Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Experience (ASURE) students who participate in IFS have the opportunity to complete one ASURE course before the fall semester starts. To learn more about how IFS courses fit your ASURE track, contact asure@iu.edu and ask about IFS.
Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Experience (ASURE)
The ASURE program handles all course placements and enrollments in IFS ASURE courses. If you would like to enroll in, change, or withdraw from an IFS ASURE course placement, you will need to contact the ASURE office.
Some ASURE students may decide to start their ASURE experience in the fall, but would still like to take an Intensive First-Year Seminars course. ASURE students who wish to take a non-ASURE IFS course are eligible to apply.
As an ASURE student in IFS you will:
- Transition to college virtually in a 3-credit course that fulfills part of your ASURE agreement
- Move to campus early for your first immersive on-campus classroom experience
- Connect with one of IU's top professors
- Get to know everything that IU Bloomington has to offer
- Develop a sense of community with other incoming first-year students
2024 IFS ASURE Program Courses (Any GenEd Status)
A Guided Tour of the Brain as Told through Exceptional Case Studies
This course will explore both the history and science of the brain as told through tales of trauma, mental illness, and remarkable healing. We will begin our tour of the brain as storytellers, diving
A History of Magic; or, It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Accused of Witchcraft
Do you believe in magic? Historically, a lot of people have done. Some of the earliest objects and texts we have are about magic or divination; if you put those terms into Google, you get tens of mill
A.I. and Making
This course will facilitate students in their experimental use of generative AI within the design process, particularly as it relates to iterative prototyping through hands on analog making. This cour
Reserved for Hudson & Holland Scholars
Art and Soundscapes: Collective Senses
How do we perceive the world through the fusion of sound and visual art? What insights do the interplay of auditory and visual mediums provide in understanding our environment? How do we translate the
Arts of War
Arts of War is an introduction to military history and philosophy, and it encourages students to think critically about the topic of war. The insights from this class apply to the fields of politic
Arts of the Self in the U.S. and Spain: From Home Movies to TikTok / Self Portraits to Selfies
The course centers on four kinds of media (selfies, self-portraits, home movies, and TikTok videos) and how they enable self-representation according to any number of factors: geography, history, race
Reserved for 21st Century Scholars
Beauty and the Self: Identity and Beauty Standards in American Culture
As experienced navigators of the image-saturated space of social media, members of Gen-Z have a sophisticated understanding of how beauty standards in our visual culture influence our self-perception.
Reserved for 21st Century Scholars
Black Dance Is/Black Dance Ain't: An Intro to Black Aesthetics in Dance History
This course will explore an Africanist worldview by interrogating dance, power, and privilege in America. Over a series of directed readings, videos, lecture-discussions, master classes and a live per
Reserved for Hudson & Holland Scholars
Blood, Babies, and Chainsaws: Gender in/as Horror
This course will orient students to a variety of critical approaches—literary, anthropological, historical, sociological—on the study of gender in a genre (the modern Horror film) that is enormous
Culture and Revolution in Paris, 1850-1900
Paris in the late 19th century was the site of a cultural and political revolution that created the world we live in today. War, bloody battles between the classes, and an on-going struggle over the r
Disrupting the Stage: Theatre as Embodied Social Activism
The highly popular and provocative Brazilian author, educator and social arts activist, Augusto Boal once explained that: “It is not the place of the theatre to show the correct path, but only to o
Economics of Epidemics
The course will examine the connections between the biology of epidemics, human responses, and economic consequences. We will consider questions like: What are the direct economic consequences of epid
Reserved for ASURE Program participants
Ethnographic Exploration of Indiana University Culture: Researching Pathways to Student Success and Wellbeing
This seminar is a unique, immersive course designed for students interested in understanding the diverse and dynamic culture of Indiana University (IU) through the lens of ethnographic research method
Reserved for Hudson & Holland Scholars
Exploring "Otherness"
This class will curate an exhibition that pairs contemporary art works with collection objects, to make an argument in space. Exploring Otherness allows students to research and advocate for works t
Reserved for 21st Century Scholars
Fashion Consumption in a Climate Emergency
What does one wear to a climate emergency? This course asks you to more carefully consider: What does what you wear mean for citizens, communities, nations, the planet and you? Environmentally, the f
Reserved for Hudson & Holland Scholars
Fashioning Identity: Art + Artifacts + Fashion Theory
In this course students will explore the communication of identity as it relates to culture, throughout history and today, through the lens of fashion and dress. Readings and discussion will cover top
Food for Thought: Food Systems from Local to Global
The essential question of this course is: Why do people eat what they eat? In an effort to answer this question, we will examine a variety of economic, ecological, sociological and political dimension
Reserved for ASURE Program participants
Foundations of the American Experience for International Students
The United States can seem like a very confusing place to international students and visitors. If Americans are supposed to be oriented to progress and the future, why do they seem obsessed with the W
Free Speech Law & Policy: A First Amendment Introduction
Free speech is an area of law that has been in the news and in the courts lately. Legal controversies involving free speech are not going away any time soon. Free speech law and theory involve princip
FreshStart: Navigating College Wellness
Embark on a Fresh Start - where every challenge is a chance to thrive, every setback a setup for success. In this course, we don't just find our way; we create it. Because in this journey, every step
Reserved for 21st Century Scholars
Game Narrative: Designing Stories for Interactive Media
When students think of narrative they most often go right to their favorite stories. Watching Casablanca on a snowy December eve, the sweeping mesas of the Mexican frontier as the gallop along on ho
Happy Hoosiers: Exploring Nature, Heritage, and Health
Who doesn't want to be a Happy Hoosier! In this course, we will investigate the role that nature and the heritage - the world we live in - plays in health and happiness. We will investigate human hea
Human Aggression
Our ultimate goal in this course will be to design successful interventions to reduce harmful aggressive behavior in our society. To accomplish this end goal, we will need to develop a thorough unders
Illusions in Culture
We spend our lives trying to get a grasp on "reality", but anyone who has ever seen a rubber pencil, read a Magic-Eye kids book, been tricked by a stage magician's sleight of hand, or watched a blockb
Reserved for ASURE Program participants
Indigenous Americas: Knowledge Otherwise
This class in an introduction to the ancestral and current knowledge that different indigenous groups and thinkers in the Americas have compiled and produced in the last decades. We will study diffe
Jesus, Alexander, and Other Muslim Heroes
What do Jesus, Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan have in common? In Western popular imagination these important individuals – the emblem of Christianity, the founder of a vast Greek Empire, and
Language and Thinking: Biases and Illusions
Language is one of the most central aspects of human life. How we think and act to a great extent relies on the language we use. This course introduces the cognitive processes underlying human langua
Reserved for ASURE Program participants
Leaving Teenage Wasteland: Expectations of Adulthood in Literature and Culture
Do you feel that? That's the powerful hand of culture, poking you with a pointed finger, reminding you that it's time to leave your youth behind and become--gasp--an adult. But even as it prods you
Music and Words
One of the most common artistic fusions we encounter in our daily lives is the melding of words and music to create song. This course seeks to give students a deeper understanding of the relationship
Music and the Mind
Music is pervasive in our lives, and not just for trained musicians. Consider some of the contexts in which we encounter music: ceremonies and rituals, social gatherings, private listening, formal pe
Popular Music as a History Book: Latin America in the 20th Century
In 2011, the famous Puerto Rican band Calle 13 released the song “Latinoamérica”, an epic piece that not only skyrocketed the transnational popularity of the band, but that became somewhat of
Reserved for Hudson & Holland Scholars
Psychopaths: Born or Made?
In the film The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist by profession, is also a cannibalistic serial killer and a psychopath. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex is a teenage sociopath
Puzzles and Problems
In puzzles, we find pleasure in mental challenges. This course explores the kinds of thinking involved in different varieties of puzzles and how puzzle thinking relates to other kinds of intellectual
Queer Activism and Public Issues
Queer activism about public issues sometimes strives to persuade audiences in mainstream ways. Sometimes, however, queer activism is more radical about love, family, political organization, and commun
Rationality and Logic
This course examines (A) The domains of human rationality: belief acquisition, inference, and actions; (B) The deductive method of inference, translations, and basic concepts (C) Some prevalent f
Seeing the Past: History in Photographs
Are you taking pictures? I am sure you have a lot of photos, picturing your life, family, and friends. Are you interested to learn how to work with visual information and get a new experience in visua
Sex, Drugs, & Glock n’ Roll: Case Studies in Emotion and the Law
Judges, lawyers, policy makers and others who work in and with the law have a tough job. They must often wade into the most controversial topics on sex and reproductive rights, medical decision making
Reserved for Hudson & Holland Scholars
Social Simulations: A Computational Exploration of Social Dilemmas
As a STEM+Social Science course, Social Simulations offers an integrated learning journey to develop a solid foundation in three domains that you can readily apply to many majors: social science, c
Reserved for Hudson & Holland Scholars
Soundtrack to Revolution
Can music change the world? If so, how? What are the dynamics of music, activism, and social justice? How does music facilitate revolution? This course proceeds from the basic idea that music is a pow
Sourdough and Selfies: How Art Saved Us During the Lockdown
In this course, we will think back to the pandemic lockdown of 2020-21, a time when you were high school freshmen, and analyze how people turned to art, broadly defined, to help them cope with the iso
Taste of the Middle East: Culture and Identity
This course helps new university students understand and adapt to the diverse and cooperative college society, with a focus on cultural identity. It aims to educate students about different cultures,
TechUniverse: A Journey into Contemporary Technologies
From the moment we wake up until we retire for the night, smartphones have become an essential companion, revolutionizing the way we access information, communicate with others, navigate our surroundi
The Power of Stories
Stories and storytelling are as old as mankind. Stories sustain us, we tell them, we live through them. Stories are an integral part of identity building and shape our understanding of events. Stories
Reserved for Hudson & Holland Scholars
The Science of Happiness
In this course, we will study the Science of Happiness through three main lenses - biology, psychology, and sociology. Biology helps us understand, for example, the amygdala’s role in our emotions
The Science of Individual & Societal Wellbeing
We will begin the course by virtually exploring the beautiful countries of Iceland and New Zealand. Both countries have consistently ranked in the top 10 of the world’s happiest people and lead worl
Vikings and Sagas: Primary Sources vs. Popular Culture
The past couple of decades have seen a spike in portrayals of Vikings in a variety of media from television and movies to comic books, manga, and video games. But who were the Vikings? Do the images o
We’ve Been Schooled!: Rethinking the History of Schooling in the U.S. & Reimagining Its Future
Over the last few decades, growing calls for compulsory education have ensured that nearly 1 billion children are enrolled in schools worldwide. In the U.S., young children spend, on average, 180 days
Reserved for Hudson & Holland Scholars
What Makes Good Music?
We all like music. The goal of this course is to talk about why. My primary objective is to introduce you to the study of music through the fundamental vocabulary of music, outlining the most critica
Reserved for Hudson & Holland Scholars
What is Politics, and Why Should We Care?
Together we can ruin the world or make it better. The purpose of politics is said to be the latter – to enable us to care for interests that we share in common and foster effective citizenship throu
World Literature and Intellectual Traditions
This course explores the intellectual, cultural, and literary development of the “pre-modern” period through canonical literature, philosophy, drama, and theology from the beginnings of the Common
“JUST GO PLAY!”: The Importance of Play for Life
The birds and the bees do it, so do octopuses, dolphins, kittens, humans, and maybe even dinosaurs. It’s an essential drive across many species, is culturally important, and too often missing from y