HONR 100 Freshman Honors Seminar
Overall, this class should be viewed as “breather” from life, though not in the sense that there will be less work than usual. (There will be more work than usual!) Instead, this is an opportunity for you, wherever you are in your academic careers and pursuits, to pause… reflect… think… to learn about various things beyond what you usually learn… to consider where you are, where you might be going in life, and how you might get there.
In short, a principal objective here is to learn more about yourself.
With this in mind, what we will be doing is “experimenting”… trying out different kinds of thinking and learning, different kinds of topics and ideas. These different kinds of topics should require you to make use of different parts of your brain. They are diverse ways of thinking. These ways of thinking could very well come up again in your college studies, and they will almost certainly come up in life – not the specific content, but the general modes of thinking required by those tasks.
HONR 100 - Dr. John Rowan, Professor of Philosophy
HONR 390 Poetry and Philosophy
This course explores the relationship between poetry and ideas. Since Plato’s famous pronouncement of an “ancient quarrel” between philosophy and poetry, philosophers have generally mistrusted poetry. One could argue however, that poets occupy themselves with the very areas of thought that philosophers claim as their own: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Poets since the Romantic era especially, have created an impressive body of creative work that examines the relationship between reality and mind, that questions what lies beyond the percieved world, and that explores the social, ethical and linguistic bonds that connect us to culture, and to each other. We will discuss two separate but related kinds of texts: the poetry of ideas, and the prose of poets and philosophers who have made serious claims either for valorizing poetry, or for disqualifying it. The majority of the poetry discussed in the course will be lyric poems written in English.
Spring 2009 HONR 390 – Dr. Michael Dobberstein, Associate Professor of English
HONR 390 Stereotyping and Prejudice
This course will provide a broad overview of the area of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, with emphasis placed upon discussions of the work in the field and the methods used to study it. Overall, the course will emphasize the pervasive nature of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination in society; why the study of such phenomena is important, and how it occurs; and how such phenomena might be reduced or eliminated.
Fall 2009 HONR 390 – Dr. David Nalbone, Assistant Professor of Phychology
HONR 390 Your Food in History
How has the American diet changed over time? In the first part of the class, we’ll look at how religious, economic, and social movements (including immigration) influenced Americans’ food choices. In the second half of the class, we’ll examine the industrialized Western diet and its detrimental effects on our bodies and culture.
Fall 2010 HONR 390 – Professor Wendy St. Jean, Assistant Professor of History
HONR 390 Gender, Technology and Culture
The purpose of this course is to explore, to identify, and to analyze how technology has shaped gender and how gender has had an impact on technology and culture. This reciprocal, but mostly invisible relationship frames our everyday lives, but it is one that we seldom acknowledge or fully understand. Can gender have an impact on technology? Absolutely. From stone-age tools to space-age instruments and the computers on your desk, technologies have emerged and eveolved to accommodate the needs ofs the people who use them. The use of technologies, likewise, has had an impact on our identities, both collective and individual. Did you kow that the electric self-starting ignitions were first marketed “for the wife?” Cranking the engine was regarded as masculine. Biomedical innovations and the Internet–two of the most significant markers of the post-industrial age–have introduced a new fluidity in the categories of maleness and femaleness. Specifically, in this Honors course, we will examine contemporary debates about science and technology and study the ways that innovations in these disciplines threaten fundamental cultural assumptions about “identity,” “progress,” “propriety,” and “sexuality.” As we explore the ways in which revolutionary scientific and technological practices alter imaginative and material realities, we will pay particular attention to the disruptions of gender that occur with the advancement of science and technology.
This course will have a website; all students must be able to access Blackboard Vista from the first day of classes through the last day of the exam week. Rigorous online discussions throughout the semester will interrogate the boundaries of industrial capitalism–technological/social; production/consumption; skilled/unskilled; expert/user–and explore how these boundaries continue to have an impact on constructions of gender and social identity. Students will provide oral and written critique and review for their classmates as they work independently on their own critical writing assignments and engage in online discussion forums.
Spring 2010 HONR 390 – Dr. Mita Choudhury, Assistant Professor, English
