Fall 2023 Honors Seminars
HONS 1810W-80
“Thinking with an Accent”
MW 2:30-3:45 pm
Professor Akshya Saxena
Department of English
AXLE: Humanities & the Creative Arts (HCA)
Everyone has an accent but not all accents are equal. Some are heard as neutral and others as markers of difference. This simple fact has serious implications in the real world: accent discrimination costs jobs, housing applications, and asylum claims. How do voices and accents appear in literature and criticism? Do narrators and literary voices have accents, the way people do? This course probes practices of reading, writing, and criticism as accented—as textual sites that consolidate or contest difference. It introduces accent as a critical concept that calls out modes of relation, laying bare the very logics of representation, identity, and interpretation. Course materials include literary and filmic representations of accented speech as well as interdisciplinary scholarship on race and voice, call centers, surveillance, literature, voice synthesizing software, transcription algorithms, accent reduction programs, and sign languages. Students will interrogate the politics of accent in literature, while learning to think with an accent—to use their own accented voices to produce critical readings and informed social interventions.
HONS 1820W-34
“Virtual Worlds”
W: 2:30-5:15 pm
Professor Lynn Ramey
Department of French and Italian
AXLE: Perspectives (P)
When Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had purchased Oculus VR in 2014, he talked about the importance of feeling connected and “present” with others, unbounded by the constraints of space. He might well have mentioned time, too. Virtual reality promises to allow users to feel immersed in places and moments that were once inaccessible. What does this notion of presence offer us, and how does it fall short? We will explore the long history of human attempts to conquer space and time to achieve “presence” with the distant past, faraway lands, future, and even God. While there will be a strong historical component to this course, we will experiment with different augmented and virtual reality devices, and students will design and create their own immersive experiences (analog or digital), using virtual worlds as a storytelling device.
HONS 1830W-04
“Emotions in Context”
MW 3:35-4:50 pm
Professor Jo Anne Bachorowski
Department of Psychology
AXLE: Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS)
Contemporary theories and experimental approaches to emotions are upending long-held assumptions about how emotions work. We will study these new perspectives with respect to both behavior and brain. We will then fine tune our approach to emotions by emphasizing social and cultural contexts. The seminar will be reading and discussion intensive. Scholarly products include discussion leadership and one presentation. The final term paper will be in the form of a research proposal.
HONS 1830W-67
“Multiple Facets of Human Diversity”
TR 9:30-10:45 am
Professor Elisabeth Dykens
Department of Psychology and Human Development
AXLE: Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS)
The seminar begins with key concepts related to human diversity: cultural and structural competence, cultural humility, stigma, prejudice, implicit bias, microaggressions, colorblindness, privilege, race, ethnicity, the biology of skin color, intersectionality, and co-synthesis. With these concepts as a backdrop, the course then focuses on different isms or phobias, e.g., racism, sexism, abelism, ageism, nationalism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia. An emphasis is placed on how these ism and phobias relate to: (1) health and mental health care disparities; (2) incarceration disparities, and (3) student experiences at Vanderbilt. Students also learn tools that facilitate their self-awareness of, and life-long learning about, human diversity.
HONS 1850W-33
“Why is Biology Complex? Max Delbrück, Bacteriophage, and Tbilisi”
TR 2:45 – 4:00 pm
Professor John Wikswo
Department of Physics
AXLE: Math and Natural Sciences (MNS)
This multi-disciplinary, Socratic-style, basic science seminar is designed for humanists and science students alike and requires no science or engineering background. We will follow three interleaving themes as we examine the overlap between physics, biology, and medicine from both historical and modern perspectives. Max Delbrück was trained in theoretical physics by the founders of quantum mechanics (Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Lise Meitner, and others). From 1940 to 1947, he was a member of the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt, during which time he, Salvador Luria (University of Indiana), and Alfred Hershey (Washington University in St. Louis) used bacteriophage to establish the foundations for modern molecular biology (for which they received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Biology). We will then turn to exploring the biology and physics of bacteriophage, exquisitely well-engineered viruses that look like Moon landers and have evolved to efficiently infect specific bacterial strains by high-pressure injections of genetic material. Finally, we will learn about phage therapy, which may be the ultimate cure for antibiotic-resistant microbial infections but is only a treatment of last resort in the United States. In contrast, the George Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia has been a global center for bacteriophage research and medicine for 100 years, with a remarkable history and a proven ability to cure many microbial infections in humans and animals.
HONS 1860W-31
“Textures of Place: Exploring the Urban Through Literature”
TR 9:30-10:45 am
Professor Letizia Modena
Department of French and Italian
AXLE: International Cultures (INT)
You Are Here. It is a simple inevitability, that of space, of being in space, of bodily inhabiting a fraction of it. That portion of space, created by human experience, is place. Place is crucial to the formation of our group and individual identities, for we establish relationships with a socio-physical environment through continuous interaction with it, and place thus grows to be an active contributor to self-identity. But every place has also its own texture, made up of different materials, colors, and shapes, and its own geographical features, history, demographics, economies, and modes of urbanization. Analogously, each self has its own texture: an accumulation of layers, such as family, friends, contexts, experiences, and dislocations. Between place and the self, there is a dynamic, polyvalent relationship that yields multiple interpretations, meanings, and values.
Our itinerary in this seminar has two destinations. First, we will work on reading places physically, through the lenses of imaginative literature (and, occasionally, photography and film), to arrive at deeper reflections on our relationships to place. Second, we will contemplate how the arts impact affective and cognitive relationships to urban environments, training us as readers and viewers to grasp both place as well as place-experience, which ranges from belonging and rootedness to aversion and entrapment. Two of our guiding questions will be: How do written and visual texts confront the complex questions of self-knowledge and self-borders, being in-space or in-transit, and belonging and displacement? What can storytelling reveal about how the processes of placemaking and community-building engage and impact our cognitive mapping, senses, imagination, and emotions?
