Common Reading

May 2021

Dear First-Year Student:

On behalf of President Stuart Rabinowitz and the entire Hofstra community, greetings, and welcome to Hofstra University. You are about to join a vibrant, engaged, diverse community, with opportunities ranging from clubs, concerts, and athletics to internships and all the cultural events the New York metropolitan area has to offer. First and foremost, however, we are an academic community. At Hofstra, not only will you pursue subjects that already interest you, but our faculty will also spark your interests in new directions.

We use our summer orientation program to give you a taste of the kind of intellectual stimulation and varying ways of looking at issues you will experience this fall in a Hofstra classroom. To that end, we are asking all first-year students to read selected works from the 1619 Project, published in the NY Times Magazine. The 1619 Project marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown, Virginia, and aims to re-examine the legacy of slavery in America. Conceived and edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project includes a collection of essays and other literary works written by historians, journalists, playwrights, poets, authors, and artists. Each of these works highlights a different aspect of contemporary American life, from our broken healthcare system to rush-hour traffic, and reveals its roots in slavery and its aftermath.

As part of your participation in New Student Orientation this summer, you will attend a virtual panel event focusing on one of the main themes of the 1619 Project. The panel event will provide you with a glimpse of how some of our faculty experts and outstanding upper-level students are thinking about and engaging with social justice issues. To get started, visit this link: https://libguides.hofstra.edu/1619/. There, you will find the entire collection of works from the 1619 project, instructions on how to attend the virtual panel event, and information about how to participate in Hofstra’s Common Reading Essay Contest. If you have questions about the common reading or about New Student Orientation, please call (516) 463-4874 or send an e-mail to orientation@hofstra.edu.

Sincerely,

Herman A. Berliner, Ph.D.

Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs