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Course Level: Undergraduate

Topics vary by section, may be repeated for credit with different topic. Usually offered every term. Prerequisite: permission of University Honors program director.

Course Level: Undergraduate

Honors Colloquium in Arts and Humanities (3)

Oral Histories of the Civil Rights Movement

This class surveys 1960s civil rights movement figures and instructs students in oral history techniques. Students conduct a tape-recorded interview with a 1960s civil rights figure to construct an oral biography.

Course Level: Undergraduate

Honors Colloquium in Arts and Humanities (3)

Language Fights: How Social Forces Shape Speech and Writing

Human languages are often pawns on the social and political stage. This course explores how languages (or particular forms of language) vie for cultural territory, or are imposed upon us. The course is organized around four themes: why languages rise and fall; how have people attempted to engineer language; how did American English and English-speaking America get forged; and what the place of English is on today's world stage. The course also includes language extinction, universal language movements, language riots, spelling reform, and the cognitive benefits of multilingualism. The course combines lecture, discussion, and debate, along with independent research projects.

Course Level: Undergraduate

Honors Colloquium in Arts and Humanities (3)

America's Killing Fields: Vietnam & Cambodia: Hist/Film/Fict

This course explores the history of the U.S. invasions of Vietnam and Cambodia, emphasizing the wars' impact on American society, politics, culture, and foreign policy, paying particular attention to representations of the wars in film and fiction. In addition to carefully assessing the antiwar movement and its role in ending the wars, the class explores the wars' enduring legacy and the ways in which they continue to influence American policy. It also analyzes the impact on Vietnam and Cambodia, which suffered millions of deaths, social and political upheaval, environment degradation and, in Cambodia, genocide. This course is linked to the University Honors Program Study/Travel Abroad planned trip to Vietnam and Cambodia during spring break, for which students register separately.

Course Level: Undergraduate

Honors Colloquium in Arts and Humanities (3)

Voices of Terezin: The Arts as Spiritual Resistance

This course examines the experiences and testimonies of the Jewish inmates of the Terezin/Thereisenstadt concentration camp during and after the Holocaust, with a particular focus on the extraordinary artistic life of the prisoners, with three goals: to deepen students' understanding of the camp within the broader context of war and genocide; to equip students with knowledge of the history and rich culture of the Jewish inmates of Terezin/Thereisenstadt, most of whom came from communities across Central Europe; and to address broad historical themes such as war and genocide, totalitarianism, and collective trauma and memory. The course includes a study of theatre in the camp, readings of newly discovered plays and cabarets written at Terezin/Thereisenstadt, and explorations of theatre's function in the life of the prisoners based on survivor testimony from 1945 until today.

Course Level: Undergraduate

Honors Colloquium in Arts and Humanities (3)

Advanced Writing: Beyond Fundamentals

Every year, The Best American Essay series shows the breadth and depth of essay writing in the United States, including academic essays, familiar essays, segmented essays, braided essays, and essays whose form doesn't have a formal name. In this course students talk about what interests them, splicing and crisscrossing the academic and the personal and write essays in three different forms: the personal/historical memoir, the familiar essay, and the academic narrative. For their final project they write an essay in the form of their choice. In addition to these four major writing projects, written exercises are due nearly every class. Readings include The Best American Essays 2008, selections from past Best American Essays and other essay collections, and the craft book, Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction. This course is designed primarily for students who have not taken the Honors English sequence.