Spring 2024 Honors Seminars
HONS 1810W-81
“Seeking Adventure, Treasure, or Protection: Great Literary Quests from Homer to Toni Morrison”
TR 11 am-12:15 pm
Professor Robert Barsky, Professor of Humanities and of Law
AXLE: Humanities & the Creative Arts (HCA)
World literature is rife with characters who have set out in search of new horizons or fresh starts, either because they are bored, desperate, or in need of enlightenment. In this course we’ll accompany some of the most memorable literary characters ever created, — from Odysseus and Dante to Dracula and Scrooge–, and we’ll assess their motivations for taking flight. Our quest will lead us into vast realms of inquiry pertaining to social justice, migration or pure wanderlust, and along the way it will (re)kindle the excitement, and the perils, of travel to new worlds.
HONS 1810W-82
“Brave New Worlds? AI in Young Adult Literature: Ethics, Dystopias, and Technology”
TR 11 am-12:15 pm
Professor Melanie Hundley, Professor of Teaching and Learning
AXLE: Humanities & the Creative Arts (HCA)
Young adult literature contains multiple powerful depictions of artificial intelligence that allow readers to think through ethical situations that were once in the realm of the most technologically speculative science fiction. This course engages students with multiple young adult novels as well as other media formats to examine the issues AI was designed to solve, the ethical questions raised, and the critique the current ways AIs are being used.
HONS 1810W-83
“Percy Jackson and the Quest for Good Demons”
R 3 – 5:40 pm
Professor Catherine McTamaney, Professor of Teaching and Learning
AXLE: Humanities & the Creative Arts (HCA)
Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series incorporates themes of identity, normalcy, heroism, loyalty and belonging into a young adult adaptation of the Greek and Roman Myths. How do Percy and his peers’ adventures reflect Aristotle’s understanding of Eudaimonia, or “good demons,” the human drive toward flourishing? Together, we’ll read place the five books in Riordan’s The Olympian series in the context of supporting research into the maturing of character and virtue in adolescent development.
HONS 1820W-42
“Race between Science and Fiction”
TR 11 am-12:15 pm
Professor Ruth Hill, Professor of Spanish & Portuguese
AXLE: Perspectives (P)
In this seminar we will explore several intersections of science and literature that have shaped, shape, and will shape constructs of origins, race, ethnicity, and culture. Among the questions that we will discuss are the following: How do shifting scientific narratives of the so-called first humans, and of the first peoples in the Americas, suggest that science itself is subjective and governed by disciplinary matrices—that is, by beliefs, assumptions, academic and business affiliations, and publications in a scientific discipline that condition which questions are asked and how they are answered? What shaped scientific racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? How and why are universities today coming to grips with legacies of slavery, servitude, and graverobbing? How and why do genetics and biomedical engineering have the potential to increase or decrease social inequality, locally and globally? In what ways do/should race and ethnicity enter into critical discussions of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence?
HONS 1830W-68
“Board Games and Contemporary Issues in American Politics”
W 9:30am-12pm
Professor Sharece Thrower, Professor of Political Science
AXLE: Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS)
This course offers an examination of the most salient features, institutions, and processes of American politics – such as constitutional reform, elections, gerrymandering, patronage, and lawmaking. We will combine political science readings, class discussion, and lectures with playing board about American politics. We often learn best by doing. As such, the purpose of these board games is to provide a simulation of different features of American politics – to truly understand how they originated, how they operate, and the mechanisms behind why/how they are sustained. We will also evaluate how these features, institutions, and processes might be reformed to better achieve ideal principles of American democracy. Finally, playing these board games will allow us to identify what aspects of American politics can be better explained by further research in political science.
HONS 1840W-41
“How the American Project of Democracy Can Thrive…or Die”
M 2:30-5 pm
Professor Eli Merritt, Professor of Political Science
Professor Nicholas Zeppos, Chancellor Emeritus
AXLE: US History & Culture (US)
This course will take on the basic question of what makes American democracy thrive. At the same time, the course realistically looks at the potential failure of the American project of democracy and why that failure could occur. The course will begin with a discussion of the American democratic system, as originally conceived, contrasting it with a “pure democracy” or “direct democracy.” The course then turns to the elements of a thriving democratic system. Topics will include fundamental aspects of a successful democratic system, including the right to vote, regular elections, active citizenship, the right to dissent, political parties and gatekeepers, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, checks and balances, separation of powers, and the peaceful transfer of power as well as the character and ethics of leaders. The sine qua non of ethical leadership will be contrasted with the American experience of demagogues seeking and obtaining power. Course readings will be a mix of primary and secondary sources. Grading is based on three five to seven page “thought” papers and a weekly writing summary of the readings.
HONS 1850W-24
“What is Real?”
TR 1:15-2:30 pm
Professor Randolph Blake, Professor of Psychology
AXLE: Math and Natural Sciences (MNS)
We will utilize resources from multiple disciplines including philosophy, art, literature, science, and medicine to address an intellectually vexing question: what constitutes reality? In pursuing this quest, a major focus will be examining the mind/brain’s contribution to the construction of reality; a recurring “sidebar” will be examining disorders of mind/brain and their consequences for disordered constructions of reality. An essential challenge will be characterizing the nature of “evidence” and its bearing on the establishment of truth.
HONS 1860W-24
“Pandemics in World Literature”
TR 1:15-2:30 pm
Professor Benigno Trigo, Professor of Spanish & Portuguese
AXLE: International Cultures (INT)
A pandemic is a widespread epidemic. The word comes from the Greek Pandemos, meaning “of all the people.” COVID-19 is a pandemic disease because it has spread around the globe. It has affected virtually everybody on earth. What happens when a disease is so widespread that it makes us feel that nobody is safe, that it will contaminate everyone eventually? Does the experience make us more aware of our shared mortality? Does it make us take stock of our vulnerable condition? Does it change our perspective? Do we look differently at ourselves and at others? Does it challenge our illusions of personal invincibility and collective superiority? These are very old questions that writers the world over have addressed in literature. In this course, we will read examples from the literature of Pandemics with these questions in mind. We will explore their elaboration, in fiction, of the connection between our shared vulnerable bodies and the illusion of our personal or collective invulnerability. We will explore, again, the lessons that pandemic diseases, like COVID-19, teach us, with a view to develop a different ethical relation to our world and to others.
