Freshman Honors Colloquium
HONR 10197: Freshman Honors Colloquium I
An exciting and unique aspect of the Honors College experience at Kent State University is the Freshman Honors Colloquium (FHC). Watch the Honors College pre-orientation video to learn about FHC!
- Please familiarize yourself with the various FHC sections listed below.
- Be sure to click through all tabs to see all sections.
- Please note that FHC section information is subject to change.
- Please submit your section preferences on the FHC Preference Form via the link below.
- Navigate to the chapter entitled FHC Preference Form Demo on the Honors College pre-orientation video for instructions on how to complete and submit the FHC Preference Form.
- Please allow 30 minutes to complete this form. You can save your progress and return to it within one week.
- After you submit your form, we’ll send a confirmation email to your Kent State University email address with a receipt of your response. If you do not see it in your inbox, please check your junk folder.
First-Year Students: Complete Your FHC Preference Form Here
- If you need to change your response, please submit a new form. If you submit more than one form, we’ll use your most recent submission.
- Make sure to submit your form before your academic advising appointment during Destination Kent State (DKS) to save your seat.
- After DKS, your FHC will be locked in your schedule until Tuesday, August 5.
- To request a switch to a different FHC section, email honors@kent.edu between Tuesday, August 5, and Friday, August 22 at 12:00 p.m. If there's an open seat and your preferred FHC fits your schedule, we will accommodate your request.
Freshman Honors Colloquium Sections 1-12 (Descriptions Below)
| Subj | Course# | Section | Instructor | Times | Meeting Days |
| HONR | 10197 | 1 | Brodsky, Adam H | 07:45 am - 09:00 am | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 2 | Smith, Jeanne R | 12:30 pm - 01:45 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 3 | Van Ittersum, Derek | 09:15 am - 10:30 am | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 4 | Remley, Dirk | 09:15 am - 10:30 am | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 5 | French, Danielle | 07:45 am - 09:00 am | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 6 | Raabe, Wesley | 11:00 am - 12:15 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 7 | Winter, James P | 11:00 am - 12:15 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 8 | Mbaye, Babacar | 11:00 am - 12:15 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 9 | Swick-Higgins, Chelsea R | 11:00 am - 12:15 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 10 | Vogel, Lauren A | 12:05 pm - 12:55 pm | M W F |
| HONR | 10197 | 11 | Winter, James P | 12:30 pm - 01:45 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 12 | Morris, William A | 02:15 pm - 03:30 pm | T R |
HONR 10197 1 Adam Brodsky
Everyone’s influenced by media, so it is important to know how media works to deliver meaning. This colloquium will focus on media of the twentieth century with an emphasis on film, music, and art. We will view, listen to, read about, discuss, analyze, and critique popular media’s design, mechanics, aesthetics, and effects.
Expect several types of essays, projects, and presentations as well as student-guided discussions and group activities.
The core texts are listed below. This colloquium will also invest time directly experiencing creative works of cinema, art, and music.
Texts for Fall:
- Understanding Media
- The Anatomy of Film
Texts for Spring:
- How Music Works
- What Are You Looking At?
HONR 10197 2 Jeanne Smith
For as long as people have been writing, they have given each other advice on how to improve the experience of living, to develop healthy habits, and to succeed. Today, self-help is a profitable genre and one of the most popular among younger adults. Our Colloquium will investigate ideas about self-care and self-improvement as they relate to the lives of college students.
In Colloquium I, you will choose one book-length piece of popular nonfiction covering an area within them self-help, self-care, self-improvement, and productivity/success genre. In a series of oral presentations, you will present the knowledge claims and facilitate class discussion on how these ideas apply to college students. We will work as a class to analyze the rhetorical strategies used in these texts, and to question the knowledge claims, tracing them back to the scholarly research which may support them. We will develop class reading lists of scholarly academic literature covering research questions generated by our discussions. At the end of the first semester, you will develop a question potentially suitable for original research.
In Colloquium II, you will design an original research project examining an idea from the research literature we studied in Colloquium 1. You will conduct that research and present your findings in the format of a research presentation or poster, and a research paper. You will have opportunities to continue your research and find publication opportunities for your ideas during your undergraduate career at the university.
Texts:
- The Happy High Achiever: 8 Essentials to Overcome Anxiety, Manage Stress, and Energize Yourself for Success – Without Losing Your Edge. Mary E. Anderson, 2024.
- The Mindful College Student: How to Succeed, Boost Well-Being, and Build the Life You Want at University and Beyond. Eric B. Loucks, 2022.
- Mindset Matters: Developing Mental Agility and Resilience to Thrive in Uncertainty. Gemma Leigh Roberts. 2022.
- Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic – and What We Can Do about It. Jennifer Breheney Wallace, 2023.
HONR 10197 3 Derek Van Ittersum
Many students enrolling at KSU this year have spent more than 10 years in schools of some kind, while others may be learning in an official school context for the first time. How does schooling shape one's approach to learning? What does learning look like in a school vs. outside a school? Critics of schooling talk about the "hidden curriculum," a program of study that happens in the background of every course and trains students to stifle their curiosity, prioritize obedience over creativity, and focus on evaluation rather than enjoyment or meaning, among other things. This hidden curriculum shapes students' learning in profound ways, they argue, and differs tremendously from learning outside of schools. However, there are many different contexts for learning outside of school--not all of them are idealistic self-directed explorations. People learn through apprenticeships, through coaching, and on the job. How do these contexts shape learning and learners? What about remote schooling, homeschooling, or unschooling?
In the Fall semester, we'll investigate schooling, its effects, and then expand our focus to examine frameworks that shape the ways we learn, such as cognitive biases and mental models. Students will connect their own experiences with learning and schooling with larger conversations about these topics through writing, research, and class discussion. In the Spring semester, students will choose an ambitious learning challenge to document and complete over the course of the semester. This challenge will ask students to learn something new (maybe a skill like playing guitar, or improve a skill like writing short stories, or become expert in an area of content like nuclear physics) through methods and processes that they haven't used before. We'll be reading accounts from people who have similarly challenged themselves and writing our own accounts. By the end of the year, students should have a clearer picture of themselves as learners, an actionable understanding of how different approaches to learning suit them and their goals, and a familiarity with a variety of arguments and ideas about schooling and learning.
Texts:
- I Love Learning and I Hate School – Blum
- Range – Epstein
- Ultralearning – Young
HONR 10197 4 Dirk Remley
What makes someone a good leader? How can we critically reflect on others’ leadership skills toward understanding their effectiveness or weaknesses? How can we use these observations to assess and improve upon our own leadership skills? These are questions that will be addressed through this Colloquium section’s theme. Students will engage with principles of leadership found in characters and plot from various works of literature and film. Through critical reading, thinking, discussions, research, analytical writing activities, and other projects, students will come to understand several attributes that affect leadership effectiveness in various contexts; these attributes include cultural and social phenomena as well as personal traits and situational factors. Students, also, will consider their own leadership abilities and how they may be able to improve those skills.
The Fall semester’s experience will focus on defining and critically assessing attributes and traits leaders demonstrate.
The Spring semester’s experience will focus more on contextual factors that affect—positively or negatively—one’s ability to act on attributes/traits.
The works listed below provide a sampling of those that we will use.
Sampling of Texts:
- Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers, by Elizabeth Samet
- The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad
- Antigone, Sophocles
- Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw
- The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (Film, adapted from novel by Sloan Wilson)
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
- Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly
HONR 10197 5 Danielle French
Mainstream culture’s obsessionality with true crime dominates contemporary entertainment, social, and news media with thousands of podcasts, films, music, and endless literature dedicated to the topic, but this interest has been a mainstay in popular culture for centuries. Though used as a horror trope and easy plot device in both speculative and fantastical fiction, “madness” is often linked with criminality in unsettling ways. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), “In 2022, there were an estimated 59.3 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with AMI. This number represented 23.1% of all U.S. adults” (para. 5). Ranging from mild to severe in their impact, “young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of AMI (36.2%)” (para. 5). The AMI for the 18-25 age group has increased 6.8% since 2019, indicating instances of AMI are steadily rising. This troubling connection of mental illness with intrinsic criminal or deviant behavior demands our consideration and critical inquiry.
In this course, students will delve into historical and contemporary iterations of madness and murder across mediums and genres. As even fiction is often based in reality, students will examine mental illness depicted in creative nonfiction, fiction, podcasts, music, and film and consider the many ways disorders of the mind are often misdiagnosed, untreated, stigmatized, and criminalized. How does media romanticize, fetishize, or essentialize madness and link mental illness to deviance or criminality? Students will reflect on historical and contemporary understandings of psychopathology, analyze course texts, and produce meaningful discussion and writing on madness, murder, and true crime.
Texts for Fall:
- Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
- Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925), Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942)
- Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
- Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire (2012)
Spring texts will be elected entirely by past and present student votes from a curation of true crime books and media. Students will work with archival materials from the Borowitz Collection, housed in the Special Collections and Archives on campus, contribute to season four of our class podcast, Madness and Murder, and consider the ethical implications of true crime media production & consumption. Listen to our podcast here: https://open.spotify.com/show/32HtpKZWcJHVicHDzRGzUt?si=52c0ce173db44a8a.
HONR 10197 6 Wesley Raabe
The first Women’s Rights effort to achieve significant public recognition occurs during what is known historically as the Age of Revolution, the decades immediately following political revolutions in the United States, France, and Haiti, which led to altered government forms and altered relationships between common people and the aristocratic classes, and between enslavers and enslaved. However, the varied social transformations have strands that continued to unfold over a century and into the present, with concerns including property rights, suffrage, employment opportunity, and reproductive rights. I have selected readings, primarily originally written in English and from the genres of political philosophy, fiction, and historical accounts. During the Fall 2025 semester, the emphasis will be on the late 18th-C. origins through the turn of the 20th Century. Texts will include three treatise-like statements: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), either Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838) or her and Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). We will close the semester by pairing Frances E. W. Harper’s novel Iola Leroy (1892) with the historian Lisa Tetrault’s challenge to the best-known U.S. Woman’s Rights origin story The Myth of Seneca Falls (2015). A small number of shorter readings will be shared on Canvas or Library Reserve. The Spring 2026 semester will recur to 19th Century fictions that gained new prominence during the 20th C. women’s movement and take up later developments, into the present, with readings for the second semester selected partly in consultation with students who enroll during the Fall 2025 Semester.
HONR 10197 7 James Winter
Course Description: Norman Mailer, Pulitzer-Prize winning writer of The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner’s Song, describes “faction” as a hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration, a definition that can extend to any literature that combines historical events, people, and places (including, let’s say, even movie characters) with the narrative exploration and analysis of poetry and fiction. In this course, you will create pieces of faction that focus on a specific historical event, person(s), or place and which will culminate in a final project, again of your choice, written as poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, or an academic research project.
During our time together, a variety of texts will give you insight as to how other writers create and develop faction in its literary forms. Through our smaller essay and research assignments, you will become familiarized with the academic writing process, namely pre-writing, drafting, editing, and APA citation, as well as various methods of online research. This is because at Kent State and in the Honors College, we’d like to not only prepare you for future courses, but for you to leave the class a thoughtful, critically insightful reader, writer, and communicator. As an instructor, I do not see you as just “students,” but smart people who can succeed as academic and community leaders at the university and beyond.
Required Course Materials
- Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard
- The Donner Party by George Keithley
HONR 10197 8 Babacar Mbaye
The trickster is one of the most pervasive figures in American literature and culture. It permeates American folktales, novels, songs, and films, and serves as a tool of resistance and expression. In this course, students will study the trickster’s influences on American folklore, literature, music, and film. In Fall 2025, they will examine selected American tales, legends, myths, and brief essays on American folklore and culture. In Spring 2026, they will explore the folklore and themes in key literary texts and anthologies of blues, rock and roll, country, and rap songs. Also, students will watch major films and documentaries showing folkloric influences on American literature and culture.
Fall Texts:
- David Leeming & Jack Page. Myths, Legends, and Folktales of America: An Anthology (2000).
- Frank de Caro. An Anthology of American Folktales & Legends (2009).
- Herman Melville. The Confidence Man (1852).
- Roger D. Abrahams. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (1964).
- Zora Neale Hurston. Mules and Men (1935)
Spring Texts:
- L. Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (illustrated first edition) (2019).
- Gregory Maguire. Wicked Collector’s Edition: The Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture in a Deluxe Edition with Green Sprayed Edges (2024).
- Eric Sackheim. The Blues Line: Blues Lyrics from Leadbelly to Muddy Waters (2003).
- Hal Leonard. The Lyric Library: Classic Rock: Complete Lyrics for 200 Songs (2002).
- D. Spence. Hip-Hop and Rap: Complete Lyrics for 175 Songs (2003).
- Bobby Braddock. Country Music's Greatest Lines: Lyrics, Stories and Sketches from American Classics (2020).
HONR 10197 9 Chelsea Swick-Higgins
What does it mean to love? Is it what we read about in contemporary romance novels? Is it something else? In this section of Honors Colloquium, we will use bell hooks’ definition of what love is/is not to understand our society and how we relate to one another. This definition extends to our romantic, familial, and societal relationships. Using tropes from contemporary romance (e.g. forced proximity, enemies to lovers, second chance) to organize our units, we will explore how different loves shape our personal, professional, and societal lives.
Students can expect to participate in student-driven class discussion, compose critical essays of varying lengths, reflect on class readings and discussions through response essays, and create multimodal compositions. We will critically engage with theoretical texts to understand articles, novels, shorter literary work (short stories and poetry), and contemporary media (films, television, and multimodal compositions).
Fall texts:
- All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
- Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
- Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Spring texts:
- Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
HONR 10197 10 Lauren Vogel
This course explores complex and sensitive topics surrounding identity and social (in)justice through children’s literature, young adult (YA) literature, and crossover picture books. We will look at materials that represent mirrors of ourselves and windows into the perspectives of the often-difficult lived experiences of others.
By the end of the term, students should be able to
1. Critique social norms and biases and question issues of power
2. Include multiple perspectives when interrogating and discussing any complex issue
3. Analyze and synthesize a broad range of material
4. Apply effective search strategies to locate and use high quality information and critically evaluate that information
5. Understand the importance of and properly use academic writing conventions
6. Develop a strong sense of self and compassion for others
Fall Text:
- Stamped: (For Kids) by Jason Reynolds & Ibrahm X. Kendi (2020). Little, Brown & Company
Spring Text:
- Kent State by Deborah Wiles (2020). Scholastic Press.
HONR 10197 11 James Winter
Course Description: Norman Mailer, Pulitzer-Prize winning writer of The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner’s Song, describes “faction” as a hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration, a definition that can extend to any literature that combines historical events, people, and places (including, let’s say, even movie characters) with the narrative exploration and analysis of poetry and fiction. In this course, you will create pieces of faction that focus on a specific historical event, person(s), or place and which will culminate in a final project, again of your choice, written as poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, or an academic research project.
During our time together, a variety of texts will give you insight as to how other writers create and develop faction in its literary forms. Through our smaller essay and research assignments, you will become familiarized with the academic writing process, namely pre-writing, drafting, editing, and APA citation, as well as various methods of online research. This is because at Kent State and in the Honors College, we’d like to not only prepare you for future courses, but for you to leave the class a thoughtful, critically insightful reader, writer, and communicator. As an instructor, I do not see you as just “students,” but smart people who can succeed as academic and community leaders at the university and beyond.
Required Course Materials
- Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard
- The Donner Party by George Keithley
HONR 10197 12 William Morris
Comedy, humor, and laughter are uniquely human ways of being in the world. While everyone has some sense of humor, what is funny is often rooted in the customs and habits shared among those in a given community or culture. Like love, or justice, or virtue, humor is a complex human activity which is difficult to define for lay and academic audiences alike. This course surveys comedies in Western culture from the Old Comedy of ancient Greece to modern novels and short stories of literary merit to film and stand-up among other comedic artifacts.
Over the course of two terms, we become a small scholarly community sometimes silly, sometimes serious, but always inquisitive and collegial. We develop our understanding through student-lead discussion, brief and extended analyses of course readings, short presentations, and essays directed by individual student inquiry. One goal of this course is that students should emerge with a deeper understanding how comedy and humor shape our intellectual pursuits, inform our shared social values, and enrich our individual capacity to be curious comedy connoisseurs.
Fall Texts:
- Aristophanes - The Clouds or The Birds
- Dante - Selected Excerpts
- Boccacio - Selected Excerpts
- Shakespeare - Twelfth Night
- Moliere - Le Misanthrope
- Select Scholarship defining comedy
Spring Texts:
- Voltaire - Candide
- Swift - Selected Essays
- Alexie - Selected Short Stories
- Films- Silent Era & Contemporary Satires
- Stand-Up- Carlin, Pryor, Rivers, et. al.
- Select Scholarship on film and stand-up
Freshman Honors Colloquium Sections 13-24 (Descriptions Below)
| Subj | Course# | Section | Instructor | Times | Meeting Days |
| HONR | 10197 | 13 | Richards, Dale E | 02:15 pm - 03:30 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 14 | Wagoner, Elizabeth A | 09:15 am - 10:30 am | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 15 | Whiteleather, Hagan Faye F | 03:45 pm - 05:00 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 16 | Takayoshi, Pamela D | 09:15 am - 10:30 am | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 17 | Whiteleather, Hagan Faye F | 05:30 pm - 06:45 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 18 | Clark, Patrick J | 07:00 pm - 08:15 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 19 | Shank, Matthew A | 11:00 am - 11:50 am | M W F |
| HONR | 10197 | 20 | Shank, Matthew A | 12:05 pm - 12:55 pm | M W F |
| HONR | 10197 | 21 | Swick-Higgins, Chelsea R | 12:30 pm - 01:45 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 22 | Vogel, Lauren A | 01:10 pm - 02:00 pm | M W F |
| HONR | 10197 | 23 | Uhrig, Karl | 03:45 pm - 05:00 pm | M W |
| HONR | 10197 | 24 | Remley, Dirk | 11:00 am - 12:15 pm | T R |
HONR 10197 13 Richards, Dale E 02:15 pm - 03:30 pm T R
Our identities, our sense of who we are, is formed entirely from memories, stories we tell ourselves and others. In the first semester of this colloquium, we use neuroscientist David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Life of the Brain to examine how memory works and why our most vivid and enduring memories are often unreliable reflections of our actual experiences. We will use this perspective to examine the formation of personal and group identities through the careful reading of two fictional texts.
In the second semester, we employ the concept of emergence to investigate more deeply how personal identity is formed. Emergent phenomena, such as human consciousness, cannot be understood or explained in terms of simple, linear cause-and-effect relationships. From the perspective of emergence, however, we can examine thoughtfully the processes that enable and constrain the formation of each individual’s mind, personality, and sense of self. Students select one of four texts that provide deeper insight into the complexity of human thought and behavior. The concepts and themes that emerge from discussion and individual research will inform our reading of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.
Fall Texts:
- Ranganath, Charan. Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters
- Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club
- Morrison, Toni. Beloved
Spring Texts:
- Murakami, Haruki. Dance Dance Dance
- Student choice: Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
- Dehaene, Stanislaus. How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine. . . for Now
- Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
- Sapolsky, Robert. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
HONR 10197 14 Wagoner, Elizabeth A 09:15 am - 10:30 am T R
Come for the glow in the dark cats and neurotic AIs, stay for the discussions of ethics, philosophy, and pop cultural representations of science! This section explores major issues in science fiction, as well as issues raised by popular discussions of science today, through themed units focusing on larger philosophical, ethical, and theoretical ideas. Each unit will contain works from literature, comics/graphic novels, film, and nonfiction science writing. Science-fiction issues covered in this course include:
- Science Fiction as a Genre – Contested, Lowbrow, Beloved, and now Quite Difficult Due to the Speed of Innovation
- Progressivism – Is humankind advancing toward a more evolved or better state of being through technological innovation?
- Space Travel – The Science Required to take us to Mars and Beyond.
- The Apocalypse in Science Fiction – AI, Viral, Nuclear, and Climate Disasters
- Science vs. Superstition – Pseudoscience, Logic, and the Battle for the Human Mind Examining the ways scientific ideas are framed through these texts, we will gain a richer awareness of major issues in science fiction and science today. In addition to weekly writings and discussion, there will be several researched essays, and film analysis.
Fall Texts:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick.
- Binti: The Complete Trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor, and Interstellar, Christopher Nolan.
Spring Texts:
- The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Silent Spring – excerpts, Rachel Carson.
- Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, and Dune: Part One by Denis Villeneuve.
HONR 10197 15 Whiteleather, Hagan Faye F 03:45 pm - 05:00 pm T R
Over the course of this colloquium, we will explore the realities and cultural constructs that surround death and the rationale behind these socially crafted ceremonies. We will examine how these practices influence our own experience with/understanding of death. A primary focus will be placed on the ways location and environment shape the rituals of death, and how loss has become mediated by the funeral industry. Fear not, this class is not all gloom and doom, much of the year will be devoted to examining death as a motivator and significance creator—in the words of Kafka, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” While the reading list is set, I promote flexibility in discussion topics and welcome any conversations you find especially stimulating or intriguing. I’m excited to see how our preconceived notions of death and grieving shapes classroom discussions and potentially alters our currently held beliefs and perceptions of an experience to which we will all one day succumb.
Fall Texts:
- Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty (2014)
- Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (2014)
- Homie by Danez Smith (2020)
- The Body by Stephen King (1982)
- “2B0R2B” by Kurt Vonnegut (1962)
- Films & Podcast for Fall: Stand by Me (1986) / The Farewell (2019) / S-Town (2017)
Spring Texts:
- Our Town by Thornton Wilder (1939)
- Deciduous Qween by Matty Lane Glasgow (2019)
- A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis (1961)
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
- Lost Connections by Johann Hari (2018)
- "The Three Questions” by Leo Tolstoy (1885)
- “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace (2005)
- Films: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)/After Life (1998)/Harold & Maude (1971)/Soul (2020)
- TV/Musical: Black Mirror: “San Junipero” (2016) / The Good Place (2016-2020) / Hadestown (2019)
HONR 10197 16 Takayoshi, Pamela D 09:15 am - 10:30 am T R
How does writing help us make sense of our lives? How do you tell your story and write about the people in that story? How do you know you can trust your memory? How do you find your authentic voice (is there such a thing)? In this course, we will read and write memoirs in order to explore these questions about being human, about writing, and about the search for meaning in our lives.
Memoir writing raises complex intellectual problems involving truth, representation, self-understanding, and the bounds between private experience and public lives. Most importantly, the theme of memoir allows us to explore how we make sense of our lives and what role writing can play in the sense-making. In this way, it is a rich and broad shared-focus for our Honors Colloquium section -- there will be some assigned texts so we have a common focus, but memoir allows for students to tailor this class to their own individual interests. We’ll start with The Art of Memoir, by Mary Karr, a best-selling memoirist, to give us a shared understanding of this enormously popular and enduring genre of literature. We’ll vote to determine common texts and then students will choose memoirs in areas of their interest (and believe me when I say that there are memoirs about almost every aspect of being human -- family, health and death, race, LGBTQ identity, gender, class, addiction, science, almost every profession you can name, historical events, and politics). We’ll write critical analyses of and responses to memoirs, and we’ll also do our own memoir writing. We’ll listen to memoirs in the form of podcasts (again, so many choices!), and we'll watch a film adaptation of a memoir to think about how the medium makes a difference.
Possible Texts:
- Art of Memory - Karr, Mary
- The Worlds I See - Li, Fei-Fei
- The Best Minds - Rosen, Jonathan
- Raised by a Serial Killer - Balascio, April
- Spellbound - Hanley, Phil
- Whiskey Tender - Jackson Taffa, Deborah
- Educated - Westover, Tara
HONR 10197 17 Whiteleather, Hagan Faye F 05:30 pm - 06:45 pm T R
Over the course of this colloquium, we will explore the realities and cultural constructs that surround death and the rationale behind these socially crafted ceremonies. We will examine how these practices influence our own experience with/understanding of death. A primary focus will be placed on the ways location and environment shape the rituals of death, and how loss has become mediated by the funeral industry. Fear not, this class is not all gloom and doom, much of the year will be devoted to examining death as a motivator and significance creator—in the words of Kafka, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” While the reading list is set, I promote flexibility in discussion topics and welcome any conversations you find especially stimulating or intriguing. I’m excited to see how our preconceived notions of death and grieving shapes classroom discussions and potentially alters our currently held beliefs and perceptions of an experience to which we will all one day succumb.
Fall Texts:
- Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty (2014)
- Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (2014)
- Homie by Danez Smith (2020)
- The Body by Stephen King (1982)
- “2B0R2B” by Kurt Vonnegut (1962)
- Films & Podcast for Fall: Stand by Me (1986) / The Farewell (2019) / S-Town (2017)
Spring Texts:
- Our Town by Thornton Wilder (1939)
- Deciduous Qween by Matty Lane Glasgow (2019)
- A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis (1961)
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
- Lost Connections by Johann Hari (2018)
- "The Three Questions” by Leo Tolstoy (1885)
- “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace (2005)
- Films: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)/After Life (1998)/Harold & Maude (1971)/Soul (2020)
- TV/Musical: Black Mirror: “San Junipero” (2016) / The Good Place (2016-2020) / Hadestown (2019)
HONR 10197 18 Clark, Patrick J 07:00 pm - 08:15 pm T R
This course will look at the interplay between text and film, the qualities and conditions that go into adapting literature for the big screen audience, the constraints of turning narrative into film, what happens to literature when it is adapted into a screenplay, and the psychology of difference in how we read and view these texts.
Our exploration of literary adaptions will focus on what makes a novel ripe for adaptation; limitations and possibilities that confront screenwriters when adapting a text for a target audience; and how directorial ambition and vision (and production budgets and meddling) can affect the final product. Additionally, the class will discuss fandoms' influences in popularizing, producing, and critiquing text-to-film adaptations. The course will also confront how a "canonized" film can affect longtime fans of a text and inspire newcomers to the genre.
All the novels we will read are familiar and popular and represent different literary styles, including psychological thrillers, coming-of-age narratives, modern Westerns, high fantasy, horror, sci-fi, counterculture, and graphic novels, examining the challenges in adapting the different genres.
Fall Texts:
- Stephen King, The Body
- Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
- Chuck Pahlaniuk, Fight Club
- Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
- Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle
- Alan Moore, Watchmen
The texts necessitate a study of directors Rob Reiner, Sophia Coppola, David Fincher, The Coen Brothers, Hayao Miyazaki, and Zack Snyder.
Spring Texts:
- Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
- Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
- Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
- Patrick Süskind, Perfume: the Story of a Murderer
- Richard Adams, Watership Down
- Alan Moore, V: for Vendetta
Directors include Gus Van Sant, Jon Avnet, Stacie Passon, Tom Tykwer, Martin Rosen, and James McTeigue.
HONR 10197 19 Shank, Matthew A 11:00 am - 11:50 am M W F
The major theme of the course will be literature’s depiction of the various forms of disenfranchisement (gender, political, racial, sexual, religious, economic, class, age, etc.) within modern society, and how those who are disenfranchised attempt to overcome the issues that cause their disenfranchisement. This analysis will lead to other related topics including the Anti-hero, Postmodernism, Dystopian Fiction, Signs of Fascism and Genocide, and Classical Archetypes. Analysis of disenfranchisement in pop culture (film, TV, music, animation, graphic novels, children’s literature, comedies, social media, etc.) will also be possible subjects. Eventually we will address real life examples of disenfranchisement, from history to present day
The goals of this colloquium are to develop skills as critical readers and as writers. Students will write several five-page essays each semester, as well as a final, longer research paper dealing with disenfranchisement in our world in the spring. There will be no exams but occasional quizzes and shorter writing assignments (WAs) will be given regularly. Class discussion will be a crucial part of the course, both individually and in-class group work, and students will also be required to give in-class presentations throughout both semesters. Collaboration between students is encouraged!! Students will also be encouraged to try creative approaches to the assignments, including video productions or other various artistic media. The spring semester will end with a final creative project depicting our course theme.
Possible titles: The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games, Gone Girl, Night, The Great Gatsby, The Fault in our Stars, The Catcher in the Rye, Fences, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Hate U Give, The 2084 Report, The Buddha in the Attic, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Fight Club, A Man Called Ove, Slaughterhouse-Five, No Country for Old Men, Civil Disobedience, The Body, The Spectacular Now, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Catch-22, The Awakening, I Am Malala, Harry Potter, Divergent, Reasons to Stay Alive, Flow.
HONR 10197 20 Shank, Matthew A 12:05 pm - 12:55 pm M W F
The major theme of the course will be literature’s depiction of the various forms of disenfranchisement (gender, political, racial, sexual, religious, economic, class, age, etc.) within modern society, and how those who are disenfranchised attempt to overcome the issues that cause their disenfranchisement. This analysis will lead to other related topics including the Anti-hero, Postmodernism, Dystopian Fiction, Signs of Fascism and Genocide, and Classical Archetypes. Analysis of disenfranchisement in pop culture (film, TV, music, animation, graphic novels, children’s literature, comedies, social media, etc.) will also be possible subjects. Eventually we will address real life examples of disenfranchisement, from history to present day
The goals of this colloquium are to develop skills as critical readers and as writers. Students will write several five-page essays each semester, as well as a final, longer research paper dealing with disenfranchisement in our world in the spring. There will be no exams but occasional quizzes and shorter writing assignments (WAs) will be given regularly. Class discussion will be a crucial part of the course, both individually and in-class group work, and students will also be required to give in-class presentations throughout both semesters. Collaboration between students is encouraged!! Students will also be encouraged to try creative approaches to the assignments, including video productions or other various artistic media. The spring semester will end with a final creative project depicting our course theme.
Possible titles: The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games, Gone Girl, Night, The Great Gatsby, The Fault in our Stars, The Catcher in the Rye, Fences, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Hate U Give, The 2084 Report, The Buddha in the Attic, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Fight Club, A Man Called Ove, Slaughterhouse-Five, No Country for Old Men, Civil Disobedience, The Body, The Spectacular Now, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Catch-22, The Awakening, I Am Malala, Harry Potter, Divergent, Reasons to Stay Alive, Flow.
HONR 10197 21 Swick-Higgins, Chelsea R 12:30 pm - 01:45 pm T R
What does it mean to love? Is it what we read about in contemporary romance novels? Is it something else? In this section of Honors Colloquium, we will use bell hooks’ definition of what love is/is not to understand our society and how we relate to one another. This definition extends to our romantic, familial, and societal relationships. Using tropes from contemporary romance (e.g. forced proximity, enemies to lovers, second chance) to organize our units, we will explore how different loves shape our personal, professional, and societal lives.
Students can expect to participate in student-driven class discussion, compose critical essays of varying lengths, reflect on class readings and discussions through response essays, and create multimodal compositions. We will critically engage with theoretical texts to understand articles, novels, shorter literary work (short stories and poetry), and contemporary media (films, television, and multimodal compositions).
Fall texts:
- All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
- Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
- Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Spring texts:
- Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
HONR 10197 22 Vogel, Lauren A 01:10 pm - 02:00 pm M W F
This course explores complex and sensitive topics surrounding identity and social (in)justice through children’s literature, young adult (YA) literature, and crossover picture books. We will look at materials that represent mirrors of ourselves and windows into the perspectives of the often-difficult lived experiences of others.
By the end of the term, students should be able to
1. Critique social norms and biases and question issues of power
2. Include multiple perspectives when interrogating and discussing any complex issue
3. Analyze and synthesize a broad range of material
4. Apply effective search strategies to locate and use high quality information and critically evaluate that information
5. Understand the importance of and properly use academic writing conventions
6. Develop a strong sense of self and compassion for others
Fall Text:
- Stamped: (For Kids) by Jason Reynolds & Ibrahm X. Kendi (2020). Little, Brown & Company
Spring Text:
- Kent State by Deborah Wiles (2020). Scholastic Press
HONR 10197 23 Uhrig, Karl 03:45 pm - 05:00 pm M W
Who gets to tell someone’s story? How do they construct reality through the way they tell it? What can we learn about our relationships to ourselves, each other, and society by looking closely at human agency and discourse?
This course is based on 1) the study of human agency, or the ways in which people have the ability to assert control over their circumstances, and 2) discourse analysis, the study of the ways in which humans construct understanding of their place in the world through language. Through the lenses of discourse and agency, we will read short stories, poems, and plays by authors from around the world and analyze them through discussion and writing. In addition, I will have you choose your own texts to analyze (any book, news story, movie, music, podcast, TikTok video, etc. that interests you).
Learning the concepts that comprise discourse and agency will take us a very short time, after which our discussions will take off and become extraordinarily interesting. These discussions will provide plenty of material for you to use to write the required essays that focus on specific concepts and specific texts. You will present your own ideas and engage in the ideas of your classmates. By the end of this course, not only will you have the tools to engage in any text with a critical, analytical eye, but you will also have the tools to better understand what’s going on in society, in the news, in popular culture, and in your own life.
Texts:
- Northanger Abbey – Austen,
- Boule de Suif – de Maupassant
- The Poisonwood Bible – Kingsolver
- Things Fall Apart – Achebe.
Movies:
- Brokeback Mountain
- Parasite
- Spirited Away
HONR 10197 24 Remley, Dirk 11:00 am - 12:15 pm T R
What makes someone a good leader? How can we critically reflect on others’ leadership skills toward understanding their effectiveness or weaknesses? How can we use these observations to assess and improve upon our own leadership skills? These are questions that will be addressed through this Colloquium section’s theme. Students will engage with principles of leadership found in characters and plot from various works of literature and film. Through critical reading, thinking, discussions, research, analytical writing activities, and other projects, students will come to understand several attributes that affect leadership effectiveness in various contexts; these attributes include cultural and social phenomena as well as personal traits and situational factors. Students, also, will consider their own leadership abilities and how they may be able to improve those skills.
The Fall semester’s experience will focus on defining and critically assessing attributes and traits leaders demonstrate.
The Spring semester’s experience will focus more on contextual factors that affect—positively or negatively—one’s ability to act on attributes/traits.
The works listed below provide a sampling of those that we will use.
Sampling of Texts:
- Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers, by Elizabeth Samet
- The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad
- Antigone, Sophocles
- Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw
- The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (Film, adapted from novel by Sloan Wilson)
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
- Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly
Freshman Honors Colloquium Sections 25-31 (Descriptions Below)
| Subj | Course# | Section | Instructor | Times | Meeting Days |
| HONR | 10197 | 25 | Uhrig, Karl | 05:30 pm - 06:45 pm | M W |
| HONR | 10197 | 26 | Roman, Christopher M | 12:30 pm - 01:45 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 27 | Hall, Elizabeth A | 09:55 am - 10:45 am | M W F |
| HONR | 10197 | 28 | Hall, Elizabeth A | 11:00 am - 11:50 am | M W F |
| HONR | 10197 | 29 | Wagoner, Elizabeth A | 11:00 am - 12:15 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 30 | Trzeciak Huss, Joanna | 11:00 am - 12:15 pm | T R |
| HONR | 10197 | 31 | Washbourne, Kelly | 5:30 pm - 6:45 pm | M W |
HONR 10197 25 Uhrig, Karl 05:30 pm - 06:45 pm M W
Who gets to tell someone’s story? How do they construct reality through the way they tell it? What can we learn about our relationships to ourselves, each other, and society by looking closely at human agency and discourse?
This course is based on 1) the study of human agency, or the ways in which people have the ability to assert control over their circumstances, and 2) discourse analysis, the study of the ways in which humans construct understanding of their place in the world through language. Through the lenses of discourse and agency, we will read short stories, poems, and plays by authors from around the world and analyze them through discussion and writing. In addition, I will have you choose your own texts to analyze (any book, news story, movie, music, podcast, TikTok video, etc. that interests you).
Learning the concepts that comprise discourse and agency will take us a very short time, after which our discussions will take off and become extraordinarily interesting. These discussions will provide plenty of material for you to use to write the required essays that focus on specific concepts and specific texts. You will present your own ideas and engage in the ideas of your classmates. By the end of this course, not only will you have the tools to engage in any text with a critical, analytical eye, but you will also have the tools to better understand what’s going on in society, in the news, in popular culture, and in your own life.
Texts:
- Northanger Abbey – Austen,
- Boule de Suif – de Maupassant
- The Poisonwood Bible – Kingsolver
- Things Fall Apart – Achebe.
Movies:
- Brokeback Mountain
- Parasite
- Spirited Away
HONR 10197 26 Roman, Christopher M 12:30 pm - 01:45 pm T R
This course will teach students how to make comics in a variety of genres. Comics are a unique medium that combine word and picture and are used in a number of settings. Students may be acquainted with superhero comics, but comics are used in a number of fields such as schools, hospitals, and labs, along with the more personal: exploring one’s own life in the form of memoir. As well, comics are useful in making arguments, structuring stories, inviting advocacy, and framing historical events. Throughout the year, students will produce a number of kinds of comics. We will focus on telling your own story through memoir comics, experimenting with the superhero genre, research and writing a historical comic, writing a comic to explain a concept, and learning how to write scripts. Along the way, students will learn about framing, narrative arcs, panel use and page design, scripts and storyboarding, and a little history of comics studies in the academic field. By the end of the two semesters, students will have produced a portfolio of various comics. You do not need to have a background in drawing; as we will discuss and examine, anyone can make comics.
Fall Texts:
- Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics
- David Small, Stitches
- Tillie Walden, Spinning
- Lynda Barry, Making Comics
- Greg Rucka, Batwoman: Elegy
- Jeph Loeb, Batman; The Long Halloween
HONR 10197 27 Hall, Elizabeth A 09:55 am - 10:45 am M W F
It’s likely you have heard of Mean Girls or even watched one of the movie versions—but have you read Queen Bees and Wannabes? How about William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Mean Girls? This is your chance to learn about the origins of Mean Girls and how, besides what you might have heard, the phenomenon has evolved. In addition to a broader cultural studies approach, we will contemplate these ideas:
Medium, Genre, and Audience Shifts — Tina Fey took Rosalind Wiseman’s parenting book and turned it into a comedy film. Since 2004, Mean Girls itself has been transformed into other fictional works, including a musical. Despite these shifts in medium and genre, does the original intention of Wiseman’s book remain? How exactly has the “message” changed from one “text” to the next? What kind of “weight” or “authenticity” does each carry—and does it matter how much the “facts” of Wiseman’s “rhetorical situation” are represented? As the subtitle of Wiseman’s work indicates, the work is meant for parents of daughters who want to help them maneuver their social realm. Fey’s choices to “recast” the book and place in front of a larger audience—that is, all moviegoers—calls into question who really should be the recipient of Wiseman’s original message.
Shakespeare, Popular Culture, and “Pop Shakespeare” — Shakespeare wrote for the masses, but now his work is considered canonical literature and most worthy of academic study. Though adaptation of Shakespeare’s work has happened frequently in popular culture, Doescher’s “Pop Shakespeare” series offers a fascinating approach. Is it worthy of academic study? What other parallels do you see between Shakespeare’s plays and works in modern popular culture?
Main Fall Texts:
- Olga Mecking’s “Why Parenting Books Are Not Really Written for the Parents” (2021)
- Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes (2002)
- Meda Chesney-Lind’s “The Meaning of Mean” (2002)
- Mean Girls [film script and movie] (2004)
Main Spring Texts:
- Elizabeth Abele’s “Introduction: Whither Shakespop? Taking Stock of Shakespeare in Popular Culture” (2004)
- Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Mean Girls (2019)
- Carlin Borsheim-Black’s “Reading Pop Culture and Young Adult Literature through the Youth Lens” (2015)
- Mean Girls [transcript and musical film] (2024)
HONR 10197 28 Hall, Elizabeth A 11:00 am - 11:50 am M W F
It’s likely you have heard of Mean Girls or even watched one of the movie versions—but have you read Queen Bees and Wannabes? How about William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Mean Girls? This is your chance to learn about the origins of Mean Girls and how, besides what you might have heard, the phenomenon has evolved. In addition to a broader cultural studies approach, we will contemplate these ideas:
Medium, Genre, and Audience Shifts — Tina Fey took Rosalind Wiseman’s parenting book and turned it into a comedy film. Since 2004, Mean Girls itself has been transformed into other fictional works, including a musical. Despite these shifts in medium and genre, does the original intention of Wiseman’s book remain? How exactly has the “message” changed from one “text” to the next? What kind of “weight” or “authenticity” does each carry—and does it matter how much the “facts” of Wiseman’s “rhetorical situation” are represented? As the subtitle of Wiseman’s work indicates, the work is meant for parents of daughters who want to help them maneuver their social realm. Fey’s choices to “recast” the book and place in front of a larger audience—that is, all moviegoers—calls into question who really should be the recipient of Wiseman’s original message.
Shakespeare, Popular Culture, and “Pop Shakespeare” — Shakespeare wrote for the masses, but now his work is considered canonical literature and most worthy of academic study. Though adaptation of Shakespeare’s work has happened frequently in popular culture, Doescher’s “Pop Shakespeare” series offers a fascinating approach. Is it worthy of academic study? What other parallels do you see between Shakespeare’s plays and works in modern popular culture?
Main Fall Texts:
- Olga Mecking’s “Why Parenting Books Are Not Really Written for the Parents” (2021)
- Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes (2002)
- Meda Chesney-Lind’s “The Meaning of Mean” (2002)
- Mean Girls [film script and movie] (2004)
Main Spring Texts:
- Elizabeth Abele’s “Introduction: Whither Shakespop? Taking Stock of Shakespeare in Popular Culture” (2004)
- Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Mean Girls (2019)
- Carlin Borsheim-Black’s “Reading Pop Culture and Young Adult Literature through the Youth Lens” (2015)
- Mean Girls [transcript and musical film] (2024)
HONR 10197 29 Wagoner, Elizabeth A 11:00 am - 12:15 pm T R
Come for the glow in the dark cats and neurotic AIs, stay for the discussions of ethics, philosophy, and pop cultural representations of science! This section explores major issues in science fiction, as well as issues raised by popular discussions of science today, through themed units focusing on larger philosophical, ethical, and theoretical ideas. Each unit will contain works from literature, comics/graphic novels, film, and nonfiction science writing. Science-fiction issues covered in this course include:
- Science Fiction as a Genre – Contested, Lowbrow, Beloved, and now Quite Difficult Due to the Speed of Innovation
- Progressivism – Is humankind advancing toward a more evolved or better state of being through technological innovation?
- Space Travel – The Science Required to take us to Mars and Beyond.
- The Apocalypse in Science Fiction – AI, Viral, Nuclear, and Climate Disasters
- Science vs. Superstition – Pseudoscience, Logic, and the Battle for the Human Mind Examining the ways scientific ideas are framed through these texts, we will gain a richer awareness of major issues in science fiction and science today. In addition to weekly writings and discussion, there will be several researched essays, and film analysis.
Fall Texts:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick.
- Binti: The Complete Trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor, and Interstellar, Christopher Nolan.
Spring Texts:
- The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Silent Spring – excerpts, Rachel Carson.
- Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, and Dune: Part One by Denis Villeneuve.
HONR 10197 30 Trzeciak Huss, Joanna 11:00 am - 12:15 pm T R
This colloquium will be centered on the delicate moment in childhood in which one confronts the wider world. Through literature and film, we will see the world in all the freshness, rawness, and newness that it possesses when viewed through the eyes of a child. Childhood experiences do not determine who we become, but they are something we always carry with us. Through reading, viewing, discussion, writing and student presentations, we will explore the tension between the formative effects of childhood experiences, how they stay with us throughout life, and the power each of us possesses to probe and examine those experiences to take ownership of our lives and ourselves. Ever mindful of the conventions, constraints and possibilities of genre, we will set our sights on developing a multi-dimensional understanding of the phenomena of childhood and the loss of innocence as depicted in novels, short stories, poetry, and film.
Fall texts:
- Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, trans. Judson Rosengrant
- Isaak Babel,“The Story of My Dovecot”
- Olga Tokarczuk, E. E.
- Zuzanna Ginczanka, selected poems
- Film: Volker Schlondorff The Tin Drum
- Wisława Szymborska, selected poems
- Tadeusz Różewicz, selected poems
- Film: Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood
- Film: Mikhail Kalatozov, Cranes are Flying
- Film: Elem Klimov, Come and See
- Film: Roberto Benigni, Life is Beautiful
- James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain
- James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
- Clarice Lispector, select short stories
Spring texts:
- Film: Louis Malle, Au Revoir Les Enfants
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
- Film: Stanley Kubrick, Lolita
- Film: Charles Laughton, Night of the Hunter
- Film: Satyajit Ray Pather Panchali
- Kenzaburo Oe, “Prize Stock”
- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
- Yann Martel, Life of Pi
- Film: Ang Lee, Life of Pi
- Han Kang, Human Acts
- Film: Richard Linklater, Childhood
HONR 10197 31 Washbourne, Kelly 5:30 pm - 6:45 pm M W
Education should fuel the brain, but also the mind, soul, and heart. This course searches civilizations present and past for the wisdom to lead a good and flourishing life. We start with self-knowledge (passing first through a self-unknowing). Then, how do we connect to higher selves, presence, flow, nonduality, creativity, and compassion? And to communities: What ways of being in the world have people known? "Local to Global: Wisdom and the Self" reads around the world in the service of fashioning oneself through attentive encounters with 'the other'. Wisdom is knowing self but also cosmopolitan consciousness: imagining others—the empathic imagination, including nature-human bonds and obligations. If we are woven into nature, what is wise to do about it? We will also explore the role of others’ languages in shaping our knowing and self-knowledge: What is in lak’ech, the Mayan “I am another you, as you are another me”? How is eudaimonia more than mere happiness? When we learn of Pratityasamutpada, we learn too to see the interdependent arising of all phenomena. An inner and outer journey from ancient sutras to the solarpunk manifesto, from the African creation myth “A Dream Dreaming Us” to the Aboriginal “Dreaming the World into Being”, from the stillness at the center of the Tao Te Ching to the chaotic cybernetic labyrinths of Jorges Luis Borges’ identity parables. We travel from ecstasy to empathy, from the human to the ecological posthuman, and to the wonder of sacred geometry. The re-enchantment of the world starts at home.
Fall texts:
- Cohen, G.L., Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection
- Jackson, W.J., Heaven's Fractal Net: Retrieving Lost Visions in the Humanities
- MacFarquhar, L. Strangers Drowning
- Rumi, Daylight
- Singer, P., The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress.
Spring texts:
- Abram, D., The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World. [excerpts]
- Bridle, J., Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
- Martusewicz, E., and Lupinacci, J. EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse, Democratic, and Sustainable Communities. [excerpts]
- Roszak, T., Where Psyche Meets Gaia. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind.
- Theise, N., Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being. [selections: chs. 3-9 + afterword]
- Treanor, B., “Introduction: The Human Place in the Natural World.” Being-In-Creation: Human Responsibility in an Endangered World, eds. B. Treanor, B. Ellis Benson, and N. Wirzba.