice? How do we as individuals live a just life even as we aspire collectively to realizing a just social order? FYSEM’s theme, The Republic Revisited, invites you to travel through time from this anchor text in order to extend and revise your initial findings. Who belongs, as a citizen, to the republic and what is the relationship of a republic to democracy? How can we imagine new forms of belonging, representation, and membership in a democratic community? Finally, what do Gloria Anzaldúa, Aeschylus, Phillis Wheatley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, W.E.B. Du Bois, Margaret Cavendish, Vladimir Nabokov and Ibn Tufayl teach us about ongoing struggles to claim Plato’s question as our own?

The texts selected by the dedicated co-directors of First-Year Seminar and the outstanding teachers who will meet with you around the seminar table this year are among the most challenging, beautiful, and complex creations in human history. They are also works that invite each of us, as readers and thinkers, to enter new worlds of imagination even as they may—if we are paying close enough attention—shake our convictions about what we know and believe to be true.

Together, we affirm the power of reading (not to mention writing about and discussing) these texts early and often throughout one’s life. First readings can be among the most intense and memorable encounters you will have with other minds, other cultures, other ways of being. And you will do this in community with fellow Bardians.

On a very practical level, First-Year Seminar will offer you an unparalleled opportunity to develop your own voice as a thinker and as a writer. Being present, fully engaged, in this place and at this time of your life is a commitment to develop into the kind of citizen who understands well what is at stake in the project of education for us all.

Once again, welcome!

Deirdre d’Albertis
Vice President and Dean of the College
Professor of English

First-Year Experience Resources

Contact Us

Program Directors

Robert Cioffi, Kathryn Tabb and Roosevelt Montas

The program directors hold regular office hours throughout the semester.
We welcome the chance to meet with you about the course and your experiences.

Fall Semester Office Hours:
Tuesdays - Kline Dining Room - 1:00pm -2:00pm
Please note that this is in addition to your own FYSEM instructor's office hours, which you should attend with specific questions / concerns about your own FYSEM section and your own personal progress in the course.

FYSEM program directors can be reached by email at [email protected]

For further information, contact Program Assistant Julie Cerulli
[email protected] | 845-758-7514