Course Level: Undergraduate

Topics vary by section, may be repeated for credit with different topic. Usually offered every term. Prerequisite: permission of University Honors program director.

Course Level: Undergraduate

Honors Colloquium in Arts and Humanities (3)

Perspectives on the History of Race and Incarceration in U.S

This course examines the history of the American prison system, and focuses on the role of race and racism in shaping our nation's unique prison practices and its current incarceration crisis. Readings include texts from sociologists, historians, ethno-musicologists, journalists, playwrights, film makers, and prisoners themselves.

Course Level: Undergraduate

Honors Colloquium in Arts and Humanities (3)

Advanced Writing: Creative Nonfiction

In this intensive prose writing course, students define, study, write, and revise examples of "creative nonfiction," a broad term that encompasses many different forms of composition. Those forms invite both the use of memoir and the kinds of research that provide the foundation for literary journalism. The class spends time on generative writing exercises and in workshops in which students sharpen the ability to consider critically both their own work and their classmates'.

Course Level: Undergraduate

Honors Colloquium in Arts and Humanities (3)

Oral Histories of the Civil Rights Movement

This course surveys 1960s civil rights movement figures and instructs students in oral history techniques. Students conduct a tape-recorded interview with a 1960s civil rights figure to construct an oral biography.

Course Level: Undergraduate

Honors Colloquium in Arts and Humanities (3)

Imagining the Afterlife: Visions of the End

The question of what happens when we die has inspired the human imagination like few others. This course examines texts from a variety of religious traditions, as well as personal and scientific accounts of the after-death experience, to trace the contours of dying, death, and the afterlife. The class explores how depictions of the passage through the end of life, and then visions of both eternal comfort in Paradise and unceasing punishment in Hell, reflect personal, philosophical, and social anxieties about what it means to live.

Course Level: Undergraduate

Honors Colloquium in Arts and Humanities (3)

Notions of Civility

In response to political gridlock, Americans call for a return to civil discourse, but how do we understand civility or civil discourse? This seminar includes presentations from guest speakers, as well as engaging texts and debates from history, literature, philosophy, and political and social theory to investigate whether civility is a virtue, how ideals of civility are gendered and embodied, and what kind of person or subject is produced by practices of civility. The class examines whether movements employing uncivil practices (e.g., suffrage, civil rights, feminist, LGBT, disability rights, Occupy movements) challenge conceptions of civility, or assumptions about civil discourse. Course projects include, for example, an examination of the Civility Project at Johns Hopkins University, which partners with U.S. municipalities to motivate citizens to choose civility; literary analysis of a text influential in Western conceptions of civility (e.g., the Epic of Gilgamesh); historical analysis of the genealogy of the modern concept of civility; a philosophical account of civility as a moral virtue; interviews with movement or civic leaders and/or observations of political processes (e.g., public hearings) to evaluate the function of civil discourse; or researching contemporary scholarship, for example, the University of Oslo's Civility, Virtue and Emotions in Europe and Asia project that brings together interdisciplinary groups of scholars from three continents to study the concept of civility.