THE HONORS SEMINARS – SPRING 2012
HONR300L111
Honors Ethics
Campisi, Joseph
TR 3:30-4:45
Core Distribution Area: Ethics
Junior Standing Required
Description: In this course, students will reflect upon and critically evaluate a number of fundamental moral questions as they are broached in some of the major ethical theories
(utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, rights-ethics, care-ethics, etc.).
Throughout the course we will also turn our attention to ethical questions surrounding food.
In recent years, moral issues concerning food have started to attract a lot of attention. For example, countless restaurants and college campuses throughout the country are now offering vegetarian and even vegan options on their menus. Supermarkets make efforts to stock organic products and “fair trade” coffee. The list goes on: In response to pressure from consumers and groups like PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), fast-food chains such as McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s use suppliers that humanely raise and slaughter animals. Many consumers are wary of genetically-modified or so-called
“Frankenfoods,” fearing the impact they could have on their health and on the environment.
Disdaining industrial agriculture, people throughout the United States are joining “CSA’s”
(Community Supported Agriculture), groups in which members buy “shares” of produce from local farms (in some CSA’s, shareholders receive credit for actually working on the farm). It is a climate like this that helps explain the popularity of books like Eric Schlosser’s
Fast Food Nation and films like Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me.
So, alongside our exploration of classical ethical theories, we will also examine various ethical questions involving food. What should “count” as food? Should we, for example, eat animals? Which ones? How should food be produced? Should we be concerned with the environmental impact of agricultural practices? What about genetically-modified food?
Does such bio-engineering represent the means by which we can overcome food shortages and hunger or does it involve an unacceptable manipulation of “nature”? What responsibility do we have to feed populations that are facing food shortages? Etc. In exploring questions such as these, we will determine how various ethical theories inform or fail to inform the relevant debates.
Besides Honors, this seminar satisfies the CORE Ethics requirement.
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HONR310 L111: Versions of the Self: Love and Desire
DeAngelis, Rose
MW 3:30-4:45
Besides Honors, this seminar satisfies the College's CORE Literature requirement elective credit for the English major and minor.
Description: The course will focus on various conceptualizations of romantic love and the ways in which these concepts affect expectations about and experiences within marriage in the decades following World War II as people tried to renormalize life. Was this the
“Wonder Bread” period depicted by television of the 1950s? Did women happily return from wartime factories to the kitchen? Did “father know best”? And how did the 1960s relationships grow out of this period of seeming normalcy? The cultural artifacts at the center of course investigations and discussions will include fiction, drama, television, and film.
Besides Honors, this course will satisfy the Core literature requirement and may serve as an elective for the English major.
HONR313 L200: Versions of the Self: Religion, Media, and the Super Concentrated Landscape
Scialabba, Karen
T 6:30-9:00
Besides Honors, this seminar satisfies the College's CORE Philosophy/Religious Studies requirement.
Description: Do media control what faith we will follow? Does the media system control what we think about religion? Does it control how we perceive “other” religions? Do media control how we interpret the doctrines of different religions and how they play out in world politics? Before the invention of the printing press, organized religion was its own mass media. It projected to the public the interests that reflected the values of the religion and its own self-interest. Serving as an advocate of its own “culture,” organized religion – as a public ritual -- provided the public with what they thought the public ought to know.
Today, the super concentrated landscape of corporate media serves as an advocate of its own
“culture” and is at the center of our public rituals. It directs us to social solidarity by telling all of us what it thinks we “ought to know.” Further, media have put religion on their entertainment, political, and news agendas; most often using stereotypical images to “brand” particular religious and spiritual meanings for quick connections with specific target audiences.
In a culture overrun by corporate media profit motives, do religions have to take control of their own “branding” to make sure that their message is heard? Have they done this already?
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In understanding that a changing culture requires a dialogue and a change in the way that one educates the public, this course relies on class discussion and creative assignments to reflect upon what we define as the most important goals of global citizenship in a mediasaturated culture. Questions and concerns will be addressed through a media literacy lens
(awareness, analysis, reflection, and action) and through the vision of notable religious thinkers past and present. This class will provide an important bridge between the expressive and social dimensions of participatory culture. Further, it will challenge students to consider their own impact and active engagement in the civic and political aspects of religious life within this new media landscape.
HONR 315 L111: Versions of the Self: Online Environments and Culture
Roper, Shannon
TR 11:00-12:15
Besides Honors, this course satisfies the CORE Cultural Diversity requirement and serves as an upper division requirement in the Communication major.
Description: This course explores various effects of online environments to create social and psychological expectations and enactments. By exploring a myriad of online environments and different cultures, students taking this course will be able to better understand how and why some online communities and their individuals flourish while others go astray and either remove themselves or deviate from online societal expectations.
HONR 320 L111: Art of Culture: Gettysburg- Memory, Identity, and the American Civil War
Morreale, Mark
MW 2-3:15
Besides Honors, this course satisfies the CORE Literature requirement and serves as elective credit for the English major and minor.
Description: This course examines historical and literary memory, both in the ways perceptions of gender, race and class were formed (and transformed) by memory of the
American Civil War, and how more recent sensibilities have reshaped these points of identity.
Students will explore these issues fictionally, historically, and culturally by examining a variety of materials. These materials, including memoir, letters, history, criticism, poetry, fiction, art and film, will all grapple with the issue of identity and identity formation in fundamental ways. What types of stresses did the Victorian Age put upon American culture, especially as those stresses impacted upon the relations between races and genders? How did men and women define themselves in this crisis-laden age and how did those definitions inform the ways we see ourselves today? Assignments will include creative projects, literary criticism, and historical research.
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HONR 321 L111: Art of Culture: Holland Theater [THIS IS A CROSS-LISTED COURSE]
Curley, Eileen
W8-9:15 F11:00-12:15
Besides Honors, this course serves as elective credit for the Global Studies minor or satisfies the
CORE Foreign Culture or Cultural Diversity requirement. It may also count for other core/major/minor requirements. See your academic advisor for specifics.
Description: This course is a spring attachment Honors seminar centered on the 2013 Holland
Festival. The Holland Festival is an annual performing arts event which showcases contemporary Dutch theater, music and art, much of which employs modern multi-media approaches to performance art. We will study how interdisciplinary performance art is created, staged, envisioned, and experienced, but we will also look at how the placement of these events in a highly-regarded national festival imparts additional meaning onto the works. Students will explore approaches to performance art, Dutch history, and some of the texts and companies which we will view at the festival.
HONR 324 L112: Art of Culture: Visions of the Future: Fiction, Prediction & Context
Rosen, Robyn and Grinnell, Richard
MR 9:30-10:45
Besides Honors, this course satisfies either the CORE Literature or History requirement.
Description: Literature is a powerful tool for speculating about the future, for proposing ideal, or terrifyingly possible worlds. But literature, no matter how future-looking or alternative, can really only be understood in historical context. When writers speculate about the future they inevitably comment on the present. This team-taught course will bring history and literature together dynamically to focus on selected utopian and dystopian literary texts, and on their cultural and historical contexts. We’ll be interested in the historical construction of gender, class, race, power and politics, and in the ways these issues are played out in the literature and the history of the 19th and 20 th century.
HONR 320 L113: Hudson River Valley Studies: Change and Resistance in the Hudson Valley
Garabedian, Steven
MR 9:30-10:45
Besides Honors, this course satisfies the CORE History requirement.
Description:
This course traces the themes of change and resistance in New York’s Hudson River Valley from the early years of colonization into the twentieth century. It explores this local history in relation to larger national and international development, and it covers a wide range of sub-topics, from music, literature, and art, to politics, economics, and social relations. The readings emphasize key periods and events when New York was at the vanguard of dramatic change for the nation. This course requires students to engage their critical reading skills
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when examining interpretations of the past and to argue their own conclusions coherently and persuasively.
HONR 331 L111: Hudson River Valley Studies: Literary Places
Mercier, Stephen
TBA
Besides Honors, this course satisfies the CORE requirement in Literature and serves as elective credit in the English major and minor.
Description: This course asks you to examine and explore literary representations of the
Hudson River Valley. We will focus primarily on Hudson River Valley authors. We will examine the relationship between these texts and popular images of the places they represent.
Hence, we will look at various types of signifiers, such as literary texts, maps, magazines, pamphlets geared toward tourism, paintings, photographs, web sites, and other visual images.
We will then attempt to understand how these varied images shape our conceptions of place and the Hudson River Valley. We will engage in a wide variety of approaches and methodologies, such as literary criticism, landscape geography, architecture, archaeology and artifacts, cultural studies, folklore and mythology, and electronic media.
HONR 340 L150: Global Engagement: Holland Theater [THIS IS A CROSS-LISTED COURSE]
Curley, Eileen
W8-9:15 F11:00-12:15
Besides Honors, this course serves as elective credit for the Global Studies minor or satisfies the
CORE Foreign Culture or Cultural Diversity requirement. It may also count for other core/major/minor requirements. See your academic advisor for specifics.
Description: This course is a spring attachment Honors seminar centered on the 2013 Holland
Festival. The Holland Festival is an annual performing arts event which showcases contemporary Dutch theater, music and art, much of which employs modern multi-media approaches to performance art. We will study how interdisciplinary performance art is created, staged, envisioned, and experienced, but we will also look at how the placement of these events in a highly-regarded national festival imparts additional meaning onto the works. Students will explore approaches to performance art, Dutch history, and some of the texts and companies which we will view at the festival.
HONR 343 L111 -- Global Engagement: African Ethnicities
Yates, Brian
F3:30-4:45W2-3:15
Besides Honors, this seminar satisfies the College's CORE History requirement.
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Description: This course is designed to inform students on not only the general schools of ethnic construction, but also Africa’s unique contribution to the development of the field.
This course will begin with general themes in ethnic construction and cover pre-colonial ethnic constructions in Uganda, Southern Africa and Yorubaland. Later themes in this course will detail the forces of nation building, conflict and migration as important factors in ethnic construction. There will be several case studies given in the class which represent some of extremely varied African experiences with ethnicity. In this course you will receive a very general understanding of ethnic construction that can be used as a foundation for further inquiry. The class will test critical thinking, effective communication and reading comprehension. Knowledge of identity construction in the rest of the world is essential in understanding the conflicts that occasionally arise due to them, the diversity of this ever shrinking world and how we define ourselves.
HONR350 L111 -- Science, Technology, and Society: Exploring the Mathematics of Infinity
McGrail, Tracey
TF 12:30-1:45
Besides Honors, this course satisfies the CORE Mathematics requirement.
Description: How many integers are there? How many real numbers are there? Can one infinite set be bigger than another? What happens when you combine two infinite sets—does the set get bigger? This course explores these and other mathematical questions about infinity.
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