This course will introduce students to the fields of ecology in times of rapid global change. Special attention will be paid to the organizing principles of evolution and the evolutionary processes that have shaped, and continue to shape, biological life and interactions among organisms. Students will learn theories/models used in ecology and animal behavior and then apply these models to field projects that engage questions related to foraging, competition, migration, and reproductive decisions, among others. Students will also critically analyze how conflicting and beneficial interactions among species (including humans) are developed, established, and persist in different ecosystems. This course is suitable for all honors students. 

What is culture? Is it merely an identity category, or a living practice that resists definition? Can one inhabit many cultures or transform them? Is it an expression, a device, an instrument of power, or a fragile symbolic meaning? Can we exist outside of culture, or are we forever entangled within it? Is there, after all, such thing as a singular “human culture”? These are some of many questions we will discuss on this course. 

 This class embarks on a scholarly adventure to unwrap the dense, nuanced, and contested fabric of what we understand as culture. It seems that the concept of culture claims universality, whether in the most remote village or the most crowded metropolis, yet it always manifests through particular lives, gestures, and histories. Everyone participates in its making, its circulation, its consumption. In this course we will start by examining the impact of the colonial period, the imperial and the conquest enterprises on the framing of what culture is or should be midst the resistance of pre-Columbian societies as a way of articulating memory and oblivion politics. At the same time, we will explore how the classical thinkers thought of culture as a moral and intellectual pursuit. We will ask and examine how does the idea of civilization with its internal contradictions will frame our understanding of culture today. This course is suitable for all honors students. 

Writing in Honors introduces students to practices, techniques, and strategies that will enhance their ability to write in academic and social contexts. The course offers students opportunities to think critically and creatively and to develop questions that engage with complex issues. Course assignments and activities equip students to approach writing as a process and an opportunity for collaboration. Students will explore the value and process of research-based inquiry and argumentation while developing the skills useful to composing an honors thesis. This course is suitable for all honors students.  

This is a class of applied philosophy. We will explore how three important modes of thought came into the world at a similar time and changed the course of human culture. The ideas of Socrates, Confucius and The Buddha. But simply exploring the histories of these philosophies and discovering their texts and ideas is only the beginning. Modes of information gathering have rapidly changed. AI can summarize the histories and philosophies of these ancient traditions for us in seconds. So why have this class? Why listen to a professor? Travel to Asia? You will ask these questions of me, yourself, our university system, and your classmates. 

AI and research databases can answer much of what, when, and where of the origins of Asian and western religious and philosophical thought. But there are essential questions that AI will never be able to productively answer, as each of us navigate life with our own moral compass. 

Why study the religious and philosophical exchange of ideas between the East and the West? Is such a generalization useful? Necessary? Does religious practice have a place in our global technocratic societies? How might these ancient ideas shape human interactions across diverse cultural systems? This course is suitable for all honors students. 

 You will learn to apply concepts from these great thinkers to modern problems in a complex way based on your own interests and how you believe these ancient ideas might be used to address modern problems. You will choose the direction your path will take through these ideas supported by your instructor, your peers and a few guardrails.  

If it is true that we all likely live with stories, or live through stories, then understanding how their forms and functions have changed over time can offer us a way to reflect on both our individual and social lives. The word "narrative," which came into use primarily in legal contexts around the 16^th century, is one of the ways we have come to describe and theorize the structure of stories as a meaningful sequence of events, facts, details, etc. Narratives establish connections and give those connections meaning for a reader, an audience, or a participant.

What we will do together is not only interrogate those meanings but also try to understand the needs and contexts that give rise to narratives in the first place. We will develop an interdisciplinary vocabulary for how narratives work as well as the work narratives have been asked to do in fields ranging from design, medicine, social science, data visualization, philosophy, and studies of human culture. Just as narratives create their own distinct worlds with their own rules, patterns, and standards of behavior, we will experiment with utilizing narratives techniques and forms to create worlds of our own. Each week we will meet in the Marriott Library and alternate between critical readings and workshops with partners around campus that will expose us to various methods and tools for creating narratives. We will think about narratives on multiple scales, from practical questions about the sequencing of images or pages to larger theoretical questions about how narratives can help us rationalize our place or role in systemic phenomena like climate change or public health crises.

Your work in the course will be divided between regular reading and written responses, participation in workshops, and the ongoing design of a collaborative narrative project in which you will decide on the form and content of a “narrative” with peers from various disciplines. The goal will be to create narratives that are meaningful not only for you but for future public audiences. This course is suitable for honors students with “junior-level status” (60 credits or higher, including those in progress).

This course examines social conflicts and political controversies in American culture through the lens of visual culture, including art and photography but also popular media. We will consider how visual images both reflect and participate in the social and political life of the nation and how the terms of citizenship have been represented—and, at times, contested—by artists throughout the 20^th century. Students in this course will consider the relation between American art and body politic by focusing on issues of nationalism, war, government patronage, poverty, activism, censorship, consumerism, class identity, sexuality, and race. In examining American art and social life, students will combine close attention to selected images with the broader study of historical context and conflict. This course is suitable for all honors students.

This course will look at the question of its title, “what is art?,” not to find THE answer but rather to explore how to go about answering it in different times, places, and contexts. We will look at how the question has been answered differently and think about why that has been the case. Drawing in large part from collections held at the Marriott Library, specifically in Rare Books and the Art and Architecture libraries, this course will give students an opportunity to look at a variety of different primary sources. In-class and outside-of-class work will guide students through the research process to make sense of unfamiliar cultural products and practices—including conventionally understood art objects, books, magazines, and prints—from familiar and unfamiliar contexts. Course themes include: interactivity, the idea of use, value, space, language, material, craft and virtuosity, politics, and representation. This course is suitable for all honors students.

From the Society for Creative Anachronism to Game of Thrones to neo-Gothic architecture found in Cinderella’s castle, the Middle Ages have been created and recreated many times in the classroom, in media, and on the “battlefields” of modern-day parks. Renaissance festivals offer opportunities to “experience” the medieval in ways historical and fantastical, through dress, music, weapons and jousting demonstrations, and such gustatory delights as turkey legs (a new world bird) through simulacra. Medievalism is a system of belief and practice inspired by elements of the Middle Ages, expressed in areas such as architecture, literature, music, art, philosophy, scholarship, and various vehicles of media.  

During the Renaissance, there was a sense, expressed by Petrarch and others, that European culture between the Golden Age of Rome and his own period of “rebirth” of those cultural elements was dark and unimportant, thus “medium aevum” (“middle period”), or media tempestas (“middle time”). Since then, people have been fantasizing about the medieval. The architectural Gothic Revival and classical Romanticism gave rise to the Gothic novel, often dealing with dark themes in human nature against medieval backdrops and with elements of the supernatural. An increased interest in Old English and imagined Anglo-Saxon culture was a result of, and in turn fueled, political upheaval in the 17th and 18th centuries. Romanticism has been seen as "the revival of the life and thought of the Middle Ages," reaching beyond rational and Classicist models to elevate the exotic, unfamiliar, and historically distant medieval.  

The name "Romanticism" itself was derived from the medieval genre chivalric romance. Authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien created fantasy literature based in a pseudo-medieval setting, mixed with elements of medieval folklore. Interest in the medieval was increasingly expressed through the form of reenactment, including combat reenactment, re-creating historical conflict, armor, arms, and skill, as well as living history, which re-creates the social and cultural life of the past, in areas such as clothing, food, and crafts. The movement has led to the creation of medieval markets and Renaissance fairs, computer games, and neo-medieval music (Gregorian Chants), all areas of the intersection of contemporary representation and the idea of the past. This course is suitable for all honors students. It does not carry a general education or bachelor’s degree designation. 

This course will cover the US-Russia relationship from the 1900s until the present. The two countries have never been openly at war, but the stability of the relationship has varied quite a bit. Over this period, Russia went from an empire to the core of the Soviet Union to a federation, and its relationship with the United States was similarly eventful. We will cover the political, military, economic, cultural, and religious dynamics of this relationship as they evolved over this 100+ year time period. Two core, interrelated questions of the course are how people in each country see each other and how those perceptions shape domestic and foreign policy in both countries.

A workshop-style class where lower-division undergraduates in the Honors College arrive from diverse disciplines to write, read, analyze and critique creative writings. Genres will include poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The Creative Writing Workshop is rooted in diverse ways of thinking and organizing thought. Writing from the fabric of their lives and embedding requisite research, student writers must wrestle with what matters to them in what they read, write and otherwise engage. Their final Creative Writing Portfolio (which might be revised and developed toward the Honors Thesis in appropriate disciplines) requires revision based on the peer critiques received throughout the term and thus sets out to solve audience-perceived issues with concrete solutions. In this way, 2010 requires its student writers/researchers to hone their work with a real-world audience in mind and to step out of the writing vacuum into a peer group setting.

Part of the Honors mission is to produce students who think critically and engage as citizens of various communities. In acquiring the tools for such, students will consider criticism from peers whose ideas and backgrounds are far different than their own. By using critical thinking, peer criticism, and their own creative instincts to construct the revised Creative Writing Portfolio, students build foundations for lifelong learning and the ability to communicate effectively as engaged participants of their various communities.