First-Year Seminar Courses 2025-2026

You'll take a FYS within your first two semesters at Xavier. FYS is a rigorous, academic, 3-credit course. In the catalog, FYS is called CORE 100. Search under "Core Curriculum" to find these courses.

Fall 2025

Conserving Nature
George Farnsworth
How should we view and manage endangered and threatened species and ecosystems? In this course we will explore what species we value and how we try to keep them from going extinct. We will examine these issues from a variety of perspectives including science, history, philosophy, and art.

Ethics and the Environment
Brent Blair
We all rely on the environment in both apparent and nuanced ways. However, our perceptions of nature and our choices in how we interact with it are shaped by various factors, such as the time period, culture, and one’s economic status. In this course, we delve into these concepts and examine how deteriorating environments can affect human well-being disparately based on individual characteristics (e.g., race, class, and gender) and geographical location. The curriculum encompasses an exploration of fundamental economic, ecological, and environmental science principles, alongside discussions on topics related to environmental ethics.

The Art of Expression
Madeleine Mitchell
Anyone can be an artist, but many people don't see themselves as one. This seminar explores how creative expression is an integral part of being human and how it contributes to personal and intellectual growth, meaningful life work, and stronger communities. In this course, we will examine various roles of artistic expression in society: healer, teller of hard truths, voice of solidarity, and catalyst for social change. Students will study and research examples of art movements, engage with local artists, and create individual works of art.

What We Brought to the Jungle
Lara Dorger
This seminar also seeks to give students the time and space to develop the Jesuit value of magis, the more universal good. In discussions and/or assignments, seminarians will examine how their vocation contributes to the greater good, a concept we’ll explore through the lens of sacramentality and justice.

Great (and not so great) Expectations
Lara Dorger
We live in our own heads most of the time, but we often evaluate our wants mostly in terms of the outcomes rather than what makes the foundations of our wants. Often our sense of success is arbitrary and personal and may depend mostly on preconceived beliefs. Rather than focusing on solely an end result, a more-sound approach would involve understanding our expectations going forward. This seminar has you carefully reading 12 short stories to use as a springboard to foster the practice of asking questions about topics relevant to you at this time: school, career, and relationships, among other subjects. Some of the questions you will have the chance to discuss are "Can I be a good friend if I stop listening to my friend's problems?" "How much work am I willing to do to get an A?" or the age-old question "What is love?" While answers may not be forthcoming for all questions, you will have the chance to create the habit of examining your expectations prior to evaluating your success or failure, a key component to analysis, through the media of short stories and writing.

Growing Pains
Kelly Austin
Welcome to college, that space between adolescence and full-blown adulting. That means the freedoms and responsibilities of adulthood, without the experience. It's a time to explore who you want to be (identity) and what you want to do (vocation). Some psychologists call this developmental phase emerging adulthood. In this section of First-Year Seminar, we'll study theories of development, identity and belonging to see what makes this phase of life unique and interesting and challenging—and sometimes terrifying. After all, they're called "growing pains" for a reason. We'll examine literature that highlights adolescence and emerging adulthood and use those discussions to investigate your own journey on the path to adulthood. 

Pursuit of Happiness
Rita Rozzi
​The United States Declaration of Independence states that one of our “unalienable Rights” is the “pursuit of Happiness.”  If we are guaranteed such an absolute freedom to obtain it, why aren’t we all happy? What does it even mean to be happy? Although we will work to define happiness and explore the latest research on this topic through reading and discussion, we will also be putting into practice what we discover. The hope is that by doing so, we will learn how to cultivate happiness in ourselves and in others.

Thoreau: In Search of a Simpler Life
Nate Windon
If you have ever gone outside to escape the anxiety and strain of the modern world, then you have something in common with Henry David Thoreau, the famous nineteenth-century American author of Walden. There’s a lot we can learn from Thoreau, who dedicated his life to writing about his experiences in nature. We’ll not only read Thoreau (as well as some of his literary descendants) but we’ll try acting like him, too: as part of this class you’ll take walks, make a map, identify some plants, and mend something in need of repair. Thoreau did not think we should, or could, totally retreat from civilization, but he did think we could cultivate a simpler life in the midst of the busyness of the world, which is what we will read about, write about, and practice doing.

Pride and Prejudice Then & Now
Jodi Wyett
In the year of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, we will study her most enduring novel, Pride and Prejudice (1814), and some of the myriad ways it has been adapted. We will focus on the novel’s concern with the greater good both in relation to Austen’s social and cultural conditions and to our own. Assignments include curating and editing a historical artifact from late- eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain and creating adaptations of Pride and Prejudice for our own time to be posted on a course website.

Uprising: Slave Rebellions in the Atlantic World
Randy Browne
From the early 1500s through the end of the nineteenth century, millions of Africans and their descendants were enslaved throughout the Americas. In this seminar we will explore enslaved people's armed resistance to slavery, during the Middle Passage and in American slave societies.

Food, Farming, Eating
James Wood
This seminar explores issues related to the production, distribution, and consumption of food from philosophical, anthropological, and biological perspectives. Topics include food ethics, agricultural models, the culture and anthropology of eating, and human nutritional needs.
Authors include philosophers, biologists, anthropologists, historians, journalists, and farmers, and there will be opportunities to engage with people involved in various aspects of the food scene here in Cincinnati.

Games and Virtue
Greg Braun
This course looks at games of all types, with a focus on board, card, and role playing games. What can games today and throughout history tell us about humanity? What virtues & skills are valued by games, and by society? What does the mathematical field of game theory tell us about how people make decisions, particularly important ethical decisions? How do probability and the mechanics of games affect what we take away from them? What is the nature of play itself? Students will design a game as a group project throughout the semester.

Ireland, Culture, & Film
Timothy White
This course explores Irish culture since the late nineteenth century focusing on the development of Irish identity and how this identity has been challenged by those not included in the historic conception of Irish national identity.

Political Theory of Democracy
John Ray
The course is a detailed reading of parts of John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, the Federalist Papers, and Tocqueville's Democracy in America with a view to understanding the political theory of modern liberal democracy. Emphasis will be on student discussion of the moral, political, and economic issues discussed in the texts. .

Government's Role in Healtcare?
Rick Browne
In the US, healthcare is for many families their second most expensive monthly budget item (next to housing), and is therefore a major concern and stress. Our healthcare system is unusual in this way and many others. This course explores the question of the role government should play in healthcare. It examines different models of government involvement in healthcare, health systems from a variety of countries, and the advantages/disadvantages of different models and systems.

Spring 2026