WINTER 2013 HONORS COURSES OF INTEREST
***NOTE—If a course is full, consider putting yourself on the wait list.***
Honors 250.001
Capitalism, Slavery and Consequence
Meets with Econ 195.001
Instructor: Warren Whatley
Meets: Tuesday, Thursday 1:00-2:30, G449 Mason Hall
Distribution: SS
In this Honors seminar students will explore the historical origins of capitalism, how and why it rejuvenated
slavery, and the long-term consequences of this social choice. We will explore the following topics:
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what is capitalism? the historical origins of capitalism in Europe;
slavery and the expansion of capitalism to the Americas;
the transatlantic slave trade and the under-development of Africa;
the American Civil War and Reconstruction; and
the political economy of racial identity in America.
A major goal of the class is to demonstrate how basic economic principles are at work in our past and present
worlds.
Intended Audience: The seminar is intended for first and second year undergraduates in the social sciences
and history who might be considering a major or minor in economics.
Class Format: Class time will be spent discussing seminal articles and books, listening to lectures and films,
debating the professor, stumpin-the-timeline, and conducting online research.
Honors 250.002 Evolution of Cognition and Social Science Ways of Knowing
Instructor: William Birdsall
Distribution: SS
Meets: Wednesday 2:00-5:00, G421B Mason Hall
There is now overwhelming evidence for the evolution of all known life. This course will focus on the
evolution of human cognition and its implications for what we know and believe about cognition today,
particularly social science knowledge. Some questions we plan to address:
1. In what respects is sensory knowledge given to the brain passively versus constructed by the
brain?
2. What does the brain “know” that it doesn’t tell our consciousness?
3. When did language evolve and why?
4. Does language reveal or hide the knowledge process?
5. What can and do we know consciously?
6. What is certainty and of what can we be certain?
7. How does science differ from ordinary experience and from art?
8. What is the role of imagination in the sciences?
9. How and why are social sciences so different from physical science and from one another?
In this course we will carefully review the philosophical foundations of modern physical and social sciences
and compare their methods. The disciplines I will emphasize are economics, anthropology, sociology, and
psychology; political science will not be neglected if there is interest among the students.
Honors 250.003 Alternative Realities: Science and the Study of Human Perception
Instructor: Robert Pachella
Distribution: SS
Meets: Tuesday, Thursday 10:00-12:00, G421B Mason Hall
This course will investigate a number of broad, highly subjective, inherently interesting questions about the
nature of human perceptual experience. The broadest of these will be the question of cultural relativism: Do
people from widely different cultures experience reality in fundamentally different ways? The alternative
realities to be explored will be those attributable to cultures, subcultures, cults, historical eras, substances (i.e.,
drugs), and mental illness. Most importantly, the scientific enterprise itself, as one mode among others, of
establishing an order of reality will also be presented in this context. Grades will be determined entirely by
writing papers: a one page (or two) weekly “commentary” paper discussing ideas and issues that are currently
under discussion in class, and one longer paper due at the end of the term, in which the student develops a
concept about the nature of human perception and how it generically relates to some concept of “reality”.
Honors 250.004 The Theory and Practice of Communism
Meets with Political Science 389.003
Instructor: Zvi Gitelman
Meets: Wednesday 1-4, G128 Angell Hall
Distribution: SS
About 1.5 billion people in the world were living in Communist polities in 1989 when the Soviet Union fell
apart. Today, very few countries have Communist polities. What is Communism, what were its appeals, and
why did it nearly disappear as a political and economic system? This seminar will explore Communist
ideology and rule, the forces that led to their collapse, and the legacies they left behind. We shall read primary
sources (Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, et al) as well as secondary works. The USSR, China,
Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe will be the main focus of our attention. Short papers and a major seminar
paper will be required.
Honors 354.001 Race and Identity in Music
Cross-listed with AAS 354.001, RCHUMS 354.001, WOMENSTD 354.001
Instructor: Naomi A. Andre
Meets: Tuesday, Thursday 10-11:30am in 4153 USB
Distribution: HU, RE
This course explores the parameters of racial and ethnic identities in music. From the discourse surrounding
exoticism and Orientalism, to the effects of evocative instrumentation, the use of dialect, and foreign subjects,
the focus of this class is to understand how racial and ethnic difference can be portrayed musically. Musical
case studies will be drawn from the nineteenth century through the present with a strong emphasis on the genre
of opera. Central questions to be raised are: how is racial/ethnic difference expressed musically? Who is
representing whom? What is the intersection between the original performing context and our understanding
of these works today? This course encourages interdisciplinary dialogue. Readings will be drawn from postcolonial and cultural studies as well as musicology.
Course Requirements: Grades will be based on written assignments, a take home final, and class
participation.
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Intended Audience: No previous music classes are prerequisite and harmonic analysis will be presented in a
form accessible to students without a specialized musical background.
Honors 493.001
Complexity and Emergence
Meets with Psych 447.004 and Psych 808.004 and EECS 594.001
Instructor: John Holland
Meets: Tuesday, Thursday 9:00-11:00, G437 Mason Hall
Many of our most difficult contemporary problems depend upon an understanding of systems consisting of
agents that adapt and learn: ecosystems, markets, language acquisition and evolution, political systems, the
Internet, nervous systems, immune systems, reaction networks in biological cells, and so on. These systems,
called complex adaptive systems (cas), exhibit properties such as "emergent" structures, "complex" conditional
interactions, perpetual novelty in behavior, and diversity in agents (there is no "best" agent). Because of these
properties, cas require novel techniques for analysis and understanding. This class will introduce and explore
techniques, such as agent-based modeling, that have been most effective in helping us to explore and
understand the behavior of complex adaptive systems.
The class aims to develop a range of ideas, examples, models, and intuitions that provide a deeper
understanding of cas. All techniques will be fully developed in class, starting from elementary principles. The
order of topics will depend partly upon particular interests of the class, but the following topics, at least, will
be covered:
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Performance systems — sets of condition/action rules.
Signal-passing systems — their pervasiveness from cell biology to language.
Parallelism — systems with many rules active simultaneously.
Agent-based models — models with multiple interacting agents.
Credit assignment — strengthening stage-setting and predictive rules.
Rule discovery — genetic algorithms.
Building blocks — their role in everything from perception to invention.
Honors 493.002 Singing Out of Our Minds
Instructor: Dick Siegel
Meets: Tuesday 7:00-9:00 pm, 1306 Mason, inside 1330 Mason
** In order to get into this course, you must submit an application to the
Honors Office, 1330 Mason Hall. Forms available at the front desk.
This course is designed to foster student songwriting and to develop a deeper
understanding of the songwriting art. Most of our time will be spent in
workshop mode. Songs written for the class will be performed and then
followed by discussion between artist and audience. We’ll strive to make the workshop environment one that
is encouraging, inspiring, and informative, in which participants feel comfortable exploring and taking creative
risks. A new song will be due approximately once every two weeks.
Class time will also be focused on expanding artistic boundaries and gaining insight into song structure, song
fundamentals. How do songs work? How do language and music intertwine to produce potent and
entertaining entities? For guidance we’ll listen to and analyze some of the best work of the great American
songwriters, from early roots, blues, folk and country practitioners through to contemporary pop artists. There
will be occasional short writing exercises to loosen the imagination.
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All in-class performances will be recorded and made available on-line. At the end of the course there will be a
student concert, open to friends, family and the public.
Suggested Guidelines: This course would be well-suited for people who have had some experience with
music and song-writing or poetry and are comfortable with the idea of performing new work for their peers.
Being able to accompany oneself on guitar, other stringed instruments or keyboards will be very helpful,
although not absolutely necessary. We’ll work at networking possibilities to connect singer/songwriters with
musicians to accompany them. Also, unaccompanied performing will be possible.
Grading: While performance skills will be honed throughout the academic term, an individual’s performing
ability (voice quality, musicianship etc.) will not be considered in grading. Individual songs will not be graded
either.
Final evaluations will focus on classroom participation and a broad appraisal of student effort in their own
songwriting process.
Honors 493.003 The Qur’an in the World (1 credit mini-course meets Jan 15-Feb 26)
Meetswith AAPTIS 493.001and MENAS 493.001
Instructor: Karla Mallette
Meets: Tuesday 4-5:30
During the nineteenth century, colonial administrators and indigenous intellectuals in Malta debated whether
the Arabic colloquial spoken locally should be written in Arabic script, the Latin alphabet, or a combination of
the two. In 1928, Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk legislated an alphabet revolution, giving Turkish intellectuals
and officials a mere six months to implement the conversion to Latin script for a language that had
traditionally been written in the Arabic alphabet. The creation of the state of Israel put extraordinary pressures
on both Hebrew — a language of scripture and exegesis which must be adapted to the needs of a modern state
— and Yiddish, elevated to a new status by the events of the first half of the twentieth century. Currently,
writers from Lebanon to Morocco debate the role that French plays in the intellectual life of Arabs, while
Arabic and Turkish-language newspapers have become a familiar sight in European newsstands. This course
explores the history, methods and goals of language engineering in the Middle East, giving attention to both
the materiality of language (e.g., alphabets, phonetics, texts and their transmission) and the ideological
missions that language sometimes serves, with an emphasis on language debates on the three shores of the
Mediterranean.
English 407.003
Theories of Love
Instructor: David Halperin
Meets: Tuesday, Thursday 2:30-4 in 3347 Mason Hall
Intended audience: Honors Juniors and Seniors
A survey of theories of love and desire in European literature from Plato to
Nabokov and beyond. The course is designed to provide an introduction to the
Platonic, Christian, and Freudian traditions as well as an overview of the most
important and influential contributions to Western thinking about love by
canonical male writers. It offers an opportunity to read broadly, to acquire a
general background in the humanities, and to prepare for advanced work in critical theory and cultural studies.
Authors to be studied include Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Montaigne, Proust, Freud, and Nabokov.
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Sociology 230.001 Health and Population in South Africa
Instructor: Barbara A. Anderson
Meets: Tuesday, Thursday 11:30am-1:00pm in 3156 LSA Building
Distribution: SS
This seminar focuses on population and health in South Africa in transition. The instructor has traveled to
South Africa numerous times since 1995 and is actively engaged in research about South Africa. This seminar
discusses the historical roots and the current health and population situation in South Africa. Hopefully the
complexity of the situation in South Africa will be understood as well as the kinds of choices that need to be
made as South Africa faces the future. This is an LSA Honors course with first preference for LSA Honors
students. The course is also an International Studies Across the Curriculum course. (There is an optional twoweek trip to South Africa in May, which is worth an additional two course credits.) There will be a charge for
this trip, although there is no additional tuition charge.
* * * *Other Courses You Might Enjoy * * * *
Comparative Literature 322.002 – Translating World Literatures: Translation Workshop
Instructor: Anton Shammas
Distribution: HU
Meets: Tuesday, Thursday 4-5:30pm in 2175 North Quad
Writing on the “Task of the Translator” in 1923 (one of the foundational texts of translation theory, and one of
the basic texts we’ll be referring to throughout the term), Walter Benjamin poses the deceptively simple
question: "Is translation meant for readers who do not understand the original?" And later he argues, among
other things, that translation is meant to liberate the language imprisoned in a text through the recreation of
that text, and by doing so it “serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between
languages.” “When two languages meet,” the Moroccan critic Abdelfattah Kilito counter-argues at the other
end of the 20th century, “one of them is necessarily linked to animality: Speak like me or you are an animal.”
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What is the task of the translator, then?
Why translate?
Who translates?
Is translation at all possible between languages that are positioned, for various reasons, at both ends of
an asymmetrical power relation?
Drawing on a variety of theoretical and literary texts, this course is an interactive introduction to different
histories and theories of translation, and it’s designed and meant to give students an opportunity to build on
their skills in a foreign language by exploring the process of translating literary texts into English. Students
will compare various translations of “world literatures” and integrate broad theoretical concepts about
translation into a series of creative translation exercises and short critical essays that emphasize the process of
reading and re-writing texts.
Course Requirements: The critical and creative writing assignments are designed to build on each other,
enabling students to become more attentive readers, and to produce increasingly articulate responses to the
translated texts, which in turn inform their own translation strategies. The course leads up to a final translation
project, for which students will produce 8-12 pages of a translation, into English, of a literary text from
another language, prefaced by a 5-8 page introduction that reflects critically on their practice as translators.
History 230.003 – History of the University: From the Middle Ages to the University of Michigan
Instructor: Tomoko Masuzawa
Distribution: HU
Meets: Tuesday, Thursday 11:30-1:00pm in 3333 Mason Hall
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What is the university? When, where, how, and why did it originate? Which existing universities in the world
are the oldest, and were they public or private institutions? What did the Islamic culture have to do with the
founding of the Medieval European universities? What is the difference between the college and the
university? Which older university was the University of Michigan modeled after, and why? What were the
factors most responsible for the dramatic reform of the university that took place worldwide in the 19th
century, and what has been the outcome?
These are some of the questions we will address in this lecture course, as we survey the history of the
university as an important institution from its medieval emergence in Europe to the founding of the University
of Michigan in the early 19th century. The reading material will include historical documents and sources, as
well as more recent scholarly publications (mostly available online). Students interested in conducting some
archival research will be encouraged.
Course Requirements: Two exams, a final paper.
History 238.001 – Zoom: A History of Everything
Instructor: Douglas Northrop
Meets: Lecture Monday, Wednesday, Friday 12-1pm in Aud D Angell Hall
Pick one of Discussion Sections 002, 003, 004, or 005
Distribution: ID
This interdisciplinary course in “Big History” integrates the human story with its terrestrial and cosmic
surroundings while focusing on three key themes. First, it pays careful attention to issues of scale; via the
notion of “powers of ten”; by shifting perspectives in space and time through many orders of magnitude. The
class proceeds logarithmically, “nesting” each topic within its predecessor. Lectures thus narrow the picture
from cosmic groups of galaxies through the solar system and our own planet, ultimately reaching questions of
biology, life, and the human experience. Second, each topic offers a different disciplinary perspective, and the
course integrates humanistic, social-science, and natural-science perspectives on the wider human
environment. Although providing an overview of key notions in the field of world and global history, the
course also provides an opportunity for students to see the connections (and tensions) between different
disciplinary approaches, epistemological assumptions, and the natural, terrestrial, cosmic, and historical scales
of time and space. Third, it focuses on themes of complexity and connection; showing how the universe and
earth have their own history. Starting with the Big Bang, these histories have been characterized by the
emergence of more complicated aggregations of atoms, molecules, and elements. These new units grew in
complexity (but also instability) as they extracted increasing amounts of energy from their environments. Yet
just as stars and galaxies ultimately face collapse or a slow demise (via entropy and the second law of
thermodynamics), so human society now also confronts a range of resource challenges that are difficult to
deny or overcome.
“Zoom” is a four-credit course, with three weekly lectures and a one-hour GSI-led discussion section.
Assignments include a midterm and final exam (20% each), one short paper and a disciplinary web module
project. Each of these assignments determines 20% of the course grade; attendance / participation comprise
the remaining 20%. Readings average 150 pages per week.
History of Art 194.001 – The Archbishop’s Bones: Art, Architecture, and Pilgrimage at Canterbury
Cathedral
Instructor: Achim Timmermann
Distribution: HU
Meets: Monday, Wednesday 1-2:30pm in 180 Tappan
On 29 December 1170, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his own cathedral. Fifty
years later, Canterbury Cathedral had become one of the major centers of pilgrimage in western Christendom,
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drawing pilgrims — like those described in Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' — from all over Europe. The goal of
the pilgrimage were Thomas Becket's mortal remains, kept within a series of golden shrines, and staged within
the rich and luminous architecture of Canterbury's new choir, one of the first, and one of the important, Gothic
structures in England. Our seminar will explore the extraordinary story of Becket's martyrdom, the
posthumous veneration of his relics, but above all, the magnificent architecture and stained glass of Canterbury
Cathedral. Our discussions will introduce you to the spatial lay-out, structure, function and imagery of a great
Gothic church, and sharpen your skills of visual and architectural analysis. You will also learn how to read
primary textual sources (such as contemporary accounts of Becket's murder), and secondary literature (for
instance a scholarly article analyzing medieval imagery depicting Becket's murder).
Course Requirements: One short paper (visual analysis) of ca. 5 pages — 25 %. One paper (architectural
analysis) of ca. 7-8 pages — 35 %. Class participation and discussion questions. In this seminar, class
participation and an active engagement with the visual and textual material under discussion will be essential
— 40%.
11/21/2012
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