First-Year Writing Intensive Seminars (FWIS)
FWIS 100 - INTRODUCTION TO ACADEMIC WRITING
Short Title: INTRO TO ACADEMIC WRITING
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: FWIS 100 introduces students to academic reading and writing through the study of a specific topic. In this course, students will acquire strategies to improve their critical reading comprehension and will learn how to enhance the clarity, style, and organization of their writing. Students will participate in group discussions and workshops, as well as individual consultations with Writing Coaches. Typical assignments include mapping an academic argument and summarizing a scholarly article. (This course does not fulfill the composition graduation requirement.)
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/programs/first-year-writing-intensive-seminars/fwis-100-overview
FWIS 101 - THE BIBLE IN POPULAR CULTURE
Short Title: THE BIBLE IN POPULAR CULTURE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: We will introduce various ways in which the Bible plays a significant role in contemporary popular culture. By analyzing biblical references found in music, film, art, and the medial, students will discover that even in today's seemingly secular culture, the Bible continues to influence our artistic, social, and political landscapes.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 102 - BLIND SPOTS: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO VISUAL CULTURE
Short Title: BLIND SPOTS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: The blind spot of "the act of seeing" is its social construction, its ideological nature. This seminar unveils the various historical, political, economic, and social “filters” that condition our decoding of visual information. This writing seminar aims at developing skills to de-naturalize the "act of seeing."
FWIS 103 - WRITING ABOUT THE ARTS: LOOKING AT HISTORICAL ART IN ITS CULTURAL CONTEXT
Short Title: WRITING ABOUT THE ARTS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course will focus on historical art forms and their cultural context and aesthetic qualities. How does one put into words one’s ideas and feelings about something that is non-verbal? The course will cover a great range of art, including painting, photography, architecture, film, and even music.
FWIS 104 - WHAT WE OWE TO EACH OTHER: THE ETHICS OF WRITING AND RESEARCH
Short Title: WHAT WE OWE TO EACH OTHER
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In this course, students will watch episodes of The Good Place paired with readings on the theories featured to explore “what we owe to each other” across a range of contexts, from every day communication to equity and access in writing and research in the students’ chosen field of study.
FWIS 106 - WRITING THE SENSES
Short Title: WRITING THE SENSES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course investigates the ways different disciplines develop theories of and tools for touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, and seeing. We experiment with the distinctions we draw between our senses as well as other ways we process information including our sense of balance, sense of pain, sense of time, and synaesthesia.
FWIS 107 - IN THE MATRIX: ON HUMAN BONDAGE AND LIBERATION
Short Title: IN THE MATRIX
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Using the film "The Matrix" as the point of reference, this course presents celebrated explorations of servitude and emancipation - from religious mysticism to Marxism and artistic modernism. Texts by Lao Tzu, Farid ud-Din Attar, Plato, Freud, Marx, Baudelaire, J.S. Mill, Proust, de Beauvior, Malcolm X, Marcuse, Baudrillard.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 108 - FROM THE CHINA DESK: CHINA ANALYSIS AND REPORTING ON CHINA
Short Title: FROM THE CHINA DESK
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course will require students to read critically, discuss, synthesize, summarize and analyze writings about the contemporary affairs of the People’s Republic of China. The students will become familiar with a range of basic documentary sources in English – official press releases, government reports – and also popular and academic secondary sources.
FWIS 109 - CONTEMPORARY ART AND ENVIRONMENT
Short Title: ART AND ENVIRONMENT
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course delves into questions of environment, ecology and sustainability through the lens of contemporary art. From earthworks, to performance, to land art, activist art, and community-based practices, participants engage critically and creatively with contemporary practices. This course is eligible for credit toward the Environmental Studies minor.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 111 - UNDERSTANDING THE UNITED STATES THROUGH BASEBALL
Short Title: US HISTORY THROUGH BASEBALL
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This is a course that uses the game of baseball as a prism through which to understand a complicated last 150 years of US history. It is a course about the place of baseball in American society and how the game both reflected and shaped/influenced American society. We will examine issues of economic growth and the rise of modern sport, race, gender, class, immigration, suburbanization, urban planning, capitalism, globalization and personal and community identity in American history using baseball as our analytical lens.
FWIS 112 - WRITING ABOUT VIDEOGAMES: APPROACHING VIDEOGAMES AS LITERATURE THROUGH CRITICAL READING AND WRITING
Short Title: WRITING ABOUT VIDEOGAMES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In this course students will engage with the growing body of academic literature on videogames, learning the theoretical and methodological perspectives scholars have used to engage with the medium for the past few decades.
FWIS 113 - RACE, PUBLIC POLICY, AND RACIAL CHANGE IN AMERICA
Short Title: RACE, POLICY, & RACIAL CHANGE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course examines conceptual and historical features of race and representation in the U.S., how race has shaped public policy development in the 20th century, and how American political institutions have affected outcomes for different racial groups. It also examines the causes and consequences of political mobilization for racial minorities.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 114 - THE HOLY GRAIL: RELIGION, QUEST, AND TRANSFORMATION
Short Title: THE HOLY GRAIL
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course explores the grail as object, moving from its roots in medieval romance through the literary-historical developments by which it emerges as a reality. Starting with the Arthurian legends, we explore developing associations of the grail within Christianity, and move to grail motifs in modern occultism, fiction and film.
FWIS 115 - EXPLORING BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH CHALLENGES
Short Title: EXPLORING BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This writing-intensive course introduces students to biological research and scientific communication. Student teams work on investigative projects with opportunities to ask questions, perform experiments, collect and analyze data, and share their findings. Recommended for students interested in the Biosciences major who have limited laboratory experience. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for FWIS 115 if student has credit for BIOS 150.
FWIS 116 - AMERICAN JOURNEYS
Short Title: AMERICAN JOURNEYS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: The narratives of travelers in the US are a window into history. Drawing on authors like Crevecoeur, Tocqueville, Trollope, and Kerouac, the class will discuss and write about themes such as Indian life and territorial expansion, democracy, slavery, civil war, western settlement, and 20th-cent. social movements. This course is eligible for credit toward the major in History.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 117 - CULTURAL DIPLOMACY IN THE AMERICAN CENTURY: "THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE WORLD" IN THE TWENTIETH CENT
Short Title: CULTURAL DIPLOMACY IN THE AMER
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This FWIS course seeks to introduce Rice freshmen to the hidden layers of the story of the Americanization of the world in the twentieth century. The topics to be explored include the role played by private philanthropy in shaping and transmitting American cultural forms, the impact of the Cold War on the diffusion of American culture in such diverse arenas as literature, visual and performing arts, movies, TV programming and science and technology.
FWIS 120 - FICTION AND EMPATHY
Short Title: FICTION AND EMPATHY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This writing-intensive course explores the possible link between reading literary fiction and empathizing with others. We'll read short stories, novel excerpts, and literary criticism in an effort to scrutinize and more deeply understand the specific elements of fiction that might provoke empathy.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 121 - TIME TRAVEL NARRATIVES: FICTION, FILM, SCIENCE
Short Title: TIME TRAVEL NARRATIVES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: From an aesthetic perspective, time travel has existed as long as there have been stories. Narrative introduces alien temporalities, transporting listeners and readers into different temporal landscapes. This writing-intensive course investigates the historical, aesthetic, and scientific connections between the authorial and scientific co-creation of time travel.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 123 - STAR WARS AND THE WRITING OF POPULAR CULTURE
Short Title: STAR WARS & WRITING CULTURE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course will unpack the cultural legacy of the Star Wars films through traditional literary analysis and close reading, by situating the films historically, and by considering the ways that the films reflect attitudes towards a variety of social issues, such as spirituality/religion, philosophy, race, gender, class, nationality, and imperialism.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 124 - WITNESSING THE HOLOCAUST
Short Title: WITNESSING THE HOLOCAUST
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course will examine selected testimony given by Holocaust survivors. Their testimony varies according to time and the circumstance in which it was given and also according to the genre (film, memoir, drama) in which it is presented.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 125 - WRITING WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Short Title: WRITING WITH AI
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: The course will examine the role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in students’ own composition education and prepare them to make informed decisions as consumers of this rapidly evolving technology. Topics include AI-assisted writing, AI ethics, and AI’s role in education generally and writing specifically. By the end of this course, in addition to improved writing skills, students will employ AI tools in their writing, evaluate some tools, and gain insights into how they are transforming education.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 127 - KING ARTHUR IN POPULAR CULTURE: TIME TRAVEL, SPACE ALIENS, AND HOLY HAND GRENADES
Short Title: KING ARTHUR IN POPULAR CULTURE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This writing-intensive seminar examines how medieval Arthurian literature has been re-imagined within 19th, 20th, and 21st century contexts. Beginning with foundational readings from Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, we will examine and discuss how the Arthurian tradition has been translated into various mediums, including the novel, comic books, art, and film.
FWIS 128 - SPACE, SPEED, CINEMA: THE AUTOMOBILE IN AMERICAN FILM
Short Title: THE AUTOMOBILE IN U.S. FILM
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Covering movies ranging from the early 20th Century to the present day, this class asks students to think critically about what it means to depict the automobile through film and to consider how these depictions, and their meanings, might change in accordance with different historical, artistic, and political contexts.
FWIS 130 - WRITING EVERYDAY LIFE
Short Title: WRITING EVERYDAY LIFE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course is dedicated to the poetics of everyday life. It draws from the forms and colors of what surrounds us day-to-day, from landscapes, to bodies and objects. Students develop research and writing skills through creative fieldwork assignments and workshops. This course is eligible for credit toward the major in Anthropology.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 131 - THE WAR ON DRUGS
Short Title: THE WAR ON DRUGS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course examines the rhetoric and implications of the “War on Drugs” in the U.S. and Latin America. Students analyze from different perspectives key texts that are related to policies enacted in the last fifty years to suppress illicit drug use and that have affected civil liberties and national security.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 132 - SLAVERY ON FILM
Short Title: SLAVERY ON FILM
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course will look at the ways major Hollywood (or equivalent) films have dealt with chattel slavery in the United States. We will explore the general question of how feature films deal with controversial historical issues by analyzing more specifically how Hollywood has dealt with American slavery.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 133 - WOMEN AND THE HOLOCAUST: VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS
Short Title: WOMEN AND THE HOLOCAUST
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course will examine the Third Reich and the Holocaust from the perspective of women as perpetrators and as victims.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 135 - WHAT IS A BOOK? THE MATERIAL FOUNDATIONS OF READING AND WRITING
Short Title: WHAT IS A BOOK?
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course will explore the history of books and the material (both intellectual and physical) from which they are created. We will consider how the physical form of books has shaped their content and meaning and think critically about how contemporary media shape our reading, writing, and thought.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 136 - COWBOYS AND CORNFIELDS: (UN)MAKING THE AMERICAN WEST IN FILM, T.V., AND LITERATURE
Short Title: (UN)MAKING THE AMERICAN WEST
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: FWIS 109 examines film, television, novels and short stories in order to consider the American West from a variety of different perspectives and identities. In each case, we examine how alternate Western narratives intersect with, or refute, the dominant tropes and mythologies of this most contested of cultural spaces.
FWIS 137 - POP MUSIC AND AMERICAN CULTURE
Short Title: POP MUSIC & AMERICAN CULTURE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Recent cultural movements encourage a more serious exploration of popular music. This course will participate by taking a critical look at what songs mean, what songs/albums/genres express, what our interest in music expresses, and how writing about music can lead us to great insights.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 138 - PLOTTING MARRIAGE: ROMANCE, INHERITANCE, JURISPRUDENCE
Short Title: PLOTTING MARRIAGE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What does marriage do – socially, economically, legally? In "Plotting Marriage" we will examine representations of marriage in literature and film to answer these questions, revealing how the institution of marriage has largely constructed our understanding of gender roles and how representations of marriage have plotted to represent marriage as desirable.
FWIS 139 - SHAKESPEARE IN ADAPTATION
Short Title: SHAKESPEARE IN ADAPTATION
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course, as its central focus, addresses the tension that exists between the longevity of Shakespeare’s stories and the fluidity of adaptation that has been applied to these works, begging the question of where lines can be drawn between novel creation and adaptation.
FWIS 140 - IMAGINING THE PAST: FILM, FICTION, AND HISTORY
Short Title: FILM, FICTION, AND HISTORY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In the twentieth century and beyond, movies and television serve as an important source of mythologized national narratives (or somewhat “faked news”) from war movies, to westerns, to “biopics” of figures such as Kenneth Turing. Are their patterns of distortion at work, we can identify? How do we correct them?
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 141 - STORYTELLING IN THE SCIENCES
Short Title: STORYTELLING IN THE SCIENCES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Scientists communicate through articles, press releases, podcasts, and books. This course explores how scientific ideas transform across formats for different audiences. Students will examine how a discovery evolves into a research paper, news article, podcast, or graphic narrative, analyzing changes in the core message and its impact.
FWIS 142 - WATER AND CITIES
Short Title: WATER AND CITIES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Investigates ancient, historical, and modern cities and how their residents received water. Questions include: how cities developed water resources, how water shaped city life, and how the environment was engineered to produce water. Students will be able to choose a city and a water topic for their final seminar project.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 143 - LEARNING TO OBSERVE THROUGH A TOUR OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF TEXAS
Short Title: NATURAL HISTORY OF TEXAS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In this course, students will hone their skills of observation through careful study of nature, from the geology to the birds and plants of Texas. Students will learn how to interpret and communicate these observations through writing and illustration. This course will involve several local field trips to explore the natural history of the upper Texas coast.
FWIS 145 - MUSEUMS IN WORLD HISTORY
Short Title: MUSEUMS IN WORLD HISTORY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What is a museum? What role do they play in the modern world? This course fosters critical thinking about how and why museums were important institutions. They emerged as sites of identity within and between local, regional, national, imperial and global networks. Globally, a diverse number of museums are at once beloved and controversial, commanding and irrelevant. These contradictions aren’t new. To address the future of museums we must understand the evolution of these institutions in their global pasts.
FWIS 146 - APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
Short Title: APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What is Apartheid? During the course, we will learn what Apartheid was and how white South Africans constructed and justified a system of racial separation, oppression, and violence in South Africa during the 20th century. We will also learn about the ways non-white South Africans fought against it.
FWIS 147 - AMERICA THROUGH FOREIGN EYES
Short Title: AMERICA THROUGH FOREIGN EYES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: The United States has always been a source of fascination – both attraction and repulsion – for many people around the world. The course covers the perceptions and interactions of five regions – Africa, China, France, Mexico, and Russia – with America. It offers ways to approach cross-cultural study and concludes with a segment that “reverses the gaze” by analyzing American opinions of other cultures. "America through Foreign Eyes" addresses four overarching themes: 1) democracy and modernity; 2) globalization and capitalism; 3) racism and immigration; and 4) intellectual and cultural life.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 148 - THE ART OF SPORTSWRITING
Short Title: THE ART OF SPORTSWRITING
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This class is designed to introduce students to sports writing as a vehicle for conveying complex ideas and stories, and investigating difficult issues. It is not a sports journalism course, but rather one focused on story-telling through and about sports. We will read a variety of fictional and non-fictional writing about sports as a means to learning about how to look deeply into the world and the people around us.
FWIS 149 - DOING THINGS WITH WORDS IN THE ODYSSEY
Short Title: DOING THINGS WITH WORDS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Close reading of Homer's Odyssey, with a focus on what the poem suggests about different ways of using words, their effects on speakers and audiences, and their capacity to heal or harm. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for FWIS 149 if student has credit for CLAS 303.
FWIS 150 - THE WORLD OF MEDIEVAL MEDICINE
Short Title: THE WORLD OF MEDIEVAL MEDICINE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: How did medieval Christians understand and treat mental and bodily illness? How did their experiences of pain, sex, childbirth, and death interact with larger concepts of God, nature, and the heavens? What role did angels and demons play? This seminar will explore these issues through close reading of medieval texts. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for FWIS 150 if student has credit for FSEM 171/MDEM 171/RELI 171.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 151 - THINK OF THE CHILDREN – HISTORIES OF 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDHOOD
Short Title: THINK OF THE CHILDREN
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This writing intensive seminar casts attention to some histories of twentieth century American childhood. Some of the topics explored include the advent of juvenile courts, psychologization of children, coming-of-age film, youth political disenfranchisement, and age as means of organizing collective life. Any and all majors are welcome.
FWIS 152 - NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS: REAL REMEDIES OR SHADY SCIENCE?
Short Title: THE SCIENCE OF SUPPLEMENTS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This writing-intensive seminar examines evidence for the use of nutritional supplements in promoting health. Topics include the role of vitamins, herbs and food-based supplements in medicine; the biology of illnesses such as cancer and depression; and the molecular mechanisms of supplements in disease prevention and management.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 153 - BODY POLITICS IN FRANCOPHONE FICTIONS
Short Title: BODY POLITICS FRENCH FICTIONS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: How do political, social, and cultural forces shape women’s experience and beliefs about their body? We will analyze the social construction of women’s body through contemporary Francophone fictions and discuss the roles personal, institutional, and disciplinary powers play in the degree of control women retain over their body.
FWIS 155 - WRITING ASIAN FOOD IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
Short Title: WRITING ASIAN FOOD
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course exposes students to the exercise of writing about Asian food. Students engage in the activity of "converting" multi-sensory experience, i.e. eating food, into writing on the one hand and think about transnational Asian food in the context of globalizing world. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for FWIS 155 if student has credit for ASIA 205.
FWIS 156 - THE STATISTICAL MEASURES OF CAUSE AND CORRELATION
Short Title: CAUSE AND CORRELATION
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Statistics is traditionally concerned with correlation rather than saying anything about cause-and-effect. This class will examine recent work toward extending statistical methods to include formal inference about causal relationships. We will consider the historical development of the field as well as current applications of the methods.
FWIS 157 - TRAVEL AND MODERN ASIA: LIVED EXPERIENCES ACROSS TIME AND SPACE
Short Title: TRAVEL AND MODERN ASIA
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In this class, we will read and write about people who traveled across and beyond Asia from the fourteenth century to the twentieth century, focusing on core topics such as intercultural interactions, globalization, and modernity. In doing so, we will also challenge the common misconception that Asian societies were isolated from one another and from the rest of the world before the arrival of the Westerners in Asia in the nineteenth century.
FWIS 158 - THE HOLOCAUST IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Short Title: THE HOLOCAUST IN HISTORY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course will examine the history of the Holocaust from early accounts to recent reconstructions of the origins, implementation, and aftermath of the “Final Solution.” We will also analyze documents, testimonies, memoirs, trial records, and various forms of representations and commemoration of the Shoah.
FWIS 160 - GENDER, RACE, AND THE CARCERAL STATE: INCARCERATION THROUGH AN INTERSECTIONAL LENS
Short Title: GENDER, RACE, & INCARCERATION
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course will examine the gender and racial dynamics of incarceration, particularly as they intersect with other systems of oppression. This interdisciplinary course will provide students with the tools to consider the place of the prison in the context of the United States punitive landscape, and in considerations of “justice.”
FWIS 161 - AUSTRALIAN CULTURE AND HISTORY
Short Title: AUSTRALIAN CULTURE AND HISTORY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course covers over 200 years of Australian culture. We interrogate the many crises following the British invasion. Students will investigate settler colonialism, issues surrounding Indigeneity, democracy, and cultural change. We will read novels, newspapers, and archival objects to think critically about life in the colonies.
FWIS 162 - HOW TO WRITE ESSAYS ABOUT LOVE
Short Title: HOW TO WRITE ESSAYS ABOUT LOVE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Love is an ancient philosophical problem. Writing about love means discussing politics, race, and sexuality, alongside psychology and biology. Our inherited ideas about love - how, who, and in what way, is it best to love? - are undergoing a revolution. Students will learn how to write to participate in these conversations.
FWIS 163 - SEX, DEATH, AND SPIRITUAL WRITING
Short Title: SEX DEATH & SPIRITUAL WRITING
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In this course we will look at the ways in which a variety of historical and contemporary “spiritual but not religious” texts grapple with sexuality, mortality, race, gender, class, and politics. This course will foreground discussion and reflection, and students will write weekly discussion posts on canvas, in addition to the three major papers and a group presentation.
FWIS 164 - WAYS OF WALKING IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Short Title: WAYS OF WALKING
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course explores the act of walking, in theory and in practice. Through readings, discussions, writing assignments, and group and individual walks, it examines questions about the body and its movements; the construction and navigation of space; the tradition of travel writing; and the relationship between walking and thinking.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 165 - MEDIATION, "FAKE NEWS," AND DEMOCRACY
Short Title: FAKE NEWS AND DEMOCRACY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This writing-intensive seminar examines how and why the spread of disinformation has become increasingly more prevalent in our 21st century society and what impact it has on our democratic processes. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to discussing fake news, drawing from history, philosophy, journalism, media studies, and political science.
FWIS 166 - EXPLORING THE WORLD THROUGH INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION
Short Title: EXPLORING INTL EDUCATION
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Every year millions of college students leave their home countries to spend months, or even years, integrating into a new culture and interacting meaningfully with people in another country. This course explores significant features of international education, through reading, writing, and learning from experts.
FWIS 167 - BOOKS YOU CAN'T PUT DOWN: AN EXPLORATION OF THE READING EXPERIENCE
Short Title: BOOKS YOU CAN'T PUT DOWN
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What is it about certain books that draws us in and keeps us turning the page? To answer this question, this class examines selected works of fiction and creative nonfiction with a focus on literary form, the psycho-social functions of narrative, and the physical and emotional experience of reading.
FWIS 168 - CASE STUDIES OF BUILDING DESIGN PROBLEMS
Short Title: BUILDING DESIGN PROBLEMS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: We will analyze buildings that ended up in legal battles. Problems include structural failures, design blunders and near disasters. You will write about what went wrong and why, who saved that day and who should have acted differently. You will learn to write critically and present a convincing argument.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 169 - WHAT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS?
Short Title: WHAT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS?
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: We hear and talk about "human rights" frequently, but few of us have an easy time defining ideas so inherently contested and pitted against one another. This class will read, discuss, and write about the history and future of human rights in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 170 - "WHAT IS CITIZENSHIP?"
Short Title: "WHAT IS CITIZENSHIP?"
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Paying special attention to the experiences of immigrant, indigenous, and (formerly) enslaved peoples of the United States, this seminar takes a broad approach to the examination of “citizenship,” its global contexts, and its material domains, including education, identity, labor, language, sovereignty, and suffrage.
FWIS 171 - THE DEVIL AND THE WORLD: THE IMAGE OF THE DEVIL IN WESTERN CULTURE
Short Title: THE DEVIL AND THE WORLD
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What are the reasons for the Devil's sustained popularity in Western culture? And what are the consequences of this "popularity"? How and why did the Devil, the embodiment of pure evil, become a romantic and tragic hero? This class will tackle these and other questions regarding the image of the Devil.
FWIS 172 - SITES, SOUNDS, & STORIES: THE RHETORIC OF PUBLIC MEMORY
Short Title: RHETORIC OF PUBLIC MEMORY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course invites students to consider whose stories we remember, and how/when/where. How does the framing of historical events bolster or disrupt dominant narratives of public memory? Students will examine scholarship on public memory and conduct analyses of the sites, sounds, and stories of national and local histories.
FWIS 173 - GENDER AND RACE IN U.S. POPULAR MUSIC
Short Title: GENDER & RACE IN US POP MUSIC
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course aims to introduce students to popular music as a site for critical analysis. Listening to U.S. female artists across time and genre, students will consider how gender, race, and class become signified in sound and how the intersection of these categories shape iconic figures. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for FWIS 173 if student has credit for FSEM 159/HIST 159.
FWIS 174 - SOUNDING THE CITY
Short Title: SOUNDING THE CITY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Sound surrounds us. And yet we often put little thought into what role it plays in our lives and the lives of our public spaces. This course aims to correct this oversight by offering an introduction to the field of sound studies focused on Houston’s audio environment, past and present.
FWIS 176 - DRAMATIC PAUSES: INTRODUCTION TO EAST ASIAN PERFORMANCE STUDIES
Short Title: EAST ASIAN PERFORMANCE STUDIES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Introduces performing arts of China, Japan, and Korea, like Noh, P'ansori, and Beijing opera, focusing on psychological and multimedia aspects. Introduces performance studies--how to think, write, and present ideas about singing, dancing, storytelling, and drama from perspectives like ritual, gender, music, choreography, costume, stage design, and literary criticism.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 177 - STORYTELLING IN BUDDHISM
Short Title: STORYTELLING IN BUDDHISM
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course explores the forms and contexts of storytelling in Buddhism, with a broad eye toward literature, visual arts, and performance. Students engage in both creative and academic writing to understand the importance of narrative in Buddhist cultures and different approaches to writing in the modern day. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for FWIS 177 if student has credit for FSEM 109.
FWIS 179 - MEDICINE AND DISEASE IN TRANSNATIONAL ASIA: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Short Title: MEDICINE IN TRANSNATIONAL ASIA
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What does the history of medicine look like when Asian experiences are emphasized? This writing-intensive seminar examines the history of health and disease in Asia and beyond. Topics covered include public health as both a political and practical concept; pluralistic medical systems; colonial and semi-colonial medicine; disease stigmatization; and pandemics.
FWIS 180 - RACE IN THE 20TH CENTURY UNITED STATES
Short Title: RACE IN THE 20TH CENTURY USA
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course combines ideas from history, public policy, sociology, and political science to examine how ideas of race have changed over from 1877 to the present. While we might think of ideas like “white,” “Black,” “Asian American,” or “Hispanic” as concrete categories, all of these categories and their social impact changed significantly over the course of a century.
FWIS 181 - GRAPHIC BLACKNESS: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMIC BOOK TRADITION
Short Title: AFRICAN AMERICAN GRAPHIC NOVEL
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course examines the struggle for black representation in comics and graphic novels. We will discuss the unique opportunities that sequential narratives present to creators as they represent race on the page and we will examine the history of black artists working in the comic book industry.
FWIS 182 - BORDER POLITICS: MIGRATIONS AND THE MEANING OF THE NATION
Short Title: BORDER POLITICS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In the midst of a global climate and migration crisis, the safeguarding of borders has become an increasingly contentious issue worldwide. In this course we will explore the perilousness of the human condition, as experienced in the crossing of real and imaginary borders, and in the traumatic loss of homeland and self.
FWIS 183 - UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS
Short Title: UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course discusses utopias and dystopias across history and cultures through a political lens: national borders, imperial conquests, and modern urbanism all result from map-making and the power of human engineering to overcome or live in harmony with nature. Content includes films, essays, comics, novels, and more. All majors welcome.
FWIS 184 - THE CULTURAL IMAGINATION OF TEXAS
Short Title: CULTURAL IMAGINATION OF TEXAS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What do we mean by Texas? How has Texas been figured in the American imagination? How are ideas of place both meaningful and limiting? In this course will look at how Texas has been portrayed in the American imagination while uncovering lesser told histories of the state.
FWIS 185 - CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY
Short Title: CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This class will delve into contemporary American poetry by exploring outstanding poetry books of the previous year. Students will study American poetry in literary and historical contexts, develop ability to analyze how poems "work," develop ability to create clear, effective prose, and build framework for exploring other types of poetry.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 189 - POST-APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE AND FILM
Short Title: POST-APOCALYPTIC LIT AND FILM
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Our culture is fascinated with its own destruction. From zombies to nuclear war, ecological disasters, aliens, disease and killer machines, Armageddon takes many forms. Structured around ways in which we have imagined the world ending, this course charts the cultural consciousness of apocalypse.
FWIS 191 - THE ART OF THE SHORT STORY
Short Title: THE ART OF THE SHORT STORY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: How exactly does the length of a piece of writing connect to its expression as a work of art and our interpretation of it? In this course, we’ll consider “shortness” as a challenge authors undertake, investigating the ways they weave complex tales into brief, often pithy, masterpieces.
FWIS 192 - THE ROARING TWENTIES
Short Title: THE ROARING TWENTIES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: The 1920s were about new possibilities, aesthetic experimentation, and frenzied expression. We'll examine iconic '20s literature by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Woolf, and others, as well as the linchpins of '20s culture: jazz, Prohibition, the Harlem Renaissance, and modern art. Highlights include lessons on the Charleston and a Roaring Twenties soiree.
FWIS 193 - THE RULE OF LAW AND THE PURSUIT OF JUSTICE
Short Title: LAW AND JUSTICE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Democratic societies claim to be based on the rule of law. This course examines what is required of a society that treats every individual equally regardless of a person´s status or influence. We will analyze the relationship of politics and the law in the distinct historical and national contexts of the contemporary US and post-war Germany, as well as exploring the topics of crimes, guilt, punishment and vigilante justice in selected literary texts and films.
FWIS 194 - LATIN AMERICAN DICTATORSHIPS THROUGH FILM
Short Title: LATIN AMERICAN DICTATORSHIPS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course examines ways films have grappled with histories of dictatorship in Latin America, in the 20th century. We will use films alongside other historical and literary sources, to learn about various dictatorial regimes and explore broader questions about state violence, democracy, revolution, imperialism, justice, and memory.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 195 - ON NOTHING: NIHILISM AND AFTER
Short Title: ON NOTHING: NIHILISM AND AFTER
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course introduces students to some historical and contemporary variants of nihilism via discussions of philosophy, literature, film, and art. It aims to help students see beyond these doomed views by providing them with an innovative set of perspectives and practices for successfully navigating an increasingly absurd world.
FWIS 196 - BUSINESS IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION
Short Title: BUSINESS IN LITERATURE & FILM
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: The world of business has long been a culturally rich site for national and self-reflection. As we read representations of business in literature and film, we will consider an array of allegories, motifs, and plots about the profits and pitfalls of American commerce culture.
FWIS 197 - SCIENCE, PSEUDOSCIENCE AND SKEPTICISM: HOW TO TELL GOOD SCIENCE FROM JUNK SCIENCE
Short Title: SCIENCE OR PSEUDOSCIENCE?
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This class focuses on scientific skepticism and critical thinking, and how they can be utilized to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Core topics include the fallibility of perception; mechanisms of self-deception; as well as metacognition, cognitive biases and logical fallacies. These topics will be illustrated through examples of good and bad science.
FWIS 198 - THE ESSAY AS LITERATURE: MONTAIGNE AND HIS LEGACY
Short Title: THE ESSAY AS LITERATURE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This FWIS will treat the essay as a genre that is just as artful and worthy of attention as poetry, fiction, or drama. We’ll begin with Montaigne, the inventor of the form, and consider how his legacy has been embraced and complicated by essayists and educators in our own time. Along the way, we’ll read and write a variety of critical, personal, and scholarly essays, strengthening our abilities as writers, readers, and thinkers.
FWIS 200 - TRANSFER CREDIT – FIRST-YEAR WRITING (FWIS)
Short Title: TRANSFER CREDIT-FWIS WRITING
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Transfer Courses
Course Type: Transfer
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: For transfer of an approved first-year writing intensive seminar. This course may not have been taken pass-fail at the transferring institution and must meet Rice University’s transfer credit requirements. Credit for this placeholder course will count towards the total credit hours required for graduation, and will be eligible to satisfy the university’s Writing and Communication Requirement. Transfer students must contact the FWIS transfer credit advisor to determine if their course will transfer. Instructor Permission Required.
FWIS 201 - 'THEIR OWN MYSTERIOUS STARDOM': FILMING ENVIRONMENTS; VIEWING ENVIRONMENTS
Short Title: FILMING ENVIRONMENTS; VIEWING
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This class focuses on the various ways that filmmakers have sought to represent the environment through film and television, while also considering the different "environments" that surround us. We will discuss diverse modes of filmmaking including documentary, genre cinema, and science fiction. Writing tasks will emphasize film analysis and criticism.
FWIS 207 - US CULTURES OF THE SIXTIES
Short Title: CULTURES OF THE SIXTIES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course investigates US culture of the nineteen sixties by examining texts, such as Plath’s Ariel; films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey; and music such as The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.
FWIS 209 - CONTEMPORARY ART AND ENVIRONMENT
Short Title: ART AND ENVIRONMENT
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course delves into questions of environment, ecology and sustainability through the lens of contemporary art. From earthworks, to performance, to land art, activist art, and community-based practices, participants engage critically and creatively with contemporary practices. This course is eligible for credit toward the Environmental Studies minor.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 211 - THE MEANING AND IMPACT OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
Short Title: MEANING AND IMPACT OF QUANTUM
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: We will discuss many ongoing debates over the content and meaning of quantum theory. This will reveal how theories are formed, how science is done, how these impact our day-to-day culture, and the surprisingly significant role that humans play in objective science.
FWIS 213 - THE SUPERNATURAL SOUTH: HAUNTED PLANTATIONS, CONFEDERATE VAMPIRES, AND CREATURES IN THE BAYOU
Short Title: THE SUPERNATURAL SOUTH
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In this course, we will examine and analyze the meanings of supernatural stories—both historical and contemporary—set in the American South, as well as southern ghost tourism. In doing so, we will discuss what these stories tell us about southern history, culture, and ongoing debates over southern memory.
FWIS 214 - A HISTORY OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA IN THE AMERICAS IN 12 OBJECTS
Short Title: AFRICAN DIASPORA IN 12 OBJECTS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course revolves around twelve objects that reflect the profound impact of the African diaspora in the Americas. From towering monuments to humble leather pouches, each artifact serves as a portal into the multifaceted tapestry of Black lives from the 16th to the 21st century, from the US to Brazil.
FWIS 215 - EXPLORING BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH CHALLENGES
Short Title: EXPLORING BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This writing-intensive course introduces students to biological research and scientific communication. Student teams work on investigative projects with opportunities to ask questions, perform experiments, collect and analyze data, and share their findings. Recommended for students interested in the Biosciences major who have limited laboratory experience.
FWIS 217 - CULTURAL DIPLOMACY IN THE AMERICAN CENTURY: "THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE WORLD" IN THE TWENTIETH CENT
Short Title: AMERICANIZATION OF THE WORLD
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This FWIS course seeks to introduce Rice freshmen to the hidden layers of the story of the Americanization of the world in the twentieth century. The topics to be explored include the role played by private philanthropy in shaping and transmitting American cultural forms, the impact of the Cold War on the diffusion of American culture in such diverse arenas as literature, visual and performing arts, movies, TV programming and science and technology.
FWIS 219 - THE BEAUTY OF THE BEAST: TELLING AND RE-TELLING THE TALE AS OLD AS TIME
Short Title: THE BEAUTY OF THE BEAST
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course examines filmic and literary adaptations of “Beauty and the Beast” from the “original” 1740 French version to the present day. It asks how the tale reflects cultural anxieties and fears and reinforces problematic representations of gender roles, toxic masculinity, and the tenuous fairy-tale conflation of goodness and beauty.
FWIS 220 - FICTION AND EMPATHY
Short Title: FICTION AND EMPATHY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This writing-intensive course explores the possible link between reading literary fiction and empathizing with others. We'll read short stories, novel excerpts, and literary criticism in an effort to scrutinize and more deeply understand the specific elements of fiction that might provoke empathy.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 221 - TIME TRAVEL NARRATIVES: FICTION, FILM, SCIENCE
Short Title: TIME TRAVEL NARRATIVES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: From an aesthetic perspective, time travel has existed as long as there have been stories. Narrative introduces alien temporalities, transporting listeners and readers into different temporal landscapes. This writing-intensive course investigates the historical, aesthetic, and scientific connections between the authorial and scientific co-creation of time travel.
FWIS 225 - WRITING WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Short Title: WRITING WITH AI
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: The course will examine the role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in students’ own composition education and prepare them to make informed decisions as consumers of this rapidly evolving technology. Topics include AI-assisted writing, AI ethics, and AI’s role in education generally and writing specifically. By the end of this course, in addition to improved writing skills, students will employ AI tools in their writing, evaluate some tools, and gain insights into how they are transforming education.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 229 - HEAVY METAL & SOCIETY
Short Title: HEAVY METAL & SOCIETY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course explores Heavy Metal music as a misunderstood yet globally popular genre, offering a compelling subject to study how music reflects societal concerns. Students will develop research and writing skills through readings and discussions in Heavy Metal and Popular Music Studies, practicing writing about music’s relationship with culture and society.
FWIS 230 - WRITING EVERYDAY LIFE
Short Title: WRITING EVERYDAY LIFE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course is dedicated to the poetics of everyday life. It draws from the forms and colors of what surrounds us day-to-day, from landscapes, to bodies and objects. Students develop research and writing skills through creative fieldwork assignments and workshops. This course is eligible for credit toward the major in Anthropology.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 231 - THE WAR ON DRUGS
Short Title: THE WAR ON DRUGS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course examines the rhetoric and implications of the “War on Drugs” in the U.S. and Latin America. Students analyze from different perspectives key texts that are related to policies enacted in the last fifty years to suppress illicit drug use and that have affected civil liberties and national security.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 232 - RESPONSIBLE USE OF AI FOR RESEARCH AND WRITING IN STEM
Short Title: AI FOR WRITING IN STEM
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course examines AI's role in STEM and medical research. Students will use AI tools for literature reviews, summarizing, editing, and presentations while focusing on ethical implications like plagiarism, privacy, and bias. Ideal for those seeking to integrate AI responsibly in academic work with an emphasis on integrity and excellence.
FWIS 234 - PLOTTING MARRIAGE: ROMANCE, INHERITANCE, JURISPRUDENCE
Short Title: PLOTTING MARRIAGE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What does marriage do – socially, economically, legally? In "Plotting Marriage" we will examine representations of marriage in literature and film to answer these questions, revealing how the institution of marriage has largely constructed our understanding of gender roles and how representations of marriage have plotted to represent marriage as desirable.
FWIS 236 - COWBOYS AND CORNFIELDS: (UN)MAKING THE AMERICAN WEST IN FILM, T.V., AND LITERATURE
Short Title: (UN)MAKING THE AMERICAN WEST
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: FWIS 109 examines film, television, novels and short stories in order to consider the American West from a variety of different perspectives and identities. In each case, we examine how alternate Western narratives intersect with, or refute, the dominant tropes and mythologies of this most contested of cultural spaces.
FWIS 237 - POP MUSIC AND AMERICAN CULTURE
Short Title: POP MUSIC & AMERICAN CULTURE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Recent cultural movements encourage a more serious exploration of popular music. This course will participate by taking a critical look at what songs mean, what songs/albums/genres express, what our interest in music expresses, and how writing about music can lead us to great insights.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 240 - IMAGINING THE PAST: FILM, FICTION, AND HISTORY
Short Title: FILM, FICTION, AND HISTORY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In the twentieth century and beyond, movies and television serve as an important source of mythologized national narratives (or somewhat “faked news”) from war movies, to westerns, to “biopics” of figures such as Kenneth Turing. Are their patterns of distortion at work, we can identify? How do we correct them?
FWIS 242 - WATER AND CITIES
Short Title: WATER AND CITIES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Investigates ancient, historical, and modern cities and how their residents received water. Questions include: how cities developed water resources, how water shaped city life, and how the environment was engineered to produce water. Students will be able to choose a city and a water topic for their final seminar project.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 243 - LEARNING TO OBSERVE THROUGH A TOUR OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF TEXAS
Short Title: NATURAL HISTORY OF TEXAS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In this course, students will hone their skills of observation through careful study of nature, from the geology to the birds and plants of Texas. Students will learn how to interpret and communicate these observations through writing and illustration. This course will involve several local field trips to explore the natural history of the upper Texas coast.
FWIS 245 - MUSEUMS IN WORLD HISTORY
Short Title: MUSEUMS IN WORLD HISTORY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What is a museum? What role do they play in the modern world? This course fosters critical thinking about how and why museums were important institutions. They emerged as sites of identity within and between local, regional, national, imperial and global networks. Globally, a diverse number of museums are at once beloved and controversial, commanding and irrelevant. These contradictions aren’t new. To address the future of museums we must understand the evolution of these institutions in their global pasts.
FWIS 248 - THE ART OF SPORTSWRITING
Short Title: THE ART OF SPORTSWRITING
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This class is designed to introduce students to sports writing as a vehicle for conveying complex ideas and stories, and investigating difficult issues. It is not a sports journalism course, but rather one focused on story-telling through and about sports. We will read a variety of fictional and non-fictional writing about sports as a means to learning about how to look deeply into the world and the people around us.
FWIS 251 - THINK OF THE CHILDREN – HISTORIES OF 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDHOOD
Short Title: THINK OF THE CHILDREN
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This writing intensive seminar casts attention to some histories of twentieth century American childhood. Some of the topics explored include the advent of juvenile courts, psychologization of children, coming-of-age film, youth political disenfranchisement, and age as means of organizing collective life. Any and all majors are welcome.
FWIS 252 - NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENTS: REAL REMEDIES OR SHADY SCIENCE?
Short Title: THE SCIENCE OF SUPPLEMENTS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This writing-intensive seminar examines evidence for the use of nutritional supplements in promoting health. Topics include the role of vitamins, herbs and food-based supplements in medicine; the biology of illnesses such as cancer and depression; and the molecular mechanisms of supplements in disease prevention and management.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 254 - GENE MANIPULATION: AN EVALUATION OF GENE-BASED MODIFICATIONS TO ANIMALS AND PLANTS
Short Title: GENE MANIPULATION
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course will examine the deployment of gene manipulation techniques in medicine and agriculture in order to address the benefits and potential hazards associated with widespread application of these methods.
FWIS 255 - WRITING ASIAN FOOD IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
Short Title: WRITING ASIAN FOOD
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course exposes students to the exercise of writing about Asian food. Students engage in the activity of "converting" multi-sensory experience, i.e. eating food, into writing on the one hand and think about transnational Asian food in the context of globalizing world. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for FWIS 255 if student has credit for ASIA 205.
FWIS 257 - TRAVEL AND MODERN ASIA: LIVED EXPERIENCES ACROSS TIME AND SPACE
Short Title: TRAVEL AND MODERN ASIA
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In this class, we will read and write about people who traveled across and beyond Asia from the fourteenth century to the twentieth century, focusing on core topics such as intercultural interactions, globalization, and modernity. In doing so, we will also challenge the common misconception that Asian societies were isolated from one another and from the rest of the world before the arrival of the Westerners in Asia in the nineteenth century.
FWIS 260 - GLOBAL INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTALISM
Short Title: INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTALISM
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In this course, we will draw on a range of disciplines, including anthropology, environmental studies, and indigenous studies, as we examine various indigenous environmental movements through the lens of foundational concepts such as land as pedagogy, indigeneity, and settler-colonialism. This course is aimed to (1) introduce specific case studies of indigenous leadership, knowledge, and innovation in environmental protection initiatives; (2) equip students with skills they need to critically analyze and compare various indigenous environmental movements; and (3) engage students in cultivating heathier ways of relating to land and indigenous communities.
FWIS 261 - AUSTRALIAN CULTURE AND HISTORY
Short Title: AUSTRALIAN CULTURE AND HISTORY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course covers over 200 years of Australian culture. We interrogate the many crises following the British invasion. Students will investigate settler colonialism, issues surrounding Indigeneity, democracy, and cultural change. We will read novels, newspapers, and archival objects to think critically about life in the colonies.
FWIS 262 - HOW TO WRITE ESSAYS ABOUT LOVE
Short Title: HOW TO WRITE ESSAYS ABOUT LOVE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Love is an ancient philosophical problem. Writing about love means discussing politics, race, and sexuality, alongside psychology and biology. Our inherited ideas about love - how, who, and in what way, is it best to love? - are undergoing a revolution. Students will learn how to write to participate in these conversations.
FWIS 263 - SEX, DEATH, AND SPIRITUAL WRITING
Short Title: SEX, DEATH, & SPIRITUAL WRITIN
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In this course we will look at the ways in which a variety of historical and contemporary “spiritual but not religious” texts grapple with sexuality, mortality, race, gender, class, and politics. This course will foreground discussion and reflection, and students will write weekly discussion posts on canvas, in addition to the three major papers and a group presentation.
FWIS 267 - BOOKS YOU CAN'T PUT DOWN: AN EXPLORATION OF THE READING EXPERIENCE
Short Title: BOOKS YOU CAN'T PUT DOWN
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What is it about certain books that draws us in and keeps us turning the page? To answer this question, this class examines selected works of fiction and creative nonfiction with a focus on literary form, the psycho-social functions of narrative, and the physical and emotional experience of reading.
FWIS 268 - CASE STUDIES OF BUILDING DESIGN PROBLEMS
Short Title: BUILDING DESIGN PROBLEMS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: We will analyze buildings that ended up in legal battles. Problems include structural failures, design blunders and near disasters. You will write about what went wrong and why, who saved that day and who should have acted differently. You will learn to write critically and present a convincing argument.
Course URL: pwc.rice.edu/
FWIS 271 - THE DEVIL AND THE WORLD: THE IMAGE OF THE DEVIL IN WESTERN CULTURE
Short Title: THE DEVIL AND THE WORLD
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What are the reasons for the Devil's sustained popularity in Western culture? And what are the consequences of this "popularity"? How and why did the Devil, the embodiment of pure evil, become a romantic and tragic hero? This class will tackle these and other questions regarding the image of the Devil.
FWIS 273 - THE RHETORIC OF STAR TREK
Short Title: THE RHETORIC OF STAR TREK
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Star Trek reflects the rhetoric of the times and is itself also explicitly rhetorical. The franchise makes persuasive arguments about social issues and what values humans should pursue. This course will explore these rhetorical themes and allow students to focus on topics of their choice within the Star Trek universe.
FWIS 274 - SOUNDING THE CITY
Short Title: SOUNDING THE CITY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Sound surrounds us. And yet we often put little thought into what role it plays in our lives and the lives of our public spaces. This course aims to correct this oversight by offering an introduction to the field of sound studies focused on Houston’s audio environment, past and present.
FWIS 277 - STORYTELLING IN BUDDHISM
Short Title: STORYTELLING IN BUDDHISM
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course explores the forms and contexts of storytelling in Buddhism, with a broad eye toward literature, visual arts, and performance. Students engage in both creative and academic writing to understand the importance of narrative in Buddhist cultures and different approaches to writing in the modern day.
FWIS 280 - RACE IN THE 20TH CENTURY UNITED STATES
Short Title: RACE IN THE 20TH CENTURY USA
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course combines ideas from history, public policy, sociology, and political science to examine how ideas of race have changed over from 1877 to the present. While we might think of ideas like “white,” “Black,” “Asian American,” or “Hispanic” as concrete categories, all of these categories and their social impact changed significantly over the course of a century.
FWIS 281 - GRAPHIC BLACKNESS: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMIC BOOK TRADITION
Short Title: AFRICAN AMERICAN GRAPHIC NOVEL
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course examines the struggle for black representation in comics and graphic novels. We will discuss the unique opportunities that sequential narratives present to creators as they represent race on the page and we will examine the history of black artists working in the comic book industry.
FWIS 282 - BORDER POLITICS: MIGRATIONS AND THE MEANING OF THE NATION
Short Title: BORDER POLITICS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: In the midst of a global climate and migration crisis, the safeguarding of borders has become an increasingly contentious issue worldwide. In this course we will explore the perilousness of the human condition, as experienced in the crossing of real and imaginary borders, and in the traumatic loss of homeland and self.
FWIS 283 - GENDER AND RACE IN U.S. POPULAR MUSIC
Short Title: GENDER & RACE IN US POP MUSIC
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course aims to introduce students to popular music as a site for critical analysis. Listening to U.S. female artists across time and genre, students will consider how gender, race, and class become signified in sound and how the intersection of these categories shape iconic figures.
FWIS 284 - THE CULTURAL IMAGINATION OF TEXAS
Short Title: CULTURAL IMAGINATION OF TEXAS
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: What do we mean by Texas? How has Texas been figured in the American imagination? How are ideas of place both meaningful and limiting? In this course will look at how Texas has been portrayed in the American imagination while uncovering lesser told histories of the state.
FWIS 286 - MINORITIES AND SUBCULTURES IN EAST ASIA
Short Title: MINORITIES AND SUBCULTURES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course challenges the myth of homogeneity in the understanding of East Asian societies by examining the experience of a variety of minority groups in terms of ethnicity, gender, religion, class, occupation, as well as physical and mental conditions.
FWIS 290 - BLACK CONTEMPORARY ART
Short Title: BLACK CONTEMPORARY ART
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course introduces students to the field black contemporary art. How is a new generation of black art making shaping the way we think about race, gender, sexuality, and disability? How have expressions of self-representation changed over the decades and how do we begin to understand the political stakes of who is seen, who is overseen, and who is made invisible?
FWIS 291 - THE ART OF THE SHORT STORY
Short Title: THE ART OF THE SHORT STORY
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: How exactly does the length of a piece of writing connect to its expression as a work of art and our interpretation of it? In this course, we’ll consider “shortness” as a challenge authors undertake, investigating the ways they weave complex tales into brief, often pithy, masterpieces.
FWIS 292 - THE ROARING TWENTIES
Short Title: THE ROARING TWENTIES
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: The 1920s were about new possibilities, aesthetic experimentation, and frenzied expression. We'll examine iconic '20s literature by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Woolf, and others, as well as the linchpins of '20s culture: jazz, Prohibition, the Harlem Renaissance, and modern art. Highlights include lessons on the Charleston and a Roaring Twenties soiree.
FWIS 293 - THE RULE OF LAW AND THE PURSUIT OF JUSTICE
Short Title: LAW AND JUSTICE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: Democratic societies claim to be based on the rule of law. This course examines what is required of a society that treats every individual equally regardless of a person´s status or influence. We will analyze the relationship of politics and the law in the distinct historical and national contexts of the contemporary US and post-war Germany, as well as exploring the topics of crimes, guilt, punishment and vigilante justice in selected literary texts and films.
FWIS 295 - ON NOTHING: NIHILISM AND AFTER
Short Title: ON NOTHING: NIHILISM AND AFTER
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This course introduces students to some historical and contemporary variants of nihilism via discussions of philosophy, literature, film, and art. It aims to help students see beyond these doomed views by providing them with an innovative set of perspectives and practices for successfully navigating an increasingly absurd world.
FWIS 296 - BUSINESS IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION
Short Title: BUSINESS IN LITERATURE & FILM
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: The world of business has long been a culturally rich site for national and self-reflection. As we read representations of business in literature and film, we will consider an array of allegories, motifs, and plots about the profits and pitfalls of American commerce culture.
FWIS 297 - SCIENCE, PSEUDOSCIENCE AND SKEPTICISM: HOW TO TELL GOOD SCIENCE FROM JUNK SCIENCE
Short Title: SCIENCE OR PSEUDOSCIENCE?
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This class focuses on scientific skepticism and critical thinking, and how they can be utilized to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Core topics include the fallibility of perception; mechanisms of self-deception; as well as metacognition, cognitive biases and logical fallacies. These topics will be illustrated through examples of good and bad science.
FWIS 298 - THE ESSAY AS LITERATURE: MONTAIGNE AND HIS LEGACY
Short Title: THE ESSAY AS LITERATURE
Department: First-Year Writing Intensive
Grade Mode: Standard Letter
Course Type: Seminar
Credit Hours: 3
Restrictions: Enrollment is limited to Undergraduate, Undergraduate Professional or Visiting Undergraduate level students.
Course Level: Undergraduate Lower-Level
Description: This FWIS will treat the essay as a genre that is just as artful and worthy of attention as poetry, fiction, or drama. We’ll begin with Montaigne, the inventor of the form, and consider how his legacy has been embraced and complicated by essayists and educators in our own time. Along the way, we’ll read and write a variety of critical, personal, and scholarly essays, strengthening our abilities as writers, readers, and thinkers.