WRPR H101  FINDING A VOICE: IDENTITY, ENVIRONMENT, AND INTELLECTUAL INQUIRY  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

This course considers students fluid relationship to identities that they examine, explore, and take on through course materials. We begin by examining how difference is perceived/obscured/challenged and/or bridged in constructions of identity. We then consider how identities exist in the physical environment and how environment affects these identities. The different positions that experts have taken serves as a model, finally, for students to enter another scholarly debate within an area of interest in a possible prospective major. Open only to members of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H104  IMAGINATIVE FUTURES: SCIENCE FICTION AND SOCIAL CRISIS  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

This course looks at the heritage of science fiction from the Scientific Revolution and the present, examining how fictionalized accounts responded to the moral, religious, and philosophical stakes of natural philosophy and early modern science. Through critical reading, writing, and research we will explore how speculative fiction repeatedly stages a central tension: the sense that technological progress advances more rapidly than the moral, political, and ethical frameworks meant to govern it.

(Offered: Spring 2027)

WRPR H105  THE POLITICS OF SELF-CARE  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

In this course, we’ll interrogate the relationships between self-care; politics; and physical, mental, and spiritual health by turning to three distinct moments in the history of American self-care: “self-reliance” in the 19th c. as articulated by Emerson and Thoreau; late 20th c activist groups including the Black Panther Party, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, and ACT UP; and contemporary understandings of self-care discourses such as wellness and the perspectives of those living with chronic illnesses. Pre-requisite(s): Placement by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2027)

WRPR H107  COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY: CLOSE READING MYTH FROM AROUND THE GLOBE  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

This course will examine mythological literature from across the globe, with an emphasis on narratives of creation, destruction, and emergence. We will encounter well-treated myths such as those of Greek, Norse, and Judaic origin, as well as less oft-discussed myths from African, Japanese, and Native American origin, among others. We will take a comparative approach to these narratives, employing close reading to identify and examine themes such as symbolism, cultural knowledge, gender commentary, and environmentalism. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. Lottery Preference: First year students.

WRPR H111  POWER, PLACE, AND FILM  (1.0 Credit)

Staff

Division: First Year Writing

This writing seminar introduces students to film analysis through the themes of power and place and covers topics such as colonialism and imperialism, immigration, inequality, etc. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H113  WOMEN AND WAR  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

Women have traditionally been viewed as passive actors in the male-dominated field of war. They serve as catalysts for war, as in the case of Helen of Troy, or spoils of conquest. In this course, we will explore both the well-known traditional martial roles assigned to women in the Classical world, as well as the less-discussed, and perhaps more surprising, roles: warrior, spy, aggressor, as well as reflecting on women's roles in modern wars. Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H117  TECHNOLOGIES OF INTIMACY: DATA AND EVERYDAY LIFE  (1.0 Credit)

James Draney

Division: First Year Writing

This course will examine the continuities between literature and algorithmic media as technologies of intimacy. As we learn how to write and think like scholars, we will explore the idea of intimacy—what it is, how it’s experienced, and how it’s crafted through language, media, and design. How does writing create a sense of personal connection? What does it mean to feel addressed, known, and understood by a technology, whether digital or analog? As a writing-intensive course, our main goal will be to practice and improve your writing by responding to these questions in thoughtful, creative, and analytical ways. You’ll write personal reflections, critical reviews, and research-based projects that help you connect big ideas about media, identity, and emotion to your own experiences. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H118  PORTRAITS OF DISABILITY AND DIFFERENCE  (1.0 Credit)

Kristin Lindgren

Division: First Year Writing

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes that "staring is an interrogative gesture that asks whats going on and demands the story. The eyes hang on, working to recognize what seems illegible, order what seems unruly, know what seems strange." In this seminar we will explore visual and literary portraits and self-portraits of bodies marked by difference, bodies that often elicit stares. We will ask: What kinds of stories are told about these bodies? How do memoirs and self-portraits by people with disabilities draw on and challenge traditions of life writing and portraiture? How does this work enlarge cultural and aesthetic views of embodiment, disability, and difference? Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College writing.

(Offered: Fall 2026)

WRPR H119  BROWN V. BOARD AT 70: UNFULFILLED PROMISES & UNFINISHED ACTIVISMS FOR EDUCATIONAL EQUITY  (1.0 Credit)

Christopher R. Rogers

Division: First Year Writing

The landmark victory of Brown v. Board (1954) was popularly understood to symbolize the ability of all students, particularly Black students, to have access to high-quality schooling and shatter the grip of segregation in our schools and public institutions. We will explore perspectives emerging from Black-led education organizing at the 70th Anniversary of the Brown v. Board decision to inform how we understand the purpose of education in our own lives and as social anchor.

WRPR H120  EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENTS  (1.0 Credit)

Carol Schilling

Division: First Year Writing

From the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century to the present, scientists, ethicists, disability activists, and others have argued about the uses of increasingly sophisticated technologies for preventing certain inherited traits and enhancing others. We will track representative arguments in ethics, the court, social movements, and popular culture. How do these medical technologies intersect with cultural values and beliefs? How do they influence who will be included in the human community? Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Fall 2026)

WRPR H121  LITERACY AND SOCIETY  (1.0 Credit)

Marigold Stratford

Division: First Year Writing

Literacy studies is the study of reading, writing, and written text in a social and cultural context. As we discuss the major themes of this field, we will ask questions like, Where did literacy come from, and how is it different from orality (speaking and listening)? How do communities of individuals engage with literacy? How can literacy be a tool for coercion as well as empowerment? and What does the future of literacy look like? Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of the Writing Program.

WRPR H124  CONVERSATIONS WITH BLACK WRITERS: ON WRITING OUR LIVES-IN-THE-ALONG  (1.0 Credit)

Christopher R. Rogers

Division: First Year Writing

What can direct conversations with Black writers teach us about the promise, struggle, and worldmaking potential of writing? Drawing on the University Press of Mississippi’s Literary Conversations series and related multimedia, this seminar examines interviews with major twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black writers. Students will write a personal essay on public writing, a close-reading portrait of one writer, and a final reflective profile connecting their own development as writers to the voices studied throughout the semester.

(Offered: Spring 2027)

WRPR H129  WRITING FROM THE INSIDE OUT: VOICE, MEMORY, AND THE PERSONAL ESSAY  (1.0 Credit)

La-Toya Scott

Division: First Year Writing

What does it mean to write as yourself? This seminar treats the personal essay as both literary form and intellectual inquiry. Students read writers who use memory, voice, and embodied experience as evidence, then craft essays that develop from personal reflection into research-informed arguments for public audiences. The course emphasizes positionality, craft, revision, and the relationship between a writer’s life and thinking. This is a Writing Center-supported seminar.

(Offered: Fall 2026)

WRPR H130  B-SIDES + BLUES VISIONS: REVIEWING BLACK POPULAR CULTURE FOR SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION  (1.0 Credit)

Christopher R. Rogers

Division: First Year Writing

In a classic essay interrogating cultural organizing in the 21st Century, journalist Jeff Chang (2010) spoke to the critical and historical role of cultural production (especially hip-hop) for leveraging grassroots movements for progressive social change. In this writing seminar, we will investigate the relationship between cultural production arising from Black communities and its resonance within their visions/actions for social transformation.

(Offered: Fall 2026)

WRPR H131  HOW HAVERFORD WRITES  (1.0 Credit)

Crystal Fodrey

Division: First Year Writing

This seminar takes as its premise that writing is not simply a way to report what we already know. Writing helps us generate ideas, pursue questions, test possibilities, make stylistic and rhetorical choices, reflect, revise, and refine our thinking as we participate in different fields of study. Using Haverford itself as our primary site of inquiry, we will investigate how students learn discipline-specific ways of writing across their undergraduate experience.

(Offered: Fall 2026)

WRPR H133  THE AMERICAN WEST IN FACT AND FICTION  (1.0 Credit)

Emma Lapsansky-Werner

Division: First Year Writing

An examination of the imagery of the American West. Using visual and verbal images, this course explores such diverse aspects of the West as cowboys, cartography, water rights, race and social class, technology, religion, prostitution, and landscape painting. Open only to member of the first-year class as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H135  HEALTH AND HUMANITIES  (1.0 Credit)

Staff

Division: First Year Writing; Humanities

Over the last few decades, “medical humanities” and “health humanities” initiatives have been established at health professional schools across the country. In these programs, students study art, literature, history, and philosophy in the hopes that these endeavors will help them become better healthcare providers. But what exactly are “the humanities”? How do they differ from and relate to “the arts” or “humanity” itself? And how does a humanistic education benefit both healthcare providers and their patients? In this writing seminar, we will explore how humanistic inquiry contributes to knowledge about health and healthcare by turning to four foundational humanities concepts: observation, narrative, history, and ethics. Throughout the semester, we will focus in particular on how we might leverage tools from the humanities to promote health equity and create more just systems of care. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Fall 2026)

WRPR H138  RACE AND GENDER IN AMERICAN HORROR FILM AND FICTION  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

This course unravels various tropes that haunt the horror genre, exploring how horror film and fiction reflect the values, mores and fears of a collective unconscious, with special emphasis on the ways in which racial stereotyping and gender violence are often deployed as horror tropes. We look closely at portrayals of violence, shock, resistance and power, asking how race and gender play central roles in the production of fear, terror, monstrosity and its subversion. Pre-requisite(s): Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing. Lottery Preference: Only first year students are eligible for these seminars.

WRPR H141  THE EAR AND ELECTRONIC SOUND  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

The 20th century marks a time of rapid transformation in the world’s conception of sound, music, listening, and communication. Technologies that electronically store, transmit, and generate sonic information have caused a fundamental shift in how and why we listen. Through research, discussion, and personal reflection students will deepen their experience of listening while investigating the illuminating history of audio technologies, electronic music, and our evolving relationship to the auditory.

WRPR H142  DEFINING BLACKNESS: RACE & INTIMACY IN AMERICAN DISCOURSE  (1.0 Credit)

Staff

Division: First Year Writing

In this course, students will close-read narrative and filmic depictions of transcending, transgressing, and violating racial borders, thinking about what these narratives reflect and what they produce when it comes to understandings of race, gender and sexuality. We’ll look at the effects of both transgressive and progressive figurations of “racial mixture” and mixed race individuals, considering what functions these discourses play in larger schemas of American politics, ideologies and affects. Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing

WRPR H143  LENAPE STORIES: EXAMINING MYTHOLOGY, STORYTELLING, AND CULTURE THROUGH LENAPE LORE  (1.0 Credit)

Staff

Division: First Year Writing

This course will examine the cultural stories of the Lenape Native Americans. Students will experience Lenape stories through oral and written traditions, including cosmological and etiological myths, trickster tales, stories addressing settler contact and colonization, and wisdom anecdotes from Lenape elders. Through these stories, we will examine themes of myth theory, culture transmission, contact zones, adaptation & translation theory, colonization, oral vs. written tradition, and selection bias in “canonical” curriculum. Lottery Preference: First year students as placed by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H144  RHETORIC IN EVERYDAY LIFE  (1.0 Credit)

Crystal Fodrey

Division: First Year Writing

In this seminar, we will study rhetorical concepts and methods for interpreting how people use language and other symbols to make meaning, negotiate relationships, shape knowledge, and act within social and cultural contexts. We will practice rhetorical criticism through a series of analytical projects, including a sustained research inquiry into self-selected contemporary artifacts.

(Offered: Spring 2027)

WRPR H147  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND CULTURE  (1.0 Credit)

James Draney

Division: First Year Writing

This course will examine how our cultural imagination of superintelligent computers shapes—and is shaped by—the technologies we call “artificial intelligence,” from chatbots to predictive algorithms. We will analyze narrative fiction, nonfiction essays, and films that depict AI in various forms. Assignments will include a film criticism essay, a close reading paper, a research review, and a longform analytical essay. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Fall 2026)

WRPR H148  BORDERLANDS: WRITING BETWEEN PLACES, IDENTITIES, AND DISCIPLINES  (1.0 Credit)

Indie Halstead

Division: First Year Writing

Through reading, discussion, and writing, students investigate how writers and thinkers navigate multiple identities and disciplines, and in turn, develop their own academic voices. Students learn how to construct well-supported arguments, integrate secondary sources, and refine their work through revision. This is a Writing Center-supported seminar, meaning that students will receive individualized support from the instructor and will work closely with experienced Writing Center tutors who have been assigned to the course. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Fall 2026)

WRPR H149  NARRATING OURSELVES: THE POWER OF STORYTELLING  (1.0 Credit)

Division: First Year Writing

This course explores the rhetorical and literary dimensions of storytelling, asking how migration narratives shape personal identity, cultural memory, and public discourse. This is a Writing Center-supported seminar, meaning that students will receive individualized support from the instructor and will work closely with experienced Writing Center tutors assigned to the course. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H150  APPROACHES TO LITERARY ANALYSIS  (1.0 Credit)

Lindsay Reckson, Nat Rivkin

Division: First Year Writing

Intended like other sections of the Writing Program to advance students' critical reading and analytical writing skills, this course is geared specifically towards introducing students to the discipline that studies the literary traditions of the English language. One of its aims is to explore the broad range of thematic interests inherent in these traditions, sharing as they do common roots in the history of our language and its influences. The powers and limits of language; ideas of character and community, and the relation between person and place; heroic endeavor and the mystery of evil; loss and renovation these are among the themes to be tracked through various strategies of literary representation and interpretation in a variety of genres (epic, narrative, and poetry) and modes (realism, allegory, and romance), and across a range of historical periods. Our goal is to develop the vocabulary, skills, and knowledge necessary to understand not only how we decide what literary texts mean, but also how literary texts generate and contemplate meaning. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2027)

WRPR H151  THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: ANCIENT SEXUALITY AND MODERN QUEER POLITICS  (1.0 Credit)

Ryan Warwick

Division: First Year Writing

In this course, we will examine the influence of Greco-Roman antiquity on the way that we talk about sex and sexuality today, in particular, how queer people have used the Classics to define their own identities. There follows a series of questions: What is at stake when we see ourselves in the past? What does it mean to identify an ancient person as queer? In these histories, which elements are emphasized, which are left out? Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H152  TRENDING: DESIRE & VIRAL AESTHETIC CULTURE  (1.0 Credit)

Bethany Swann

Division: First Year Writing

What can our infatuation with viral social media trends tell us about human desire, identity, and the need to be known? This course examines a variety of aesthetic categories from cute to quirky to intimidating while asking questions like, Who are we in this contested space based on how we interact with aesthetic trends? We’ll also consider how a politics of representation intersects with ideas about identity, mimicry, and conformity in gender and sexuality studies. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2027)

WRPR H153  CHRONICALLY ONLINE: ASIAN AMERICANS AND THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES  (1.0 Credit)

Bethany Swann

Division: First Year Writing

Instead of treating Asian American studies and the Digital Humanities (DH) as unrelated fields, this course views them as mutually constitutive. Asian American studies shapes DH’s critical concerns while DH reframes how knowledge about race and technology is created and reproduced. How can humanities-based questions sharpen our understanding of the relationship between race, data, and power? How might digital methods offer fresh ways to visualize erasure, map resistance, and tell stories that disrupt dominant narratives?

(Offered: Fall 2026)

WRPR H155  ORIGIN STORIES: ASIAN AMERICAN NARRATIVES OF MIGRATION, DISPLACEMENT, AND DIASPORA  (1.0 Credit)

Theresa Tensuan

Division: First Year Writing

In this course we will read a range of origin stories--creation narratives, memoirs, alter/native accounts of settler colonialism, and trickster tales--that delineate constructions of identity and constitutions of community with a focus on the ways in which writers and artists represent ongoing “encounters” between indigenous and imperial cultures, examining inventive work that play with genres ranging from the lyric to the epic to speculative fiction as a means of offering new ways of understanding history and imagining the future. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2027)

WRPR H156  GOOD GUYS & GALS? QUAKER IMAGERY IN FICTION  (1.0 Credit)

Emma Lapsansky-Werner

Division: First Year Writing

What have been the literary uses of Quaker ideas and images in fiction? How have these changed over time? Here on the Haverford campus, with its Quaker heritage and traditions, is housed perhaps the largest collection of Quaker novels anywhere in the world, fiction by or about Quakers, often populated with characters whose Quakerliness is designed to evoke a certain mood, message, or subtext. For some authors, Quakers became stand-ins for virtue. For others, the Quaker image is of the troublemaker, the nay-sayer, the haughty, unbending zealot. In this course we will read excerpts from an array of Quaker fiction. Then, through class discussions, written essays, and through considering each others writing, students will explore how commentators have interpreted the meaning of "Quakerness" in literature." Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H157  CLASSICS AND CLASS  (1.0 Credit)

Indie Halstead

Division: First Year Writing

This course examines the ways in which classical texts and histories have been used to uphold social hierarchies while also serving as tools of resistance and reinvention. Through reading, discussion, and writing, students will explore how class shapes access to education, cultural heritage, and the narratives we inherit about antiquity. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2027)

WRPR H161  NARRATIVE AS EVIDENCE: LITERATURE AND THE LAW  (1.0 Credit)

La-Toya Scott

Division: First Year Writing

This course examines how legal discourse and literary narrative define justice, humanity, and evidence. Through fiction, memoir, testimony, and speculative writing, students explore race and criminalization, gender and bodily autonomy, immigration and citizenship, and labor and class. No prior legal knowledge is required. Students develop close-reading and analytical writing skills while asking whose stories count as evidence, how storytelling shapes power, and how literature exposes the limits of law and imagines alternatives.

(Offered: Spring 2027)

WRPR H168  NARRATIVES OF ENVIRONMENTAL EQUITY: WRITING TOWARD CLIMATE JUSTICE  (1.0 Credit)

Staff

Division: First Year Writing

This writing seminar explores how environmental narratives shape public understanding, personal identity, and cultural belonging in the face of climate crisis. Over the semester, students will engage with global and local stories—from scientific accounts and Indigenous perspectives to memoirs and podcasts—to investigate how storytelling can serve as a method of inquiry, advocacy, and transformation. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H169  WRITING VISUAL CULTURE: ART, CINEMA, AND GRAPHIC NARRATIVE  (1.0 Credit)

Staff

Division: First Year Writing

In an age where our interactions with images have both proliferated and been made shallow by social media and generative AI, deep encounters with images are increasingly rare and valuable. This course deals with the reading and writing of visual culture, focusing on both literary and critical modes of writing about art. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

(Offered: Spring 2027)

WRPR H171  TASTE AND THE AMERICAN IMAGINARY  (1.0 Credit)

Bethany Swann

Division: First Year Writing

This course provides a broad introduction to cultural identity through the lens of food studies. Foodways are defined as the beliefs and behaviors that have to do with the production, distribution, and consumption of food. While this course takes a special interest in foodways local to Philadelphia— Little Mexico in South Philadelphia and Chinatown in Center City—we will also zoom out to consider how food operates as a global site of community and cultural exchange. Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H172  REVOLUTIONARY PROSE: DECLARATIONS, MANIFESTOS AND THE OPEN LETTER  (1.0 Credit)

Terrance Wiley

Participants will consider the dynamic and influential form and style of manifestos, declarations, and letters, examining their role in shaping modern social, cultural, and political ideologies, movements, and revolutions, from the Protestant Reformation and Occupy Movement to Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Palestinian Liberation, examining how these statements reflect--in style, form and aspiration--the socio-political contexts of their time, often challenging established norms and advocating for radical change. Lottery Preference: First year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H182  THE AMERICAN FAMILY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE  (1.0 Credit)

Emma Lapsansky-Werner

Division: First Year Writing

Explores values, and stresses, as interfaced with realities of “family," e.g.,Native American, Hispanic, African American; Protestant, Jewish, Mormon and Catholic, North, South and West, over time; rituals of birth, marriage, illness, disability; expectations of family "loyalty." Open only to first-year students as assigned by the Director of College Writing.

WRPR H183  COMPUTING THE SELF: THE ART AND PHILOSOPHY OF DIGITAL CULTURE  (1.0 Credit)

James Draney

Division: First Year Writing

What does it feel like to live in data? To be tagged, tracked, followed, favorited, or rated? How has the datafication of everyday life shaped your social life, altering the way you relate to yourself and others? Students in this class will ask what it means to see and be seen as a data object, analyzing a variety of novels, stories, works of philosophy, psychology, and social science that have dramatized the questions posed above.

(Offered: Spring 2027)