Overview
In 2025, for select students who are eligible for the First-Year Scholars at Yale (FSY) Program but are unable to attend, we are offering an alternative option of enrolling in English 114 online in Yale Summer Session (YSS) during Session B. English 114 is a popular Yale College writing seminar, offered during the academic year and as a part of the FSY Program. Through the course this summer, we seek to provide 24 incoming students with a chance to earn a Yale College course credit, to engage with other incoming students in the classroom, and to learn about many of the resources and opportunities available to Yale College students.
Students who accept this opportunity will be enrolling in a Yale College course, which is offered synchronously online and condensed into a fast-paced, rigorous five-week summer session. Students will have access to experienced instructors, writing partners, librarians, and other staff from across Yale. After successfully completing this course, students will enter Yale College already having earned one course credit toward their degree program and having satisfied one of the two writing (WR) distributional requirements. Completion of one course credit before matriculation gives students a head start on their degree requirements and may provide students with more flexibility to take a lighter credit load in a future term.
Details
The course will be offered in Session B of Yale Summer Session, which runs from June 30 to August 1, and the cost of tuition, online technology fee, and course materials are covered by Yale.
The 24 students who are invited to take English 114 online this summer will enroll in one of two sections (12 students per section) based on their time zone:
- ENGL S114E (01): Home, MWF 12-2:15pm (EDT) – intended for Pacific and Mountain time zones
- ENGL S114E (02): Liberalism and its Critics, MWF 9-11:15am (EDT) – intended for Eastern and Central time zones
Expectations
Attendance at all class sessions (Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays) is mandatory. Additionally, students who accept this opportunity must attend required programming on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12-1pm (EDT). This programming will include workshops, social activities to connect you with current students, and other events to help you prepare for the fall. There may also be additional activities and events beyond this period that are optional, and you are encouraged to attend if you are able.
To participate in this online class and additional programming, students must have access to a computer where they can log in and connect to a virtual classroom and must have camera or microphone capabilities. Students will want to connect from a suitable environment where they are able to participate in classroom discussion with minimal distraction (e.g., private room, office, study space at a public library, etc.). If you are interested in participating but have concerns about the technology requirements, please email fsy@yale.edu.
Course Descriptions & Instructor Bios
Note: For fall 2025, Yale College is changing its course number system from 3- to 4-digit numbers. ENGL 114 is equivalent to its new course number, ENGL 1014.
ENGL S114E (01): Home
Where do you call home? Is your sense of home fixed to specific places, persons, languages, or memories? Must the idea of home always suggest rootedness? What does it mean to feel at home? In this course, we examine the affective responses elicited by various notions of home, from feelings of nostalgia and familiarity to estrangement, and we consider the ways in which generic and particular spaces enable or constrain individual agency and constitute our relation to others. Unsettling the easy boundary between the private and the public, we will seek to understand what various imaginings of home reveal about our collective and individual desires and anxieties, and we will examine the social and political forces at play in the making of home. Drawing from multiple disciplines and different modes of argument including essays, poetry, song, and film, we will study how home overlaps with spirituality, language politics, hierarchies of gender and labor, and educational opportunities, and how climate crises, pandemics, global economies, and immigration policies impact home. As we examine the debates and contests over space, we will think about who has the right to belong where and what it means—for instance—to belong at Yale. Informed by various theories and poetics of home, at the end of the course, we will revisit the places that make us.
Instructor: Felisa Baynes-Ross. Felisa is a Lecturer in English at Yale University where she teaches courses in expository writing, creative non-fiction, and pedagogy. She writes and teaches on topics including, home and migration, medieval poetry and religion, and historical narratives on the Caribbean.
ENGL S114 (02): Liberalism and its Critics
This course addresses important claims about the philosophical and political meanings of “liberalism” since the early-nineteenth century, including the claims brought against it by some of its most influential critics. Thus, one of our course goals will be to interrogate what it means to defend and/or criticize the core tenets of a political or social worldview.
We will also examine how the meanings and aims of “freedom” and “individualism” – which liberalism is designed to promote – have been shaped by historical, economic, racial, and social contexts, e.g., the Cold War, the struggle for black liberation and civil rights, the globalization of financial markets, and the looming threat of climate disaster. Some of the questions we will explore include: Is the shaping of a political culture like liberalism largely determined by external events, by human choice, or a combination? What role does intellectual exchange play in defining liberalism? And what have individuals and larger collectives done to embody or resist a specific political culture?
Instructor: Marcus Alaimo. Marcus received his PhD in English from Yale in 2024. His academic work explores the polemical exchanges between Romantic poets and the utilitarian philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, and asks how poetry and political rhetoric in this period competed for cultural authority. He has taught first-year writing at Yale and for the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI), and this fall, he will teach Historical and Political Thought in Yale’s Directed Studies program. Marcus lives in Branford College, where he is a fellow, with his wife and three dogs.
Next Steps
Please accept or decline your invitation to enroll in ENGL S114E by May 25.
If you have any questions, please contact us at fsy@yale.edu.