2027 Spring Courses

Credits: 3
Instructor: Ann Stebner Steele
Modality: Asynchronous Online
Honors College Attributes: Honors Global Perspectives, Upper-Division Elective
USP attributes: (H) Human Culture
A&S attributes: none
Course Description:
The stories we hear matter – they shape our understanding of history, the world, and ourselves. By listening carefully to the stories of others, we can begin to broaden our perspectives, redefine and expand our thinking, and deepen our empathy for diverse experiences. Too often in America, we hear a single story about Native American people, one that reduces and marginalizes their experiences. The stories we have been given are incomplete, tidied up, simplified. Even as we learn the limitations of the history we’ve been taught, representations of Native people are frequently reduced to stereotypes of dying cultures. Thus, the stories we have are inadequate for representing the history and present-day experiences and knowledge of Native American people. But many Native authors have revised the shape of stories to create containers capable of conveying the complexity and richness of those experiences and that knowledge.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Lori Howe
Modality: Asynchronous Online
Honors College attributes: Upper-division elective
USP attributes: H (Human Cultures)
A&S attributes: none
Course Description: Through readings, research, films, documentaries, virtual tours of museums and sites, popular sources, and research, students will explore the complex histories of several great human civilizations via such disciplines and foci as food, art, music, architecture, science, mathematics, engineering, medicine, literature, politics, religion, language, gender, agriculture, and many more. In this exploration, students will examine these threads in the ancient world and follow them forward, exploring ways in which the historical intersections of culture, religion, politics, and other topics and phenomena continue to impact our contemporary world. Students will work individually, in pairs, or in groups of three to research and creatively respond to aspects of one civilization, culminating in an artistic or literary project and presentation. Students will also do a deep dive into a specific civilization, offering a presentation on some compelling aspect of that civilization to the class as a course text. Finally, students will work singly or in small groups on the two-part Capstone Assignment, researching a particular civilization or empire and the culture and history of that place, culminating in a multimodal presentation and research paper. The delivery method of this course is asynchronous, with optional synchronous discussion sessions each week for those who want to meet. 

Credits: 1
Instructor:  Karagh Brummond
Modality:  Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Concurrent Major Core
USP attributes: none
A&S attributes: none
Course Description:
Producing Knowledge: Interviews, Surveys, & Experiments is an activity-based course introducing approaches to producing, refining, analyzing, and evaluating knowledge. Course topics are investigated through a combination of readings, lectures, research, and individual and collaborative activities. This course is part of the Producing Knowledge series, along with Analysis, Creativity, and Expression (ACE); the two courses can be taken in any order.
Through this course you will gain exposure to the terminology, theory, and practice necessary for generating knowledge and insight that impacts academic, professional, and wider public audiences. You will have opportunity to practice the skills necessary for clear communication. You will be encouraged to develop your own personal awareness of and appreciation for different imaginative approaches to research and knowledge production. A culminating application challenge will be undertaken through exploration, experimentation, and refinement.

Credits: 3
Instructors: Ashleigh Pilkerton 
Modality:  Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Concurrent Major Core
USP attributes: none
A&S attributes: none
Course Description:
This capstone seminar provides a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment where students engage in peer support, brainstorming, and mentorship to develop meaningful capstone projects. You will build critical project management skills such as planning, research synthesis, and effective communication that are essential for any professional path. Through guided reflection, interdisciplinary inquiry, and close mentorship, you will identify and refine a significant problem or issue to explore. The course emphasizes iterative project design, peer feedback, and diverse presentation methods to help you communicate your work with impact.
This seminar ensures your capstone is not only a culminating academic experience but also a launchpad for your ongoing intellectual and professional journey.

Credits: 1
Instructor:  Chris Rothfuss
Modality:  Online Asynchronous
Honors College Attributes: Concurrent Major Core
USP attributes: none
A&S attributes: none
Course Description:
This individualized course supports your professional development and academic reflection through structured activities centered on your internship experience. With guidance from the instructor, you'll explore topics such as goal setting, organizational analysis, workplace dynamics, project management, relationship building, and career preparation, including a mock interview. Whether you're currently in an internship or reflecting on a recent one, the course provides a scaffolded framework to help you grow personally and professionally.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Ahmad Nadalizadeh
Modality: Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Upper-Division Elective
USP attributes: none
A&S attributes: none
Course Description: 

The word “auteur” (French for author) emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s to ascribe to film 
director’s idiosyncratic vision a creative role of authorship and critique comparable to the expressive autonomy claimed by literary authors. No longer a mere agent among other agents producing a film, film director as auteur was granted a creative agency whose unique view was expressed in the film. However, auteurism was later on challenged by shifting critical attention to the role of the production conditions, constructivist contexts, and deconstructive intertexts. As we shall see, these alternative theories challenged auteur theory by emphasizing the collective role of various agents in filmmaking, by highlighting the role of the nonhuman elements of genre and language in preconditioning of plots and characters, and by considering films as sites of contradictory expressions which must be determined by the authorial role of spectator rather than director. However, the view of the film director as auteur has thus far survived this critical shift to the spectator, with the director’s name consistently utilized for both commercial and, in particular, art-house cinema. In this course, we will examine these critical debates alongside the films of global auteurs—Alain Resnais, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, and Michael Haneke—to review the key features of contemporary auteur cinema, but also to explore the ways in which auteur theory reveals the complex relations between aesthetics, politics, and philosophy in film form.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Kent Drummond
Modality: Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Upper-Division Elective
USP attributes: none
A&S attributes: none
Course Description: 

After the tragedy of 9-11, many pundits predicted the (continued) demise of New York City. After the fall of the twin towers, who would want to live in, visit, or even think about New York except with pity, anger, or regret? Thirteen years, later, Manhattan has emerged triumphantly from the rubble: clean, bright, safe, heavily and (mostly) healthfully consumed. How did this drastic change take place in so short a time? Our class will answer this question by exploring the ways in which the sites, monuments (literal and figurative) and experiences of Manhattan have been marketed, from Madison Square Garden to Lincoln Center, from Wall Street to Central Park. The class includes a required field research trip to New York City. Trip dates will be April 21-25, 2027. The cost to students will be $900 each.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Brandon Gellis
Modality: Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Upper-Division Elective
USP attributes: none
A&S attributes: none
Course Description: 

This interdisciplinary course invites students to examine how urban citizenship and public space are negotiated through global street art, posing questions such as: Who has the right to the city? How do artists and communities reshape belonging and promote citizenship through art in public spaces? Students will engage with case studies, media analysis, and critical making to understand the role of street art in shaping identity, promoting democracy, and advancing social justice globally. The course addresses complex issues, including spatial justice, resistance, creativity, and the dynamics of street art in public spaces, drawing on perspectives from visual art, art history, sociology, politics, and urban studies. Available to students across disciplines, it offers a rich Honors experience with interdisciplinary inquiry, original research, critical discussion, and creative projects. Learning outcomes include developing communication skills, applying knowledge through global case studies (i.e., Middle East, Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania), examining indigenous and marginalized urban experiences, and undertaking creative and research-based final projects. The course can integrate digital mapping tools and public digital exhibitions. Assessment will include reflection essays, digital portfolios, presentations, paper discussions, and active participation. This course aims to meet the Honors College's goals by fostering interdisciplinary, global, and creative engagement with the pressing question of citizenship and representation in urban spaces through the vibrant lens of street art.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Eric Jorgensen
Modality: Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Upper-Division Elective
USP attributes: none
A&S attributes: none
Course Description: 

This course explores how performance—on stage, on screen, in literature, and in life—shapes our understanding of health, illness, and survival. Students will examine how stories of illness and survival illuminate broader questions of justice, community, and care, particularly (but not exclusively) within the context of HIV/AIDS and its ongoing legacies. Drawing on plays, essays, memoirs, and interviews, we will consider how writers and artists like Paul Monette, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Tony Kushner, Donja Love, and Anna Deavere Smith transform lived experience into acts of witness and resistance. Through reading, discussion, and creative experimentation, students will investigate how illness narratives complicate cultural assumptions about strength, stigma, and empathy. The course will bridge scholarship in the health humanities with theatrical practice—inviting students to write and perform brief pieces of autopathography (self-narrative) and to critically engage with performance as a tool for social insight. Ultimately, the class asks: How can storytelling make us more attentive to the suffering and resilience of others? How might performing illness teach us about the ethics of care? And in an era marked by public health inequities and eroding compassion, how do we keep imagining—and rehearsing—more just futures?

Credits: 3
Instructor: Tyler Fall
Modality: Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Global Perspectives, Upper-Division Elective
USP attributes: none
A&S attributes: none
Course Description:
What are we doing when we are not working?  This course examines ideas about leisure across both historical periods and cultures.  Starting in the ancient world of Greece, Israel, China, and India and continuing to the present day, we will consider how thinkers have understood the diverse reasons for taking it easy. We will also explore how changing notions of work have altered our relationship to leisure, as well as who has access to it.  Through a selection of readings drawn from philosophers, creative writers, poets, religious sages, hermits, iconoclasts, activists, and so-called bums, weirdos, and deadbeats, we will attempt to figure out the value of free time and what it really means to take it easy.    

Credits: 3
Instructor: Ahmad Nadalizadeh
Modality: Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Global Perspectives, Upper-Division Elective
USP attributes: none
A&S attributes: none
Course Description: Although the term “Middle East” only came into common parlance after World War II, its other iterations were already in circulation in the nineteenth century, designating an imaginary geography which consigned “the East” to the periphery and further solidified the privileged position of Europe. Since the term reflected such European self-universalizing assumptions, it cast its geographic referent as the object of patronizing systems of Eurocentric political representations. In this course, we will turn to various film cultures of the Middle East and will situate its national film traditions within regional and global perspectives. We will investigate how the filmmakers emerging from the region represent their cultures as deeply embedded within a globalized world—one too replete with unexpected combinations to be discretely divided into the civilizational hierarchies of the West and the East. Taking a critical approach to national cinema studies in a world of increasingly globalized film audiences, we will explore both the influence of world cinema on the film cultures of the Middle East and, in turn, the extent to which the aesthetics of the movies of this region proves integral to our conception of world cinema. Our discussions of films in class will be supplemented by pertinent scholarly analyses in order to complicate any facile understanding of the region, but also to further deepen our awareness of the cultural contexts through which cinema has emerged as an aesthetic form. Drawing on various national traditions, this course will include movies from Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Chris Dewey
Modality: Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Global Perspectives, Upper-Division Elective
USP attributes: none
A&S attributes: none
Course Description:
This course offers a didactic and practical (hands-on) exploration of the Traditional Asian Martial Arts. The course would explore Chinese arts such as Taiji and Qigong, Korean arts such as Tae Kwon Do and Hapkido, and Japanese arts including Aikijujutsu, Judo, Ju Jutsu and Karate. Students would be given the opportunity to investigate the historical, philosophical, cultural, political and religious influences that affected the development and evolution of the various martial arts that have been an integral part of Chinese, Korean and Japanese society for more than two millennia. The didactic component of the course would, therefore, take an evolutionary and historical perspective of the martial arts in an effort to demonstrate how the various cultures influenced each other and how the development of the martial arts have progressed to become the world-wide phenomenon that they are today. Additionally, students would be given an opportunity to gain practical experience of the similarities and differences between the various art forms. Students would learn and practice techniques from a variety of martial disciplines as a necessary and integral part of the course structure.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Joslyn Cassady
Modality: Synchronous Online 
Honors College Attributes: Global Perspectives, Upper-Division Elective
USP attributes: none
A&S attributes: none
Course Description:
Poverty cripples the lives of millions of people in the world today. Despite the prosperity that has emerged with the rise of global capitalism, there is a widening gap between the rich and the poor. How has love, or rather the commodification of love and care, become a strategy for survival and mobility in the world today? This is the concern of this class.  In looking at various case studies, including sex tourism in Costa Rica, host clubs in Tokyo, and OnlyFans in America, we examine whether people are in control of the marketing and sale of their bodies, and therefore benefitting from the transaction, or are being harmed by force, fraud or coercion. You will become trained to identify potential vulnerabilities for sexual exploitation in your own community and learn how to effectively strengthen your response. In the end, Dr. Cassady hopes you will agree that this course offers a vital look at love, sex, and care in our globalized world and inspires us to work creatively and collaboratively to make a difference.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Noah Miles
Modality: Asynchronous Online
Honors College Attributes: Global Perspectives, Upper-Division Elective
USP attributes: (H) Human Culture
A&S attributes: (G) Global

Course Description:

This course is designed to introduce Japanese society and culture.  The class will take a thematic approach to the study of Japan.  We will integrate history and literature from the Jomon to the Edo periods, covering a diverse range of topics including: language development, the introduction of Buddhism, poetry, classical and modern literature, traditional arts and holidays concluding with the development of popular culture.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Adrian Molina
Modality: Asynchronous Online
Honors College Attributes: Upper-division elective
USP attributes: H (Human Culture)
A&S attributes: none
Course Description:

This course is about the present human condition, human diversity, and the future of humanity.  

Is there any question that we are living in the future?  Is there any doubt we are in times of accelerated change and shifting landscapes?  Whose future is it?  Whose imagination are we living in?  It is a time of mass movements for racial and economic justice, new gender orientations, populism and fascism, anti-fascism and mass protests.  Mixed reality.  Wearable technology.  Virtual headsets.  Artificial intelligence.  Robots.  Cyborgs.  Self driving vehicles and flying cars.  Singularity.  Questions of human survival.  Time travel.  Quantum leaps…  

Futurism 101 places students in the context of present and future times.  Most college classes and the bulk of academia revolves around the distant past or recent history, with select courses focusing on current events.  While it is critical to study history from a multitude of perspectives, young people know intuitively that we are in different times. The social rules, norms, modes, moods, pace, and dialogue have shifted dramatically over the past decade.  Popular media, social media, and social and political movements indicate that further shifts will come in rapid succession.  Students now need to study the future as much as they study the past.  Given the multitude of present and future problems facing the human species, we have never been more in need of imagination, expansions of consciousness, and forward thinking.  

Futurism 001 exposes students to various futurist movements of the past 100 years, with a focus on contemporary perspectives of Women of Color, and the futurist movements of people of color.  Course topics include: futuristic depictions in popular media and alternative media; philosophies of time and space; future cultural, social and political identities; human agency to determine future life on planet earth; and emerging strategies for social change.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Hosanna Krienke
Modality: Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Upper Division Elective
USP attributes: H (Human Culture)
A&S attributes: none
Course Description:

We are in an age of unprecedented technological change, or so we hear. But are we really so unique in history? This class scrutinizes such contemporary assumptions by exploring the rich history of technology panics in the nineteenth century. We will analyze the Victorian era not as a strange or distant past, but as the origin of quintessentially modern experiences; the Victorians were the first people in history to sit for photographs, to travel at unnatural speeds, to set their clocks to new time zones, even to read trashy tabloids. Their varied responses to such new and scary technologies will help contextualize our own reactions to the technological changes of our own era. Using a blend of literature, philosophy, history of science, and medical humanities, this class will challenge students to confront the long history of freaking out about the latest technologies. 

Credits: 3
Instructor: Chris Rothfuss
Modality: Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Upper-division elective
USP attributes: H (Human Culture)
A&S attributes: none
Course Description:
Go fast. Break things. Build with AI.
This course asks a simple question: what happens when we fully embrace AI instead of restricting
it? Students from across disciplines will experiment, create, and prototype at the edge of possibility,
stepping outside their comfort zones to see just how far human + machine collaboration can go.
Projects will be fast, messy, and ambitious: from stories and music to apps, games, and unexpected
inventions. Some will fail, others will surprise, but all will reveal how AI can amplify creativity,
problem-solving, and imagination. Together, we’ll try to find out just how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Adam Blackler and Edward Seidel
Modality: Traditional
Honors College Attributes: Upper-division elective
USP attributes: H (Human Culture)
A&S attributes: none
Course Description:

A three-credit interdisciplinary seminar for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, from any discipline, will trace how science became a force that reshaped culture and modern life. Likewise, we show how culture can shape science. In short, we cover the period from 1880 to the present and examine the world in three broad acts:

I. The World Becomes Modern, ~1900–1933
Einstein, relativity, quantum theory, modernism, HG Wells, Proust, Bergson, Debussy, Schoenberg, the Great War.

II. Science, War and Power, ~1933–1960
Nazism and migration, WWII, Turing and computation, nuclear physics, Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer, Big Science, Cold War.

III. Science Remakes the World, ~1960-present
Science - The Endless Frontier and the National Science Foundation Act, space exploration and the race to the Moon, computing, Star Trek and the Warp Drive, molecular biology, black holes and cosmology, gravitational waves and LIGO, networks and the Internet, AI and the next revolution. Where is it taking us?

While this is partly a history of science class it also explores broader historical context, social movements, arts and humanities throughout. The course begins with the state of the world at the end of the nineteenth century and follows the revolutions that came next. Space, time, matter, energy, perception, and artistic form all changed dramatically around 1900. The period also brought fascism, global war, nuclear weapons, and Cold War institutions, followed by spaceflight, molecular biology, computing, networks, gravitational-wave astronomy, and artificial intelligence. Scientific ideas appear alongside the people, their stories, institutions, political choices, literature, art, music, and films that gave them historical meaning. Einstein is a recurring figure, but not the sole subject. Computation will be another major theme throughout. The course will conclude with a look at how science and technology impact our world and economy, and finally how AI is taking us into yet another revolution.

Credits: 3
Instructor: Adrian Molina
Modality: Asynchronous Online
Honors College attributes: Upper-Division Elective
USP attributes: H (Human Culture)
A&S attributes: D (Diversity)
Course Description:

This course is an inter- and multi-disciplinary course inspired by human culture.  This course explores a culture and form of music that hundreds of millions of people throughout the world identify with.  Hip-Hop was born in the South Bronx, NY in the early 1970s, where African-American, Latino, and immigrant populations were essentially cast off as a result of the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, white flight into the suburbs, and the politics of abandonment.  Hip-Hop music and culture has now spread throughout the world, and regardless of whether the discussion is about mainstream gangster rap or socially and political conscious Hip-Hop, this emerging field of study has broad, cultural, social, political, and economic implications.  Students will research, explore, discuss and write about American historical music influences, the history and development of hip-hop, the various artistic elements of hip-hop, hip-hop as a culture,  hip-hop journalism, and hip-hop’s influence on American society.  Using hip-hop as an academic tool, students will also explore the following issues: race relations, racism, sexism and misogyny, class struggle, urbanization, pan-ethnicity and ethnic/cultural diasporas, civil rights era activism, post-civil rights Black and Latina/o community leadership, activism through art, globalization, the commodification of art and culture in corporate America, the perpetuation of racism and sexism through mass media, alternative forms of cultural media, the poetics of hip-hop, and communication through musical form.