Fall 2024 FHC Sections 13-26 with Course Descriptions (2024)

HONR1019713FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM ILord, Susan D.

The American Library Association reports that a record number of books were challenged and/or banned in 2023. Organized groups and some state legislators are working to remove books that they deem controversial from public school classrooms and, in some cases, even public libraries. In this course, we will explore the issue of censorship, focusing mainly on some texts that have appeared on the ALA’s lists in recent years. Why are these books controversial, and what makes them worth reading and discussing? Is censorship ever acceptable or desirable? During fall semester, we will focus mostly on dystopic novels, and during spring semester, we will look at topics such as race in literature.

Texts for Fall:

• Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
• Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
• Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

Texts for Spring (tentative):

• Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
• Alice Walker, The Color Purple
• Art Spiegelman, Maus
• John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
• Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

HONR1019714FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IRichards, Dale E.

Our identities, our sense of who we are, is formed entirely from memories, stories we tell ourselves and others. In the first semester of this colloquium, we use neuroscientist David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Life of the Brain to examine how memory works and why our most vivid and enduring memories are often unreliable reflections of our actual experiences. We will use this perspective to examine the formation of personal and group identities through the careful reading of two fictional texts.

In the second semester, we employ the concept of emergence to investigate more deeply how personal identity is formed. Emergent phenomena, such as human consciousness, cannot be understood or explained in terms of simple, linear cause-and-effect relationships. From the perspective of emergence, however, we can examine thoughtfully the processes that enable and constrain the formation of each individual’s mind, personality, and sense of self. Students select one of four texts that provide deeper insight into the complexity of human thought and behavior. The concepts and themes that emerge from discussion and individual research will inform our reading of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

Texts for Fall:

• Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Life of the Brain
• Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club
• Morrison, Toni. Beloved

Texts for Spring:

• Murakami, Haruki. Dance Dance Dance
• Student choice:Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
• Dehaene, Stanislaus. How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine. . . for Now
• Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
• Sapolsky, Robert. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

HONR1019715FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IWagoner, Elizabeth A.

Come for the glow in the dark cats and neurotic AIs, stay for the discussions of ethics, philosophy, and pop cultural representations of science! This section explores major issues in science fiction, as well as issues raised by popular discussions of science today, through themed units focusing on larger philosophical, ethical, and theoretical ideas. Each unit will contain works from literature, comics/graphic novels, film, and nonfiction science writing. Science-fiction issues covered in this course include:

• Science Fiction as a Genre – Contested, Lowbrow, Beloved, and now Quite Difficult Due to the Speed of Innovation
• Progressivism – Is humankind advancing toward a more evolved or better state of being through technological innovation?
• Space Travel – The Science Required to take us to Mars and Beyond.
• The Apocalypse in Science Fiction – AI, Viral, Nuclear, and Climate Disasters
• Science vs. Superstition – Pseudoscience, Logic, and the Battle for the Human Mind

Examining the ways scientific ideas are framed through these texts, we will gain a richer awareness of major issues in science fiction and science today. In addition to weekly writings and discussion, there will be several researched essays, and film analysis.

Texts for Fall:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick.
• Binti: The Complete Trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor, and Interstellar, Christopher Nolan.

Texts for Spring:

• The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Silent Spring – excerpts, Rachel Carson.
• Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, and Dune: Part One by Denis Villeneuve.

HONR1019716FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IWhiteleather, Hagan F.

Digging Death: Dying, Death, Greif, Spiritualism, & the Afterlife

Over the course of this colloquium, we will explore the realities and cultural constructs that surround death and the rationale behind these socially crafted ceremonies. We will examine how these practices influence our own experience with/understanding of death. A primary focus will be placed on the ways location and environment shape the rituals of death, and how loss has become mediated by the funeral industry. Fear not, this class is not all gloom and doom, much of the year will be devoted to examining death as a motivator and significance creator—in the words of Kafka, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” While the reading list is set, I promote flexibility in discussion topics, and welcome any conversations you find especially stimulating or intriguing. I’m excited to see how our preconceived notions of death and grieving shapes classroom discussions and potentially alters our currently held beliefs and perceptions of an experience to which we will all one day succumb.

Texts for Fall:

• Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty (2014)
• Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (2014)
• Homie by Danez Smith (2020)
• The Body by Stephen King (1982)
• “2B0R2B” by Kurt Vonnegut (1962)
• Films & Podcast for Fall: Stand by Me (1986) / The Farewell (2019) / S-Town (2017)

Texts for Spring:

• Death: The Deluxe Edition by Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell (2013)
• Our Town by Thornton Wilder (1939)
• Deciduous Qween by Matty Lane Glasgow (2019)
• A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis (1961)
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
• Lost Connections by Johann Hari (2018)
• "The Three Questions” by Leo Tolstoy (1885)
• “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace (2005)
• Films: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)/After Life (1998)/Harold & Maude (1971)/Soul (2020)
• TV: Black Mirror: “San Junipero” (2016) / The Good Place (2016-2020)
• Musical: Hadestown (2019)

HONR1019717FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IRichards, Dale E.

Our identities, our sense of who we are, is formed entirely from memories, stories we tell ourselves and others. In the first semester of this colloquium, we use neuroscientist David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Life of the Brain to examine how memory works and why our most vivid and enduring memories are often unreliable reflections of our actual experiences. We will use this perspective to examine the formation of personal and group identities through the careful reading of two fictional texts.

In the second semester, we employ the concept of emergence to investigate more deeply how personal identity is formed. Emergent phenomena, such as human consciousness, cannot be understood or explained in terms of simple, linear cause-and-effect relationships. From the perspective of emergence, however, we can examine thoughtfully the processes that enable and constrain the formation of each individual’s mind, personality, and sense of self. Students select one of four texts that provide deeper insight into the complexity of human thought and behavior. The concepts and themes that emerge from discussion and individual research will inform our reading of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

Texts for Fall:

• Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Life of the Brain
• Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club
• Morrison, Toni. Beloved

Texts for Spring:

• Murakami, Haruki. Dance Dance Dance
• Student choice:Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
• Dehaene, Stanislaus. How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine. . . for Now
• Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
• Sapolsky, Robert. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

HONR1019718FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IWhiteleather, Hagan F.

Digging Death: Dying, Death, Greif, Spiritualism, & the Afterlife

Over the course of this colloquium, we will explore the realities and cultural constructs that surround death and the rationale behind these socially crafted ceremonies. We will examine how these practices influence our own experience with/understanding of death. A primary focus will be placed on the ways location and environment shape the rituals of death, and how loss has become mediated by the funeral industry. Fear not, this class is not all gloom and doom, much of the year will be devoted to examining death as a motivator and significance creator—in the words of Kafka, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” While the reading list is set, I promote flexibility in discussion topics, and welcome any conversations you find especially stimulating or intriguing. I’m excited to see how our preconceived notions of death and grieving shapes classroom discussions and potentially alters our currently held beliefs and perceptions of an experience to which we will all one day succumb.

Texts for Fall:

• Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty (2014)
• Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (2014)
• Homie by Danez Smith (2020)
• The Body by Stephen King (1982)
• “2B0R2B” by Kurt Vonnegut (1962)
• Films & Podcast for Fall: Stand by Me (1986) / The Farewell (2019) / S-Town (2017)

Texts for Spring:

• Death: The Deluxe Edition by Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell (2013)
• Our Town by Thornton Wilder (1939)
• Deciduous Qween by Matty Lane Glasgow (2019)
• A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis (1961)
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
• Lost Connections by Johann Hari (2018)
• "The Three Questions” by Leo Tolstoy (1885)
• “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace (2005)
• Films: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)/After Life (1998)/Harold & Maude (1971)/Soul (2020)
• TV: Black Mirror: “San Junipero” (2016) / The Good Place (2016-2020)
• Musical: Hadestown (2019)

HONR1019719FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IClark, Patrick J.

LITERATURE, FILM, AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TEXT-TO-SCREEN ADAPTATION.

This course will look at the interplay between text and film, the qualities and conditions that go into adapting literature for the big screen audience, the constraints of turning narrative into film, what happens to literature when it is adapted into a screenplay, and the psychology of difference in how we read and view these texts.

Our exploration of literary adaptions will focus what makes a novel ripe for adaptation; limitations and possibilities that confront screenwriters when adapting a text for a target audience; and how directorial ambition and vision (and production budgets and meddling) can affect the final product. Additionally, the class will discuss fandoms' influences in popularizing, producing, and critiquing text-to-film adaptations. The course will also confront how a "canonized" film can affect longtime fans of a text and inspire newcomers to the genre.

All the novels we will read are familiar and popular and represent different literary styles, including psychological thrillers, coming-of-age narratives, modern Westerns, high fantasy, horror, sci-fi, counterculture, and graphic novels, examining the challenges in adapting the different genres.

Texts for Fall:

• Stephen King, The Body
• Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
• Chuck Pahlaniuk, Fight Club
• Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
• Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle
• Alan Moore, Watchmen.

The texts necessitate a study of directors Rob Reiner, Sophia Coppola, David Fincher, The Coen Brothers, Hayao Miyazaki, and Zack Snyder.

Texts for Spring:

• Michael Punke, The Revenant
• Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
• Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
• Patrick Süskind, Perfume: the Story of a Murderer
• Richard Adams, Watership Down
• Alan Moore, V: for Vendetta.

Directors include Alejandro González Iñárritu, Jon Avnet, Stacie Passon, Tom Tykwer, Martin Rosen, and James McTeigue.

HONR1019720FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IShank, Matthew A.

The major theme of the course will be literature’s depiction of the various forms of disenfranchisem*nt (gender, political, racial, sexual, religious, economic, class, age, etc.) within modern society, and how those who are disenfranchised attempt to overcome the issues that cause their disenfranchisem*nt. This analysis will lead to other related topics including the Anti-hero, Postmodernism, Dystopian Fiction, Signs of Fascism and Genocide, and Classical Archetypes. Analysis of disenfranchisem*nt in pop culture (film, TV, music, animation, graphic novels, children’s literature, comedies, social media, etc.) will also be possible subjects. Eventually we will address real life examples of disenfranchisem*nt, from history to present day

The goals of this colloquium are to develop skills as critical readers and as writers. Students will write several five-page essays each semester, as well as a final, longer research paper dealing with disenfranchisem*nt in our world in the spring. There will be no exams but occasional quizzes and shorter writing assignments (WAs) will be given regularly. Class discussion will be a crucial part of the course, both individually and in-class group work, and students will also be required to give in-class presentations throughout both semesters. Collaboration between students is encouraged!! Students will also be encouraged to try creative approaches to the assignments, including video productions or other various artistic media. The spring semester will end with a final creative project depicting our course theme.

Possible titles are listed below.

Texts:

• The Handmaid’s Tale
• The Hunger Games Gone Girl
• Night
• The Great Gatsby
• The Fault in our Stars
• The Catcher in the Rye
• Fences, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• The Hate U Give, The 2084 Report
• The Buddha in the Attic
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane
• Fight Club
• A Man Called Ove
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• No Country for Old Men
• Civil Disobedience
• The Body
• The Spectacular Now
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Catch-22
• The Awakening
• I Am Malala
• Harry Potter
• Divergent
• Grief is the Thing with Feathers
• Disney

HONR1019721FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IShank, Matthew A.

The major theme of the course will be literature’s depiction of the various forms of disenfranchisem*nt (gender, political, racial, sexual, religious, economic, class, age, etc.) within modern society, and how those who are disenfranchised attempt to overcome the issues that cause their disenfranchisem*nt. This analysis will lead to other related topics including the Anti-hero, Postmodernism, Dystopian Fiction, Signs of Fascism and Genocide, and Classical Archetypes. Analysis of disenfranchisem*nt in pop culture (film, TV, music, animation, graphic novels, children’s literature, comedies, social media, etc.) will also be possible subjects. Eventually we will address real life examples of disenfranchisem*nt, from history to present day

The goals of this colloquium are to develop skills as critical readers and as writers. Students will write several five-page essays each semester, as well as a final, longer research paper dealing with disenfranchisem*nt in our world in the spring. There will be no exams but occasional quizzes and shorter writing assignments (WAs) will be given regularly. Class discussion will be a crucial part of the course, both individually and in-class group work, and students will also be required to give in-class presentations throughout both semesters. Collaboration between students is encouraged!! Students will also be encouraged to try creative approaches to the assignments, including video productions or other various artistic media. The spring semester will end with a final creative project depicting our course theme.

Possible titles are listed below.

Texts:

• The Handmaid’s Tale
• The Hunger Games Gone Girl
• Night
• The Great Gatsby
• The Fault in our Stars
• The Catcher in the Rye
• Fences, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• The Hate U Give, The 2084 Report
• The Buddha in the Attic
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane
• Fight Club
• A Man Called Ove
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• No Country for Old Men
• Civil Disobedience
• The Body
• The Spectacular Now
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Catch-22
• The Awakening
• I Am Malala
• Harry Potter
• Divergent
• Grief is the Thing with Feathers
• Disney

HONR1019722FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM ISwick-Higgins, Chelsea R.

In our society, we often are deduced to one distinguishing feature of our identity: be it gender, race, class, religious belief, disability, or any other identity. In this section of Honor’s Colloquium, we will be addressing how people cannot be viewed as one single identity but are instead the intersections of many identities. Using interpretive lenses from literature, rhetoric, linguistics, and gender studies, we will explore how intersectionality is used within literature and contemporary media and how that shapes the world in which we live.

Students can expect to participate in student-driven class discussion, compose critical essays of varying lengths, reflect on class readings and discussions through response essays, and create multimodal compositions. We will critically engage with theoretical articles, novels, shorter literary works (short stories and poetry), and contemporary media (films, television, and multimodal compositions).

Texts for Fall:

• Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine
• Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
• Bell Hook’s Belonging: A Culture of Place
• Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class

Texts for Spring:

• Susan Nussbaum’s Good Kings, Bad Kings: A Novel
• Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees
• Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

HONR1019723FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IVogel, Lauren A.

This course will explore complex and sensitive topics surrounding identity, social justice, and diversity through children’s literature and young adult (YA) books. We will read literature that represents windows of ourselves and mirrors into the perspectives of the often-difficult lived experiences of others. Students will produce mini multigenre projects throughout the semester to prepare for their final multigenre research social justice project.
Texts:

• Kent State by Deborah Wiles
• Stamped (for kids) by Jason Reynolds and Ibram Kendi

HONR1019724FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IMorris, William A.

Comedy, humor, and laughter are uniquely human ways of being in the world. While everyone has some sense of humor, what is funny is often rooted in the customs and habits shared among those in a given community or culture. Like love, or justice, or virtue, humor is a complex human activity which is difficult to define for lay and academic audiences alike. This course surveys comedies in Western culture from the Old Comedy of ancient Greece to modern novels and short stories of literary merit to film and stand-up among other comedic artifacts.

• Aristophanes - The Clouds or The Birds
• Dante -Selected Excerpts
• Boccacio - Selected Excerpts
• Shakespeare - Twelfth Night
• Moliere - Le Misanthrope

• Voltaire - Candide
• Swift - Selected Essays
• Alexie - Selected Short Stories
• Films - Silent Era & Contemporary Satires
• Stand-Up- Carlin, Pryor, Rivers, et. al.

Select Scholarship on film and stand-up

HONR1019725FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IUhrig, Karl

Discourse and Agency
Who gets to tell someone’s story? How do they construct reality through the way they tell it? What can we learn about our relationships to ourselves, each other, and society by looking closely at human agency and discourse?

This course is based on 1) the study of human agency, or the ways in which people have the ability to assert control over their circ*mstances, and 2) discourse analysis, the study of the ways in which humans construct understanding of their place in the world through language. Through the lenses of discourse and agency, we will read short stories, poems, and plays by authors from around the world and analyze them through discussion and writing. In addition, I will have you choose your own texts to analyze (any book, news story, movie, music, podcast, TikTok video, etc. that interests you).

Learning the concepts that comprise discourse and agency will take us a very short time, after which our discussions will take off and become extraordinarily interesting. These discussions will provide plenty of material for you to use to write the required essays that focus on specific concepts and specific texts. You will present your ideas and engage in the ideas of your classmates. By the end of this course, not only will you have the tools to engage in any text with a critical, analytical eye, but you will also have the tools to better understand what’s going on in society, in the news, in popular culture, and in your own life.

Texts:

• Persuasion – Austen
• Boule de Suif – de Maupassant
• Hamlet – Shakespeare
• The Poisonwood Bible – Kingsolver
• Things Fall Apart – Achebe
• The Kite Runner – Hosseini
• “Brokeback Mountain” – Proulx

HONR1019726FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IRemley, R. D.

What makes someone a good leader? How can we critically reflect on others’ leadership skills toward understanding their effectiveness or weaknesses? How can we use these observations to assess and improve upon our own leadership skills? These are questions that will be addressed through this Colloquium section’s theme: Leadership Characteristics and Characters. Students will engage with principles of leadership found in characters and plot from various works of literature and film. Through critical reading, thinking, discussions, research, analytical writing activities, and other projects, students will come to understand several attributes that affect leadership effectiveness in various contexts; these attributes include cultural and social phenomena as well as personal traits and situational factors. Students, also, will consider their own leadership abilities and how they may be able to improve those skills.

The works listed below provide a sampling of those that we will use.

Texts:

• Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers, by Elizabeth Samet
• The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad
• Antigone, Sophocles
• Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw
• The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (Film, adapted from novel by Sloan Wilson)
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly