English 1014: Writing Seminar helps students become more fluent and effective academic writers. Taught through a combination of seminar discussion, writing instruction, and one-on-one conferences, the Writing Seminar also introduces students to the debates and discussions that support genuine inquiry and scholarship. Many incoming Yale students can write effectively when asked to synthesize or report knowledge—but academic writing asks, instead, that students begin to create new knowledge. In emphasizing academic writing, Writing Seminar will teach First-Year Scholars to write about problems. Through this course, First-Year Scholars will gain invaluable experience at developing interesting, nuanced arguments, allowing them to participate in the larger conversation about ideas that are at the heart of a liberal arts education.
[point]During the academic year, this course if offered as ENGL 1014. The equivalent summer course number is ENGL S1014 where the "S" prefix denotes it is a summer course.
Every section of English S1014 stages an inquiry into some topic of pressing intellectual or political urgency. This summer’s topics are linked below, but regardless of the subject, every section of Writing Seminar leads students to higher achievement as writers, thinkers, and beginning scholars.
In summary, English S1014 is designed to help students evaluate and produce both academic and public writing. In this course students will have the opportunity to:
- develop the habits of experienced writers, including revising, editing for style, proofreading, and giving and using feedback;
- evaluate writing strategies in any text and practice incorporating techniques into their writing;
- use writing to engage significant questions, and enter into ongoing debates by writing clear and effective analysis and arguments;
- conduct research as a process of inquiry, use some of Yale’s exceptional academic resources (such as libraries, scholars, and the student community), and find, evaluate, analyze, and document information
View the 2026 Course Descriptions
[FAQ]Telling Stories - Craig Eklund
Human beings are storytelling animals. We tell stories of our lives, our families, and our nations. We tell stories of the past, present, and future. Stories are a natural, universal way for us to order and interpret experience. But not all stories declare themselves with a “Once upon a time.” Many, in fact, are told without any announcement at all. Many are told without any obvious teller. Many are not so much stories we tell as they are stories that tell us—how to live, how to think, how to understand things. In this course we will explore how narratives and narrative-like structures secretly shape the way we conceive of the world. We'll ask what happens to the past when we craft it into the narrative that we call history. We'll look at the modern myths that populate our cultural landscape and the stories that shape our political convictions. We'll read the science of stories and the stories of science. We will think about how our own life stories relate to how we conceive of ourselves. Examining both the way we tell stories and what stories tell us, this course tries to get the story straight, once and for all.
Craig Eklund is a Lecturer in the English Department. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale. He specializes in French and English language Modernism and wrote his dissertation on the imagination in the writings of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. He has been teaching writing classes at Yale and Quinnipiac Universities for several years now.
[FAQ]BAMN: What is a Social Movement? - Tim Kreiner
By any means necessary is a slogan with a history. In the US, it is usually associated with Malcolm X. But Malcolm borrowed the phrase from Frantz Fanon, who made the slogan popular among militants in the struggles for liberation from colonialism. And although the revolutionary mood that slogan gathered owes much to the Cold War and liberation movements in the global South, that mood passed through revolts against masters of every kind in much of the global North. This class explores the history of collective action in the postwar US in order to ask what is a social movement? Are the burning of the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, #NODAPL riots, #MeToo no-platforming, and risings against police violence part of the antiracist, feminist, anticapitalist, and climate justice movements born in the 1960s? Or do they suggest that something new is afoot in the twenty-first century? What about Trump-ism and the Capitol riot? Who struggles for freedom from what, why and how, in short? And why do we divide the manifold dynamics of those struggles into discrete "movements”? Readings will be drawn from the writings of militants as well as scholars, and span movement histories, critical theory, and contemporary inquiries into ongoing social struggles.
Tim Kreiner is the Course Coordinator for ENGL 115 and a Lecturer in Directed Studies and the English Department at Yale. He is finishing a book of literary history titled Contentious Poetics: Social Movements and American Poetry in the Postwar World and teaches courses on political theory, global social movements, 20/21 c. American literature, and the relationship between cultural production and social contest.
[FAQ]Against Empire: Postcolonial and World-Systems Theory - Chris McGowan
This course will introduce students to some of the central debates and questions in postcolonial studies and world-systems theory, such as: What motivates and sustains empire? How has imperialism developed historically and what are the distinctive features of imperialism in the present? How have people subjected to colonialism resisted it, and how have they thought about and described that resistance? What role do cultural and educational institutions—or, students, teachers, artists, and writers—play in ongoing decolonization struggles? We read critical works by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Wallerstein, Hazel Carby, and Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, and discuss several poems, films, and short stories.
Chris McGowan is a Lecturer in English at Yale. He is currently working on an academic book called "Genre Trouble: The British Modernist Novel," which studies the relation between British modernism, novelistic genre, and the end of the British Empire. At Yale, he teaches courses on literature, political philosophy, creative nonfiction, and first-year writing. He is a founding member of the Left Literary Studies Working Group and the Irish Worlds Seminar.
[FAQ]Creative Obsessions - Carol Morse
What is the nature of creativity? Is there such a thing as “creative genius,” or are most creative endeavors achieved through hard work and practice? Can it be taught? From childhood crushes to white whales, artists, scientists, and writers have transformed ordinary obsessions into expressions of beauty and wonder. But as much as we praise the imagination and the work it produces, it can have a darker side; creative types are sometimes linked to mental instability, substance abuse, and self-delusion. This class will allow you to explore and write about the many varieties of creativity. We’ll read scholarly work from different academic disciplines, such as STEM fields, education, and the humanities. What is the relationship between creativity and obsession? Creativity and addiction? Are we motivated by external validation or an inward drive to manage, or even escape, reality? Readings will include work by or about such artists as Gloria Anzaldua, Richard Deming, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maurice Sendak, and we'll explore a film about the creative process (Greta Gerwig's Little Women).
Carol Tell Morse is a lecturer in the English Department and a Residential College Writing Tutor. She has taught a variety of writing classes--from children's literature to poetry--but her favorite class is 1014. Prior to coming to Yale, she taught at the University of Michigan, and she received her PhD in Irish poetry from University College, Dublin.
[FAQ]AI Through the Looking Glass - Steve Shoemaker
As AI approaches, and in some ways exceeds, human-level intelligence, it offers both a portal into strange new territory and a mirror held up to our very natures. In this course, we will pursue the question of what it means to be human at a moment when the boundaries between human and nonhuman are shifting as never before. Through reading essays and book excerpts by writers like Ted Chiang, Ethan Mollick, Emily M. Bender, Martin Buber, Carrie Jenkins, and Harry Frankfurt, we’ll place discussions of the nature and purposes of AI in dialogue with philosophical treatments of the qualities that make us human, including empathy, love, and creativity. Through watching films like Her and I’m Your Man, we will imagine possible futures and explore their implications. Students will strengthen their skills and abilities as writers and critical thinkers while also experimenting with, and assessing, strategies for AI-assisted writing.
Steve Shoemaker has taught writing and literature for more than thirty years, and at a number of colleges and universities, including Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Virginia. He also served for many years as the Director of College Writing and the Roth Writing Center at Connecticut College. As a teacher of writing, he is committed to helping students engage with writing as a genuine act of thinking, a powerful means for pursuing the questions they find most compelling.
[FAQ]Fakes, Imitations, and Knockoffs - Taylor Kang
What is a “fake”? A plastic-leather bag? A fake Caravaggio? The word alone invokes complicated ideas surrounding “authenticity,” in addition to long histories of capitalism, labor, and (e)valuation. In this course, we examine our longstanding cultural obsession with “the authentic” – and the forms of artistic anxiety, panic, and outrage that often accompany good fakes. We take a transhistorical approach, moving from the Renaissance practice of aemulatio, to Roman and Las Vegas architecture, to recent discussions of autofiction in the contemporary book world. In the process, we interrogate what we mean when we talk about “originality,” and why we often denigrate imitations, fakes, and knockoffs.
Taylor Yoonji Kang (she/her) is a PhD student in Comparative Literature & Early Modern Studies, where she works on poetry, philosophy, and visual culture between the early modern period and the twentieth century. Before coming to Yale, she got her A.B. in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Outside of academics, she enjoys running, reading, and making art.
[FAQ]Invented Languages - Angus Warren
TBD Course Description
Angus Warren is a TBD.
[FAQ]Cultures of Violence - Barbara Stuart
According to an August 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center, four-in-ten adults in this country live in a household with a gun, including 32% who personally own one. 72% of gun owners surveyed have purchased that gun for protection. But the Pew survey also shows that “six-in-ten U.S. adults say gun violence is a very big problem in the country today.” The survey reveals tensions in a culture where gun ownership is significant and legal and where citizens are concerned about the pervasiveness of gun violence. (Source: Pew Research Center: Key Facts About Americans and Guns)
This course seeks to look beyond the polarizing rhetoric over rights to gun ownership to explore how individuals and communities can work towards responding to and reducing gun violence. We will be looking at the cultural, social, political, and institutional structures that have contributed to the U.S.’s higher rates of gun violence as compared to peer countries and at a range of creative efforts to make U.S. communities safer through local, regional, and national endeavors. In doing so, we will be examining these key questions: Through what mechanisms can individuals and communities come together to reduce gun violence? How can a persistent problem like gun violence be addressed?Barbara Stuart earned her PhD long ago and happily taught at Yale for 30 years. The focus of her doctoral work was the Victorian novel, and she often re-reads those novels with great pleasure, but at Yale she has taught documentary film, the contemporary essay, and two courses inspired by her own and her students’ interest in our food system: “The Real World of Food” and “Writing about Food.”