CAS: Humanities
GSB: D1, Humanities Core, English Writing
CALS: Humanities
CEMS: Engineering Students - Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students check with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with your academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with your academic advisor
CESS: Consult with your academic advisor
“Representing Race” is a follow-up to the fall semester of the FY Honors College seminar (“The Pursuit of Knowledge”) in which the students read three philosophers—Descartes, Hume, and Aristotle—who gave them three different perspectives on how and what we know: rationalism, empiricism, and a kind of humanistic thinking that we referred to as narrativism.  In the reading that followed our exploration of those philosophical texts, we looked, sometimes directly, often indirectly, at the ways in which subjectivity can play a role in the construction of knowledge. Following on that experience, “Representing Race” narrows the focus to consider questions of knowledge (what do we know?), persuasion (how do we know it?) and power (who decides?) in the field of race and race relations. These are exceedingly vexing questions which play out across disciplinary boundaries. How biologists consider race is likely different than how a legal scholar thinks of the issue and distinct once again from how a poet, a painter, or philosopher thinks about the question. At the turn of the twentieth century, the issue of racial representation was further complicated by the births of cinema and the mass media, which offered spectators images of race that were at once “authentic” pictures of reality while at the same time culturally-determined fabrications. Hence in the first half of Representing Race, we will take a broad view of racial representations across a variety of disciplines, (biology, legal theory, visual arts, literature, philosophy, etc.) dating from antiquity to the present-day. In the second half of the semester, we will examine how these various types of knowledge play into representations of race in the mass-media from early silent films to television shows to the Internet, and beyond. In addition to traditional assignments, the course will culminate in the opportunity to a creative, collaborative project incorporating materials and ideas from the class.

HCOL085 B – Language and Mind, Emily Manetta

Honors College Distribution
CAS:  Scoial Sciences 
GSB:  English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult academic advisor

Major/Minor requirements: Linguistics: elective below the 100-level; can count for major or minor. Anthropology: elective below the 100-level; can count for the major or minor.

Do you think in language or in images? What language do you speak in your dreams? Why did humans first begin to talk and what did that sound like? This course explores thinking past and present on the development of human language, the nature of linguistic capacity and social structure, and the relationship between language and thought. In this investigation, we will take a critical approach to currently-held theories and popular (mis)conceptions, expressed through extensive writing and discussion. We will explore everything from historical perspectives through to Minimalism and Neo-Whorfian empiricism. At the conclusion of this course, you will be able to both identify and to produce sound linguistic argumentation for answers to questions like those above, which get at the essential nature of language and mind.

Honors College Distribution
CAS: CAS elective credit only
GSB:  English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult academic advisor

Are scientists’ and the media’s communications with the public on topics ranging from public health to climate change effective? What role and responsibility do scientists have in influencing public opinion? This course will explore those ideas and teach effective communication. We will establish what the goals of scientific communication are and examine who is responsible for relaying the messages. Students will analyze and practice how information is disseminated and develop approaches to reading and writing about original scientific research, using different methods for communicating within the scientific community or with laypeople. No specific scientific background is necessary. We will address the issue of who has access to scientific information, and how diverse populations can be differentially affected by distribution of scientific information. Finally, students will choose an issue or research finding, and a platform that best fits their personal goals for disseminating that information, and create a product to be shared with the public.

Honors College Distribution

CAS:  Humanities
GSB:  English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult academic advisor

This is a course about bodies and minds – with “mind” being a place that we imagine to be separate from our bodies, a place where our “self” is, or our “soul.” Yet despite our often unconscious belief in this mind/body dualism (as it’s called), our lived experience, even our very recent experience of a pandemic, tells us that the relationship between the mind and the body is based on much more than simply proximity. There is, in other words, a lot about our “selves” that is determined by our bodies – whether we are the ones doing that determining to ourselves, or whether something outside our own bodies is doing that determining.

The course will spend time chiefly exploring ideas having to do with two kinds of bodies: sick bodies, and Black bodies (more than once in the course, we will explore what happens when those categories overlap).  In our reading, discussions, and writing, we’ll journey through texts that will take us to many times and places, from seventeenth-century France, to Greece in the early fourth century BCE, to 20^th-century Antigua, to twenty-first-century America.

Honors College Distribution
CAS:  Humanities
GSB:  English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult academic advisor

What is it to be or have a self? What is involved in the creation/construction of a self? And how do positionality, systems of social power, and dominant social understandings shape self-creation/construction? Readings, discussions, and written assignments for this course aim to engage this cluster of questions. Thus, this course will explore contemporary theorizing aimed at understanding how an individual comes to be constituted as the distinctive self that they are, with a particular emphasis on analyses of identity in terms of social-construction.  And, along the way, this course will help students continue to develop a set of critical thinking and communication skills can be usefully applied in a variety of different domains within and outside of academia. In particular, this course will help students develop their capacities to communicate clearly and concisely, to accurately reconstruct an argument or position from a piece of text or discussion, to apply a theoretical tools in analyzing current events, cultural phenomena, etc., to critically evaluate an argument, analysis, or theoretical framework, to construct persuasive arguments of their own in defense of a position or view, and to anticipate and address potential objections to arguments that they find persuasive.

Honors College Distribution
CAS:  Humanities
GSB:  English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult academic advisor

Climate Change is the global crisis that defines our historical moment.  As such, it raises a host of complex ethical issues unlike any we have confronted before and it makes traditional ethical issues more difficult.  For instance, what should individuals do to combat climate change, given that individually our actions would seem to have little effect?  Why should I make significant sacrifices today, which will have little direct impact now, to help people 100 years or so into the future?  Do I have direct obligations to the planet and its ecosystems, or just the people that occupy it?  How should we think of our obligations to address climate when any success is dependent on the actions of many other people over a long period of time?  How should we weigh the need to deal with climate change against so many other pressing problems, like global poverty, proliferation of nuclear weapons, social injustice, etc.?  Should we spend large sums of money to remediate the damage that climate change has done and will do by restoring species and habitats, making coastal communities resilient, investing in green public works projects, etc?  Many of the answers to these questions depend on projections of how bad the effects of climate change might be.  How should we make decisions now, with the best available evidence, given the range of predicted effects and some of the associated uncertainty to these predictions?  Should we plan for the worst and hope for the best or take more aggressive preventive measure?  This class will explore these issues in detail, investigating scholarly attempts to untangle these, and various other related issues, and try to provide some productive approaches to providing answers.

Honors College Distribution
CAS:  CAS elective credit only
GSB: English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult academic advisor

How is it that human thinking has evolved the ability to engage in complex thinking focused on the self? Metacognition involves self-awareness and understanding of your own thought processes and as such promotes learning, goal setting, problem solving, personal insight and future planning to name a few important functions. This course will examine an overview of the current science on metacognition. Perhaps more importantly, the course will also draw on examples from creative writing, history, philosophy, art and more of people using metacognition to understand the world and their places in it. Students will also have the opportunity to explore examples on their own and in line with personal interests. This course is a seminar requiring students to engage in classroom discussion and reflective writing using assigned readings as well as self-selected readings. The goal is for students to use both science and examples drawn from the study of many liberal arts sources to gain a personal understanding of their own thought processes.

Honors College Distribution
CAS:  Humanities
GSB:  English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult academic advisor

What does it mean to be “modern?”  What values and assumptions have shaped our world?  How have authors and thinkers across the centuries attempted to situate the modern self?  Some key foundational texts, in philosophy and cultural theory, of “modernity,” with special attention to the cultures of France and Germany, will help us characterize the modern self in its relation to the external world.  We will use these texts to help us understand the music, art, and literature of one of the most exciting, eccentric, and vibrant periods of cultural history, the turn of the twentieth century.   Along the way, we will talk about progress, power, freedom, individualism, race, sexuality, the role of art, and much more. We shall investigate key moments in the history of modernity: its foundations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the era known as the Enlightenment), and then its manifestation in the later nineteenth and turn of the twentieth centuries, when the art and ideas commonly labeled “modernism” flourished.  Along the way, we will read and experience some of the most influential and vibrant thinkers, writers, and artists of the modern world.

Honors College Distribution
CAS:  CAS elective credit only
GSB: English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult academic advisor

Food gives us sustenance and pleasure; it provides an occasion to nourish our bodies, our minds, and our bonds with one another. Whether it is a single piece of fruit or a multi-course feast, every item of food we ingest is interconnected with histories and cultures, legends and localities, economies and ethics. In this course, we will examine case studies of how foods are deeply embedded in systems of both uplift and oppression, of slavery and sovereignty, and of spiritual wellness and appropriation. After the case studies, each student will dive deeply into researching a simple food of their choice.

Honors College Distribution
CAS:  CAS elective credit only
GSB:  English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult academic advisor

How do we come to be who we are? Does our identity form, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle coming together-or are we born this way? Or is it both? We will explore fields of knowledge including psychology, literature sociology, education, media, music etc., to formulate responses to these questions. We will discuss why identity matters and the factors that impacted the evolution of our own. This class will be a mix of reading, watching, researching and sharing insights. There will be, curated (by me) assigned readings, TV, movie, TED talk viewing selections. Choice-in some of the materials we use, and the ways in which you can demonstrate what you learn will be a cornerstone of the course.

Honors College Distribution
CAS:  Literature
GSB: English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult academic advisor
CNHS: Consult academic advisor
CESS: Consult  academic advisor

Major/Minor requirements: English: elective below the 100-level; can  count for the major or minor.

In this course, we’ll explores narrative as a way of knowing with a focus on fiction. Across the semester, we’ll read a selection of short stories and one novel supported by critical theory in narrative and literary studies, philosophy and history to frame some big questions: How do fictions, from “historical realism” to “absurdist fantasy,” reflect the world we think we know? What are the effects of getting to know the world through fiction? What kind of thinking do we engage in when we read fiction? What sort of “truth,” if any, can we find in fiction? What can a study of narrative knowing teach us about other ways of knowing? What does it mean to “read for pleasure,” and how do (or should) our reading habits change when we’re reading for study? The masterful story-writers we’ll encounter include: Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, Chimamande Ngozi Adichie, Ursula Le Guin and Ted Chiang, among others. Our novel is the darkly satirical classic of postmodern fiction: Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. Coursework will closely follow the shared goals of HCol 085, including three shorter, drafted essays (1200 words) and a longer, research-based final project, including a drafted final essay (1800 words). Students will be expected to attend class, participate actively in class discussion and complete short weekly writing assignments for homework.

Honors College Distribution
CAS:  Literature
GSB:  English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult academic advisor

You are probably familiar with the stories of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, but you may not realize that the oldest versions of these tales come from Renaissance Italy, and that similar stories exist all over the world. No one knows for certain the reasons for these similarities, and few people know that the first Cinderella murdered her own stepmother by crushing her skull with the lid of a trunk; that the original Sleeping Beauty was raped and impregnated by a king married to someone else; and that Rapunzel, in the earliest version of the tale, drugged with opium the ogress so she could have sex with the prince who climbed up the tower on her long braids. In this course, we will read these and other tales from the European tradition in its global context, and watch some of the most compelling of their film adaptations.

Honors College Distribution
CAS:  Humanities
GSB:  English Writing
CALS:  Consult academic advisor
CEMS:  ENGR: Gen Ed Elective; Math/Stat/CS/DS students consult with your advisor
RSENR: Consult with academic advisor
CNHS: Consult with academic advisor
CESS: Consult academic advisor

The Latin phrase mens sana in corpore sano –a healthy mind in a healthy body– has been widely used for decades to support the idea that physical exercise is essential for the wellbeing and development of the mind in the pursuit of knowledge. In this HCOL 85 course, we will explore both mind and body, to engage the question of what it means to “know.” How do we make meaning of the world around us, and how do we cope when unexpected crises challenge what we thought we knew? To address these questions, we will employ a variety of disciplinary perspectives from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and rather than seeing the human body as a support of the mind –like the Latin phrase implies–, we will consider it as a source of embodied knowledge that can help us grapple with cultural, social and political phenomena from the 21^st century. Our explorations will begin with readings from some of the foundational approaches that have shaped what we call today Western knowledge –, including rationalism and empiricism– followed by some ethical considerations from 20^th century scholars. The second unit will look at challenging the perceived universality of the Western perspective by addressing other ways of knowing, such as narratives from the Native American and Latinx experience. In the final unit, we will critically examine how a material body produced in discourse, from novels to film, performance and daily life, acts as a means to reveal fundamental aspects of human culture, such as constructions of ethnicity, race, class, sex and gender. This approach will enable us to look at how the experiences of the body, a typically gendered or racialized body, might call into question our own society today, during times of profound disruptions such as the recent pandemics.