2021-2022 Undergraduate Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Course Offerings
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History |
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HIST 349 - ‘We Shall Overcome’: White Terror, Black Struggle, and American Memory
(Same as SOC 349 .) 3 credits
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HIST 352 - Chinese Civilization
A study of China from earliest times to the mid-1990s from five broad perspectives: the composition of the Chinese people, elite thought and behavior, family life, popular culture, and the economy. (Offered every year.) 3 credits
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HIST 354 - From Samurai to Pokemon: A Social History of Modern Japan
What did modernity mean for the Japanese people? Topics include the way of the warrior, the fall of feudalism, Westernization, gender, male-male sexuality, epidemics and modern medicine, war, empire, occupation, economic recovery, and the decadent 1980s. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HIST 355 - Disease, Power and Sex: Medicine and the Body in East Asia
This course focuses on the effects of disease, medical limitations, and popular practices in East Asia. Cholera, the plague, western medicine, the medicalization of sex, and the relation between science, war, and imperialism are examined to uncover the history of medicine and the body. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HIST 357 - History of Jewish Migration
This course explores Jews on the move, from antiquity to the present. Topics include Biblical and medieval migration, Holocaust refugees, migration to New York, Zionism, migration from Iraq. Primary sources include the Bible, letters, posters, websites, films. (Offered spring semester, alternate years.) 3 credits
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HIST 358 - Jewish Life from Napoleon to Hitler
What was it like to be Jewish in modern Europe? This course tells the story of Jews in Germany, France, and Italy, from the 19th century to the Holocaust; and how Europeans today mis-remember the Holocaust. Sources include memoirs, laws, artwork, and films. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HIST 359 - Elie Wiesel: Life and Works
(Same as REL 359 .) This course is an intensive study of selected writings by Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. Readings will include works of fiction and non-fiction. In addition, students will read a brief history of the Holocaust by Doris Bergen and an interpretive work on oral and written memory by Lawrence Langer. (Offered spring semester.) 3 credits
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HIST 363 - The Arab World: Colonialism to Revolution
(Same as POSC 363 .) This course surveys the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa from Napoleon’s invasion in 1798 to the revolutionary turmoil of 2011. Students will explore the unique cultures and character of each region, and specific challenges they face in the transition to modernity. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HIST 365 - Topics in the Holocaust
(Same as REL 365 .) This course examines selected topics within the study of Holocaust history, such as the roles of doctors, theologians, and religion under Hitler, the persecution of non-Jewish groups (including homosexuals and gypsies), and the experiences and choices of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. Courses that treat different themes may be repeated for credit. (Offered every year.) 3 credits
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HIST 365a - Perpetrators, Witnesses, and Rescuers
(Same as REL 365a .) Within the context of Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust, this course examines the choices that individuals faced and the decisions that defined them as perpetrators or rescuers. Includes the stories of those who survived the Holocaust to become witnesses to the truth. (Offered every year.) 3 credits
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HIST 365b - The Holocaust: Memoirs and Histories
This course explores the complex history of the Holocaust from the perspective of selected memoirs written by survivors and examines the contributions and limitations of memoirs in shaping the historical record. (Offered spring semester, alternate years.) 3 credits
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HIST 366 - Capitalism and the Modern World
This course examines the development of modern capitalism from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism to postindustrial globalization. Themes include the connection between capitalism and colonialism, imperialism, the Atlantic slave system, the enlightenment, nationalism, the global economy, and environmental consequences. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HIST 367 - The Holocaust in Eastern Europe
This course examines the Holocaust in Eastern Europe during World War II, with emphasis on historical events in German-occupied regions of Poland and the Soviet Union. Themes include prewar social and political developments that shaped ethnic relations during wartime. (Offered spring semester, alternate years.) 3 credits
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HIST 369 - History of Terrorism in the United States
This course examines the major acts of terrorism in the United States from the American Revolution to the present by critically analyzing the major political, intellectual, economic, and cultural impact of these events. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HIST 372 - California History
An in-depth examination of California from its discovery in 1542 to the present. Topics include how the Golden State has changed, the roles of mining, Indians, agriculture, high technology, Japanese-American relations, and the mission system. (Offered every year.) 3 credits
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HIST 373 - U.S. Economic History
(Same as ECON 373 .) 3 credits
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HIST 374 - European Economic History
(Same as ECON 374 .) 3 credits
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HIST 377 - The AIDS Epidemic in the United States
This course traces the history of the AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s when doctors were first baffled by the new disease, through the work of ACT UP activists, to the discovery of effective drug cocktails in the 1990s. Letter grade with Pass/No Pass option. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HIST 388 - Technology and the Media in the United States
This course considers the impact of technology change on the United States from the Industrial Revolution to the Computer Age. Topics include the role of the media and mass communications in economic and political change, the shaping of utopian visions, gender relations, and the West’s relationship with the non-Western world. (Offered every year.) 3 credits
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HIST 392 - Pre-Columbian and Colonial Latin America
This course covers the Native American-European encounter of the early 16th century and colonial control and establishment of European institutions in Latin America. Topics include politics, the economy, diplomatic and military affairs, and the intellectual life of the colonies. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HIST 396 - Mexican History
History of Mexico from colonial times to the present with emphasis on politics, racial relations and slavery, culture, the economy, the Russian Revolution and relations with the United States. Letter grade with Pass/No Pass option. (Offered spring semester, alternate years.) 3 credits
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HIST 396 - Mexican History
History of Mexico from colonial times to the present with emphasis on politics, racial relations and slavery, culture, the economy, the Russian Revolution and relations with the United States. Letter grade with Pass/No Pass option. (Offered spring semester, alternate years.) 3 credits
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HIST 398 - The Historian’s Craft
Prerequisite, HIST 296 , or consent of instructor. This course introduces students to the philosophy of history and historical thought, historical methodology, and the craft of doing history. (Offered spring semester.) 3 credits
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HIST 399 - Individual Study and Research
Prerequisite, consent of instructor. Designed to meet the specific needs of superior students, this course provides students with an in-depth study of a specific area of research. Course content and goals are chosen in conference between the instructor and student. May be repeated for credit with different topic. (Offered as needed.) 1-6 credits
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HIST 490 - Independent Internship
Prerequisite, consent of instructor. P/NP. May be repeated for credit with different topic. (Offered as needed.) ½-6 credits
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HIST 491 - Student-Faculty Research/Creative Activity
Prerequisite, consent of instructor. Students engage in independent, faculty-mentored scholarly research/creative activity in their discipline which develops fundamentally novel knowledge, content, and/or data. Topics or projects are chosen after discussions between student and instructor who agree upon objective and scope. P/NP or letter grade option with consent of instructor. May be repeated for credit. (Offered every semester.) 1-3 credits
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HIST 495 - Holocaust Minor Research Seminar
Prerequisites, holocaust minor, consent of instructor. This course is an intensive research course for junior and senior Holocaust history minors culminating in a major, original research project that serves as a capstone project for the minor. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HIST 496 - Advanced Research Thesis I
Prerequisites, HIST 398 , history major, consent of instructor. Students will design and research an advanced research thesis. (Offered fall semester.) 3 credits
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HIST 498 - Advanced Research Thesis II
Prerequisites, HIST 496 , history major. Students will write, revise, and present an advanced research thesis. (Offered spring semester.) 3 credits
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HIST 499 - Individual Study
Prerequisite, consent of instructor. Designed to meet the specific needs of superior students, this course provides students with an in-depth study of a specific area of research. Course content and goals are chosen in conference between the instructor and student. May be repeated for credit with different topic. (Offered as needed.) ½-6 credits
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Honors |
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HON 202 - On Being Ethical in the World
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. This course surveys the history of ethics, with particular attention to the history of philosophical approaches to ethics as well as to the process of moral decision-making in major religious traditions. These philosophical and religious perspectives are then critically examined in light of some contemporary moral problems. Among the moral problems considered are abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, sexuality and marriage, the moral status of animals, and the environment. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 206 - In Search of Reality: Media, Self and Society
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program or consent of instructor. This course will be a critical exploration - on both the “objective” and the “personal” level - of the phenomenon conventionally labeled “mass media;” an examination of the origin, history and functions of “mass media” and its pervasive effects on viewers social life and ‘private’ mental life. What social conditions brought about the phenomena of “mass media”? How do the media, in turn, shape the texture of experiences of social reality and social history? How much of people’s version of reality has been shaped, molded and tailored by the media? It would seem that it is not until an event, principle, movement, institution, etc. crosses the media threshold or media membrane that it takes on a solid, legitimate and confirmed reality today. Is the function of mass media to inform, educate, and enlighten or rather to deform and endarken, to train people to become more and more unaware of how people are actually living their lives, more and more actively ignorant? How does the mass media mix with and permeate the texture of intimate experiences of who people are, of how they experience their personal and social identities? This course hopes to develop a keen media awareness that will help students live mindfully and skillfully with the media in this world, instead of unconsciously living in the world of the media. In reference to the great historical transformation, tectonic shift, from the print age to the electronic age, students will inquire into how the medium of Gutenberg’s typographic print influenced their frames of reference towards “knowledge” “truth” and “reality”? This course will ask, are TV, the Internet, the Social Media Platforms a neutral technology - like viewing the electric light bulb - or are they actually more of a collective, hypnotic force and organized technique of social control, a la Huxley’s Brave New World, or Orwell’s 1984, or the Wachowski’s The Matrix? Etc. What does the acquired practice called “watching television” (or “reading the newspaper”, or “listening to the radio” “surfing social media”) actually, phenomenologically, consist of? Do newspapers simply “report” how things are, or do they perhaps function more to promote an ontology of the social world and a disguised form of further entertainment, further distraction? Can people justifiably say that the primary role of the media is to serve as a delivery system for advertisers? How has advertising effected, infected and infested the view of each person? How has the media impacted the experience of political democracy? Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 207 - Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory: The Science and the Controversy
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. This course will address the topic Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and its place in scientific thought, and explore the controversy surrounding it for many in the general public. We will explore the options for finding comfort with both the science of evolution and one’s personal religious beliefs. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 209 - Death, Self and Society
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Students participate in an interdisciplinary investigation of death, dying, and the grieving process. Topics include: The American way of death as a social institution, dying as a psychological process, how society conditions us to deny death and repress grief, how students relate to their own death, and the death of significant others. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 210 - Monsters and Monstrosities
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we will investigate and interpret the stories we construct about ourselves and the Other by exploring works from east/west involving the vampire, the specter, and the witch. We will particularly focus on cultural, literary, and political representations from various periods and locations. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 216 - Twilight of the Gods
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. This course examines the history of thought on agnosticism, atheism, and skepticism by studying a selection of classical writings from some of the most celebrated thinkers in the West - from Lucretius to Carl Sagan. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 218 - Social Movement in the Sixties
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. Through film, literature and direct commune-experimentation this course will be a fresh look, with beginner’s eyes, at the 60’s: that most outrageous decade, that most idealized and despised decade, that most creative and anarchic decade. The course is structured around Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter-Culture and the PBS 6-part documentary Making Sense of the 60s. We will examine the cultural trance we are caught up in, in reference to social movements and social change. As a culture, our definition of social change has been deeply inhabited by a belief in progress, achievement, betterment. Change was progress, especially economic and technical progress. The social movements of the 60’s counter-culture contested that concept of social change and have provoked a change in our concept of social change itself. We will be looking at social movements and social change on a personal, societal, and global-planetary level. We will be examining our values in reference to change and in reference to politics, democracy and freedom-particularly whether those values come consciously out of our understanding or unconsciously out of our conditioning. We will contrast the movements and forces at work in the 60’s youth with the movements and forces at work in today’s youth. Education is a journey, not a destination, hence students will be highly encouraged to integrate their formal book reading with their direct, personal, on-the-spot life experiences. There will be various “exploriments” and “exercises” designed to provoke us into doing sociology rather than merely learning about it. Our dominant, established educational tradition is that your acquire knowledge through collecting stuff and knowing it-especially for exams. We will attempt to contest the authority of that tradition and celebrate thinking, experiencing, and creating rather than collecting, memorizing, and grading. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 222 - Honors Composition: Rhetorical Agency Across Genres
Prerequisite, acceptance to University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Honors Composition prepares students to write effectively in response to on-going academic discussions in a number of different genres. This class is about writers learning to “situate” themselves in relation to texts and ideas, learning to analyze for rhetorical effect, and writing through those processes. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 238 - The Power of Storytelling: Narrative Theory and Practice
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program or consent of instructor and Honors Director. A distinctly human endeavor, storytelling can serve many purposes: interpreting past and present, projecting a future, encouraging empathy, providing testimony, giving voice to individual realities, and more. Through the composition of personalized writing projects that are critical and creative and through the analysis of narrative use in various genres and texts of established authors, students explore the humanistic value and rhetorical effect of storytelling in their own work and the works of others. This writing seminar will focus on the structure and function of narrative and its conventions, the persuasive use of narrators and narration, and the implications of interpretation and adaptation across media. Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 240 - Anime and War
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Japanese animation or anime has become much more popular in the United States over the last three decades, and today Japan State policy sees the medium as an important “cultural asset.” However anime is not new, nor is it a medium exclusive to Japan. One might even argue that many technologies of visual animation pre-date its live-action cinematic cousin. As Paul Virilio and others have argued, the history of both animated and live-action film are intimately related to the parallel histories of 20th century warfare. This course will trace the development of mid- and late-20th century Japanese animated films in terms of their relationship to war. Analyzing Japanese films on historical, narrative, diegetic, and formal levels, we will consider relations among image production and viewing, in terms of economic, cultural, social, and political parameters. Readings will include classic theoretical texts on war and cinema, as well as more recent historical and sociological readings specific to Japanese and Pacific contexts. This course will focus upon the following four sub-units; 1) “animation theory and modern Japanese visual history 2) the Pacific War and politics of memory 3) the Cold War, ideological alliances, and cultural-economic empires and lastly 4) animated projections and the War on Terror.
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(Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 242 - Beyoncé, Madonna, Nina Simone
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. In a New York Times conversation following Beyoncé’s explosive 2016 Superbowl performance, critic Wesley Morris suggested that Beyoncé “lands somewhere between” Madonna and Nina Simone. This course brings these three artists from different generations together, situating their work historically, within contemporary critical discussions around race/gender/sexuality and cultural appropriation, and in dialogue with one another. The course offers a cultural studies-based examination of the work of the three artists; our method is not primarily sociological or biographical, though relevant biographical and sociological evidence may inform our analysis. We listen to the music of the three artists, watch their music videos, and read scholarship in critical race studies and feminist cultural criticism. Students develop collaborative oral presentations on each of the three artists and a final critical or creative mashup or disentangling of Beyoncé /Madonna/Nina Simone. Discussion-based seminar. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 254 - Symmetry
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. Symmetry is everywhere. The human fascination with it originates from our observations of the natural world where symmetric forms appear abundantly. Nature’s symmetries range from very simple to extremely complex, from very concrete to very abstract, and they extend over scales ranging from subatomic to cosmological distances. For millennia symmetric forms have inspired artists, architects, musicians and scientists. Artists have explored symmetries of the natural world and the human body to create masterpieces that look harmonious and appeal to our senses of beauty, harmony and perfection. Observing symmetries in nature and developing their own symmetric standards, architects have learned to design beautiful buildings and ornamental art. Ancient Greeks associated rhythm, harmony and patterns in music with periodicity and variations of forms in mathematics. In more recent developments symmetry emerged as one of the deepest ideas of modern mathematics and science responsible for our significant advancement in understanding the world. In this course we will explore historical origins of symmetry and its wide applications by examining how the quest to understand symmetry leads to beautiful science describing the beautiful natural world. We will also briefly mention entertaining aspects of symmetry and demonstrate its use in games and puzzles, mostly in Rubik’s Cube and mathematical tricks with playing cards. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 255 - Serving to Learn: Learning to Serve
This course serves as an introduction to service and cross-cultural engagement, and is heavily based in classroom discussion and local, external civic opportunities. Learning takes place in the context of supportive communal activity and social awareness. This course aims to foster global citizenship and academic, political, and social diversity within the University Honors Program. At least three community service trips/events are required for this course. (Offered as needed.) 1 credit
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HON 266 - Sound and Spirit
Prerequisite, admission to the University Honors Program. This course will explore the relationship of music and spirituality focusing on important questions: What is the unique quality of music that makes it the art form most essential to transcendent experience? How have different religions used music to achieve transcendence and express the divine? How are significant works in the western classical canon related to their roots in communal spiritual practice? And how do non-western traditions articulate the music / spirituality connection? The course will consider major works of the western classical tradition that span over 250 years and reflect different approaches to this relationship. We will also engage in experiential learning, as students engage with music in various spiritual contexts. Each week we will engage in one of Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations (1974) - a way of connecting to each other and more deeply with the musical experience as well as critiquing conventional religious practices. Additionally, students will attend a musical event and make a class presentation.
(Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 275 - Thinking and Risk Taking from Outside the Box
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. An introduction to advanced-level critical inquiry, on thinking outside the box, challenging the status quo, evaluating preconceived ideas, risk taking, and dealing with failure using scientific concepts and examples. P/NP. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 277 - Game of Thrones: Beyond the Wall
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. This course situates George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones in contemporary dialogues about, multiple perspectives of, and various theoretical approaches to the literary, the visual, the political, and the historical. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 280 - Honors Forum
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. The Honors Forum meets three times a week to familiarize students with the academic and civic dimensions of the University Honors Program. 1. The academic component of Honors Forum introduces the theory and practices of interdisciplinarity, basic inductive and deductive logic, and theories on the civic responsibility of democratic citizenship. 2. The civic component of Honors Forum introduces not only theories regarding civic responsibility but also opportunities for practical application of those theories through engagement in efforts to address different needs in our local community. (Offered every semester.) 3 credits
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HON 282 - Evolution, Morality, and Ethics
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. This course challenges the current and common belief that morality and ethics remains purely in the realm of theology, philosophy, and metaphysics. Morality and ethics are not only woven into the very fabric of life, they are also, in part, a product of evolution itself. The topics of evolutionary biology, evolutionary ethics, and different social and political systems and theories will be considered concurrently with the ethical theories of Divine Command Theory (Augustine), Deontology (Kant), Moral Emotions/Sentiments (Hume and Smith), Utilitarianism (Bentham and Mills), Virtue Ethics (Aristotle), Egoism (Rand), Ethical Relativism (Benedict), and Social Contract Theory (Rawls), in light of recent developments that attempt to integrate facts and values, science and ethics. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 286 - Origins
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Where did the universe come from? Why complexity? How did life originate? Was life inevitable? How does evolution work? Why did humans evolve? Were we inevitable? This is an honors class for students of all disciplines, science and non-science majors. It is a class that will explore origins at a reductionist scientific perspective, as well as from a philosophical perspective. P/NP. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 288 - Close Reading
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. This course focuses on small and subtle elements in a wide range of texts. Specific texts vary by semester but generally include a mix of visual images, television commercials, music videos, short films, short stories, op-ed pieces, stageplays, and feature-length films. In considering all of these texts, the objective is to delve into the details, observing and analyzing aspects of the text that often go unnoticed and unexamined. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 292 - The Art of Revenge
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. This course focuses on representations of revenge from classical antiquity to contemporary times. Specific texts vary by semester but typically include a mixture of stageplays, short stories, short films, and feature-length films, along with contextualizing religious writings and philosophical treatises. Our objective in considering these texts will be to analyze the ethical and aesthetic “grammar” of revenge. In other words, how do various authors and directors tell revenge stories in such a way as to shape, satisfy, modify, and/or confound our notions of right and wrong, offense and punishment, and justice and mercy? (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 302 - Witnessing the World: The Art of Travel Writing
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program or consent of instructor and Honors Director. Marcel Proust once said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Why do people desire travel? Can journeys of the imagination be as satisfying as firsthand travel experiences? Can traveling around a neighborhood stimulate us as much as trips to other continents? In this course, characterized as both a writer’s workshop and a Socratic seminar, students examine the stages of travel from anticipation to return and uncover motivations behind the desire to witness the world and then write about it. Students analyze, according to artistic style, cultural bias and rhetorical impact, celebrated and representative examples of travel literature and media as well as create their own original travel writings. Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 307 - Topics in the Great Operas of the Western Tradition
Prerequisites, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. An exploration of both the literary and the musical traditions of the finest operas written in western tradition (Italian, German, French and American) and their relationship to other literary genres and performing arts. Class will feature performances by invited faculty and students and field trip(s) to LA Opera. Class may be repeated for credit up to 6 credits, as the topic and operas covered will change each time it is offered. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 308 - Consciousness and Cognition
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. How is it possible that in a universe made of mindless atoms following physical laws, some of those atoms have the capacity to produce a first-person, subjective, conscious experience of the world? How can a hunk of brain matter produce an “inner life” of thoughts, perceptions, and “Feelings? In short, how does mindless matter become mind? The existence of consciousness is a profound scientific mystery and our inability to explain it is arguably the biggest gap in our scientific understanding of reality. This course will focus on the problem of consciousness from the perspective of philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. The course will be organized around the following major questions from each discipline. Philosophy: What is consciousness, and what is the problem? Can our current laws of physics account for consciousness? What would a scientific explanation of consciousness entail? Cognitive neuroscience: How does consciousness emerge from non-conscious matter? How do my conscious cognitive experiences of thinking, Feeling, remembering and perceiving relate to the physical processes going on in my nervous system? Cognitive Science: Are all cognitive processes conscious? Artificial Intelligence: Can computers be conscious? What would it take for a machine to be conscious? Get ready for an adventure as we attempt to understand the single most shocking and amazing feature of the universe! Come along for the ride as we use our consciousness to understand consciousness (how meta). “The almighty human brain: the only hunk of matter in the universe that can reflect upon its own existence.” –Me.
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(Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 310 - Experiencing Forms and Colors: Goethe’s Approach to Science
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Is it possible to imagine a science that has subjective experience at its core, that acknowledges the primacy of daily experiences as mediated by the senses, all along without diminishing its own rigor, objectivity and predictive power? In this course we will attempt to find answers to these questions by taking Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s scientific work as a starting point. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 311 - Ethnicity, Race and Nationalism
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. All around us we see the rising tide of ethnic, racial, and national conflicts. From terrorist acts in New York City to war in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Rwanda, we see people divided along ethnic, religious, and national identities. Is this inevitable? What are the possible causes and consequences of these conflicts? We will explore what we mean by identity and its various representations such as ethnic, religious, and national identities today. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 313 - Golden Opportunities: Immigration and the Arts in Southern California, 1900-1950
Prerequisite, acceptance to University Honors Program. Artists and intellectuals converged on southern California from all directions in the first half of the 20th century. Initially drawn by the landscape, the climate, and the promise of economic opportunity, and soon joined by refugees from oppression and war in Europe, they discovered a human landscape already rich with social and ethnic diversity. The resulting convergence of personalities and perspectives shaped an environment of cultural innovation, replete with challenges to received notions about modernity vs. tradition and elitism vs. populism. By midcentury, many of the immigrants had left, but their legacy still resonates today. This course will consider those who were here, those who came, and how their interactions changed the world. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 314 - Dante’s Afterlife
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. This course is devoted to one of the most fascinating and influential masterpieces of Western literature, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s poem relates one man’s journey from the dark wood of error to the vision of truth, but readers do not only observe the pilgrim’s journey through the afterlife, they participate in it as well. They encounter questions about the nature of evil, the possibility for spiritual improvement, and the experience of true happiness, and discover surprising parallels with their own time. While situating Dante’s work within the intellectual and social context of the late Middle Ages, the course also challenges students to recognize Dante’s presence in modern and contemporary global culture and mediascape. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 315 - Power and Imagination in the Italian Renaissance
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. The European Renaissance marked a time of a heightened quest for truth in different fields and of a conscious and deliberate attempt to change the way people thought and acted in the world. During this revolutionary period, Italy served as the crucible for the formation of new ideals and values as well as a new understanding of the role the intellectual, writer, and artist should play in society. By analyzing and contextualizing a variety of representative texts-including poetry, visual arts, and scientific and political treatises-we will examine the complex relationship between imagination and power dynamics of a political and religious nature. The dilemmas of caution and resoluteness, simulation and dissimulation, heroism and conformity, orthodoxy and innovation, will be considered as some of the themes shaping early modern western literary and cultural production. The emphasis will focus upon epoch-making thinkers and artists such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Alberti, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Bruno, and Galileo. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 317 - Visual Literacy in a Generation of Visible Surplus: Its Theory, Practice and Applications
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. The generation of online social networking, competitive commerce, instantaneous global and local media, and excessive visual diversion is changing the way we filter, access, and understand the world around us. This course will explore the histories, theories, and strategies of visual literacy and apply them to personal experience as well as professional case studies, including business, social, political, and cultural applications. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 319 - Dinosaurs: In Science and Media
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of University Honors Program Director. This course will address the topic of dinosaurs from the perspectives of science and media. The scientific perspective will include how dinosaur remains are found, studied, and interpreted while the media perspective will focus on how dinosaurs are depicted in media as well as how dinosaur science was integrated into the Jurassic Park franchise movies. Students will write an article and a short script. P/NP. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 326 - Writing Food Culture
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. Food is increasingly surfacing to the foreground of cultural studies and various modes of writing and activism as an especially multifaceted and vital theme intersecting crucial issues of identity, culture, and environment. This course focuses on food writing across multiple genres of expression and its evolution over time across media and national borders. In response to their engagement with significant texts related to food, its production and consumption, students will compose creative and critical writing projects. Discussion-based seminar and writing workshop. Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 328 - Elder Law and Juvenile Law
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program or consent of instructor and Honors Director. Elder Law and Juvenile Law concerns legal issues involving the rights and needs of children and the elderly. Finance, physical, and mental health matters are central in the study of elder law and juvenile law but any issue which impacts a child or an elder’s quality of life is included. In this course students will study the various issues and laws which confront children and the elderly, and compare and contrast how the law impacts these two groups. Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 329 - Experimental Course
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program or consent of instructor. Honors experimental courses are designed to offer additional opportunities to explore areas and subjects of special interest. Course titles, prerequisites, and credits may vary. Some courses require student lab fees. Specific course details will be listed in the course schedule. Letter grade with Pass/No Pass option. May be repeated for credit if the topic is different. Fee: TBD. (Offered as needed.) ½-3 credits
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HON 330 - Bodies Under Construction
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. Often times, the body is an object that is taken for granted. What does it mean to have a body? This course will explore ways in which society and culture construct the body. Students will explore questions involving the classic Cartesian “mind-body” problem and literature exploring the “lived” experience of the body. They will then move into constructivist perspectives that explore how bodies as symbolic and disciplinary objects. After establishing several frameworks for how bodies are socially constructed, they will then explore how the body is a politicized object that intersects with various sites of power, including racism, sexism, and other forms of inequality. Students will then examine how the bodies is actively (re)constructed in various arenas. They will consider the following questions: To what extent are bodies culturally constructed? How does each researcher conceptualize the body? What is the role of biology in shaping the body? What are biological constraints and possibilities when exploring the body? How does power intersect with the body? Do some bodies matter more than other bodies? Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 335 - The Enigma of Being Awake: Zen Buddhism
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. This course will involve a three-part study: 1) “we will explore the history of Buddhism in general and Zen Buddhism in particular, 2) “”we will investigate the central concept of anatta, along with attendant Buddhist concepts and critically examine the Zen claim of immediacy, and 3) we will experimentally engage in dharma practices employed by Zen.
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(Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 338 - ThanaTourism: Traveling the “Dark Side”
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we will focus on diverse travel narratives, literary works, and theoretical approaches to investigate the increasing allure of various tourist and historical sites that are associated with collective traumas and that raise questions about memory, commemoration, and exploitation. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 344 - Illustrating History/the World: Graphic Memoirs, Novels, and Reportage
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this course will explore the ways in which history and culture, the “Other” and the “Self,” are conveyed and/or challenged through visual texts, such as graphic memoirs, novels, and reportage. We will examine the relationship between text and image as well as the efficacy of representing individual and collective histories and experiences in “comic” form. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 345 - Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy explores the causes and effects of illegal immigration, legal responses to immigration, challenges faced by immigrant communities, challenges faced by states and localities with high immigrant populations, the development and implementation of refugee law, and human trafficking. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 347 - Listening to Time: Area Studies in Ethnomusicology
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. This course examines various musical traditions from non-western cultures. Topics are approached with an emphasis on the sociohistorical climate at the time of each tradition’s inception and throughout the path of its evolution. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 354 - Origin and Evolution of the Universe and Life
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. This course will cover the modern scientific understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe and life, beginning with the Big Bang and ending with the evolution of life on earth and the possibilities for life on exoplanets. We will cover the history and evolution of the universe from a fraction of a second to the present day and to its possible futures as governed by physical laws ascertained through the scientific method. We will discuss the creation of matter and the elements through Big Bang nucleosynthesis and stellar nucleosynthesis and characterize the evolution of large scale structures including planets, stars and galaxies. We will describe the evolution of our understanding of the concept of space and time, highlighting Einstein’s Special and General Relativity and its implications on the fundamental nature of space-time and the recent experimental evidence. We will then proceed to build the earth, characterizing its geological evolution and the concomitant emergence of life and its evolution into the sentient beings capable of understanding the universe to the degree that it can modify its own evolution. This course is the story of our existence and the evolution of our understanding of physical reality through scientific rationalism. This course will require a qualitative and quantitative understanding utilizing basic math skills that will be reviewed during the course though a conceptual understanding will be emphasized. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 359 - Fundamentals of Deductive and Inductive Logic
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. A study of methods to distinguish good and bad reasoning. Students will learn how to “translate” natural language arguments into formal languages of sentential and predicate logic, to construct proofs in the language, and to understand the semantics (or model theory) for the language.
(Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 360 - Performing Americas: Celebrating American Identities
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. As a public platform, the stage has long been a site for expressing or challenging individual, national, or group identities. Students will examine primary materials including plays, vaudeville, minstrel, and circus entertainments from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, in conjunction with multidisciplinary critical and theoretical scholarship, to develop an understanding of the history of U.S. performance as a tool for political and social agency. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 362 - Philosophical Themes in the Films of Ingmar Bergman
Prerequisite, acceptance into the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. The films of Ingmar Bergman offer a range of jumping-off points for some traditional debates in philosophy in areas such as the philosophy of religion, ethics, and value theory more broadly. Bergman’s oeuvre also offers an entry point for a critical examination of existentialism. This course will investigate some of the philosophical questions posed and positions raised in these films within an auteurist framework. We will also examine the legitimacy of the auteurist framework for film criticism and the representational capacity of film for presenting philosophical arguments. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 363 - The Castaway Narrative in World Literature
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. While stories of drift and survival at sea are certainly as old as humanity’s first attempts to float, the literary and cultural form of castaway narrative has its own history that is tied directly to the world-historical conditions of trans-oceanic travel and the accompanying geo-political relations between colony and colonizer. It is therefore possible to also see the castaway narrative, not as simply the result of any national cultural development, but instead a literary form that emerges simultaneously in various sites of cultural production. From a historical perspective, we might argue that the castaway narrative emerges throughout the globe at the very moment that circumnavigation is made possible and thus can be read an important transnational literary form in which competing ideas and visions of the newly imagined world are proposed and contested. As such, these stories of survival at sea, tend to also be fascinating ideological texts that allow us to see the interplay between concrete world historical conditions and more abstract categories of language, geography, ethnography, race, gender, and national identity. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 364 - Biology in Media and Reality
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. An introduction to advanced-level critical inquiry, focusing on basic understanding of biological principles and how they are depicted in news and media. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 367 - Pythagoras Revisited: A Quest for Interior Precision
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. Can precision and quantitative reasoning be integral parts of spirituality and introspection? How do we express a contemplative experience that does not renounce to exacting discrimination of inner and outer phenomena? In this course we will move at the intersection of mathematics, literature, philosophy and religion, to find possible answers to these questions. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 369 - Select Contemporary Problems: Religion and Politics
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Examination of current issues involving the interaction and conflict of religious beliefs and practices with the political process. Topics addressed include, but are not limited to: gay marriage, physician assisted suicide and religious expression and practice in the context of school, government or public settings. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 371 - The World of Fellini’s Cinema
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Federico Fellini, Italy’s greatest film director, was voted in 1992 the most important film director in the history of the cinema by 100 directors and people in the industry (edging out Orson Welles); and, in a parallel vote on the best films during the same year, two of Fellini’s-La strada and 8 1/2-were selected in a list of the best 10 films ever made. This course investigates the nature, development, and impact of Fellini’s artistic, taken within its cultural and intellectual contexts. The course will explore how a personal vision, even a poetic and fantastic perspective, may be developed in a medium that is too often seen as only a business or a low-brow form of entertainment. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 373 - The Puppet Metaphor Across Media
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor and Honors Director. This course investigates the theoretical and historical significance of the myth of the puppet by examining its cultural history and its life across media boundaries. The coursework traces the evolution of influential European, and especially Italian, puppets and puppeteering traditions comparatively with other types of theatre of animation around the world, from Renaissance theatre to avant-garde literature, film, and digital media. This course also addresses the archetype of the transformation from animate to inanimate in literature and cinema, including the theme of the cyborg. Readings and lectures provide historical background and dialogue with recent theories of theatricality, intermediality, and post-human. Through class discussions, presentations and critical papers, students will analyze a number of literary, cinematographic and digital texts that intersect with puppetry in various ways. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 374 - Philosophy of Science: Interdisciplinary Applications
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Through a chronological review of contemporary philosophical positions, students will critique the social construction of science. In the problem-based intellectual engagement, students will explore how science is practiced and how scientific progress is attained in different fields. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 376 - Sustainability in an Unsustainably Structured World
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor and Honors Director. The students will be introduced to the fundamentals of sustainability including historic background, population trends, pollution control laws and regulations, carbon footprints, climate change impacts, ozone depletion, elements of life cycle assessments, and evaluating issues associated with fossil fuels and green energy/renewable energy sources. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 377 - Critical Animal Studies
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor and Honors Director. How and when did animals come to be distinguished from humans? What other kinds of relationship to/with animals might we develop? What does the representation of animals in cultural productions suggest about the world views of the producers and consumers of those productions? This course engages with these and other related questions through in-depth study of the interdisciplinary field of Critical Animal Studies. Students engage with key articles, films, and books in Critical Animal Studies, and produce their own creative and critical projects in response. Discussion-based seminar. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 381 - Think for Yourself: From Socrates to Adorno
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor and Director of Honors. This course analyzes texts that deal with the philosophical and literary concepts of the ideal individual, emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition. It covers selected periods from Classical Antiquity to the 20th Century. Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 382 - The Fabric of the Universe: Space, Time, and Reality
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor and Honors Director. Did you ever wonder what is the arena of our physical Reality, what is the Shape of the Universe, or what is the Arrow of Time? Through concrete examples and engaging exercises that teach mind-expanding ideas in an intuitive and informal way, we will learn connections between Geometry and recent developments in Cosmology. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 383 - Controversial Topics in Biology
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. An introduction to advanced-level critical inquiry, focusing on the biological topics that create controversy and how they are depicted in news and media. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 385 - Is Big Data Enough? A Conceptual Exploration of Data Science
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. In this course we will explore the computational, mathematical and philosophical concepts underpinning the use of large collections of data to solve problems. We will ask whether it is possible to preserve a role for our reason, when so much of what we understand and what we decide is ultimately shaped by data-driven algorithms. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 389 - The Science Blender
Prerequisites, acceptance to the University Honors Program, consent of instructor. In the Science Blender, teams composed of 5 students from disparate majors within Schmid and the Honors program will be coalesced around “grand challenge” projects designed to leverage their growing individual (disciplinary) knowledge bases, skill sets, and problem-solving abilities. As the teams delve deeply into their projects, identify the current knowledge gaps that prevent simple solutions to the grand challenges, and then develop strategies to address those gaps, the students will become more conversant in the languages of the different disciplines and will develop a highly sophisticated appreciation for how team-based problem solving can have a maximal impact on a specific scientific pursuit. Instruction and discussion will be augmented with frequent participation of guest speakers who will serve as mentors and guides for the student teams.
(Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 392 - Adventures in Cosmologies
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. ADVENTURES IN COSMOLOGIES (with deference to Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, 1933). Structure: The Ancient Greeks, The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, The 19th Century, The 20/21st Centuries, “Had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years, have created number, and have given us a conception of time, and the power of inquiring about the nature of the universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man.” (Plato, Timaeus, my emphasis, in Ferris p19). Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 393 - Tricksters and Cosmopolitans
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. This course explores U.S. narrative fiction in the twentieth century, approaching the figures of tricksters and cosmopolitans within the literary works and in the process of literary production. Writers include Charles Chesnutt, Sui Sin Far, Nella Larsen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Philip Roth, Timothy Yu, and Edwidge Danticat. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 395 - Topics in Honors
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. This is a special topics course to provide additional opportunities to explore subjects of special interest. Each topic will have a specific syllabi and bibliography. May be repeated for credit provided the course content is different. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 395H - Newton and the Scientific Revolution
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. This course will account for the intellectual complexity and apparent contradictory aspects of one of the main, if not the main champion of Western science and culture, Newton. The course will study the complexity of Newton figure and activity, for the apparent contradiction of his intellectual activity, for his works on the interpretation of prophecies and the philosopher’s stone, for his anti-trinitarsm, for his apparently strange (and today totally dismissed) “historical conception of the origins of civilization, for his tyrannical direction of the Royal Mint and the Royal Society. While expounding and discussing Newton major scientific outcomes (including infinitesimal calculus, theory of light and colors, rational mechanics, and universal gravitation), it will also reconstruct Newton’s views on the Holy Scripture, his conception of God as supreme master, his anti-dogmatic (before than anti-trinitarist) theology, his adhesion to alchemic tradition and practice, his views on the history of humanity, and his political ambition and thirst for wealth and power.
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(Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 396 - The Politics of Waste
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. The Politics of Waste is an interdisciplinary medical humanities course to be taught in the Honors Program. By waste, we are referring to effluent, garbage and industrial pollution. The medical humanities literature on world health points to sewer systems as one of the fundamental advances in terms of disease prevention in the 19th century. The field of medicine as well identifies water-based flush toilets as a major medical achievement. The history of these achievements however reveals the contested nature of eliminating waste from the environment. Our course has relevancy to current world challenges. Sewage disposal is a problem today for over 2.5 billion people who do not have access to proper sanitation. Numerous global initiatives such as the Gates Foundation’s “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge” continue to seek effective responses to this never-ending problem. This course’s outcome has value in informing a larger understanding of a worldwide concern and thus embodies the University’s goal of producing students who live “inquiring, ethical, and productive lives as global citizens.” This course examines - from perspectives of history, literature, psychology, politics and economics – the various ways that humanity has struggled to both accommodate and marginalize the greatest taboo. Our course not only contributes to expanding the breadth and depth of medical humanities inquiry, but it also addresses a topic that remains a global problem today. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 398 - Honors Tutorial
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. Each Honors Tutorial focuses attention on an important thinker, idea, or concept in-depth so as to supplement and enhance a liberal arts education. Individual course topics are chosen by the Instructor. Letter grade. Tutorials may be repeated for credit. (Offered as needed.) 1 credit
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HON 398A - HONORS Tutorial, The Posthuman Condition
Prerequisite, admission to the University Honors program. Honors Tutorial: Each Honors Tutorial focuses attention on an important thinker, idea, or concept in-depth so as to supplement and enhance a liberal arts education. Individual course topics are chosen by the Instructor and may or may not repeat, and students may take as many Tutorials as they like. Topics already selected include Populism, Historical Memory, Descartes, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.” The world finds itself in a moment of intense reality, where the belief in human exceptionalism is undergoing a necessary, critical scrutiny. What makes a person human? What makes a person exceptional? What if humans are not the world’s principal actors, but instead the effects of a complex network of non-human entities? Through an immersion in a variety of “texts” and discourses-critical theory, literature, cinema and television, and even video games-this HONORS Tutorial will interrogate the rhetoric (re)examining and (re)inventing human and nonhuman being, developing students’ critical inquiry into the frameworks of our perceived reality, its problematic opacities, and its potential for subversion. Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 1 credit
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HON 399 - Individual Study
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. The student initiates and conducts an in-depth study or research in a specific area in conjunction with an individual faculty member. May be repeated for credit. (Offered as needed.) ½-6 credits
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HON 404 - Early Modern Sexualities: The Body, Gender, and Sex before Western Modernization
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program or consent of instructor. Imagine sex. Imagine sex without psychology. Imagine sex before the Confession Box. This course explores notions of gender, sexuality, courtship, and the body in Japanese societies before the arrival of Western values associated with the historical modernization project of the Nation-State. In Classical Japanese there is a verb, onnafu, which roughly translates as, “to become female/woman.” An equivalent term has never been found in a modern Japanese dictionary. The disappearance of language, as limited in usage as it might appear to us, is certainly regrettable. However, in the case of Japan, the moment of the “early modern” (kinsei)-a time characterized by an ever-growing awareness of “The West” and the ideas of civilization-driven empire, scientific-rational conceptions of life, and Judeo-Christian concepts of religion, Truth, and propriety-is the moment in which historians now see the accumulation of these small acts of cultural elision and induced amnesia, particularly in terms of how the body, gender, and sexuality had other normative ways of being/becoming. With the establishment of regulations meant to severely limit contact with Westerners and access to foreign texts, weapons, maps, and other contraband, the study of the West became the prerogative of elite Rangaku (or “Dutch scholars”), Confucian, and medical specialists. As Japan encounters a radically new worldview through a regulated fascination with the West, it does so in a relatively controlled context and in piecemeal. It is not until the mid-19th c. and what came to be referred to as American Gunboat Diplomacy, that Japan fully capitulated to 19th c. American/ Victorian infused values, legal codes, and social concerns regarding the body, sexuality, and gender. The two hundred plus years that Japan was able to hold off colonization by the West allowed for a relatively long period of incubation and processing of Japanese identity vis-à-vis Western nationalism. It also means that certain non-Western understandings and practices of sexuality, gender, and reproduction thrived and came to be documented in innumerable ways before they were ultimately (and sometimes reluctantly) deemed, if not inferior, abnormal and perhaps illegal. The course will study both primary sources related to traditional medicine, Buddhism, folk practices and cultural production in the form of print erotica, literature, theater, and travel guides, as well as secondary scholarship in social, cultural, intellectual, and political history, queer theory, and gender studies. Examining the topic in an interdisciplinary manner that borrows from history, cultural anthropology, feminism, gender studies, literary theory, and art history, it is expected students will be able to apply the critical reading, thinking, and writing skills they develop in class in order to better understand and communicate how they understand the body, sexuality, and gender in today’s contexts. Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 406 - Brain, Mind, and Film
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program. This course explores aspects of the psychological and brain sciences through the lens of motion pictures. As such, the material engulfs interdisciplinary topics from neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and film studies with an emphasis on a juxtaposition of cognition with the humanities. The course draws on aspects of philosophy (e.g., epistemology, general philosophy of science, philosophy of particular sciences, logic, foundations and philosophy of logic, rhetoric, and psycholinguistics), anthropology and sociology (e.g., ethnography, first-person versus third-person accounts, altered consciousness, transcultural effects, group trends), clinical applications and medicine, and the computational and engineering sciences. Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 409 - Hermes Unbound: Divining Hermeneutics
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Reflections on Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods, gave rise to hermeneutike, the art of interpretation. This art of interpretation, hermeneutics, is the discipline arising from reflection on the problems involved in the transmission of meaning from text or symbol to reader or hearer. This course will survey reflections on these problems from ancient times to our own. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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HON 412 - “Seas of Stories”: Postcolonial Literature and Theory
Prerequisite, acceptance to the University Honors Program, or consent of instructor. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we will explore diverse “seas of stories” (as Salman Rushdie terms it) from various parts of the world. We will focus on key issues involved in postcolonial theory as well as the complexities, possibilities, and challenges of this particular theoretical approach to the study of literature and culture.
(Offered as needed.) 3 credits
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