🐻 Cornell Freshman Writing Seminars unofficial reading list 2026
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Anthropology
Culture, Society & Power: Person, Time & Conduct ANTHR 1101-101 (fa26)
- Stories as Equipment for Living: Last Talks and Tales of Barbara Myerhoff
Architecture
Building to Extract: Architecture & Natural Resources ARCH 1901 (fa26)
- Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country by Traci Brynne Voyles
- Architecture & the Face of Coal: Mining & Modern Britain by Gary A. Boyd
- Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights & the Economic Culture of Decolonization by Christopher R. W. Dietrich
- Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power & Working-Class Communities by Dinius & Vergara
- The Company Town: Architecture & Society in the Early Industrial Age by John Garner
- The Company Town by Hardy Green
- Classes of Labour: Work & Life in a Central Indian Steel Town by Jonathan Parry
- El Dorado In West Africa: The Gold Mining Frontier, African Labor & Colonial Capitalism by Raymond E. Dumett
- Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest by Linda Carlson
- The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand & How It Transformed Civilization by Vince Beiser
- City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity & the Making of Modern Kirkuk by Arbella Bet-Shlimon
- Brazil’s Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power & Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964 by Oliver Dinius
- Extraction Ecologies & the Literature of the Long Exhaustion by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Asian Studies
Songs of Love & War: South Asian Lyrics ASIAN 1104 (fa26)
- They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing by Graff & Birkenstein
- Poems of Love & War: From the Eight Anthologies & the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil by A. K. Ramanujan
The Great Epic of India ASIAN 1106 (fa26)
- The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata
- The Mahabharata, v.1: The Book of the Beginning
- The Mahabharata, v.2: The Book of Assembly & the Book of the Forest
- The Mahabharata, v.3: The Book of the Virata & the Book of the Effort
Comparative Literature
Robots COML 1106-103 (fa26)
- Severance by Ling Ma
- The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
- Exhalation by Ted Chiang
English
Writing Across Cultures: Modern Fantasy Media ENGL 1111-104 (fa26)
- The Hobbit, or There & Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien
- ✔️ Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
Writing the Environment: Enchanting Nature ENGL 1130-101 (fa26)
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Writing the Environment: Climates of Resistance ENGL 1130-102 (fa26)
- Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko
True Stories ENGL 1134 (fa26)
- Assata by Assata Shakur
- Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
- ✔️ They Called Us Enemy by George Takei
American Voices: Lost in the City: The Great Migration & Imagining the Urban Space through Black Art ENGL 1158-102 (fa26)
- Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks
- ✔️ The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (my highlights)
- Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
- The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Intersections: Race, Writing & Power ENGL 1160 (fa26)
- Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black by bell hooks
- Thinking Through Writing by Susan R. Horton
Cultural Studies: Black Politics & Writing Towards Liberation ENGL 1168-101 (fa26)
- Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
- Assata by Assata Shakur
- A Short Walk by Alice Childress
Short Stories ENGL 1170-105 (fa26)
- Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner
- ✔️ The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (my highlights)
- Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
- The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future by Brodsky & Nalebuff
- Collected Stories of Carson McCullers
- Eudora Welty : Stories, Essays & Memoir
Word & Image ENGL 1183-107 (fa26)
- Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
- American Journal: 50 Poems for Our Time by Tracy K. Smith
British Literature: Oscar Wilde ENGL 1191-102 (fa26)
- The Portable Oscar Wilde
- A Pocket Style Manual with Exercises by Hacker & Sommers
Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Black Feminist Speculation & Futuring FGSS 1100-101 (fa26)
- Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience & Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life by Ruha Benjamin
- Bloodchild & Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler
- Dear Science & Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
- Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
- Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
- Black Utopias: Speculative Life & the Music of Other Worlds by Jayna Brown
- The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches & Meditations by Toni Morrison
- How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory by Jennifer C. Nash
German Studies
From Fairy Tales to the Uncanny: Exploring the Romantic Consciousness GERST 1109 (fa26)
- Goethe, Tieck, Foque & Brentano: Romantic Fairy Tales
- The Marquise of O & Other Stories by Heinrich Von Kleist
Love & Death in Vienna GERST 1122 (fa26)
- The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann by Ingeborg Bachmann
- Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann
Human Ecology
Health Equity: The Body Speaks: Narratives of Female Pain HE 1150 (fa26)
- The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness & Ethics by Arthur W. Frank
- Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
- The Camera My Mother Gave Me by Susanna Kaysen
- Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood by Lucy Jones
Italian
Writing Italy, Writing the Self: Jewish-Italian Lit and the Long 20th Century ITAL 1113 (fa26)
- Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
- Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story by Dan Vittorio Segre
- Who Loves You Like This by Edith Bruck
- Americordo: The Italian Jewish Exiles In America by Gianna Pontecorboli
- Nonna Carla by Alain Elkann
- Anita by Alain Elkann
- A Single Day by Alain Elkann
- The Novel of Ferrara by Giorgio Bassani
- Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn by Ayala Fader
- ✔️ Just a Girl: A True Story of World War II by Lia Levi (my highlights)
- The Golden Age of Italian Jews: 1848-1938 by Gino Segrè
- The Most Tenacious of Minorities: The Jews of Italy by Sara Reguer