FHC Sections 11-20
Freshman Honors Colloquium Sections 11-20 (Descriptions Below)
| Subj | Course# | Section | Instructor | Meeting Days | Times |
| HONR | 10197 | 011 | Winter, James P | T R | 12:30 pm - 01:45 pm |
| HONR | 10197 | 012 | Brodsky, Adam H | T R | 09:15 am - 10:30 am |
| HONR | 10197 | 013 | Richards, Dale E | T R | 02:15 pm - 03:30 pm |
| HONR | 10197 | 014 | Wagoner, Elizabeth A | T R | 09:15 am - 10:30 am |
| HONR | 10197 | 015 | Whiteleather, Hagan Faye F | T R | 03:45 pm - 05:00 pm |
| HONR | 10197 | 016 | Takayoshi, Pamela D | T R | 09:15 am - 10:30 am |
| HONR | 10197 | 017 | Whiteleather, Hagan Faye F | T R | 05:30 pm - 06:45 pm |
| HONR | 10197 | 018 | Clark, Patrick J | T R | 07:00 pm - 08:15 pm |
| HONR | 10197 | 019 | Shank, Matthew A | M W F | 11:00 am - 11:50 am |
| HONR | 10197 | 020 | Shank, Matthew A | M W F | 12:05 pm - 12:55 pm |
HONR 10197 011 Winter, James P
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 012 Brodsky, Adam H
How Media Works
Everyone is influenced by media, so it is important to know how media works to deliver meaning and extend human experience and understanding. This colloquium will explore the nature of media and focus on entertainment and informational media types with an emphasis on film, music, and art. We will view, listen to, read about, experience, analyze, write about, and critique popular media to recognize patterns, both contemporary and historic, in its design, mechanics, aesthetics, and effects.
Expect several types of essays, projects, presentations, and group activities. The core texts are listed below. This colloquium will invest time directly experiencing creative works of cinema, art, and music.
Texts for Fall:
- Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
- The Anatomy of Film
Texts for Spring:
- How Music Works
- What Are You Looking At?
HONR 10197 013 Richards, Dale E
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.
Texts for Fall:
Ranganath, Charan. Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club
Morrison, Toni. Beloved
Texts for Spring:
Murakami, Haruki. Kafka on the Shore
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 014 Wagoner, Elizabeth A
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.
Texts for Fall:
2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, Film.
Binti: The Complete Trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor
Texts for Spring:
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu and Silent Spring – excerpts, Rachel Carson
Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm
HONR 10197 015 Whiteleather, Hagan Faye F
Digging Death: Dying, Death, Greif, Spiritualism, & the Afterlife
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.
Texts Fall:
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)
Texts Spring:
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)
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (2013)
"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: The Good Place (2016-2020) / Black Mirror: “San Junipero” (2016) / Hadestown (2019) / Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
HONR 10197 016 Takayoshi, Pamela D
Writing, Meaning, Memory
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 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 Carr, 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.
Books listed below are suggestive of possible titles:
- The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
- The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-fei LI
- The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen
- Raised by a Serial Killer by April Balascio
- Spellbound by Phil Hanley
- Whistkey Tender by Deborah Jackson Taffa
- Educated by Tara Westover
HONR 10197 017 Whiteleather, Hagan Faye F
Digging Death: Dying, Death, Greif, Spiritualism, & the Afterlife
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.
Texts Fall:
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)
Texts Spring:
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)
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (2013)
"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: The Good Place (2016-2020) / Black Mirror: “San Junipero” (2016) / Hadestown (2019) / Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
HONR 10197 018 Clark, Patrick J
Literature, Film, and the Psychology of Text-to-Screen Adaptation
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.
Texts for Fall:
- 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.
Texts for Spring:
- Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
- 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 Richard Linklater, Jon Avnet, Stacie Passon, Tom Tykwer, Martin Rosen, and James McTeigue.
HONR 10197 019 Shank, Matthew A
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, Fences, The Life of Chuck, The Great Gatsby, The Fault in our Stars, The Catcher in the Rye, 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, Little Miss Sunshine, 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 020 Shank, Matthew A
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, Fences, The Life of Chuck, The Great Gatsby, The Fault in our Stars, The Catcher in the Rye, 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, Little Miss Sunshine, 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.