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 forms of re-enactment, including combat re-enactment, 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 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.

While our histories throughout the millennia overflow with stories of empires and revolutions steeped in war and violence, the role and potential of nonviolence has always stood askew. Despite the elevation of the American Civil Rights and the Indian Independence movements to rarified status over the 20th century—along with their symbolic leaders, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, respectively—relatively few even today seem to view nonviolence as a plausible alternative to violence, except in rare cases, and even fewer study its theory or practice. Further complicating the matter, nonviolent resistance to oppression is often mischaracterized and misunderstood as equivalent to pacifism and deemed to be idealistic and impractical for dealing with pressing, “real-world” conflicts. With this course, we will take up the challenge of considering nonviolence as not only a moral or ethical imperative to resolve conflict, but a pragmatic necessity.

This course will begin with a review of the principles of human rights and the underlying ethics and moral foundations that undergird nonviolent, pacifist, and even violent action. We will then explore nonviolence theory and emerging approaches toward the establishment of nonviolence as a viable alternative to violent response. After this, we will turn our attention toward the concrete application of nonviolence throughout the past century, exploring how theory is applied in practice through case studies and engagement with activists and organizers and studying their use of protest, writing, art, film, media, democratic participation, and other methods of effecting change. For our final class project, students will work together to apply the strategies and principles we’ve been studying this semester toward a specific plan of direct action designed to advance a cause.

This course explores the law of economic crimes involving fraud through the lens of Utah’s unique (and infamous) history dealing with schemers and charlatans of all trades. From Ponzi schemes and complex financial instruments to rare coins and fake blood draws, we will examine the substantive law of offenses associated under the rubric “white collar crime,” including recent developments in the law that invite challenging questions about when commercial conduct crosses the line from merely misleading to prosecutable.

If you are a bystander and witness a crime, should intervention to prevent that crime be a legal obligation? Or is moral responsibility enough? The course examines the bystander-victim relationship from multiple perspectives, focusing on the Holocaust and then exploring cases in contemporary society. Drawing on a wide range of historical material and interviews, the course examines the bystander during three distinct events: death marches, the German occupation of Holland, and the German occupation of Hungary. While the Third Reich created policy, its implementation was dependent on bystander non-intervention. Bringing the issue into current perspective, the course explores sexual assault cases at Vanderbilt and Stanford Universities, as well as other crimes where bystanders chose whether or not to act, and the resulting consequences. The course examines whether a society cannot rely on morals and compassion alone in determining our obligation to help another in danger and whether t we must make the obligation to intervene the law, and thus non-intervention a crime.

This upper division seminar focuses on the history of Christianity (outside of the United States) after 1960. During the past half century, a seismic shift has taken place global religion. Christianity has lost importance in Europe while becoming more prominent in the Southern Hemisphere. This course examines the secularizing trajectory of Western Europe and the concurrent rise of indigenous, "new," evangelical, and pentecostal churches in Latin America, Asian, and Africa. Mass media, international transportation, liberal capitalism, and shifting populations have enabled Christianity in much of the world. Since its inception missionary activities have made Christianity a "transnational" religion and describing its current condition is the focus of this seminar.