Spring 2021 Advanced Studies Courses

***Prerequisite(s) for ALL Honors Advanced Studies Courses: At least one Honors foundation course and at least one Honors colloquium course.

HONS 204 Honors Managerial Accounting (Professor Jennifer Burbage)
Three Credits

A survey of accounting information critical for planning, control and business decision-making within an organization.

Additional Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing; HONS 203

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person/Hybrid, as able

HONS 390 Borders, Art and Migration: Voices from Europe (Professor Sarah Koellner)
Three Credits

With the rising number of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe at the beginning of 2015, the securitization of the Western World became even more evident when global mass surveillance was used to monitor, target, and track single individuals, but also ethnic, economic, and national groups on the move. This course will critically analyze how selected artistic works reflect, engage, and shape the perception of borders in contemporary German-speaking Europe with a particular focus on the refugee crisis.

Anticipated Teaching Format: The class will be taught predominantly online (synchronous) with occasional in-person meetings, as able

HONS 390 Cultures of Sight and Sound: Experimental Art from the 1950s to the Present (Professors Marian Mazzone and Blake Stevens)
Three Credits

This seminar examines a series of movements and practices that have reimagined the engagement between the visual arts and music in post-war Europe and the United States, including indeterminacy, Fluxus, sound art, minimalism, conceptual art, and performance art. Through readings in art history, musicology, and aesthetics-alongside the close study of works of visual and sound art-students will gain an understanding of the ideas that have shaped the development of art and music in late modernity and postmodernity, and their intense dialogue over matters of performance, space, abstraction, expression, and the experience of contemporary life.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person/Hybrid, as able

HONS 390 Human Pathophysiology (Professor Eric McElroy)
Three Credits

Human Pathophysiology explores the physiology of the human body’s major organ systems through the lens of disease, epidemiology, and health care. The human organism is maintained by the functions and complex interactions of its many component organs and systems; these relationships are particularly highlighted when disease impacts the normal function of any given component. This course will explore how disease impacts the physiology of the renal, endocrine, digestive, cardiovascular, nervous and immune systems; how epidemiology informs risk factors and vectors of disease; and, how the health care industry treats disease. Particular focus will be directed towards major diseases impacting our region and nation, as well as emerging diseases worldwide—both in terms of incidence and socioeconomic costs, and emerging medical therapies such as genetically-tailored treatments and gene therapies.

*This course is intended for pre-medical majors.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person/Hybrid, as able

HONS 390 Digital Media, Dystopia, and Democracy (Professor David Parisi)
Three Credits

The Digital Media, Dystopia, and Democracy course looks to the future. Examining digital media’s role in the maintenance or collapse of democratic societies, this course considers the potential impact of the sensor society, algorithmic recommendation engines in social media and streaming media platforms, surveillance capitalism, virtual and augmented reality, and wearable and implantable technologies. The class employs a Science and Technologies Studies perspective, with a focus on the values embedded in the design of media. Against this backdrop, the class also explores the depiction of these technologies in popular culture texts such as Blade Runner, The Matrix, and Black Mirror.

Anticipated Teaching Format: The class will be taught predominantly online (synchronous) with occasional in-person meetings, as able

HONS 390 Impact X: Entrepreneurship (Professor Lancie Affonso)
Three Credits

This course describes entrepreneurship as a process of economic, environmental and/or social value creation, rather than the single event of opening a business. Reflecting recent research, the course focuses on opportunity recognition, business model generation and lean startup. Students will research and develop a repeatable, scalable business model for an impact startup that solves an environmental and/or social problem, while making a profit.

*Honors Impact X is a two-course, same-semester sequence. Students must also enroll in HONS 390-03 Impact X: Technology. Interested students should contact Honors@cofc.edu to request enrollment into Honors Impact X.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person/Hybrid, as able

HONS 390 Impact X: Technology (Professor Chris Starr)
Three Credits

In this course, students enter as co-founders in the domain of the technical startup community. In the computational analog, this is akin to entering as intelligent agents within a complex adaptive system. Through the application of concepts, data, processes and tooling, students will iteratively develop and deliver innovative solutions to human problems at the intersection of applied technology and business. The theme of the course is innovation technologies rooted in the principles of computing and providing a platform for experimentation, innovation and failure.

*Honors Impact X is a two-course, same-semester sequence. Students must also enroll in HONS 390-01 Impact X: Entrepreneurship. Interested students should contact Honors@cofc.edu to request enrollment into Honors Impact X.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person/Hybrid, as able

HONS 390 Postcards from Mexico (Professor Joe Weyers)
Three Credits

The Mexican Republic shares an extensive land border with the United States. It is one of our most important trade partners. Mexico is the top foreign destination for American vacationers. A significant part of our country was once part of Mexico. Much of the growing Spanish-speaking population in the United States is originally from Mexico. Still, Mexico is widely misunderstood on this side of the Rio Grande. Mexico is an ancient country, in line with the present and future, all the while recognizing the importance and interrelation of past, present, and future.

Postcards from Mexico—actual postcards—provide the backdrop for this course. Postcards beg to be explained and explored. There is a story behind each vista and once unraveled, the story provides insight into a special place and its people. Mexico is a special place, and the story of Mexico begs to be told from any number of perspectives.

Anticipated Teaching Format: Online (Synchronous)

HONS 390 Re-Fashioning the Renaissance for the Small Screen (Professor Jennifer Cavalli)
Three Credits

What do shows about historical periods have to teach us about ourselves? This class examines the period of the Italian Renaissance as it is represented on the small screen in television series such as Netflix’s Medici: Masters of Florence and Showtime’s The Borgias. Topics include premodern medical theories and responses to disease; representations of gender, class, race, and sexualities; political ideals and corruption; individualism and self-representation; artistic innovation; religious authority and family values; and the revival of the liberal arts in education.

Anticipated Teaching Format: In-Person/Hybrid, as able

HONS 390 Writing a New U.S. Constitution (Professor John Culhane)
Three Credits

Rewriting the U.S. Constitution…Heresy? No. In fact, Thomas Jefferson—while serving as the US minister to France—wrote a letter to James Madison in 1789 advocating that our country’s Constitution of 1787 should expire after 19 years. Jefferson believed that the laws put in place by one generation should not necessarily govern the next, and that it should be up to each subsequent generation to establish their own laws. The original Constitution even contains provisions that would allow We the People to establish a second constitutional convention by which to amend our nation’s guiding document, but we have never done so.

This course will give students an opportunity to do just that: imagine what a second constitutional convention would look like, and how our nation’s Constitution could be updated to better suit society in 2021. We will ask ourselves, what does the ideal American society look like, and can a set of ruling principles reasonably get us there? We will identify prevailing issues, thinking critically about how a revised Constitution could fix those issues. We will look to the past, to try and determine what factors over the past 250 years have led our diverse nation, once the envy of the world, to a point where we are struggling to contain a lethal virus, with record unemployment, gridlock in Congress, lack of political compromise, and soaring debt. More importantly, we will also look to the future, to consider how we might fix these issues that exist in 21st century America by creating a new constitutional roadmap, one that preserves the strengths of our 240-year-old Constitution but also tries to improve the document to meet the challenges of our contemporary society.

Anticipated Teaching Format: The class will be taught predominantly online (synchronous) with occasional in-person meetings, as able

*course offerings and teaching formats subject to change; students should refer to the course syllabus for more details about each course’s teaching format