Fall 2021 Honors Colloquia Courses

All Honors College students are required to complete at least two Honors Colloquia courses. Colloquia courses count towards the 25 HONS credit requirement, and students may take additional Colloquia courses as an Honors elective. Colloquia courses do NOT count towards the College’s General Education requirements (with the exception of HONS 226, which counts towards the General Education History requirement).

***The prerequisite(s) for ALL Honors Colloquia Courses are as follows: Honors College Student, HONS 100, HONS 110, and at least one Honors Foundation course.

HONS 225-01 Designing Women: Perceptions, Reflections, and Self-Representation of the Western Female (Professor Jennifer Cavalli)
Three Credits
What are the role of religion, the state, and the family in shaping ideas about femininity? What accounts for changes and continuities in female gender roles and the regulation of female bodies? How have categories of womanhood and the imagery associated with them shaped experience and self-perception? This course explores political, religious, intellectual, cultural, and medical influences on the organization and regulation of women and gendered experience from the Classical to the Early Modern periods in Western Europe. It closely examines historic representations of women and of those persons represented as social or culturally different, and identifies and analyzes intersections of gender with other identity categories like race, social status, class, ethnicity, and religion. Topics include theories of gender; premodern medical theories; women’s legal, economic, and social statuses; religious experience and spiritual authority; women’s access to education and intellectual life; artistic, literary, and philosophical representations of women; and authorship, self-representation, and female agency during the pre-modern era.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 225-02 Happiness, Love, and Desire: a Millennium of Conversation (Professor Blanche McCune)
Three credits
What does a happy life look like? Which things that you desire will make you happy, and which, after you get them, will actually diminish your happiness? What is love, is it different from desire, and how does it make you happy? What is the relationship between individual happiness and the happiness of society as a whole? Ancient Greek and Roman authors didn't always agree about the answers to these questions, but they started a conversation that is still going on today. In this course we will read a discussion of these questions that spans a thousand years and enter the conversation ourselves. Authors will include Homer, Sappho, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Horace, Vergil, and Augustine of Hippo.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 225-03 The Scottish Enlightenment (Professor Deborah Boyle)
Three Credits
The remarkable intellectual achievements of eighteenth-century Scotland–the “Scottish Enlightenment”–had lasting effects on European and American culture. This was the era of accomplishments as diverse as Adam Smith’s economic theory, James Hutton’s revolutionary theory of the age of the Earth, Robert Burns’s poetry in the everyday language of Scots, and Thomas Reid’s “common sense” philosophy.  But what does it mean to say this was a time of “Enlightenment”? What was uniquely Scottish about the Scottish Enlightenment? What conditions made Scotland – then an impoverished country of just 1.5 million people–so capable of flourishing in this way? After examining some answers to these questions, we will read and discuss central texts by Scottish philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid, on topics such as art and aesthetics, human nature, religion and ethical theory, and political and economic theory. We will sample some poetry by Burns and Joanna Baillie. We will also consider the roles of slavery and abolitionism in eighteenth-century Scotland, and the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on the American civic tradition.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 226-01/02 Foundations of Western Civilization Pre-Modern History (Professor Elisabeth van Meer)
Three credits
This interdisciplinary colloquium examines the development of Western civilization from its origins in the ancient Near East through the Renaissance and Reformation. It relates the arts, literature and philosophy of the Western world to their political, social and economic contexts.
This course counts towards the College’s General Education History requirement

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 230-01 Banned Books that Shape(d) the World (Professor Marjory Wentworth)
Three credits
Why is a text considered incendiary, offensive or dangerous? How does it reflect the culture in which it was produced? What is the political, religious, social context in which these writers/artists worked? This course examines a variety of texts that have been banned across several centuries and continents. Books have been seized or outlawed, classified as taboo, their author’s fined, jailed, tortured, exiled and killed throughout history under many different political, religious or moral regimes. The focus is literature from the past two centuries, spanning diverse cultural and political contexts, as well as some films. In America, many writers of our most beloved books have experienced the sting of censorship and distorted judgement aimed at their work. Recent contempt for the news media will be examined within its unique role in our democracy. We will also incorporate contemporary First Amendment issues – especially in terms of the internet (social media) and hate speech. The course will be organized around literature suppressed on political, religious, social and sexual grounds. We will begin the course by examining the origins of book banning in western culture, and we will end the course discussing contemporary issues around internet regulations.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 230-02 War, Memory, and Identity: Beyond Victims Voices (Professor Marjory Wentworth)
Three credits
A writing and research-intensive course which examines the ways in which artists in all genres, educators, students, and community advocates create empathy for all our citizens through “social action writing.” From the outset, we will ask ourselves, what is social action writing? What is the artist’s role in society? What stories do we want to tell, and how would these stories affect a collective consciousness? How do these stories reflect or reveal something that is part of our current socioeconomic reality? In order to answer these questions, students will need to consider their identities (race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, language…), and how their experiences, their understanding of self and their connection to the world impact the kinds of stories they want to tell. Students will focus on exploring ways that the arts/writing and social action can affect our communities and society, encouraging civic dialogue and promote social change. The intent of this class is to develop and advance writing and social action skills, and to provide a safe space in which to deconstruct and discuss the current socioeconomic, race, and class issues that affect the daily lives we experience.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 235-01 The Ethics of Holocaust Representation (Professor Ezra Cappell)
Three credits
In this course students will consider the ethical question of how filmmakers, writers, and artists ought to represent the horrors of the Holocaust. Drawing upon the work of survivors, historians, and artists, we will explore the difficult issue of aesthetically representing the Holocaust. In this course, students will analyze historic and aesthetic representations of the Holocaust through a variety of genres, including: documentary evidence, historical texts, philosophical texts, religious texts, survivor testimony, novels, short stories, poems, photographs, films, paintings, and musical compositions. By the conclusion of this course students will be able to make ethically informed evaluations of Holocaust art and they will determine for themselves whether and how artists ought to create art from the ashes of Auschwitz.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 245-01/02 The History and Philosophy of Science (Professor Bryan Ganaway)
Three credits
How do people “know” something to be true? This class explores some of the ways that people have constructed intellectual systems to help them differentiate between true and false, good and bad, known and unknown. Scholars refer to this process as creating systems of knowledge.  We will explore a number of these systems historically including (1) the invention of writing, (2) organized religion, (3) philosophy, (4) the scientific method, (4) social science, and (5) social media. While we will certainly interrogate how these systems divide knowledge into “useful” and “useless” categories, our main goal is to try and understand how homo sapiens develop strategies to make a complex world understandable and manageable.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 245-03 Psychological Explorations of the Conscious Will: Are we Free? (Professor Chad Galuska)
Three credits
Traditional notions of free will underlie personal moral responsibility, legal and ethical practices, and some religious beliefs. The Scientific Revolution, however, popularized the metaphysical belief of the universe as a determined system that seemingly does not allow for truly free choice. This course provides historical and contemporary philosophical and psychological context into the issue of free will, introduces students to the psychological science of the conscious will, and discusses how beliefs about free will influence our understanding of mental illness, psychotherapy, and overall psychological health.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 250-01 Future of Humanity in a Technological Tomorrow (Professor Brian Bossak)
Three credits
Humanity, in the 21st century, faces novel and complex existential questions that will require critical thinking from a well-educated populace. The entwinement of technological advances such as AI and biotechnology into the life experience of current and future generations promises change – but will that change lead to positive or negative outcomes? For the first time in history, the coming decades will lead to nothing short of divine power in the hands of human beings. For centuries, people have spent their time and energy focusing on control of the ambient environment and other people. Soon, humans will be able to control and manipulate the world inside of us as well as gain additional control over the world outside. The power to extend life or selectively engineer humans (through biotechnology), create non-biological life (through AI), and perhaps even the ability to banish the traditional concept of death entirely (through the fusion of AI and biotechnology) will emerge, whether the human race is ready for it or not. This class explores the biological, economic, social, and technological questions which humanity must prepare to face in the fast-approaching future.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 255-01 Disunion: How America has Stayed Together…Most of the Time (Professor Michael Lee)
Three credits
E pluribus unum was first suggested for inclusion on the national seal by Pierre Eugene du Simitiere in 1776. National unity has been haunted by its twin, E pluribus pluria, ever since. Secession and related ghosts of disunion, nullification and interposition, appear in places some contemporary observers might not expect, in all geographic sections of the country and by very dissimilar political groups who for very different reasons have decided to opt out of the American project. To show that they never felt what James Madison called “the chords of affection,” Americans have warred to leave the nation; they have also just left, they have moved off the grid; they have adopted new flags, named new nations, and written new constitutions. This course, in short, examines American disunion. Although we will be specifically interested in acts of disunion in America, we will encounter bigger questions about peoples and nations along the way: What makes a nation a nation? Why do nations disintegrate? What are the limits of national power? What are the limits of local power? We will pay particular attention to the period 1776, the inauguration of the American project, to 1861, when rival sections went to war over the meaning of that project. To immerse ourselves in the language of disunion, we will read the essential primary texts of American disunion (from anti-federalists, Southern fire eaters, Northern abolitionists, and others) in this period as well as engage the quintessential works of American union by Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, Angelina Grimke, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. Finally, as a matter of focus, we will pay particular attention to Charleston’s outsized role in the history of American disunion.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 255-02 From the Holy to the Mundane: Myth, Ritual and Symbol (Professor John Huddlestun)
Three credits
Drawing from literature in religious studies, anthropology, and sociology, this course addresses a number of questions across a range of religious, social, and political situations. Do (or must) myths or symbols have universal meaning? What is the relationship between myth and ritual? Must one precede the other? Do myths, rituals, and symbols reflect reality, or create it? What is the place of myth, ritual, and symbol in human social and political life? What about secular rituals or rituals that are performed incorrectly or fail? How would one determine (or who would determine) that a ritual had failed? Following a reading of some influential figures and selected responses to their work, we will focus on a number of theoretical issues relating especially to ritual, as well as the ways in which myth, ritual, and symbol are created, used (or abused), revised, or reinvented to reinforce existing religious and socio-political institutions.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

 

HONS 255-03 The Self as Story: Autobiography at the Intersection of Science, Culture, Philosophy, and Art (Professor Anton Vander Zee)
Three credits
What is the self, and how has it been defined historically? And how do we conceive of the self in the today, and as we look to the digital future? How is the self-written, pictured, mythologized, transformed, and virtualized? This course will address these enduring questions, using the practice of contemporary autobiography as our focus. We will begin with a section on “investigations and methods” where we will examine ideas of selfhood across time and from different disciplinary perspectives and explore methodologies unique to the interdisciplinary field of autobiography and life-writing studies. The course will then proceed to a section on “models” where we read and discuss and write about a set of autobiographies with these investigations and methods in mind. The course will conclude with a final section focusing on “making” in which students will engage in a major research project in relation to autobiography.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

HONS 260-01 Understanding How Cognitive Measures of Attention, Working Memory and Emotional Well Being Relate to Academic Achievement (Professor Mindy Hong)
Three credits
Why do some students succeed and others struggle when the conditions for learning seem equitable? What role does environment, temperament, and leadership play the complex learning system? In this course, students will study how cognitive science can help us to understand and to maximize our learning potential. We will explore how factors of emotional well-being influence the way we learn.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person

 

*course offerings and teaching formats subject to change