Honors Colloquia For Prior Semesters

Professor Richard Kaye (English)
Course Number: HONS 2011Z
Mondays and Wednesdays; 4:00-5:15 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

The question of what it means to be human lies at the core of Western philosophical and scientific inquiry. As conceptualized in the Western tradition, preeminently in the writing of thinkers such as Aristotle and Descartes, “humanity” typically has been defined in opposition to the animal, which is said to lack the rationality, consciousness, and language that we adduce as the clearest evidence of our difference from beasts. However, recent scientific research has raised fundamental questions regarding the relationship between humans and animals. Drawing on ethical, legal, aesthetic, psychological, religious, and scientific perspectives, the class will consider the relations between animals and humans with special attention to British and American literary representation from the nineteenth century to the present. Students will take up current theoretical debates on animal rights, ecological ethics, and “post-humanist” philosophy. We will begin with Aristotle’s treatise “History of Animals” (a foundational work of the biological and zoological sciences) as well Descartes controversial conception of animals as unthinking machines. The class will then examine Jeremy Bentham’s section of his 1789 “The Principles of Morals and Legislation” on the “rights of non-human animals” and then explore sections from Darwin’s 1859 “The Origin of Species” and 1871 “The Descent of Man.” The class will compare the different attitudes towards animals within the frameworks of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam as well as in the Western secular tradition. We will consider Rudyard Kipling’s richly allegorical “The Jungle Book” (1894) and H.G. Wells’ fantastical dystopian and anti-vivisectionist “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1896). Throughout Britain, anti-vivisectionist critiques-many of them articulated by proto-feminist activists and anti-colonial writers–forged a connection between Englishness, egalitarian ideals, kindness to animals, and anti-colonialist politics. Among the twentieth- and twenty-first century writers we will consider are D. H. Lawrence (whose poetry often dealt with the relation between human and non-human animals), Virginia Woolf (who authored a biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog) Norman Mailer (who wrote on Chicago’s brutal meat-packing industry), and J. M. Coetzee (who made an animal-rights intellectual and activist the heroine of one of his novels). Recent contemporary debates dealing with animal consciousness, the ethical treatment of animals, the justifiability of zoos, and the rights of non-human creatures will be considered through readings in behavioral science, psychology, religion, philosophy and the law through the writings of Peter Singer, Vickie Hearne, Barbara Hernstein Smith, Sandra Harding, Josephine Donovan, Temple Grandin, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Darnton, Richard Posner, Daniel Dennett, Steven Wise, and Donna Harraway. We will explore four films that meditate on the subject of the animal-human divide: Robert Bresson’s 1966 “Au Hazard, Balthazar,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963, “The Birds,” Werner Herzog’s 2005 “Grizzly Man,” and Louie Psihoyos’s 2009 documentary “The Cove.”

Requirements: a mid-term paper and a final paper.

Professor Nicole Eitzen Delgado (English)
Course Number: HONS 2012Q
Tuesdays and Fridays; 1:00-2:15 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

What can captivity teach us about the invention of race and ethnicity in the United States and how do captivity narratives offer new visions of freedom for our contemporary moment? Traditionally, scholars have limited the captivity narrative genre to racist and sexist accounts of US Anglo American women (like the famous Mary Rowlandson) needing rescue from so-called Indian savages. And yet, as some scholars have recently demonstrated, most Indian captives were of Indigenous and/or Mexican descent, not Anglo- Americans. This literary bias speaks to a larger trajectory of overrepresenting white captivity and underrepresenting non-white captivity. It also reflects how our modern imaginations continue to be captive to problematic ideas about race, such as who is and is not worthy of rescue, or which types of bodies should be met with fear and suspicion.

To flip the script on captivity narratives, this class investigates practices and representations of non-white captivity from the colonial to the modern eras in the United States. This will include factual and fictional depictions of the following captivities:

• Mexican American captivity by María Ruiz de Burton
• African American slavery by Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Jacobs
• Chinese Indentured labor by Betty G. Yee
• Native American conversion in boarding schools by Francis LaFlesh and Leslie Marmon Silko
• Japanese American internment by John Okada and Monica Sonei
• Muslim Arab American wrongful arrests post 9/11 by Moustafa Bayoumi
• Undocumented Latinix detention by Valeria Luiselli and Javier Zamora

By reading academic essays, historical, and literary materials, students will reflect on the race-making power of captivity. They will also learn about the history of racialized violence and resistance in America, blurring the boundaries between captivity and freedom. Further, by engaging with the demands for freedom within captivity narratives, students will be invited to ask: in a modern society that typically associates agency with mobility, what visions of freedom can we glean from captivity, when cross-racial encounters are bountiful, and movement is radically restricted?

Course requirements:

• 5, 1-page personal reflections
• 4-page midterm essay or creative project
• 10-page final essay or creative project, accompanied by a final presentation

Professor Philip Alcabes (School of Urban Public Health)
Course Number: HONS 20146
Tuesdays and Thursdays; 4:00-5:15 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

In this course, we will take up moral problems about the public’s health-not the narrow medical-ethics questions around physician-assisted suicide or turning off life, but broad issues.

For example:

• Is it wrong to use CRISPR to treat hereditary illnesses like sickle-cell anemia, knowing that the sickle-cell gene confers some protection against malaria?
• Is it acceptable to use CRISPER-based gene drive to entirely eliminate animal species that threaten humans, like the malaria mosquito?
• May psychiatric units discharge unhoused mentally ill people to the streets, when those people can’t pay for their care?
• As artificial reproductive technology allows you to choose the race, sex, height, and likely scholastic aptitude of your offspring, is it right that people should pay more for the ova or sperm of persons with desirable traits (tall, athletic, Ivy-League grads, for instance)?
• If trans-women are prohibited from competing in women’s athletic events, is it right to allow cis-women with very high testosterone levels to compete in women’s athletic events?

To find perspectives through which we can look at questions like these, we will take up concepts from political and social theorists of the past century, including Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Carol Gilligan, Martha Nussbaum, and others.

The course is a seminar. You will be expected to read, take notes, and share your thoughts in class. You will do some writing and revising. And you will undertake to study one topic deeply enough that you can lead the class for a quarter-hour or so in a discussion of your topic.

Reading:

1. JA Doudna and SH Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018 (paper) ISBN 978-1-328-91536-8.
2. You must be familiar and able to discuss the two seminal moral theories of justice in a liberal society: the one proposed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971) and the capabilities approach proposed by Martha C. Nussbaum in Creating Capabilities (Harvard, 2011). Read these books before the course begins! If you need help making sense of them, look at Section 4 of article on John Rawls and the article on the Capabilities approach in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (revised 2020).
3. Other readings to be assigned in class.

Professor Maria Luisa Fischer (Romance Languages, Spanish)
Professor Mary Roldan (History)
Course Number: HONS 3011A
Wednesdays; 11:30-2:20 p.m.
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

State-sponsored violence has taken place in several Latin American societies in the twentieth century.  This course examines the contexts and effects of political and social violence in Latin America during the ’60s and ’70s through the years of democratic transition in the ’80s.  What is the legacy of violence and how has it shaped individual and collective notions of citizenship, justice, identity, politics, and history?  What are the causes of violence and how does it operate? How do individuals/nations remember violence and how do those memories shape imagination, a sense of self, interactions with others, and understandings of power? How do societies deal with the aftermath of violence and the need to achieve reconciliation or give voice to the impact of traumatic events of national scope? A central premise of the course is that how violence is narrated matters, constituting a powerful means of resisting oblivion, recuperating memory, or even, perpetuating violence (for instance, when certain acts, memories, or responsibilities are erased.) Narrating violence can be a way of establishing voice, asserting agency, and imbuing seemingly incomprehensible experiences with meaning.  We will explore these issues from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective (literature, history, art) focused on close readings of monographs, memoirs, official documents, novels, poetry, visual arts, and film in countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Colombia.

Course Requirements:
75 pp+ of reading per week. There will be 2-3 short paper assignments (2-3 pages each), one mid-term exam, an oral presentation, and a final paper. A final paper proposal is to be approved by the instructors by mid-April, and an 8-10 page final essay will be due during the examination period in mid-May.

Professor Jonathan Shannon (Anthropology)
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011Y
Mondays and Thursdays; 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

Revolutions take many forms and shapes, from the technological and scientific to the social and political. Because the arts tend to develop in concert with social and political-economic developments, we typically understand the arts as responding to broader social movements. However, we might also ask, Can the arts promote and not only respond to revolutionary social and political change? How do the arts – from music and song to painting, poetry, cinema, and theater – help advance revolutionary social change, or even provoke a social or technological revolution? Another way to think about this is to ask, what are the interrelationships of art, politics, and society?

This seminar explores the role of the arts in revolutionary social movements from the French and Haitian Revolutions, to the 1848 European “bourgeois” revolutions, the Bolshevik and Cuban revolutions, and the recent Arab uprisings. Students will explore how artistic practices in mediums ranging from song and painting to theater and performance art not only reflect revolutionary social and political changes but also promote them. Drawing on a range of theoretical readings on aesthetics and social movements from disciplines including anthropology, art history, literature, musicology, and politics students will develop a critical understanding of the role of art in social change, an analytical grasp of theories of social mobilization, and deeper knowledge of transformative historical moments world history.

Coursework:
In addition to weekly readings and in-class discussions, students will write short analytical essays, craft creative responses to readings and artwork, and write and present a final research paper on the arts and revolution in a particular context.

Assessment:

1. Participation: 10%
2. Reading Journal: 20%
3. Creative Responses: 10%
4. 3 Short response papers: 30%
5. Analytical Paper: 20%
6. Final Presentation: 10%

Professor Jessie Daniels (Sociology)
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011Z
Mondays and Thursdays; 11:30-12:45 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course is meant to offer a space for a critical interrogation of our understanding about the ways that racism, gender, sexuality, and class shape our interior worlds through the lens of memoir. In this course, we will read a variety of memoirs by Black, Latinx and Asian American authors who have used memoir to narrate their individual lives in ways that help us better understand them as individual human beings and to grasp the world sociologically. The course covers a range of topics usually covered by sociologists, such as systematic racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and the resistance to these forms of oppression, but offers a more interdisciplinary and artistic approach to these topics.

From The Moth to StoryCorps to documentaries such as “Great Photo, Lovely Life,” (2023) stories are ubiquitous in contemporary society and take many forms. Indeed, sociologists have argued that social life is itself “storied”-that we locate ourselves within familiar narrative structures, using them to “construct” identities and “tell” our lives. Stories, in this view, are not only the stuff of literature, but also the very fabric of social life: the foundation for individual and collective identities. This course grapples with the role of stories and storytelling in modern social life, with an intersectional feminist lens on race, gender, sexuality, and class. In the course, we will explore some of the ways that the text-based memoir has shaped these other mediated forms of storytelling, as well as how the written text competes for our attention, and how the written text offers interiority that others lack. Thus, the course is ideal for students who are interested in exploring different forms of storytelling.

SOME MEMOIRS WE WILL READ:

• Anna Qu, Made in China
• Kiese Laymon, Heavy
• Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
• Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
• Brian Broome, Punch Me Up to the Gods

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS:
Each week, students will be required to write a short reading reaction paper (one page). At the midterm, students will write a longer paper that critically analyzes the popularity of a memoir text they select, and placing it in sociological context, addressing the questions: why is this story popular now? and what does this tell us about society? (five pages)

Then, at the end of the term, students will expand and revise their midterm based on feedback. I have designed two class sessions near the end of the term (Week 14), to work with students in class on their revised papers. In the final paper, students will narrate their individual, personal story has been shaped by social, historical, and geopolitical factors. (eight to ten pages).

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Maria Hernandez-Ojeda (Romance Languages, Spanish)
Course Number: HONS 2011J
Tuesdays & Fridays; 1:00-2:15 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course will examine, in English, the literary and artistic cultural production inspired by this fascinating historical conflict of international significance.  Students will read texts by major authors, will watch films and documentaries that reflect this event, and discuss symbols and images of the War. For their final project, students will visit the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives to research the invaluable documentation that this institution offers, and choose a topic for their final paper. In this course, students will learn about the historical, political and cultural contexts that surround the readings, films and art studied during the semester.

Course Requirements:

• Writing requirement: Students will write one final paper based on their archival research at the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives located at the Tamiment Library. It will be approximately 10-12 pages long, and will be posted in the course website narratingmemory.com. Furthermore, they will write a two-page commentary on Blackboard for each one of the films assigned. I will revise every writing assignment at least once before final submission.
• Midterm and Final Exam: The format of the midterm and final exam may include any combination of the following: short-answer identifications, passages for commentary, and long essay questions.
• Oral presentation: Students will prepare a presentation individually for the class using PowerPoint.  This oral evaluation should last no more than fifteen minutes and no less than ten. The presentation will focus on topics related to the Spanish Civil War.

Sample works to be studied:

• Novel: Cercas, Javier. Soldiers of Salamis
• Poetry: Neruda, Pablo. Five Decades: Poems: 1925-70.
• Testimonial Narrative: Hemingway, Ernest. The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War.
• Interdisciplinary Essay: Labanyi, Jo. “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War.”
• Theory: White, Hayden. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”
• Film: Pan’s Labyrinth/ El laberinto del fauno.
• Documentaries: The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
• Guernica by Pablo Picasso
• Posters and Photography: Capa, Robert. Death in the Making.
• Music: Miguel Hernandez by Joan Manuel Serrat

Professor Catherine Coppola (Music)
Course Number: HONS 2012D
Mondays and Wednesdays; 5:30-6:45 pm
Room: 407HN
3 hours, 3 credits

Opera is a nexus for cultural and artistic studies. Viewed from that stance, the course will examine the literary sources of opera librettos in plays, stories, and folk tales; the social and political context from which the works grow and in which they continue to exist; and their reception, including the role of censorship in their time and ours. Students will confront societal and political issues, understand and apply musical aesthetics to the relationship between music and text, and evaluate offensive aspects in historical and contemporary context. We will sort through reactions to the beautiful music as a kind of guilty pleasure, or as some have described it, a siren song that can lull us away from difficult aspects of the plot. We will debate what would be lost if these works were to be banned, and what we as a society can learn by keeping them in repertoire and, equally important, in discussion. We will not defend tradition for its own sake, but we will challenge the fundamentally flawed presumption that today’s society is morally superior to that of these 19^th- and early- 20^th century works. Part of countering that view is in recognizing the centuries of advocacy for what we now include under the umbrella of social justice issues. Within a historical, analytical, and sociological frame, we will work in a nuanced way that takes into account the fallacies of context (that no one was addressing inequity in their time) and of change (that we have moral high ground today, the counterweight for which one has to look no further than the day’s news).

Coursework: weekly readings and viewings of operatic scenes using the Hunter Library Database-MetOpera on Demand; written and discussion board responses as well as in-class conversations; and one presentation with feedback from the class to workshop ideas for the final ten-page paper. We also expect to attend together two live performances-one at the Metropolitan Opera and one at the Manhattan School of Music.

Repertoire will include frequently performed works by Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Bizet, Strauss, and Gershwin. Our final sessions will look to the future of opera, and the ways in which our course issues are addressed by contemporary creators such as Jake Heggie, Terence Blanchard, Jeanine Tesori/Tazewell Thompson, Anthony Davis, and Wayne Shorter/Esperanza Spalding.

Discussion Assignments: 40%
Short Essay: 10%
Final Presentation: 10%
Final Paper: 40%

Professor Farzad Amoozegar (Music)
Course Number: HONS 2012N
Mondays and Thursdays; 2:30-3:45pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course offers a comprehensive interdisciplinary exploration of critical perspectives on health, mental health, and illness. It provides an in-depth examination of various facets of these topics, encompassing critical issues such as:

• Healing: In-depth analysis of healing practices, both traditional and modern, with an emphasis on their cultural and historical contexts.
• Memory: Exploration of the role of memory in shaping perceptions of health, mental health, and illness, and its impact on the individual and collective psyche.
• Emotion: Examination of the emotional aspects of health and mental health, including the influence of emotions on well-being and coping mechanisms.
• Subjectivity and Self-Processes: A critical investigation of how individuals construct their own narratives and self-identities in relation to health and mental health.
• Religion and Spirituality: Exploration of the intersection of religious and spiritual beliefs with health, mental health, and illness, including their role in coping and healing.
• Psychopathology: In-depth analysis of various forms of psychopathology, their diagnostic criteria, and their societal implications.
• Cultural Phenomenology: An examination of how culture shapes perceptions and experiences of health and wellness, including cultural variations in health beliefs and practices.

Coursework

• Attendance and participation (10%).
• Students are responsible for a one-page critical response each week. The response papers need to be posted on the class website after our Thursday classes. The report should not be more than one page long or have more than 400 words- please, adhere to these limits (25%).
• Midterm paper (5 double-spaced pages): an analysis of one of the weekly topics in the course. This is a take home assignment. (30%).
• A short research paper assignment (8 to 10 double-spaced pages) and class presentation. The students shall write an essay based on a subject matter suitable to the course. The aim of the research paper is to synthesize, discuss and assess scholarly literature and to develop a conceptual analysis of a current topic chosen. (35%).

Required Texts

• Biehl, João. 2013. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (with a New Afterward). Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Farmer, Paul. 2006. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Fadiman, Anne. 2013. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (with a New Afterward). New York: Noonday Press.
• Garcia, Angela. 2010. The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande.
• Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Singer, Merrill and Hans Baer. 2011. Introducing Medical Anthropology: Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.

Professor Nijah Cunningham (English)
Course Number: HONS 2012P
Wednesdays; 11:30-2:15pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course investigates the idea of visibility-its historical significance and political meanings-with the aim of developing an understanding of it operates within our present. Taking the discourse of invisibility and hypervisibility in black studies as our starting point, we will explore how questions of seeing and being seen shape conceptions of personhood as well as consider the effects when the interrelated notions of race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of social difference are circumscribed within the prisms of representation and the “politics of visibility.”

Through various case studies, literary works, contemporary art, and other forms visual culture such as films and family photographs, we will develop a critical framework and vocabulary for analyzing the complex social dynamics that unfold both within the visual field and beyond its limits. Drawing on modes of analysis from the disciplines of literary studies, art history, political theory, and history of science the course invites students to interrogate the regimes that govern visual experience across the various historical and geographical contexts through assignments and guest lectures.

Many of the themes and questions that we will take up over the course of the semester are in conversation with Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility, a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum organized by Ashley James, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, scheduled to open in fall 2023. In addition to regular participation and course work, students will be required to attend a walk-through of the exhibition with the curator during the latter half of the semester.

Requirements and Grade Distribution

• Regular and lively class participation (20%)
• Two short writing assignments (10%)
• Midterm essay, five to six pages (25%)
• Group presentation: Students will take part in a collaborative research and writing project on a particular contemporary black artist or group featured in Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility. (15%)
• An eight-page essay due on BlackBoard (30%)

Sample Reading List

• Anne Cheng, Ornamentalism
• Tina Campt, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See
• Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
• W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America.
• Emmanuel Iduma, I Am Still With You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History
• Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Floor Grootenhuis, Artist in Residence (Biological Sciences)
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011X
Tuesdays and Thursdays; 4:00-5:15 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

Adrienne Maree Brown explains, existence is fractal-the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet… emergence is a system that makes use of everything in the iterative process. It’s all data.¹ The body is where and through which we experience, move and engage with the world. We can map ourselves, measure where we are and perceive our relationship to each other and our environment. All of this is valuable data for us to understand our place in the world. The body can be seen as a unique and diverse vessel that has been idealized, romanticized, collected, performed, objected and obsessed over.

Social practice // art, science and mapping the collective body brings together the creative connections between socially engaged art, science and geography. It combines the scientific method with the experience and knowledge of our own bodies as living organisms moving through the world and being in connection as one ecosystem. The course is grounded in an interdisciplinary pedagogical approach that comes from the premise that we are learning resources for each other. It will build on and respond to the curiosity of the class.

Through an emergent practice of learning and experimentation the class will use the principles of scores in art, protocols in science and mapping exercises to research the relationships between identity, place and the collective body. The class will: practice listening by working with an embodied structured listening score²; understand the scientific method and how it can be paired with emergent and embodied research; experiment with scores/protocols – research tools in art, music, movement and science; develop and present as a group, a collaborative score/protocol.

There are no pre- and/or co-requisites and/or other special conditions for this course. Participation is 20% of class assessment, personal reflections readings and class material is 10%, a one-page creative essay for 5%, a map of the places that you inhabit 5%, a creative project on Our Collective Fabric // the Microbiome 10%, a personal research protocol/score for 20%, group work protocol/score for 10%, and a final paper for 20%.

A core part of this class is building community. We will learn how to listen to each other and share our curiosity related to our personal and collective relationship to identity and place. We will bring the inside space of our bodies in connection to the outside spaces that we live in and with. The emergent characteristic of this class allows for flexibility to adjust and bring in topics and questions that the class generates and are important to the group. This means that some of the specific content and readings may change, however the basic structure and grading rubric stands

Key Readings

• Brown, A. (2017). Emergent strategy. AK Press (pdf available)
• Buzzarté, Monique; Bickley, T. & Oliveros, P. (2012). Anthology of essays on deep listening. Deep Listening Publications. Giraldo, O; Garcia, A; Corcho, O. (2018). A guideline for reporting experimental protocols in life sciences. PeerJ.
• Ono Yōko. (2000). Grapefruit: a book of instructions drawings. Simon & Schuster.
• Overlie, M. (2016). Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory & Practice. Movement Publishing
• Rees, T.; Bosch, T. & Douglas, A. E. (2018). How the microbiome challenges our concept of self. Plos Biology.
• Zaragocin, S. & Caretta, M. A. (2021). Cuerpo-Territorio: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111:5, 1503-1518.

^{__________________________________
1} Brown, A. (2017). Emergent strategy. AK Press
² This is a Piece, is a collaborative performance score that was developed by Juliana F. May, rendered through verbal learning of the score as shared by dancer & choreographers Mira Treatman & Pablo Muñoz, learned from choreographer & dancer Miguel Gutierrez.

Professor Anthony Browne (Africana & Puerto Rican/Latino Studies)
Professor Roseanne Flores (Psychology)
Course Number: HONS 30148
Tuesdays and Fridays; 11:30-12:45 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This interdisciplinary course explores how sociology and psychology explain persistent poverty and the attendant effects on individuals, communities and American society. Theories and concepts from both disciplines are utilized to examine the nature and extent of poverty in the U.S., its myriad causes and consequences, as well as government programs and policies. Emphasis will be placed on understanding the intersectionality of class, race/ethnicity and gender.  Questions to be addressed include: What is poverty?  Why is U.S. poverty higher than other industrialized nations? What are the perceptions of the poor by the non-poor? What is the effect of poverty on children and families? What are individual and structural explanations of poverty? And what is the psychological impact of being poor in an affluent society? Emphasis will be placed on urban poverty and the role of the state and civil society its amelioration.

Readings:

• Mark Rank, One Nation Underprivileged – Required
• David Shipler, The Working Poor

Grading for this course is based primarily on a research paper, midterm and final exam, and class participation.

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Vishwa Adluri (Philosophy)
Course Number: HONS 2011P
Mondays & Thursdays: 10-11:15 am
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course explores the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory and theories of modernity. The Ramayana tells the story of the hero and heir apparent Rama-his pedagogy, initiation, maturity, conquest, exile, and battle to recover his wife, before he can be installed as the rightful king of the ideal, just polity. We will contrast Rama's experiences with Oedipus's. How does Rama's journey differ from Oedipus's? What is the role of initiation in maturity? How do Rama and Oedipus, each in their own way, offer alternatives to and parables for modernity, understood as an anti-heroic age (Nietzsche)? And how do psychoanalytic insights permit us to simultaneously recover the heroic perspective and offer a diagnosis of modernity?

Required Texts:

• Swami Venkatesananda, The Concise Ramayana of Valmiki
• Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, vol. 7
• Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus (Meineck and Woodruff trans.)

Course Requirements:

1. All students are responsible for a mid-term paper (10 pages min.) which counts toward 50% of their grade.
2. The mid-term paper will be on one of two questions pertaining to general aspects of Hinduism. I will distribute the questions in class one week before the paper is due. You are required to edit your papers for correct spelling and grammar. I reserve the right to reject any paper that does not meet these standards.
3. You will have the option of rewriting your mid-term paper for a better grade if you wish. I do not accept late assignments.
4. There will also be a final exam with two short questions. The final exam is 30% of your grade.
5. Regular reading counts toward 10% of your grade.
6. Class participation counts toward a further 10% of your grade.
7. Regular attendance is required; any student who misses more than three classes without notice will have to see me before he/she can continue attending. I take attendance for every session.

Course policies

Every student is required to meet with me at least once a semester during office hours to discuss his/her progress.

Professor Tara Zanardi (Art & Art History)

Course Number: HONS 2012A
Thursdays: 4:00-6:50 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

First produced in China during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), porcelain was made initially for the local market and the imperial court. Prized for its translucency and strength, porcelain was eventually exported on a global scale, reaching the Americas, Persia, Africa, and Europe, along with spices, silk, and lacquer. In order to accommodate the increasing desire for this ceramic and facilitate commercial trade, the Chinese established ports in various cities. As one of the most highly coveted luxury objects, porcelain played important decorative and political roles in interior displays, from the homes of West African merchants and the viceroys of the Spanish colonial world to the palaces of Ottoman sultans and European sovereigns. European nobility attempted to replicate the production of porcelain, with no true success until the foundation of the Meissen Porcelain Factory in 1708-1710 under Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1694-1733). With the manufacture of both hard- and soft-paste porcelain by Europeans, porcelain's circulation widened.

In this course, we will evaluate porcelain's material properties, fabrication, use, and aesthetics, and tie these considerations to broader social practices of display, collecting, trade, and consumption. We will look at key players and sites in the promotion and development of porcelain. We will address fundamental questions, such as how did porcelain, whether produced abroad or at home, contribute to the shaping of individual or collective identities? How did the introduction of Chinese and Japanese porcelain transform pre-existing ceramic traditions or help shape new ones? How did the blue and white palette used primarily for export porcelain become the first global brand under the Ming dynasty? How was porcelain integrated into international networks of exchange and systems of empire?

The course will include weekly readings and discussions, an exam, an oral presentation, and a final research paper. As a discussion-based course, students are expected to participate. We will also go on select field trips to enrich our understanding of both historic and contemporary porcelain.

Evaluation Criteria:
Participation: 20%
Exam: 30%
Oral Presentation: 15%
Research Paper, including Paper Assignments: 35%

Professor Rupal Oza (Women & Gender Studies)
Course Number: HONS 2012L
Wednesdays: 4:00-6:50 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

When President Biden announced the Student Debt Forgiveness plan, it drew the ire of Republican members of congress as well as private banks, investors, and companies. By September 2022 six Republican-led state attorney generals had filed a suit which has made its way to the Supreme Court. The implications of student debt forgiveness emerged in the context of the ballooning of student debt which at its highest was $1.7 Trillion. Current policy recommendations around student debt forgiveness need to be understood in the context of decades of student organizing and protests against student debt which disproportionately affects students of color. This course seeks to understand the history of debt, by looking at the ways in which slavery and colonialism are tied to debt. We will also examine the crisis of the 1970s and the manner in which Third World debt rose and the implications it had for those countries and its impact on the contemporary crisis.

Expected Learning Outcomes

• Understand the historical origins of debt.
• Analyze the implications of the shifts in the global political economy in the 1970s that led to the debt trap.
• Consider the relationship between Third World debt and student debt.
• Understand the roles of the IMF and the World Bank as well as the U.S. Federal Reserve's role in Third World and student debt.
• Make the connections between the racial and gender implications of debt on working class families in the U.S.
• Acquire a familiarity with key debates in the financialization of the economy.
• Question established orthodoxy that debt is inevitable.
• Look at the organizing efforts that have called to cancel student debt.

Required Texts: TBA

Assignments

1. Participation and engagement (10% of final grade).
2. Research paper outline and brief annotated bibliography (15% of final grade)
3. Group project (10% of final grade)
4. Weekly response to Professor Oza's questions, via postings on Blackboard (20% of final grade).
5. One critical response paper (3-5 double spaced pages) (20% of final grade).
6. Final Research paper (10-12 double spaced pages) (25% of final grade).Final Research paper (10-12 double spaced pages) (25% of final grade).

Professor Jonathan Shannon (Anthropology)

Course Number: HONS 2012M
Mondays and Thursday: 1:00-2:15 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement - that they seek power, and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.

What is "of true value" in life? What is the value of life, of a single life? How is the value of human life and of humanity socially constructed in particular political, economic, and cultural contexts? When one society honors athletes and movie stars more than factory laborers, does that mean people with fame, wealth and beauty are inherently more valuable? How do individuals create value and meaning in their lives in different contexts?

Drawing on multiple disciplines, from archaeology, political economy, and moral philosophy to literature and the creative arts, this seminar will deconstruct the historical definition of human value across a variety of cultures, from foragers to members of contemporary global capitalist societies. We will examine human value in terms of such themes as worth, utility, beauty, status, wealth, origin, and fulfillment via close engagement with texts, the arts, and mass media. We will engage such texts as Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Albert Camus's The Stranger, Epictetus's The Art of Living, and Peter Singer's Ethics in the Real World. We will also engage with such films as Wolf of Wall Street, Crazy Rich Asians, and Blindspotting, among others.

The seminar will include a mixture of lectures, presentations, and critical discussions based on the analysis of texts and various artistic examples. In addition, an applied component of the course will challenge students to explore concepts of human value through artistic practices ranging from sketching and poetry, to photography and multi-media projects. Practical sessions will include time for students to learn and engage with the technical tools used for expressing human value: pencil, pen, photography/videography, animation, video editing, and the like. No experience necessary! We are all artists and thinkers!

Students will be expected to write short responses papers and assemble a dossier of creative work culminating in a final project and analytical essay. In the end, this seminar is meant to provoke deep thinking on the value of life from a broad variety of perspectives, including exploration of students' own experiences of and engagement with the world. There are no finite answers to the questions, "What is of true value in life?" and "What is the value of (a) life?" Together we will explore, debate, and confront them in sensitive yet bold, analytical yet creative ways.

Professor Robyn Marasco (Political Science)
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011P
Tuesdays and Fridays: 11:30-2:25 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course will offer an intensive study of the life and work of Frantz Fanon, a philosopher, psychologist, revolutionary militant and among the most significant voices in the black radical tradition.  We will explore his early life in Martinique, his encounter with the negritude movement and the influence of Aimé Césaire on his first major work, Black Skin/White Masks. We will read this work both for the substance of its arguments about racism, the construction of identity, and the effects of an "epidermalized" domination and for its experiments in poetic form.  We will look at Fanon's training in Paris and explore the mutual influence on thinkers like Maurice Mealeau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.  And, finally, we will follow Fanon to Algeria, to the hospital at Blida-Joinville where he was appointed lead psychiatrist and to the FLN and his participation in the struggle to defeat European colonialism.  We will study Fanon's masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth, for how it advances a critique of colonialism and what it contributes to a political theory of liberation.  We will also examine some of his other political writings from this period, on the family and gender relations, on matters of political education and organization, and the role of religion and tradition in a revolutionary movement. Our semester will conclude with reflections on Fanon's influence on generations of revolutionary writers and thinkers and the lasting significance of his work for contemporary political struggles.

Course Requirements:

Weekly writing assignments in the form of response papers/reading memos and one final essay 12-15 pages in length.

Professor Allan Frei (Geography)
Professor Steven Greenbaum (Physics and Astronomy)

Course Number: HONS 30131
Mondays and Wednesdays: 4:00-5:15 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

The energy portion of this course will begin with the fundamental concept of energy as the capacity to do mechanical work, which forms the basis of transportation, electricity for industrial and home use and residential heating and cooling. Basic concepts beginning with the difference between energy and power and numerical conversion between different energy units (e.g., kWh - kilowatt hours and BTU - British Thermal Units) will be discussed with many examples provided. We will cover energy generation schemes, from fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewable (wind and solar) sources as well as infrastructure issues such as electrical transmission, storage, and the opportunities and challenges of widespread adoption of electric cars and buses.

The environmental portion of this course will address energy production in the context of coupled human and natural systems. Such interactions, which have long been a key area of interdisciplinary study for geographers, include processes related to the earth sciences (e.g., atmospheric science, hydrology, geology, ecology) as well as social sciences (e.g. history, economics, political science) and even humanities (e.g. environmental philosophy). We will consider how different modes of production of energy affect the environment, and how the environment affects energy production. We will also consider how social forces affect decisions about energy production, including case studies.

There will be one field trip, depending on COVID and other contingencies, and subject to approval by the utility company to the Big Allis (Rise Light & Power) natural gas-fired electric power plant in Astoria, Queens.

Profs Greenbaum and Frei will give lectures on alternate weeks of a two class per week schedule (and attend each other's lectures). Course grades will be based on an in-class midterm, in-class final, and team (3-4 students/team) presentations on topics to be determined.

The prerequisite for this class is one year of high school physics or high school chemistry (some review may be required!)

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Roger Persell (Biological Science)
Course Number: HONS 2011G
Fridays: 11:30-2:20 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

Within Leonardo’s boundless world of 500 years ago, he believed his anatomical drawings would yield insight into the human mind and that his paintings would explain human emotions. We revere Leonardo’s peerless art, but he saw himself foremost as an investigator of human feelings. By the 19th century, art and science diverged into “two cultures”, an intellectual chasm identified by C.P. Snow in 1959. In this century, however, neuroscientists are rethinking that separation. Science and art together help reveal how humans have evolved to make sense of what we see, to find meaning from our perceptions. What better way to explore the wondrous overlap between art and science than by discovering how our brains respond to art?

Going beyond simple “body language”, our course will focus on how the anatomy of art – and the visual world in general – leads to perception, comprehension and emotion. More important, we’ll explore how they work together to generate what we call “meaning”. Art can evoke powerful emotions and deep meaning: from fear and disgust to beauty and arousal; from sex to gender and back; from identity to mystery; from anger and strife to spiritual calm; from an Instagram selfie to religious awe.

Course texts and short projects will expand an appreciation of how we generate meaning from what we see whether from our evolutionary ancestry or universal human experiences, helping us discern significance among visual noise. Cognitive neuroscientists like Eric Kandel [Columbia University] to philosophers like Denis Dutton [Canterbury University, New Zealand] point to an understanding of the visual world and aesthetics out of the biological approach our course is grounded upon.

The course has no special pre- or co-requisites except a willingness to unleash your own creativity and to discuss potentially challenging texts. Please be aware that this course includes explicit images that some may find provocative or disturbing. On-time assignments and intensive class participation are expected and will contribute to your grade along with a major term project. An art or science background is not necessary. One meeting is currently planned via Zoom from an active sculpture studio in London where we can directly talk with the artist. At least one visit to a nearby museum will also be planned.

Beginning week 2, student pairs will lead the discussion of each week’s assignments (15%). Three short projects/essays will be assigned (15% each). Finally, you will choose your own (pre-approved) term project (30%) and present it in class (10%) for a more in-depth understanding of how art and science come together to illuminate a subject, for example the spiritual impact of Dürer’s hands, the clinical impact of an MRI, or the uncanny eyes of “Alita, Battle Angel”. Multi-media works are acceptable.

Required Text: Kandel, E. Reductionism in Art and Brain Science. (2016) Columbia Univ. Press Other required weekly readings will be posted on Blackboard. Blackboard should be checked daily.

Suggested Readings/viewings:

• Ammer, R., How drawing helps you think (2019). https://youtu.be/ZqlTSCvP-Z0
• Kandel, E. The Age of Insight, The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present (2012) Random House.
• Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (1959) with new Introduction (1998) Cambridge University Press
• Chatterjee, A. The Aesthetic Brain: how we evolved to desire beauty and enjoy art (2014) Oxford University Press
• Rampley, M. The Seductions of Darwin: Art, evolution and neuroscience (2017) Penn State Press
• Pessoa, L. The Entangled Brain, How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together (2022)
• The MIT Press Dutton, D. The Art Instinct, Beauty, Pleasure & Human Evolution (2009) Bloomsbury Press, NYC.

Professor Spiro Alexandratos (Chemistry)
Course Number: HONS 2011H
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:00-2:15 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

Reality is a concept that has been the focus of philosophers and scientists. What is reality? Is what we observe exactly as we see it? The problem of defining Reality is tied to the search for knowledge. From the earliest times, we asked “Ti esti?” (What exists?), then “How do you know?” followed by “Are you certain?”

This course explores philosophical and scientific views of reality and how we approach the question of knowledge in the Western tradition from antiquity to the present.

We begin at the beginning, with the pre-Socratic philosophers, then, in a seamless arc, proceed to the search from the perspective of scientists in modern times.

Course Objective: to understand what it means to know; to know Reality; and whether we can be certain of what we know.

Assigned Texts:

• Plato – the Theaetetus
• Rene Descartes - Meditations on First Philosophy
• George Berkely - A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (chapters 1 - 24)
• The Evolution of the Periodic System
• How the periodic table went from a sketch to an enduring masterpiece

Requirements: biweekly essays (1000 words), one mid-term, one final exam

This course is self-contained; it does not have prerequisites in either philosophy or science. Brilliant lectures and intense discussions provide all that can be known.

Professor Tanya Agathocleous (English)
Course Number: HONS 2011R
Mondays and Thursdays: 11:30am-12:45 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course looks at the relationship between empire and the transnational circulations of texts in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the British empire between 1857 and 1945. The British empire relied on military power to maintain control of its territories, but also on the power of print. Bibles, textbooks, literature, maps, periodicals, photographs, and political pamphlets were all important to the way imperial power was justified and administered, as well as to the way it was contested by colonial subjects. While Thomas Macaulay argued that “a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” in his attempt to influence educational policy in India, Mohandas Gandhi ran a printing press in South Africa from which he published a protest newspaper Indian Opinion and eventually the pamphlet Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), one of the key texts of Indian nationalism. The course will examine ideas about empire within texts (such as Jane Eyre) as well as the role that various kinds of texts and archives played in the governance of empire. It will draw on the disciplines of literature, history, art history and anthropology. Readings will include novels such as Jane Eyre and King Solomon’s Mines; poetry and periodicals by both British and Indian authors; and secondary texts drawn from postcolonial and empire studies, as well as nineteenth-century studies. Alongside literary texts, we will look at sociological and political writings, maps, photographs, and paintings that helped both to shape and contest empire.

Requirements:
One short paper in the first part of the semester (5-7 pages) and a long research paper (12-15 pages, submitted in draft and then final form), as well as an annotated bibliography and an abstract of the paper, submitted beforehand, and weekly contributions to the class website.

Professor Larry Shore (Film and Media Studies)
Course Number: HONS 2012C
Mondays and Thursday: 2:30-3:45 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course will examine, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the events and forces that have shaped the history of South Africa and Southern Africa and America's special relationship with South Africa.

Black-white relations have been central to the historical narratives of both countries. We will compare and contrast the history of white supremacy- and the anti-racist struggles- in the United States and South Africa. One vehicle for doing this will be the documentary film RFK in the Land of Apartheid: A Ripple of Hope.

The course will consider the history of the expansion of Dutch and British colonialism and eventual Afrikaner rule in South Africa culminating in the system of Apartheid and the opposition that it spawned. This will lead to an analysis of the dramatic transformation that took place in South Africa from February 1990 to April 1994- ¬the negotiated end of Apartheid and the first democratic elections. We will also analyze the 28 years of South African democracy, the current situation, and possible future scenarios in South Africa and the region.

In general, South Africa, and its recent history, provides a useful comparative case study for other countries that have made the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. The course will also study developments in other countries in Southern Africa and past and present United States policy towards South Africa, the region and Africa in general. We will also consider South Africa's post-Apartheid role as a continental power and how it compares to other post-colonial African countries.

The course will culminate in The Southern Africa Simulation Game. This exciting simulation game has been run every time this course has been taught. With faculty guidance, students select and research team and individual roles based on the important players in the South African and regional situation. The simulation game is conducted on a weekend at the end of the semester. It has very carefully constructed rules and controls and begins with an interesting scenario projected some time into the near future. More details will be provided in class.

Grading for the class is based primarily on a midterm, a research paper and preparation for and participation in the simulation game.

Professor Marlene Hennessey(English)
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011M
Tuesdays: 11:30-2:25 p.m.
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

Books have been a symbolic and mythic force central to the history of human culture and society. This colloquium will be an intensive introduction to the history of the book and will consider the role and function of the book as material object, artifact, and social force. Beginning with books and libraries in Mesopotamia and Antiquity and early writing materials including cuneiform, cylinder seals, papyrus, and wax tablets, we will examine how scrolls and copying texts functioned in the ancient world. We will then delve into the rise of the codex with a special focus on the evolution of the medieval book and the transition to print culture. We will broadly consider related topics such as authorship, readership, libraries and censorship. The scope of the course will also encompass other global histories of the book through topics such as Incan cord writing and Mayan codices; the central role of the book in the history of Islam; the invention of paper in China; and books in Ethiopia and sub-Saharan Africa. We will also briefly explore more recent iterations of the book, including 20^th-century artists' books, graphic novels, comics, and fanzines. Students will develop individual research projects on some aspect of book history related to the course and will be encouraged to write about books and other archival materials that we encounter on our site visits in class.

Please note: Site visits to special collections in the New York City area will be an essential part of the work of the course, as we will take a hands-on approach to book history that allows students to work with original materials. You must be willing to take subways around the city together with the class or on your own; for all outings, we will do our best to make sure that you are able to be back on campus by 2:20 pm. We will hold class meetings at the NYPL Treasures exhibition; New York Academy of Medicine Rare Book Room; Fales Library and Special Collections at NYU; Pierpont Morgan Library; Met Museum/Watson Library; and other sites TBA. The class will also host various guest speakers on a variety of book-related topics.

Requirements: short essay and presentation (3 pp; 5-7 mins); Midterm (5 pp); Research Paper (12-16 pp).

Selected Readings: All readings will be on Blackboard

Professor Jason Young
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011U
Wednesdays: 4:00-6:50 p.m.
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

The presentation of, and reliance upon, prediction is ubiquitous. We anticipate what others around us (including social friends, significant others, family members, politicians, that scary neighbor next door, etc.) are going to say, to feel, to do. Often, such concerns seem incidental; other times, they become obsessions. We rely on predictions to feel safe, to gain friends and favors, to render our world around us more tolerable. And yet, while we can convince ourselves in the short-term that we are, and that others should be, "pretty good" at making predictions, the further we pull back the lens on our track record, one over-riding conclusion repeatedly presents itself: at some point or another, we all suck at prediction.

The basic premises of this course will focus on 3 key features of peoples' tendencies to make predictions:

1. We strongly value predictions and perceive them to be useful. (We will discuss why.)
2. We all make predictions in the course of our daily lives. (We will discuss how.)
3. We too often overestimate or ignore the degree of accuracy of many of our predictions. (We will discuss who, what, and when.)

We will begin the semester focusing on basic foundational processes of human cognition and emotion to understand the mechanisms and filters used to interpret and anticipate the world around us. Most centrally, the concept of "attitude" has been used for decades to help identify our feelings about the world and to predict behavior. Other psychology-based areas of research in social cognition will be explored to understand several other thinking patterns that people often fall into that serve to make them feel "as if" their worlds are predictable, sometimes more so than they really are. Additionally, we will explore some of the forms of social influence that may lead us to behave more-or, in some cases, less-predictably than expected (e.g., psychological reactance theory).

We will then examine how these mechanisms play a role in a variety of different disciplines. A critical part of this course will include a series of discussions with specialists in other fields, including epidemiology, humor, music, physics, and business, to examine what techniques (often empirically-based) have been used to address making predictions in different disciplines, as well as the consequences of prediction errors.

Students are expected to contribute heavily to class discussions, including an assignment in which each student will help lead the discussion of selected readings at least once during the semester.

Course Evaluation will be based on:

• Two short papers (3-5 pages each): 40%
• One longer research paper (15-20 pages): 30%
• Discussion and class participation: 15%
• Contribution to the discussion questions: 5%
• Oral presentation of research paper topic: 10%

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Monica Calabritto (Romance Languages, Italian)
Course Number: HONS 2011Y
Tuesdays and Thursdays: 4:00-5:15 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This seminar will explore the subject of love in its dual nature: as physical, erotic passion and spiritual, ennobling emotion, starting with Plato's dialogue Symposium and the Treatise on Love by the Arab polymath Avicenna, who authored the Canon of Medicine, one of the most influential texts for the medical Islamic and European traditions up until at least the seventeenth century. These two works exemplify the tension between the body and the soul that is elaborated and developed in all the other texts that we will read. In both texts, the physiological/medical dimension is present, and interacts with the philosophical dimension. This interaction is replicated and amplified in Marsilio Ficino's commentary to Plato's Symposium, written in the fifteenth century, and read extensively by philosophers and writers alike. A selection of medical documents written between the early sixteenth and early seventeenth century will complete the exemplification of the connection of philosophy, medicine, and literature when it comes to the notion of love in the early modern period.

A selection of Italian, French, English and Spanish texts, composed between the beginning of the fourteenth and the end of the seventeenth century, will allow us to address, among others, the following questions:  how are the tensions between body and soul on the one hand and erotic passion and spiritual emotion on the other elaborated in these texts? In which way did Marsilio Ficino's Neo-Platonic fifteenth-century elaboration of the Symposium, affect the literature on love written between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century? Do genre and gender influence the way love is enacted in these works, and how?

What follows is a provisional reading list:

• Plato, Symposium;
• Avicenna, Treatise on Love;
• Marsilio Ficino, On Love;
• Girolamo Mercuriale, Consilia Medica (selections);
• Michel de Montaigne, "On Affectionate Relationships", "On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children", "On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse", in Essays; Baldassarre Castiglione, The Courtier (with special focus on book IV);
• Leone Ebreo, Dialogues of Love (Dialogue I; available online throughout CUNY);
• Michelangelo, Rime (selections);
• Louise Labé, Elegies and Sonnets (selections);
• Francisco de Quevedo, Poems (selections);
• William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet;
• Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness;
• Jean Racine, Phèdre;
• Madame de la Fayette, The Princess of Clèves.

Those who can read these texts in the original language are encouraged to do so. The seminar will be conducted in English. Students will be required to give an oral presentation, a written report based on the oral presentation, and a final research paper. Grading will also factor in class participation.

Professor Gavin Hollis (English)
Course Number: HONS 2012H
Tuesdays and Fridays: 1:00-2:15 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

Amalgams of science and art, maps are images of a society's knowledge and view of the world around it and beyond it. This illustrated, interdisciplinary seminar analyzes the roles that maps have played in selected works by writers and artists from Europe, North America, and the Global South from the late medieval period through to the early twenty-first century: paintings, films, poetry, drama, prose fiction, and of course maps themselves. Combining historical, thematic, and theoretical approaches to cartography, we will ask: What is cartography? How do we read and encounter maps? What cultural work do maps perform? What power do they (and their users) hold? How do cultures determine what maps mean and how they signify, what they depict and what they omit, and what their relationship is to the world they claim to represent? And to what extent do they allow for different views of the world, or even worlds beyond our own?

Texts will include King Lear by William Shakespeare, selected poems by John Donne, Brian Friel's play Translations, Kei Miller's poetry collection The Cartographer Tries to Map his Way to Zion, and selected poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Artists will include Johannes Vermeer, Albrecht Durer, Mona Hatoum, David Maisel, Julie Mehretu, Jasper Johns, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Maya Lin. We will also watch Vincent Ward's 1992 film, A Map of the Human Heart.

Learning outcomes:

By the end of this class, students will be able to:

• Demonstrate an understanding of the history of cartography from the medieval period to the present day
• Demonstrate an understanding of cultural and aesthetic links between maps and visual art
• Demonstrate an understanding of cultural and aesthetic links between maps and literature

Requirements:

• Participation, Attendance, In-Class Writing (25%)
• Three papers of 6-8 pages (25% each, including presentation):
  
  • a paper on maps and art
  • a paper on maps and literature
  • a creative map project.

Professor Calvin Smiley (Sociology)
Course Number: HONS 2012J
Mondays and Thursdays: 10:00-11:15 am
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course examines the intersection of uprisings and social movements throughout the 20^th and 21^st century that contextualize how race, rebellions, and riots inform and shape political, social, and economic conditions in the United States. By investigating various cases and events from Red Summer to Black Lives Matter, students will understand the differences between rebellions and riots as well as further explore the prominent role race plays in shaping American cities. Utilizing an interdisciplinary perspective of history, political science, and sociology, students will have a better understanding of why and what sparks uprisings and social movements.

Tentative Topics:

Race Riots & Urban Rebellions: Section one of this course will be a survey of historical events that are known as "race riots." Looking at several key events throughout the 20^th century including Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Massacre (1921); and Newark, NJ rebellion (1967), students will learn how these events started as well as the difference between calling them a "riot" versus "rebellion."

The Rise of 'Law and Order' Criminal Justice: Section two focuses around the national call for "law and order," which begins in the mid-1960s and becomes standard practice under President Richard M. Nixon and beyond. This shift in cultural dynamic gives rise to mass incarceration throughout the United States that disproportionately impacts Black Americans and other people of color.

Black Lives Matter & social media: Section three examines the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the 21^st century. While urban unrest at the hands of police harassment and police brutality has existed throughout American history, the rapid growth in technology and personal recording devices added a new layer of legitimacy to Black complaints of police discrimination.

Black Lives Matter, Global Pandemic, and Beyond: The final section of this course will bring instruction to present date looking at issues such as continued police brutality, BLM in the wake of deaths of individuals such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the call for "defund the police." All in the wake of the global pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted U.S. prison institutions and communities of color.

Tentative Assignments:

Research Paper Proposal: 20%
Annotated Bibliography: 20%
Policy Paper: 30%
Oral Presentation: 30%

Professor D'Weston Haywood  (History)
Course Number: HONS 2012K
Wednesdays: 11:30-2:20 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

When scholars conduct research, they may spend much of that time combing through dusty archives containing documents left behind by some well-known or obscure historical actor in order to tell some compelling story about the past or present. Recently, however, several scholars have rightly called the archive into question, arguing that what makes it into the archive and becomes a part of the historical record has a lot to do with power and privilege: who does and does not get access to the written word? What about silences in the archive, or when certain voices can be accounted for but not others? What about violence in the archive, that it is no accident that certain voices are preserved while others are deliberately eliminated? What if these things help the archive maintain the hegemony and racial hierarchies of the colonial project, and therefore require decolonization? This course answers these important questions with “Sonic Scholarship.” In other words, where there are silences in the archive, Sonic Scholarship unearths, recovers, imagines, and represents possible voices. This experimental and exploratory class fuses the academic and artistic, the critical and creative, to challenge students to interrogate questions of state power and white supremacy, racial justice, the political dimensions of popular culture, Black activism and public rhetoric, movement-making, Neoliberalism, and the connections between the literary and liberation politics using, perhaps, a people’s archive—Hip Hop. Working through diverse readings, documentaries, films, close listening, discussions, and lyrics that center on Black freedom struggles from the Civil Rights era to Black Lives Matter, assignments will involve critical and creative writing, research, and live student performances. Students will leave the course with a “usable history” that empowers them to produce research and knowledge in textual and sonic form intended to raise a critical voice at this critical historical moment.

Professor Janet Neary (English)
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011V
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:00-2:15 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

Collecting texts across a wide variety of genres-history, literature, visual art, administrative report, journalism-this course establishes a framework for investigating the historical, structural, economic, relationships between CUNY, slavery, and abolition. We will study the institutional, epistemological, and pedagogical forms that condition race relations at CUNY, attending, in particular, to how value is assigned and how knowledge is organized. In addition to collectively establishing the epistemological framework for this project, students will individually pursue independent research to fill out the historical archive, calculate the impact of these legacies, and consider how to redress inequities within the system. Discussions will be organized around the way the texts under consideration shed light on the long trajectory of racial justice work in the US as it relates to higher education, from the antebellum period through Black Lives Matter movement today. The course culminates in a significant independent research project and essay that contributes to the historical archive on CUNY's relationship to slavery and abolition and sheds light on our institution's history of race relations. Requirements include lively participation in class discussion; Blackboard posts before each class meeting; a short writing project designed to expand and reflect on the historical archive around CUNY, slavery, and abolition; a comprehensive research proposal; and the final research paper and presentation. You may have an opportunity to present your research to a broader audience and the course will be in conversation with students from the "MIT and Slavery" course, putting our work in comparative context, addressing, among other things, differences in public vs. private education; the role academic specialization (engineering, art, or liberal arts) plays in understanding and excavating this history; and various social and institutional relationships to class and wealth production.

Professor Sonali Perera (English)
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011W
Mondays and Thursdays: 11:30-12:45 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

What does it mean to invoke human rights in an age where, as one literary theorist puts it, "the banalization of human rights means that violations are often committed in the Orwellian name of human rights themselves, cloaked in the palliative rhetoric of humanitarian intervention?" What can the study of literature teach us about the paradoxes and enabling fictions of human rights? How do we understand the emergence of the Human Rights novel as a literary genre-as "popular" fiction? Where and how does literature as cultural practice intersect with the activism of international civil society groups and local human rights initiatives? By way of addressing these questions, in this course we will study the formal, historical, and ideological conjunctions between human rights and particular world literary forms.

In brief, our objectives are twofold: Towards framing the question of how we produce the concept of human rights in historical and literary studies, (1) we will read historical scholarship tracking the origins of the United Nations and International Law. (2) We will also consider alternative genealogies for internationalism opened up in postcolonial feminism, critical race studies, the literature of social movements, and other forms of world literature.

We will view two films: Dheepan (2015) and My Name is Pauli Murray (2021). Via Zoom, we will also have the opportunity to hear from guest speakers (interdisciplinary scholars, activists, and cultural workers) from South Asia and Europe as well as North America.

REQUIRED TEXTS (these may be purchased from bookstores or borrowed from libraries):

J.M Coetzee, Disgrace (Viking); Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost (Vintage); Sinan Antoon, The Book of Collateral Damage (Yale UP); Bessie Head, A Question of Power (Heinemann or Wavelend Press edition); Lynn Nottage, Ruined (Theater Communications Group/TCG)

ADDITIONAL REQUIRED READINGS WILL BE AVAILABLE ON BLACKBOARD). THEY MAY INCLUDE: Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (selections); Giorgio Agamben, "Beyond Human Rights" from Means Without End; Walter Benjamin "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and other selections; Sophocles, Antigone; Ariel Dorfman, Widows; Saadat Hasan Manto, "Toba Tek Singh" from Khalid Hasan trans. A Wet Afternoon (short story); Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera (selections); Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How it Ends (selection); Aime Cesaire, A Discourse on Colonialism (selection) ; Jacqueline Rose, "On the Universality of Madness" and "Apathy and Accountability"; Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (selections) ; Crystal Parikh, Writing Human Rights (selection); Joseph Slaughter, "Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: The Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law" from Human Rights, Inc ; Juliana Spahr, Du Bois's Telegram (selection); Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (selection); Oxford Amnesty Lecture series (selection)Text of the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Course Requirements:

1. A 10 minute oral presentation on one of the weekly history, theory, or literary readings (20%)
2. Take-Home Midterm exam (20%)
3. Two page prospectus for the final paper (10%)
4. Final paper (15-20 pages, double spaced, 12 point font) paper (35%)
5. Engaged Class Participation and discussion board posts (15%)

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Leah Garrett, Jewish & Hebrew Studies
Course Number: HONS 2012G
Mondays and Thursdays: 2:45-4:00 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

During World War Two, the Germans undertook the Final Solution to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. Jews fought back in a variety of ways against the Nazi evil, and new evidence for this is appearing all the time. Jewish resistors fought to the last in ghettos, on trains, even in the death camps themselves. And Jews also served on the front lines in all the Allied armies: in the United States, more than half a million signed up to fight the Nazi menace. In Britain there was even a secret commando unit of German Jewish refugees who served as the tip of the spear and were crucial to the Allied success. Because the war for them was personal, it meant that they battled the enemy with a focus and determination that often led to acts of unimaginable heroism.

This course will examine the story of Jewish soldiers in World War Two through a variety of means: history books, novels, films, documentaries, and poetry. We will use a global perspective that will historically contextualize the Jewish soldier and the role that they played, be it in the US military where Jews for the first time were welcome into a brotherhood of arms, to the Russian army where many Jews had to hide their background to assimilate into Soviet culture. We will also look at the experiences of African Americans in the war. To round out our study we will also take at least one field trip.

Requirements:
3 short, one-page response papers on the readings; 5 reading quizzes; 1 research paper, 10-12 typed pages, with at least four outside sources; 1 group presentation

Reading List:

• The Storm of War : A New History of the Second War, Author: Roberts, Andrew, Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, Year Published: 2012
• Point of No Return, Author: Martha Gellhorn, Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr, Year Published: 1995
• The Naked and the Dead, Author: Norman Mailer, Publisher: St Martins Pr Special, Edition: 5, Year Published: 2000
• Nine Stories, Author: Salinger, J. D., Publisher: Little Brown & Company, Year Published: 2018
• Freedom Flyers : The Tuskegee Airmen of World War, Author: Moye, J. Todd, Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incor, Year Published: 2012
• X Troop : The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War, Author: Garrett, Leah, Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publ, Year Published: 2021
• Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition, Author: Heller, Joseph, Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Edition: 50, Year Published: 2011

Potential Short list of books/films/authors to be studied:

• History Books:
  • GI Jew: How WW2 Changed a Generation by Deborah Dash Moore
  • Soviet Jews in World War Two, eds. Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh
  • Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War Two by J. Todd Moye
  • X Troop by Leah Garrett
• Novels and Readings:
  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  • The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
  • Phillip Roth short stories
  • Isaac Babel short stories
• Films:
  • Catch-22
  • The Caine Mutiny
  • G I Jew

Professor Rebecca Connor (English)
Course Number: HONS 20147
Tuesdays and Fridays: 9:45-11:00 am
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

If there is a single, defining object of our time - it is the mask. Yet this item, originally intended to prevent the spread of a highly contagious virus, quickly became much, much more. Now as much a symbol as an object, our experience of masks has never been more powerful-or more fraught—than it is today.

Because masks are a tool of transformation, they have always figured prominently in the gothic, from dystopias to horror. We will examine masks in Franju's 1960s classic film 'Les Yeux Sans Visage' ('Eyes Without A Face'), to the ever-popular 'Friday the 13th,' to the global smash-hit Korean TV series 'Squid Games.' Along the way, we will consider the use of masks in the 17th-century Venetian casino and the 18th-century masquerade ball; in Ancient Greek drama and Japanese Noh; in Mexican wrestling and the identities of super-heroes. We will also examine the metaphorical masks worn on social media, where the authentic self is filtered and perfected, and where the consequences of that inauthenticity, we now know, can be highly problematic. Why, we will ask, has the mask fascinated us for so long—and why does it continue to do so?

Your grade will be made up of the following:

• In-class participation
• Weekly written responses, including Bb, tests and examinations
• Two 5-7 page papers

Professor Martin Chodorow (Psychology)
Course Number: HONS 20151
Mondays and Wednesdays: 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

About seventy years ago, researchers in several disciplines realized that they were asking similar questions about the human mind but were using quite different approaches in their attempts to find answers. They began to discuss the ways in which their efforts might complement one another. From these discussions emerged Cognitive Science, the interdisciplinary study of the human mind from the perspectives of psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience, and philosophy.

In this course, we will examine five areas of current debate in Cognitive Science:

• Mental Architecture: What is the structure of the mind? Is it a unitary cognitive system, or does it consist of separate, independent modules?
• Philosophy of Mind: What is a mental state? Must it be identical to a physiological state? Could a machine ever have a mind?
• Mental Representation: To what degree are mental representations symbolic and rule-based? To what extent are they non-symbolic, probabilistic, and associative?
• Language Acquisition: How much of human language is innate, and how much is acquired through experience?
• Reasoning and Decision Making: How rational are human beings?

Reading List:

• Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science, Author: Bermdez, Jos Luis, Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Edition: 3

Course requirements:
The format of the course will be lecture and discussion. Grades will be based on three short written assignments (4-6 pages each) and a term paper (15 pages) with an oral presentation. Readings will be drawn from primary and secondary sources.

Professor Naby Avcioglu  (Art and Art History)
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011H
Mondays and Thursdays: 2:45-4:00 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium proposes a critical thematic and historical overview of architectural, social, political and cultural aspects of cities in the Middle East from the seventh century to the present. Often described as "Islamic" since the 19^th century by Orientalists seeking religious authenticity, these cities were either inherited or founded at various times and under different circumstances by Muslims and became powerful cosmopolitan centers. Pointing to the rhetoric surrounding the "Islamic city" in the West, which describes it as a physically haphazard, socially segregated and culturally exotic space (or stagnant, traditional and despotic), we will engage with the challenges of understanding the city in its own terms. We will probe essentialist tendencies as well as the very notion of an "Islamic city" and study social processes and cultural forces that shape them through the history of architecture, urbanism, literature and legal documents. The course will discuss early urban developments under Muslim rule, whether in pre-existing cities or newly established settlements, exploring which cultural, political, social and religious elements shaped them (e.g. architectural models existing before the Arab-Muslim conquests, building regulations in medieval Islamic law). In particular, we will discuss the relationship between architecture, urban structures and social and political realities such as the location of power in the city or segregation based on gender, ethnicity, sectarian or religious identity. Likewise, we will explore the significance of cities and their unique constellations of material wealth, cosmopolitanism and critical intellectual mass for political, social, material and cultural dynamics in Islamic history. We will also consider representations of cities in visual images, such as maps and panoramas, and in literature produced in the West and the Islamic world and explore the reputations of different cities, cultural life in cities more generally speaking, and functions of writing about the city (e.g. in travelogues, salvation history or the imaginary geography which underlies imperial ambitions). While we will focus on some of the traditional centers in the Islamic world (such as Istanbul, Cairo, Isfahan, Damascus and Baghdad), we will also discuss the remaking of Beirut, Abu Dhabi and Mecca as well as engaging in comparative exercises with European and North American cities to problematize in many ways the essentializing notion of the "Islamic city".

Reading List: No textbooks are required for this class.

List of assignments:
Students will be divided into groups at the beginning of the colloquium and assigned a city for the duration of the semester. Students are expected to familiarize themselves with the history, architecture and topography of the city. Working sessions and exercises throughout the semester will help you apply the theoretical and general discussions to a specific example. Assignments will include 2 short essays, 1 map presentation with a group presentation and a final paper of about 10 pages.

Professor Marlene Hennessy (English)
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011T
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium will focus on the Black Death in Europe, the Great Mortality of 1348-1350 that left between one-half and one-third of the population dead. This global pandemic is widely considered the most devastating epidemic in human history and profoundly changed every sphere of medieval society, including the economy, religion, medicine, literature, and the arts. We will become acquainted with the new paradigms for understanding the Black Death that have emerged out of recent research in the fields of history, genetics, and bioarchaeology. Indeed, our historical and scientific understanding of the Black Death has changed dramatically over the past 20 years, with many groundbreaking studies published in the past few years that we will study in this course. To that end, we will explore what the new plague science has to tell us about Yersinia pestis, the causative organism of the plague that spread across the globe for many centuries, possibly beginning even a hundred years earlier than previously thought. We will then look at a broad range of historical sources such as chronicle writings, plague tracts, and other medical texts to help us reconstruct this medieval pandemic as a social, cultural, and political event. Special attention will be paid to the death-oriented piety of medieval culture and to the literary and visual evidence of the Danse Macabre and the Ars Moriendi, as well as other new developments in art, literature, and religious life that came in the aftermath of the plague, such as devotions to “Plague Saints.” For the medieval English context, texts to be read include Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale; John Lydgate’s The Dance of Death; The Disputation between the Body and the Worms; and the morality play, Everyman. Continental texts to be read in translation include Boccaccio’s Decameron. Three films will also be viewed: Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011); Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Decameron (1971); and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). We will take a field trip to the NY Academy of Medicine Rare Book Room to look at medieval and early modern medical manuscripts and early printed books, including early plague tracts. Guest speakers (TBD) will visit the class from diverse academic fields (medieval history, literature, art history, public health, archaeology, and medicine) in order to enhance our understanding of the material.

Requirements:

• one research paper (15-20 pages, submitted in two drafts);
• one 7-10 minute oral report based on one of the secondary readings for the week on the syllabus, which is handed in as a 4-5 page written essay (Paper #1).
• Take-home Midterm.
• Short, weekly Discussion Board posts on Blackboard are required (250 words).

Required books for purchase:

• The Black Death, ed. Rosemary Horrox (Manchester, 1994) paper $18.50 (ISBN-10: 0719034981).
• Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron: Norton Critical Edition (transl. Mark Musa) (ISBN-13 : 978-0393091328), $20.45.
• Other assigned readings will be posted on Blackboard, including all of those from Monica H. Green, ed., Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World. Rethinking the Black Death (Arc Medieval Press, 2015) (no cost, PDF).

Professor Jason Young
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011U
Wednesdays; 10:10am-1:00pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

The presentation of, and reliance upon, prediction is ubiquitous. We anticipate what others around us (including social friends, significant others, family members, politicians, that scary neighbor next door, etc.) are going to say, to feel, to do. Often, such concerns seem incidental; other times, they become obsessions. We rely on predictions to feel safe, to gain friends and favors, to render our world around us more tolerable. And yet, while we can convince ourselves in the short-term that we are, and that others should be, "pretty good" at making predictions, the further we pull back the lens on our track record, one over-riding conclusion repeatedly presents itself: at some point or another, we all suck at prediction.

The basic premises of this course will focus on 3 key features of peoples' tendencies to make predictions:

1. We strongly value predictions and perceive them to be useful. (We will discuss why.)
2. We all make predictions in the course of our daily lives. (We will discuss how.)
3. We too often overestimate or ignore the degree of accuracy of many of our predictions. (We will discuss who, what, and when.)

We will begin the semester focusing on basic foundational processes of human cognition and emotion to understand the mechanisms and filters used to interpret and anticipate the world around us. Most centrally, the concept of "attitude" has been used for decades to help identify our feelings about the world and to predict behavior. Other psychology-based areas of research in social cognition will be explored to understand several other thinking patterns that people often fall into that serve to make them feel "as if" their worlds are predictable, sometimes more so than they really are. Additionally, we will explore some of the forms of social influence that may lead us to behave more-or, in some cases, less-predictably than expected (e.g., psychological reactance theory).

We will then examine how these mechanisms play a role in a variety of different disciplines. A critical part of this course will include a series of discussions with specialists in other fields, including epidemiology, humor, music, physics, and business, to examine what techniques (often empirically-based) have been used to address making predictions in different disciplines, as well as the consequences of prediction errors.

Students are expected to contribute heavily to class discussions, including an assignment in which each student will help lead the discussion of selected readings at least once during the semester.

Course Evaluation will be based on:

• Two short papers (3-5 pages each): 40%
• One longer research paper (15-20 pages): 30%
• Discussion and class participation: 15%
• Contribution to the discussion questions: 5%
• Oral presentation of research paper topic: 10%

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Tom Ribitzky, Ph.D. (Baruch College, Comparative Literature)
Course Number: HONS 2011X
Tuesdays and Fridays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: TBA
3 hours, 3 credits

The legend of a man who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge and power is the defining allegory of modernity. This course invites you to explore the various iterations of this figure, from an evil exploiter to a tortured artist, across different genres (literature, theater, philosophy, film, music, visual art, and even political and economic theory). Faust gives us the opportunity to ask what role art plays in a world that seems to move on without it. What are the dangers of both trivializing art and of obsessively pursuing it? What is the relation between ethics and aesthetics? Between art and critique? And what are the politics that have shaped this legend from its origins in the Renaissance and the Romantic period to its resurgence as a critique of Fascism, both in Germany and in the United States? By asking these questions, we will examine the Faust legend as a template for understanding who we are in history as we make decisions that will lock us into our future.

Required Readings:

• Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. (Norton Critical Edition). 1^st edition. Ed. David Scott Kastan. New York: Norton, 2005.
• Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. (Norton Critical Edition). 2^nd edition. Trans. Walter W. Arndt. Ed. Cyrus Hamilton. New York: Norton, 1998.
• Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. (Norton Critical Edition). 3^rd edition. Ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie. New York: Norton, 2019.
• Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Vintage, 1999.
• All other works will be provided through Blackboard and/or in class.

Grade Breakdown:

• Participation: 10%
• Quizzes / In-Class Writing Assignments: 5%
• Oral Presentation: 5%
• 5 short essay responses: 10% each = 50%
• Final Project: 15%
• Final Exam: 15%

Professor Richard Kaye (English)
Course Number: HONS 2011Z
Tuesdays and Thursdays: 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: TBA
3 hours, 3 credits

The question of what it means to be human lies at the core of Western philosophical and scientific inquiry. As conceptualized in the Western tradition, preeminently in the writing of thinkers such as Aristotle and Descartes, "humanity" typically has been defined in opposition to the animal, which is said to lack the rationality, consciousness, and language that we adduce as the clearest evidence of our difference from beasts. However, recent scientific research has raised fundamental questions regarding the relationship between humans and animals.  Drawing on ethical, legal, aesthetic, psychological, religious, and scientific perspectives, the class will consider the relations between animals and humans with special attention to British and American literary representation from the nineteenth century to the present. Students will take up current theoretical debates on animal rights, ecological ethics, and "post-humanist" philosophy.  We will begin with Aristotle's treatise "History of Animals" (a foundational work of the biological and zoological sciences) as well Descartes controversial conception of animals as unthinking machines. The class will then examine Jeremy Bentham's section of his 1789 "The Principles of Morals and Legislation" on the "rights of non-human animals" and then explore sections from Darwin's 1859 "The Origin of Species" and 1871 "The Descent of Man." The class will compare the different attitudes towards animals within the frameworks of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam as well as in the secular tradition. We will consider Rudyard Kipling's richly allegorical "The Jungle Book" (1894) and H.G. Wells' fantastical dystopian and anti-vivisectionist "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1896).  Throughout Britain, anti-vivisectionist critiques-many of them articulated by proto-feminist activists and anti-colonial writers--forged a connection between Englishness, egalitarian ideals, kindness to animals, and anti-colonialist politics. Recent contemporary debates dealing with animal consciousness, the ethical treatment of animals, the justifiability of zoos, and the rights of non-human creatures will be considered through readings in behavioral science, psychology, religion, philosophy and the law through the writings of Peter Singer, Vickie Hearne, Barbara Hernstein Smith, Sandra Harding, Josephine Donovan, Temple Grandin, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Darnton, Richard Posner, Daniel Dennett, Steven Wise, and Donna Harraway. We will explore four films that meditate on the subject of the animal-human divide: Robert Bresson's 1966 "Au Hazard, Balthazar," Alfred Hitchcock's 1963, "The Birds," Werner Herzog's 2005 "Grizzly Man," and Louie Psihoyos's 2009 documentary "The Cove."

Requirements: Weekly written responses to prompts on the readings, mid-term paper, and a final paper

Professor Janet Neary (English)
Course Number: HONS 2012E
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: TBA
3 hours, 3 credits

As recently as 2011, Stephen Best argued that the visual archive of slavery is characterized by absence and lack. Lamenting the dearth of visual material produced by enslaved people, Best claimed that "[t]here are no visual equivalents of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," a claim which overlooks Incidents' own significance within mid-19^th-century visual culture. While the recent explosion of critical work on African Americans and 19^th-century visual culture has made Best's assertion increasingly difficult to support, it speaks to a series of critical binaries that have limited our understanding of the ways African Americans generated, adapted, and transformed the technologies and terms of a visual culture that has continued to disproportionately affect their lives. By contending that images and iconography are contained exclusively within a visual archive, or treating African Americans as either the object or subject of that archive, critics misapprehend the scope and operation of visual culture and perpetuate stark divisions between object and subject, as well as image and word, which formerly enslaved people and their descendants have been contesting since the late 18^th century.

In this course we will study a broad range of texts-literary, visual, and performance-at the intersection of race and visual culture, focusing particularly (though not exclusively) on African American cultural producers' responses to their experience of visual objectification. Readings are loosely organized around the following critical flashpoints that have come to organize scholarship on the long arc of African American visual culture: the claim that there is an absence of early visual art or photography produced by African Americans; African American responses to institutional and political constraints on their cultural production; the ambivalent effects of abolitionist iconography; the commodification of blackness; issues of cultural appropriation; and the problem of depicting black suffering. To capture the history and legacy of African American visual culture, we will toggle between present-day cultural producer's interventions into existing forms and genres and early foundational texts that articulate African American visual theory, looking at Toyin Ojih Odutola's interventions into portraiture, for example, alongside Frederick Douglass's lecture "The Age of Pictures." We will examine key works of African American visual theory, analyzing their formal properties-attending to issues of framing, perspective, the relationship of word and image, tone, and the interplay of absence and excess-as well as their historical contexts, conditions of production, legacies, audiences, and reception. Requirements include lively participation in class discussion, regular posts to the BlackBoard discussion forum, a review essay on exhibition or performance in the city relevant to course themes, a take-home mid-term exam, and a final research paper. To enrich our discussions, it will be a requirement to have your camera on.

Professor Rolando Pérez  (Romance Languages, Spanish)
Course Number: HONS 2012F
Mondays and Thursdays: 2:45-4:00 pm
Online
3 hours, 3 credits

Latin America's rich tradition of essay writing, philosophical debate, and cultural criticism spanning several hundred years has received too little attention in North America. Collectively, this tradition is sometimes referred to as pensamiento, or 'thought,' to mark it as a broader domain of public discourse than that which occurs only within academic institutions. The Cuban José Martí, for example, one of the greatest thinkers of Latin America, wrote much of his writings for journals and newspapers. The Argentinian Faustino Sarmiento wrote his most influential work in a form that is part memoir, part travel writing. The founding conceptualization of human rights that emerged from the discussion between Spanish priests Las Casas and Sepúlveda was developed in the form of theological debate in church courts. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's critical commentary on the Conquest takes the form of a historical account. The world-renowned Chilean Pablo Neruda used the poetic form to convey the values of the Conquest, and the historical uniqueness of the peoples and cultures it helped to produce. And Peruvian theorist José Carlos Mariátegui developed his ideas through a sociological analysis of how to make radical social change in Peru.  Each one of these thinkers, whether through literature or philosophical analysis, has contributed to a body of knowledge that constitutes a philosophical outlook on the history and culture of the region that is crucial for an understanding of present day Latin America. The object of this course, then, is to explore the way in which questions of colonialism, politics, economics, human rights, etc., have been dealt with across disciplines and genres. And as such, many of the texts we will read operate simultaneously as philosophy, as essays, and as literature. This approach will help students learn to read the texts through multiple frames of analysis.

This course will give students an appreciation of the complexity and history of Latino/Latin American intellectual culture; provide examples of good interdisciplinary work; teach students how to understand and assess primary texts, by a number of diverse criteria; and most importantly, engage students in exploration and active debate over the topics of the readings, from human rights to cultural autonomy to identity to the nature of modernity.

Course Requirements:
There will be one short ungraded paper (2-3 pages), two short papers (3-5 pages), one in-class mid-term, and one final paper (12-15 pages). A draft of the final paper will be due in late November, and returned with comments for a final revision.

Final grades will be tabulated as follows: average of your two short papers: 20% Mid-term: 30%; Final paper: 40%; class participation: 10%.

THHP Class Participation Policy
It is expected that all THHP students attend and participate in every meeting of every colloquium in which they enroll.

Professor Allan Frei (Geography)
Professor Steven Greenbaum (Physics and Astronomy)
Course Number: HONS 30131
Mondays and Thursdays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: TBA
3 hours, 3 credits

The energy portion of this course will begin with the fundamental concept of energy as the capacity to do mechanical work, which forms the basis of transportation, electricity for industrial and home use and  residential heating and cooling. Basic concepts beginning with the difference between energy and power and numerical conversion between different energy units (e.g., kWh - kilowatt hours and BTU - British Thermal Units) will be discussed with many examples provided. We will cover energy generation schemes, from fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewable (wind and solar) sources as well as infrastructure issues such as electrical transmission, storage, and the opportunities and challenges of widespread adoption of electric cars and buses.

The environmental portion of this course will address energy production in the context of coupled human and natural systems. Such interactions, which have long been a key area of interdisciplinary study for geographers, include processes related to the earth sciences (e.g., atmospheric science, hydrology, geology, ecology) as well as social sciences (e.g. history, economics, political science) and even humanities (e.g. environmental philosophy). We will consider how different modes of production of energy affect the environment, and how the environment affects energy production. We will also consider how social forces affect decisions about energy production, including case studies such as the widespread power outages in Texas during February, 2021; and the 1960s proposal by Con Edison to build a pumped storage hydroelectric plant for New York City at Storm King Mountain in the Hudson Valley.

There will be one or two field trips, depending on COVID and other contingencies, with possible destinations:

1. Big Allis (Rise Light & Power) natural gas-fired electric power plant in Queens
2. Indian Point (Energy) nuclear power plant in Buchanan, NY
3. Storm King Mountain, NY

Profs Greenbaum and Frei will give lectures on alternate weeks of a two class per week schedule (and attend each other's lectures). Course grades will be based on an in-class midterm, in-class final, and team (3-4 students/team) presentations on topics to be determined.

The prerequisite for this class is one year of high school physics or high school chemistry (some review may be required!)

Professor Gerald Press (Philosophy)
Guest Lecturers
Course Number: HONS 30179
Tuesdays and Fridays:  2:10-3:25 pm
Room: TBA
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium will be an introduction to a number of the most influential ideas, authors, and books of the last 500 years: Darwinism and Evolutionary theory, Marxism and Revolutionary theory, Freud and Psychoanalysis, Reformation theology, Fanon and Black identity, philosophic rationalism, political realism, the earliest European novel as well as a romantic novel that set off a wave of suicides in the 18^th century.

Guest speakers will include Diana Conchado (Spanish, Romance Languages, and COH), Daniel Addison and Laura Keating (Philosophy), K. E. Saavik Ford (Astronomy, BMCC), Philip Alcabes (Public Health), Eckhard Kuhn-Osius (German), Roger Persell (Biology), and Robyn Marasco (Political Science).

As you can imagine, reading will be heavy and there will be high expectations for class participation; on the other hand, writing requirements will be relatively light: (1) either three 1,000-word essays or two 1,000-word essays and an oral presentation on individual books and authors and (2) a 2,500 word term paper bringing together books and ideas from different disciplinary perspectives.

Readings

1. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), The Prince, Discourses on Livy (Selections)
2. Martin Luther (1483-1546, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, The Freedom of a Christian, Prefaces to the New Testament
3. Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616), Don Quixote
4. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (selections)
5. René Descartes (1596-1650), Philosophical Writings (selections)
6. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Critique of Pure Reason (selections)
7. Goethe (1749-1832), Faust
8. Charles Darwin (1809-82), selections from The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man
9. Karl Marx (1818-83), selections from "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," "Theses on Feuerbach," "The German Ideology," "The Communist Manifesto," and "On the Jewish Question"
10. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), selections from works such as The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, Totem and Taboo
11. Frantz Fanon (1925-61), selections from his writings, which have influenced anti-colonial movements in Africa & the Caribbean, Black Power in the U.S., and liberation movements in many nations of the world.

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Vishwa Adluri (Philosophy)
Course Number: HONS 2011P
Tuesdays and Fridays: 12:45-2:00 pm
Online
3 hours, 3 credits

This course explores the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory and theories of modernity. The Ramayana tells the story of the hero and heir apparent Rama-his pedagogy, initiation, maturity, conquest, exile, and battle to recover his wife, before he can be installed as the rightful king of the ideal, just polity. We will contrast Rama's experiences with Oedipus's. How does Rama's journey differ from Oedipus's? What is the role of initiation in maturity? How do Rama and Oedipus, each in their own way, offer alternatives to and parables for modernity, understood as an anti-heroic age (Nietzsche)? And how do psychoanalytic insights permit us to simultaneously recover the heroic perspective and offer a diagnosis of modernity?

Required texts:

• Swami Venkatesananda, The Concise Ramayana of Valmiki
• Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, vol. 7
• Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus (Meineck and Woodruff trans.)
  

Course Requirements:

1. All students are responsible for a mid-term paper (10 pages min.) which counts toward 50% of their grade.
2. The mid-term paper will be on one of two questions pertaining to general aspects of Hinduism. I will distribute the questions in class one week before the paper is due. You are required to edit your papers for correct spelling and grammar. I reserve the right to reject any paper that does not meet these standards.
3. You will have the option of rewriting your mid-term paper for a better grade if you wish. I do not accept late assignments.
4. There will also be a final exam with two short questions. The final exam is 30% of your grade.
5. Regular reading counts toward 10% of your grade.
6. Class participation counts toward a further 10% of your grade.
7. Regular attendance is required; any student who misses more than three classes without notice will have to see me before he/she can continue attending. I take attendance for every session.

Course Policies:
Every student is required to meet with me at least once a semester during office hours to discuss his/her progress.

Professor Catherine Coppola (Music)
Course Number: HONS 2012D
Mondays and Thursdays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Online
3 hours, 3 credits

Opera is a nexus for cultural and artistic studies. Viewed from that stance, the course will examine the literary sources of opera librettos in plays, stories, and folk tales; the social and political context from which the works grow and in which they continue to exist; and their reception, including the role of censorship in their time and ours. Students will confront societal and political issues, understand and apply musical aesthetics to the relationship between music and text, and evaluate offensive aspects in historical and contemporary context. We will sort through reactions to the beautiful music as a kind of guilty pleasure, or as some have described it, a siren song that can lull us away from difficult aspects of the plot. We will debate what would be lost if these works were to be banned, and what we as a society can learn by keeping them in repertoire and, equally important, in discussion. Confronting political correctness from an unexpected standpoint, rather than defend tradition for its own sake, we'll challenge the notion that we are in any position to 'clutch our pearls' about -isms in 19^th- and 20^th-operas.

Misogyny and racism cannot be relegated to an uncomfortable past. To participate in how society moves forward from the tipping point of 2020, we must welcome difficult conversations around canonic works. Students will see firsthand how these urgent questions stimulate scholarship in the book project suggested by Dr. Coppola's editor, examining core operatic repertoire that has come under fire for offending modern sensibilities. Within a historical, analytical, and sociological frame, we'll work together in a nuanced way that takes into account the fallacies of context (that no one was addressing inequity in their time) and change (that we have moral high ground today, the counterweight for which one has to look no further than the current week's news).

Weekly readings, responses to operatic scenes (the Met is closed for the season, but we are fortunate to have full access to the Hunter Database-MetOpera on Demand) both in class and in written and discussion board assignments, and one presentation with feedback from the class to workshop.

Professor Phil Alcabes (Department of Nutrition and Public Health)
Course Number: HONS 20138
Mondays and Thursdays: 4:10-5:25 pm
Online
3 hours, 3 credits

What will Americans make of the coronavirus outbreak, once it's over? How do we explain it to ourselves now? In this course we will critically examine this claim: An epidemic, a pandemic, an outbreak-whatever it's called, it is a story. It's a human way of imagining ourselves coherently in a universe that defies coherent explanation.

What makes each epidemic unique isn't the causative agent. Some epidemics involve a virus, like SARS-CoV2, HIV, or Ebola virus; others, other germs (Vibrio cholerae, MRSA); and many involve no germ at all: epidemics of obesity, teen suicide, opioid overdose, and so forth. What distinguishes each epidemic is how the story is told.

We will read and view accounts of earlier pandemics, including the Plague of Athens, the Black Death and later plague outbreaks, cholera, polio, and HIV/AIDS. Then, we'll look at accounts of coronavirus, and see if we can understand what story we are telling ourselves about ourselves when we talk about the coronavirus pandemic.

Readings and viewings:

• Selections from Samuel Pepys' diary
• Albert Camus, The Plague
• Thomas Mann, "Death in Venice"
• Tony Kushner, Angels in America, parts 1 and 2
• Philip Roth, Nemesis
• John M. Barry, The Great Influenza
• Susan Sontag, "Illness as Metaphor" and "AIDS and Its Metaphors"
• F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu (film)
• Elia Kazan, Panic in the Streets (film)

Pre-requisite: A 3-credit lab course.

Professor Richard Kaye (English)
Course Number: HONS 20163
Mondays and Thursdays: 2:45-4:00 pm
Online
3 hours, 3 credits

Modernism was a radical European and American literary and cultural phenomenon that was powerfully related to the energies-scientific, technological, philosophical, psychological, and political-that we associate with modernity. Modernist artists typically cherished intellectual difficulty, lyrical discordance, formal abstraction, and heightened subjectivity, as "realism" came under skeptical and sometimes ferocious attack. We will consider T. S. Eliot's radical break with nineteenth-century poetics in such works as "The Waste Land," D. H. Lawrence's scandal-generating erotic fiction such as "Women in Love," and Virginia Woolf's experiments in highly subjective consciousness in fiction such as "To the Lighthouse."  We will consider Claude Debussy's 1911 "The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian" (performed in Paris and banned by the Catholic Church for its bold depiction of a Christian saint performed by a woman, the renowned Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein) and Igor Stravinsky's 1913 "The Rites of Spring"  (which generated riots at its Paris premiere) we will focus on modernist spectacle. Picasso" scandal-generating 1907 painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," which, like Debussy and Strindberg's works, harbored sensational erotic elements.  (The painting is set in a bordello and its female figures are prostitutes). We will explore, too, how modernist artists rebelled against--but also drew strength from--their creative precursors. Some critics argue, for example, that "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" was a response to Henri Matisse's paintings "Le Bonheur de Vivre" and "Blue Nude. Advanced photographers, meanwhile, struggled both to assimilate and to reject the conventions of painting, as photography's fetishization of the "real" militated against the growing modernist impulse towards abstraction in the visual arts.  How modernists reacted to one another's work is another issue we will explore, whether in Gertrude Stein's exuberant endorsement of Picasso's art or Eliot's characterization of Lawrence as a dangerous "heretic." From Surrealism and Dada to Futurism and Imagism, competing artistic movements flourished across Europe and America, with modernist writers ranging across the political spectrum. Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" staked out a claim for a feminist literary tradition and Picasso created an anti-fascist masterpiece in his 1934 painting "Guernica," a response to the Spanish Civil War. Meanwhile, Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Lawrence frequently embraced a strident reactionary politics. In "Heart of Darkness," the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad examined, with elegant pessimism and bitter irony, the legacy of European colonialism. The class will explore such manifestos of modernism as Eliot's defense of "impersonality" and "tradition" over "convention" in poetry and Woolf's insistence that works of art be "semi-transparent." Important, as well, are the new systems of twentieth-century thought (Einstein's advances in physics altered conceptions of time and space, Freud's invention of psychoanalysis as mining a hidden psychological reality, and Bergson's philosophical investigations into time and consciousness as subjectively experienced). We will view Bernardo Bertolucci's 1971 film "The Conformist." which recaptures the modernist moment as it intersected with psychoanalytic ideas about sexual repression and the rise of fascist politics. Finally, the class will consider the critique of modernism offered by post-modernist critics, who question the modernist movement's posture of "difficulty," deliberate difficulty, universalism, elitism, and claims of revolutionary break-through in the arts. In addition to the primary readings, the class will take up the writings of such major critics, scholars, and writers as Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, R.P. Blackmur, Meyer Schapiro, Roger Shattuck, Charles Rosen, Pauline Kael, Linda Nochlin, Rosalind Krauss, Susan Sontag, John Richardson, and Mary Ann Caws.

Requirements: A mid-term paper and a final paper that may be expanded from the mid-term paper.

Professor Maria Fischer (Romance Languages, Spanish)
Professor Mary Roldan (History)
Course Number: HONS 3011A
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Online
3 hours, 3 credits

State-sponsored violence has taken place in several Latin American societies in the twentieth century.  This course examines the contexts and effects of political and social violence in Latin America during the '60s and '70s through the years of democratic transition in the '80s.  What is the legacy of violence and how has it shaped individual and collective notions of citizenship, justice, identity, politics, and history?  What are the causes of violence and how does it operate? How do individuals/nations remember violence and how do those memories shape imagination, a sense of self, interactions with others, and understandings of power? How do societies deal with the aftermath of violence and the need to achieve reconciliation or give voice to the impact of traumatic events of national scope? A central premise of the course is that how violence is narrated matters, constituting a powerful means of resisting oblivion, recuperating memory, or even, perpetuating violence (for instance, when certain acts, memories, or responsibilities are erased.) Narrating violence can be a way of establishing voice, asserting agency, and imbuing seemingly incomprehensible experiences with meaning.  We will explore these issues from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective (literature, history, art) focused on close readings of monographs, memoirs, official documents, novels, poetry, visual arts, and film in countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Colombia.

Reading List:

1. Rosero, Evelio. The Armies. NY: New Directions 2009. ISBN-10 : 0811218643 ISBN-13 : 978-0811218641 $14.89 new (used from $2.49)
2. Abad Fanciolince, Héctor. Oblivium: A Memoir. London: Old Street Publishing, 2010. ISBN 978-1906964221. $12.79 new (used from $4.00)
3. Dorfman, Ariel. Death and the Maiden. NY: Penguin, 1991. ISBN 978-0140246841. $12.71 new (used from $1.21)
4. Nona Fernández, Space Invaders ISBN : 1644450070 ISBN : 9781644450079 $12.59 new (used from $3.99)

Additional pdfs of other readings will be posted on the course Blackboard site.

Course Requirements:
75 pp+ of reading per week. There will be 2-3 short paper assignments (2-3 pages each), one mid-term exam, an oral presentation, and a final paper. A final paper proposal is to be approved by the instructors by mid-April, and an 8-10 page final essay will be due during the examination period in mid-May.

Professor Hal Grossman (Library)
Professor Marlene Hennessy (English)
Course Number: HONS 3011M
Wednesdays:  10:10am-1:00 pm
Online
3 hours, 3 credits

Books have been a symbolic and mythic force central to the history of human culture and society.  This THHP colloquium will be an intensive introduction to the history of the book and will consider the role and function of the book as material object, artifact, and social force.  Major themes include the techniques of book production, with a special focus on the evolution of the medieval book and the transition to print culture.  Beginning with books and libraries in Antiquity and early writing materials including cuneiform, papyrus, and wax tablets, we will examine how scrolls and copying texts functioned in the ancient world and how the shift from orality to literacy influenced human society.  We will then delve into the rise of the codex and its role in the dissemination of Christianity in the West.  The course explores various topics in the book arts, from the book of hours (a medieval best-seller) to the invention of printing and woodcuts, as well as the wondrous, enigmatic emblem books of the 17^th century.

More modern social questions we will engage with include how the spread of printing was connected to the Protestant Reformation; the role of publishing in the rise of American national consciousness in the 18^th century and in setting the stage for the French Revolution; and the birth of corporate publishing in the 19^th century.  To that end, we will broadly consider related topics such as authorship, popular and learned readership, libraries and censorship. Of special interest will be the history of book illustration and intersections of words and pictures across literary genres. The scope of the course will also encompass other global histories of the book through topics such as Incan cord writing and Mayan codices; the central role of the book in the spread of Islam; the invention of paper in China; and books in sub-Saharan Africa.  We will also briefly explore later, more recent iterations of the book, including 20^th-century artists' books (works of art that re-imagine the form of the book as one-of-a-kind objects), early newsprint, the Victorian dime store novel, graphic novels, comics, fanzines, and "blooks" (objects that look like books but aren't books).  Students will be encouraged to find literary and historical topics for their final research paper and to relate the social role of books to their physical characteristics; in some instances, students may choose to write about books and other archival materials discussed in class. Site visits to special collections in NYC (either in-person or virtual, conditions permitting) and visits with curators and librarians will be provided during some class sessions.

Requirements: short essay and presentation (3 pp; 5-7 mins); Take-home Midterm (3-5 pp); Research Paper (12-16 pp).

Selected Readings:  All readings will be on Blackboard.

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor María Hernández -Ojeda (Romance Languages, Spanish)
Course Number: HONS 2011J
Tuesdays and Fridays: 12:45-2:00 pm
Online
3 hours, 3 credits

This course will examine, in English, the literary and artistic cultural production inspired by this fascinating historical conflict of international significance.  Students will read texts by major authors, will watch films and documentaries that reflect this event, and discuss symbols and images of the War. For their final project, students will visit the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives to research the invaluable documentation that this institution offers, and choose a topic for their final paper. In this course, students will learn about the historical, political and cultural contexts that surround the readings, films and art studied during the semester.

Course Requirements:
Writing requirement: Students will write one final paper based on their archival research at the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives located at the Tamiment Library. It will be approximately 10-12 pages long, and will be posted in the course website narratingmemory.com. Furthermore, they will write a two-page commentary on Blackboard for each one of the films assigned. I will revise every writing assignment at least once before final submission.

Midterm and Final Exam: The format of the midterm and final exam may include any combination of the following: short-answer identifications, passages for commentary, and long essay questions.

Oral presentation: Students will prepare a presentation individually for the class using PowerPoint.  This oral evaluation should last no more than fifteen minutes and no less than ten. The presentation will focus on their research for the final essay.

Sample works to be studied:

• Novel: Cercas, Javier. Soldiers of Salamis
• Poetry: Neruda, Pablo. Five Decades: Poems: 1925-70.
• Testimonial Narrative: Hemingway, Ernest. The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War.
• Interdisciplinary Essay: Labanyi, Jo. "Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War."
• Theory: White, Hayden. "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact"
• Film: Pan's Labyrinth/ El laberinto del fauno.
• Documentaries: The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
• Guernica by Pablo Picasso
• Posters and Photography: Capa, Robert. Death in the Making.
• Music: Miguel Hernandez by Joan Manuel Serrat.

Professor Larry Shore (Film and Media Studies)
Course Number: HONS 2012C
Mondays and Wednesdays: 5:35-8:05 pm
Online
3 hours, 3 credits

This course will examine the events and forces that have shaped the history of South Africa and Southern Africa and America's special relationship with South Africa.

We will compare and contrast the history of white supremacy - and the anti-racist struggles- in the United States and South Africa. Black-white relations have been central to the historical narratives of both countries. A vehicle for doing this will be the documentary film RFK in the Land of Apartheid: A Ripple of Hope which was shown on PBS.

The course will consider the history of the expansion of Dutch and British colonialism and eventual Afrikaner rule in South Africa culminating in the system of Apartheid and the opposition that it spawned. This will lead to an analysis of the dramatic transformation that took place in South Africa from February 1990 to April 1994- ­the negotiated end of Apartheid and the first democratic elections. We will also analyze the 20 years of South African democracy, the current situation, and possible future scenarios in South Africa and the region.

In general, South Africa, and its recent history, provides a useful comparative case study for other countries that have made the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy.  The course will also study developments in other countries in Southern Africa and past and present United States policy towards South Africa, the region and Africa in general.  We will also consider South Africa's post-Apartheid role as a regional and continental power.

The course will culminate in The Southern Africa Simulation Game. This exciting simulation game has been run every time this course has been taught since the early 1980s. With faculty guidance, students select and research team and individual roles based on the important players in the South African and regional situation. The simulation game is conducted on a weekend at the end of the semester. It has very carefully constructed rules and controls and begins with an interesting scenario projected some time into the near future. More details will be provided in class.

Grading for the class is based primarily on a research paper and preparation for and the participation in the simulation game.

This course satisfies Pluralism and Diversity Requirement, Group A.

Ekhard Kuhn-Osius (German)
Course Number: HONS 20136
Mondays and Thursdays: 9:45-11:00 pm
Online
3 hours, 3 credits

The activities of war violate strong peace-time social taboos. Thus, people have always tried to mediate between the societal valorization of war and the individual fighting experience. Studying past descriptions of war and heroism will give us a better perspective on some current events.

We will begin with some sociological studies on army cohesion and morale and on methods to overcome soldiers' inhibition against killing.

We will then survey traditional depictions of war ranging from Homer and Virgil to medieval epics such as the Song of Roland or Parzival, and to early modern books, such as Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus. We will also look at military history and study the depiction of war and warriors in the visual arts.

The view of the modern war experience was shaped for a long time through the literature on World War I, the "Great War". We will read Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, supplemented by selections from various right-wing and left-wing authors, such as Ernst Jünger, Walter Flex, John Dos Passos, and Dalton Trumbo. We will spend some time on the memorialization of the Great War, which used the dead for the ideological benefit of the survivors. We will view images of various memorials and see the film version of All Quiet on the Western Front as well as Renoir's Grand Illusion.

The experience of World War II will be treated by studying parts of Joseph Heller's Catch 22, and some stories by German authors. A look at a novel by Tim O'Brien on the Vietnam War and readings from Phil Klay's Redeployment on the Iraq war will illustrate the transition from a soldier to a warrior model of military service in recent years and conclude the semester.

Each student will present one brief report (app. 10 minutes) on a war novel or film of their choice and one on a work of scholarship such as The Social History of the Machine Gun; The Great War and Modern Memory; Women's Fiction and the Great War; War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age. A list of suggested books and films will be provided.

Class requirements:

• Reading and participation in class discussion
• Two book reports for in-class presentation
• One 10-15 page paper (may be based on one or both book reports)
• Final examination (essay questions)

Professor Sarah Chinn (English)
Professor Ida Susser (Antrhopology)
Course Number: HONS 3011B
Tuesdays and Fridays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Online
3 hours, 3 credits

Cities are transformative public spaces where new ideas are sown, exciting movements begin, and people meet one another and embark on new lives. The experience of the city is especially life-changing for women, whose workplaces and urban environments have been shaped by changing ideas about women and the relationship between public and private spheres.

This course will explore both literary and social scientific representations of women's experiences in major cities in Europe and the United States.  Beginning with the first major wave of urbanization in England and France in the mid-19^th century and then moving to New York and Chicago at the end of the 19^th and early decades of the 20^th century, we will look at women's relationships to labor movements, financial booms and busts, political activism, and the ongoing pressures of domesticity.  We will integrate literary texts that anchor the course with other kinds of materials: manifestos, visual representations of working women, autobiography, sociology, history, and political science, including documents from reform movements.

Requirements:

Participation: Students will participate in an online discussion board, and will be required to contribute at least once every week, as well as participating in class discussion (10%).  They will also work in groups on oral presentations based on research about the historical, political, and cultural contexts of the readings for that unit (15%).

Writing:

Each week, two students will pose discussion questions to the class, as part of the writing requirement (10%).
Midterm essay of 6-8 pages; students will have the opportunity to write in drafts and revise (25%).
Final essay of 14-16 pages (40%); students will have the opportunity to write in drafts.

Selected Readings:
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Projects; David Harvey, Paris: The Capital of Modernity; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860; Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth; Anzia Yezierska, Salome of the Tenements

Sylvia Tomasch (English)
Course Number: HONS 3011S
Mondays and Thursdays: 2:45-4:00 pm
Room 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This course will address three questions:

• What is surveillance historically?
• What is surveillance now?
• How is surveillance at work in your own life?

To answer these questions, we'll explore important historical instances of surveillance along with creative texts in a variety of media. We'll begin in the present, by viewing The Great Hack (dir., Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, 2019), before moving back to earlier, pre-digital periods before working our way to the present again.

Because of the sweep of inquiry, this course will be led by one instructor but include guest speakers with expertise in a wide range of fields, including Hunter faculty on privacy in human relations and information science, gendered representations in art, data capture, targeted advertising, and medical treatment protocols; security professionals on government intelligence and community policing; and outside scholars on persecutions and inquisitions, past and present.

Readings and viewings will be supplemented by activities such as identifying instances of surveillance at Hunter College and in individual neighborhoods; and tracking varieties of passive surveillance, from Facebook posts, pop-up ads, and Google searches to Metrocard use. Students will also find out as much as possible about their own "digital doubles." In addition to weekly posts, there will be two essays and a small-group project to pitch a movie using surveillance as a major theme.

Among the materials we'll be using in this course:

Films

• Alfred Hitchcock, dir., Rear Window (1954)
• Francis Ford Coppola, dir., The Conversation (1974)
• Peter Weir, dir., The Truman Show (1998)
• Steven Spielberg, dir., Minority Report (2002)
• Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, dir., The Lives of Others (2006)
• Black Mirror 1.3: "The Entire History of You" (2011); 2.2: "White Bear" (2013)
• Gavin Hood, dir., Eye in the Sky (2016)

Literature

• Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon, or the Inspection House (1787)
• George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
• Philip K. Dick, Minority Report and Other Stories (2002)
• Dave Eggers, The Circle (2013)

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Tanya Agathocleous (English)
Course Number: HONS 2011R
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course looks at the relationship between empire and the transnational circulations of texts in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the British Empire between 1857 and 1945. The British Empire relied on military power to maintain control of its territories, but also on the power of print. Bibles, textbooks, literature, maps, periodicals, photographs, and political pamphlets were all important to the way imperial power was justified and administered, as well as to the way it was contested by colonial subjects. While Thomas Macaulay argued that "a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia" in his attempt to influence educational policy in India, Mohandas Gandhi ran a printing press in South Africa from which he published a protest newspaper Indian Opinion and eventually the pamphlet Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), one of the key texts of Indian nationalism. The course will examine ideas about empire within texts (such as Jane Eyre) as well as the role that various kinds of texts and archives played in the governance of empire. It will draw on the disciplines of literature, history, art history and anthropology. Readings will include novels such as Jane Eyre and Kim; poetry and periodicals by both British and Indian authors; and secondary texts drawn from postcolonial and empire studies, as well as nineteenth-century studies (including writing by Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Isabel Hofmeyr, Antoinette Burton, and Gauri Viswanathan among others). Alongside literary texts, we will look at sociological and political writings, maps, photographs, and paintings that helped both to shape and contest empire.

Requirements:
One short paper in the first part of the semester (5-7 pages) and a long research paper (12-15 pages), submitted in draft and then final form), as well as an annotated bibliography and an abstract of the paper, submitted beforehand, and weekly contributions to the class website.

Professor Timothy Bromage (Biomaterials & Biomimetics, NYU)
Course Number: HONS 2011U
Wednesdays: 5:35-8:05 pm
Room: 1022HN
3 hours, 3 credits

What is Complexity?

This course is about complexity science and the tools for scrutinizing complex systems that embody many of the world's greatest challenges. Underlying the order of natural systems and the simple rules they would appear to follow, is complexity born from the large number of objects under consideration and the functional connections, or links, between these objects at hierarchies of scale. The science of complexity, and goal of this course, concerns how to evaluate such systems as diverse, interdependent, connected, and adapted networks so that we may better understand how the objects of a disparate array of systems become self-organized, robust to disruption, and connected by links that increase in number/length according to common mathematical power laws. Most of the world's top challenges are complex system problems, and thus topics for discussion will be drawn from the physical, biological, and social systems. The class shall capitalize on the collective self-organized behaviors of its participants in the search for natural patterns harboring complexity and, in small-group teams, shall each ask and address a big question of their choice.

Reading List:

• Mitchell, Melanie. Complexity. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 2009. pp. 368
• Ball, Phillip. Why Society is a Complex Matter. Springer-Verlag, Berlin. 2012. pp. 90
• Barabási, Albert-László. Linked. Plume publishing (the Penguin Group), New York, USA. 2003. pp. 304
• Firestein, Stuart. Ignorance. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 2012. pp. 208 ($16)
• Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. Little, Brown & Company, New York. 2002. pp. 301
• Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction. 2008. pp. 240 (provided as PDF)
• Strogatz, Steven. Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life. Hyperion, New York. 2003. pp. 352
• West, Geoffrey. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economics, and Companies. Penguin Press, New York. 2017.

Students who successfully complete this course will:

• Identify a complex system by its topology, or structure, as something different from a system that is simply complicated;
• Discourse on the robustness and vulnerabilities of complex systems, and to identify circumstances that may potentially lead to system, or cascade failure;
• Learn to make a map and evaluate complex systems, becoming acquainted with software programs used in network analysis;
• Gain an appreciation for a variety of disciplines occupied with complex systems, including fields within the physical, biological, and social sciences;
• Work in teams to apply principles and acquired skills to assess the reasons why specific complex systems are "broken" in efforts to fix them;
• Communicate knowledge of complex systems effectively through writing assignments and term projects.

Teams will self-organize (following a "six-degrees of separation" game played in the first week of the course) and work on a final project with the aim to provide solutions suggested to resolve complex system failures. Presentations by each team will facilitate class discussions and encourage diverse perspectives on the subject matter. There will be required reading (7-8 books), writing assignments, and a team project (2-3 members) with class presentation of the project. Two midterm examinations will be held at 1/3 and 2/3 of term.

Tom Ribitzky (Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate Center)
Course Number: HONS 2011X
Mondays and Thursdays: 2:45-4:00 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

The story of Doctor Faust is one of the great myths of the modern age and the "Faustian bargain" is a common metaphor in today's political and moral discussions. Faust is an academic who enters into a pact with the devil to gain knowledge, riches, and power. He leads a wild life, sires a child with Helen of Troy, and ultimately goes to hell. The historical Faust was an early scientist and alchemist about whom fantastic tales were told. The story originally gained popularity as a warning tale for scholars not to stray from their 'God-given' limitations. Christopher Marlowe created an exalted version of this in the Elizabethan age and thereby brought the Faust story into the realm of high culture, but his play eventually was overpowered by the sensationalist aspects of the topic and over time deteriorated into a puppet play that poked fun at 'nerds'. The Faust myth was resurrected in the Age of Enlightenment and was developed by Goethe into what is widely considered the greatest work of German literature.

Goethe's Faust is unique in many respects, since the author worked on the play for about 60 years, creating a stunning masterpiece that shows the authentic voice and thinking of a youth, a middle-aged man, and a man of advanced age all at the same time. This great symbolic story about modern man's existence in the universe was hugely successful, although often little understood, and spawned dozens of follow-ups from other artists, including poets, dramatists, composers, and painters. Goethe's Faust gave the motif new impetus since Goethe re-addressed the nature of Faust's guilt. The intrinsically sinful act of entering a devil's pact was not a sufficient reason for condemnation in a post-enlightenment world. Whether Faust is worthy of condemnation rests not on entering the pact itself, but on Faust's reasons for doing so and his actions afterwards. Goethe intellectualized Faust and largely sexualized his guilt, but at the same time introduced a redeeming female figure. These elements proved irresistible in the 19th and 20th centuries, so that the Faust motif became one of the enduring legacies of the modern and post-modern ages. The Faustian tradition has strongly influenced our views of artists, geniuses, and what is permissible in the quest for knowledge and power.

We will read three major works in this course: Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus; Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Faust, and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. In addition, we will start out with selections of the "Faust" Chapbook and then look at various post-Goethe adaptations of Faust. We may take a look at the operatic treatment of the "Faust" story by Gounod. We will also deal with three "Faust" films: the heroic version by FW Murnau, the Hollywood film Bedazzled and the truly dazzling and disturbing Faust by Jan Svankmajer from 1994.

Depending on the size of the group, students will give one or two in-class presentations on a treatment of the 'Faust' theme in a work of art other than the ones we will discuss together (literature, music, painting, film) and/or on a piece of criticism concerning one of the three major works we will be reading. These presentations should lead to a final comparative paper. I will make suggestions for both in-class presentations and for the topic of the final paper, but students are perfectly free to develop their own topics in consultation with me.

Reading List:

• Marlowe, Christopher. Dr. Faustus (1st edition), Norton Publisher
• von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust: A Tragedy (2nd edition), Norton Publisher
• Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Grey (2nd edition), Norton Publisher
• Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus (trans John E. Woods), Vintage Publisher

Professor Daniel Hurewitz (History)
Dr. Stephen Lassonde (Political Science)
Course Number: HONS 3011Q
Mondays and Thursdays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

Our notions about gender and sexuality - about who we are in relation to our bodies, about how we should behave because of our bodies, and about what kinds of intimate behavior we should and should not have with other people - often feel to us deeply natural and innate. And yet, these very notions - these ideas about gender and sexuality - are constructed by our society, and different societies have, in different periods of time, explained them in quite different ways.

In our course, we will be examining two periods in U.S. society to explore the differences between them in terms of how they conceptualized gender, sex, and sexuality. Repeatedly, we will be looking at moments from the 20^th-century U.S. - often from New York City itself - and comparing what we find there with what we see in the 21^st-century U.S. today. To that end, we will be reading histories of the early and mid-20^th century and comparing them with current accounts from journalists and sociologists.

Some of the key issues and questions we will be comparing are:

• Notions of masculinity & femininity - what are appropriate male and female behavior, fashion, and expression - and how have they changed over 100 years? How did society view individuals who resisted the categories, or wanted to move between them and be, in today's vocabulary, transgender?
• Ideas about acceptable heterosexual behavior - what is appropriate or necessary to be considered normal, what factors contributed to those ideas, and how have they evolved? This will also include discussions about monogamy and polyamory.
• Ideas about same-sex sexual activity - what is acceptable, what is celebrated, and what is going too far, and why have those ideas shifted so dramatically in the last 100 years.
• Why was birth control such a "hot button" issue over the course of the 20^th century, and how did Margaret Sanger and others choose to navigate the opposition to making birth control easily available?
• Why did abortion become such a potent political issue late in the 20^th-century, and what makes it feel that way today, as well? We will also be thinking about the relationship between arguments about birth control and abortion.
• What meaning can we give to the popularity of drag performers like Gene Malin early in the 20^th-century, and the runaway success of RuPaul's Drag Race early in the 21^st century? What is similar or different between the two periods that drag seems to express?

Course Requirements: Grading will be based on participation in discussion, 3-short papers (4 pages), and a longer final essay.

Reading List:

• Pascoe, C.J. Dude, You're a Fag (eBook)
• Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
• Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
• Clement, Elizabeth. Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945

Professor Marlene Hennessy (English)
Guest Speakers
Course Number: HONS 3011T
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium will focus on the Black Death in Europe, the Great Mortality of 1348-1350 that left between one-half and one-third of the population dead. This global pandemic is widely considered the most devastating epidemic in human history and profoundly changed every sphere of medieval society, including the economy, religion, medicine, literature, and the arts. We will become acquainted with the new paradigms for understanding the Black Death that have emerged out of recent research in the fields of history, genetics, and bioarchaeology. Indeed, our historical and scientific understanding of the Black Death has changed dramatically over the past 20 years, with many groundbreaking studies published in the past few years that we will study in this course. To that end, we will explore what the new plague science has to tell us about Yersinia pestis, the causative organism of the plague that spread across the globe for many centuries, possibly beginning even a hundred years earlier than previously thought. We will then look at a broad range of historical sources such as chronicle writings, plague tracts, and other medical texts to help us reconstruct this medieval pandemic as a social, cultural, and political event. Special attention will be paid to the death-oriented piety of medieval culture and to the literary and visual evidence of the Danse Macabre and the Ars Moriendi, as well as other new developments in art, literature, and religious life that came in the aftermath of the plague, such as devotions to “Plague Saints.” For the medieval English context, texts to be read include Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale; John Lydgate’s The Dance of Death; The Disputation between the Body and the Worms; and the morality play, Everyman. Continental texts to be read in translation include Boccaccio’s Decameron. Three films will also be viewed: Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011); Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Decameron (1971); and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). We will take a field trip to the NY Academy of Medicine Rare Book Room to look at medieval and early modern medical manuscripts and early printed books, including early plague tracts. Guest speakers (TBD) will visit the class from diverse academic fields (medieval history, literature, art history, public health, archaeology, and medicine) in order to enhance our understanding of the material.

Requirements:

• one research paper (15-20 pages, submitted in two drafts);
• one 7-10 minute oral report based on one of the secondary readings for the week on the syllabus, which is handed in as a 4-5 page written essay (Paper #1).
• Take-home Midterm.
• Short, weekly Discussion Board posts on Blackboard are required (250 words).

Required books for purchase:

• The Black Death, ed. Rosemary Horrox (Manchester, 1994) paper $18.50 (ISBN-10: 0719034981).
• Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron: Norton Critical Edition (transl. Mark Musa) (ISBN-13 : 978-0393091328), $20.45.
• Other assigned readings will be posted on Blackboard, including all of those from Monica H. Green, ed., Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World. Rethinking the Black Death (Arc Medieval Press, 2015) (no cost, PDF).

Professor D'Weston Haywood (History)
Professor Rupal Oz (Women and Gender Studies)

Course Number: HONS 3011R
Tuesdays and Fridays: 2:10-3:25 pm
Room: 412 West 
3 hours, 3 credits

A century ago, the 19th Amendment was ratified, granting women the right to vote. The culmination of decades of pointed struggle waged by the suffrage movement, which led to the Amendment, helped expand democracy. But on closer examination, the struggle for the right to vote shows that these historic developments happened against a broader backdrop of hotly contested issues, concerning questions of race, identity, rights, citizenship, democracy, and violence—issues that remain just as hotly contested 100 years later. The course explores this historical trajectory and also asks why some of its issues remain resilient even today. Taking suffrage as a flashpoint, and moving thematically and comparatively across time, students will draw on an array of interdisciplinary sources (scholarly articles, films, music) to interrogate the historical and contemporary gender and racial tensions that have long shaped the American body politic even down to the vote. Using “Intersectionality” and other theoretical frameworks to wrestle with structural inequality, the negative effects of mass media, mass incarceration, lynching, racialized femininities and masculinities, fights over raced and gendered bodies, and whiteness and white nationalism, the course invites students to reckon with the promises and limits of American democracy, and ultimately, why and how these challenges are still with us a century later.

Expected Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the history of the 19th amendment
• Learn the debates among various key figures of the suffrage movement
• Analyze the tensions between the abolitionists and suffragists in the 19th century
• Examine issues of voting and race that continue to impact the contemporary moment

Required Texts: TBA

Assignments:

1. Weekly feedback via postings on Blackboard (15% of final grade).
2. Leading class discussion once during the semester (10% of final grade).
3. One critical response paper (3-5 double spaced pages) (25% of final grade).
4. Group presentation (Please note everyone gets the same grade) (15% of final grade).
5. One final research paper of 15 - 18 pages (35% of final grade).

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Catherine Coppola (Music)
Course Number: HONS 2011M
Tuesdays and Fridays: 2:10-3:25 pm
Room: 405 HN
3 hours, 3 credits

Objectives:
Close reading of the music and text of Mozart's operas in the context of the history of women and power. Drawing on the robust 18th-century debate about gender equality in a society where powerful men could freely inhabit 'polite' and 'impolite' worlds, we confront the relevance of that debate to our own time. We trace demeaning moments in these operas alongside woke ones. Just as Enlightenment progress was not made in a straight line, in fact, attitudes toward sexual violence spanned what is described as "a murky continuum of ambivalence and inconsistency." Through video and live productions we explore the convergence of anti- and pro-feminism in Mozart's operas. We interrogate heavy-handed interpretive decisions that perpetuate fallacies of context (that Mozart was oblivious to feminist and socially progressive ideas) and of change (that today we have supposedly made so much progress for women that we cannot bear to watch a demeaned 18^th-century woman).  To view 18th-century works from a morally superior 21^st-century perch only adds to the gulf between them and the audience. We will work with primary sources i.e. contemporaneous feminist writings, source plays and stories, librettos, court records, and others, showing that there was plenty of moral repugnance to go around in the 1700s.

Repertoire:
We begin with The Abduction from the Seraglio, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni, then we set the stage for opera buffa with Piccinni's La buona figliuola, Paisiello's Nina, and Mozart's La finta giardiniera, influenced by Richardson's well-known epistolary novel, Pamela. We conclude with The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte, both of which simmer with social issues beneath the layer of fun on the surface.

The course was selected for the Pedagogy Poster Session at the March 2019 conference of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies in Denver, CO; and at the same conference Prof. Coppola presented her paper "Fallacies of Context and Change: Why We Need Mozart's Women Now More than Ever" as part of the panel The Long Shadow of Sexism: Reading the Eighteenth Century in (the) Light of #MeToo. 

Weekly readings, responses to operatic scenes in class as well as written and discussion assignments, and live performances whenever possible. Four tests and a 10-page paper.

Professor Tara Zanardi (Art & Art History)
Course Number: HONS 2012A
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

First produced in China during the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), porcelain was made initially for the local market and the imperial court. Prized for its translucency and strength, porcelain was eventually exported on a global scale, reaching the Americas, Persia, Africa, and Europe, along with spices, silk, and lacquer. In order to accommodate the increasing desire for this ceramic and facilitate commercial trade, the Chinese established ports in various cities. By the sixteenth century, European nobility began actively collecting Chinese and Japanese porcelain, and attempted to replicate the production of porcelain, with no true success until the foundation of the Meissen Porcelain Factory in 1708-1710 under Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1694-1733). With the manufacture of both hard- and soft-paste porcelain by Europeans, porcelain's circulation widened. As one of the most highly coveted luxury objects, porcelain played an important decorative role in interior displays in homes. Porcelain held vital artistic significance and cultural importance, especially as Europeans tested the limits of this ceramic for experimentation and innovation.

In this course, we will evaluate porcelain's material properties, fabrication, use, and aesthetics, and tie these considerations to broader social practices of display, collecting, and consumption. We will look at key players and sites in the promotion and development of porcelain. We shall discuss porcelain in connection to the fascination with other materials, including lacquerware, fans, silks, and natural history objects and the ways in which these objects were collected and displayed in homes. We will address fundamental questions, such as how did porcelain, whether produced abroad or at home, contribute to the shaping of individual or collective identities? We will evaluate written and visual material in the classroom through lecture and discussion and arrange for a visit to a ceramic studio with contemporary artists who employ porcelain in their work.

Students are expected to attend class, have the readings completed, and participate in discussion. Each student will develop a research project based on a single object that the student can visit in a local museum. The research paper will include several assignments, such as a preliminary bibliography, a formal analysis, and a rough draft, due throughout the semester. The exam will cover the material from the reading and classroom discussions.

Evaluation Criteria:
Participation: 20%
Exam: 30%
Research Paper Assignments: 20%
Final Research Paper: 30%

Professor Allan Frei (Geography)
Course Number: HONS 2012B
Mondays and Wednesdays: 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Overall Theme: What is water, how do humans interact with it, and how does it shape the natural world?

Course Description:
In this course students will learn about water from a variety of perspectives, including physical science, social science, and humanities. Such a course is by nature interdisciplinary, and lends itself to a wide range of possibilities in terms of student inquiry. The course is structured in five sections, beginning with a discussion of the interdisciplinary nature of water, and water in antiquity and mythology. The second section will focus on water in the natural world, including the chemistry and physics of water as well as water in the earth's climate system. Section three focuses on the role of water in human control of nature and of other humans, including water security, water supply, and case studies from different places. Section four focuses on visual aspects of water including optical effects in the atmosphere, and on visualizations of water in art, science, and society. The course ends with an interdisciplinary case study of the Hudson River, combining many of the issues discussed in earlier sections of the course.

The course will be taught using a combination of activities including lecture by the instructor, seminar style discussions on required readings which will sometimes be led by students, as well as group and individual presentations. Students are required to read assigned articles, and submit written responses, for many class meetings. Thus, student participation is critical.
There will hopefully be one or more field trips.

Assignments:

1. Weekly reading summaries and responses. Some readings will be read by the entire class; others will be read by individual students and shared with the class
2. Presentations, both individual and group (details to be determined)
3. One book review (or possibly literature review) due at the end of the semester on a book (or topic) approved by the instructor

One or two exams on selected subjects.

Professor Jeremy Glick (English)
Professor Robyn Marasco (Political Science)
Course Number: HONS 3011P
Mondays and Thursdays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course will offer an intensive study of the life and work of Frantz Fanon, a philosopher, psychologist, revolutionary militant and among the most significant voices in the black radical tradition.  We will explore his early life in Martinique, his encounter with the negritude movement and the influence of Aimé Césaire on his first major work, Black Skin/White Masks. We will read this work both for the substance of its arguments about racism, the construction of identity, and the effects of an "epidermalized" domination and for its experiments in poetic form.  We will look at Fanon's training in Paris and explore the mutual influence on thinkers like Maurice Mealeau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.  And, finally, we will follow Fanon to Algeria, to the hospital at Blida-Joinville where he was appointed lead psychiatrist and to the FLN and his participation in the struggle to defeat European colonialism.  We will study Fanon's masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth, for how it advances a critique of colonialism and what it contributes to a political theory of liberation.  We will also examine some of his other political writings from this period, on the family and gender relations, on matters of political education and organization, and the role of religion and tradition in a revolutionary movement. Our semester will conclude with reflections on Fanon's influence on generations of revolutionary writers and thinkers and the lasting significance of his work for contemporary political struggles.

Course Requirements:
Weekly writing assignments in the form of response papers/reading memos and one final essay 12-15 pages in length.

Professor Anthony Browne (Africana & Puerto Rican/Latino Studies)
Professor Roseanne Flores (Psychology)
Course Number: HONS 3048
Tuesdays and Fridays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This interdisciplinary course explores how sociology and psychology explain persistent poverty and the attendant effects on individuals, communities and American society. Theories and concepts from both disciplines are utilized to examine the nature and extent of poverty in the U.S., its myriad causes and consequences, as well as government programs and policies. Emphasis will be placed on understanding the intersectionality of class, race/ethnicity and gender.  Questions to be addressed include: What is poverty?  Why is U.S. poverty higher than other industrialized nations? What are the perceptions of the poor by the non-poor? What is the effect of poverty on children and families? What are individual and structural explanations of poverty? And what is the psychological impact of being poor in an affluent society? Emphasis will be placed on urban poverty and the role of the state and civil society its amelioration.

Readings:

• Mark Rank, One Nation Underprivileged - Required
• David Shipler, The Working Poor

Grading for this course is based primarily on a research paper, midterm and final exam, and class participation.

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Roger Persell (Biological Sciences)
Course Number: HONS 2011G
Tuesdays: 10:00am-12:30 pm
Room: 926C HN
3 hours, 3 credits

How do we sense silently what someone else is feeling? Organisms convey meaning behind feelings and emotions by manipulating their anatomy, the intensely subtle positions and movements of our musculoskeletal systems.  In this course, we will explore how "anatomy", our interior structure, underlies the meanings of our surface perceptions. Freud famously proposed an "anatomy of the mind" to expose deeper truths about human behavior. Currently, the New York Times presents an "anatomy of a scene" to display how a filmmaker creates the emotional impact of cinema.

From the earliest illustrations of anatomy to modern technology in medicine, forensics, cinema, video games, and of course all manners of art, we will uncover, so to speak, the underlying art and science of anatomical structures. Our hands can threaten hostility or offer caring sensitivity. Facial contortions signal agony or ecstasy, skepticism or sincerity; our posture displays beauty, comedy, shame, fear or threat - understanding the science and art of anatomy will open a window into understanding our meaningful emotions.

The course has no special pre- or co-requisites except an eagerness to try your own hand at creating a visual work of anatomy and to discuss sometimes challenging readings. Timely assignments and intensive class participation determine your grade. Late work is unacceptable and will be discounted. A background in art and skill in drawing are not requirements, but effort is.

Your assignments:

1. Three short projects involving both art and science (15% each): basic anatomical renditions to appreciate how expression emerges from anatomy along with a 2-3 page essay that analyzes anatomical function and its underlying meaning.
2. You will choose your own (pre-approved) term-paper project (30%) and present it in class (10%) for a more in-depth exploration of how science and art come together to illuminate a subject, for example the digitization of dinosaur anatomy in Jurassic Park movies, the spiritual meaning of Dürer's hands, or the clinical message of an MRI. Term paper topics require prior approval and will be between 12-15 pages. You may include multi-media work.
3. An honors course comes to life through open discussion. Therefore, your ongoing participation (15%) is emphasized and expected. Since the course meets only once a week, missing more than 1-2 classes is very likely to take a toll on your final grade.
4. Required Text: Kandel, E. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain. (2012) Random House.

Selected Readings:

1. Rifkin, BA, Ackerman, MJ, Folkenberg, J. Human Anatomy: A Visual History from the Renaissance to the Digital Age. (2006). Harry N. Abrams.
2. Damasio, Antonio The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures.(2018). Pantheon Books.
3. DiMatteo, B. et al. Art in Science: The Stage of the Human Body. (2015). Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research.
4. Gorman, J. (Nov 12, 2012) "Jane Doe Gets a Back Story" The New York Times
5. Wood, B. (August 2012) "Facing up to complexity", how the anatomy of three new fossils lends support to the hypothesis that there were at least two parallel lineages of early human evolutionary history. Nature (488: page 162).

Professor Hendrik Dey (Art & Art History)
Course Number: HONS 2011S
Mondays and Wednesdays: 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Mediterranean history depends on the ships and sailors that crisscrossed the Mediterranean Sea, connecting populations and cultures from Spain to Syria and creating the political, cultural and economic networks that turned the Mediterranean basin into the cradle of Western civilization. We will begin with a brief overview of ancient seafaring, with particular emphasis on the technical advances that marked the evolution of seagoing ships from the Bronze Age to the early Middle Ages (ca. 3000 BC to 1000 AD). We will then examine theory and practice of maritime archaeology, which has only recently come into its own as a scientific discipline, and which has the potential to reshape current thinking about a broad range of topics, from commerce and trade, to communications and cultural contacts, to questions of state-formation and empire-building. In the final segment of the course, we will turn to some case-studies that illustrate some of the many ways in which the Mediterranean and its associated cultures would have been unthinkable without what we might call a flourishing 'maritime habit'. Greeks and Trojans could never have fought, nor could Homer and Virgil have written; Athens would never have been built; Rome and Constantinople would have starved...

Required Texts: (note that this list will change between now and beginning of class!)

• L. Casson, The Ancient Mariners, 2^nd ed., Princeton, 1991.
• R. Gould, Archaeology and the Social History of Ships, 2nd ed., Cambridge, 2011
• L. Babits and H. Van Tilburg (eds.), Maritime Archaeology: A Reader of Substantive and Theoretical Contributions, New York, 1998.
• Digital "coursepack" with additional readings.

Grading and Requirements:

• Class participation/preparedness: 10% of final grade
• 15-minute oral report and 3-4 page written presentation on an underwater excavation of your choice: 15% (presentation can be done anytime during the semester - dates will be chosen early in the semester)
• Midterm exam: 30%
• 12-Page final research paper: 45%

Professor Monica Calabritto (Romance Languages, Italian)
Course Number: HONS 2011Y
Mondays and Thursdays: 4:10-5:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This seminar will explore the subject of love in its dual nature: as physical, erotic passion and spiritual, ennobling emotion, starting with Plato's dialogue Symposium and the Treatise on Love by the Arab polymath Avicenna, who authored the Canon of Medicine, one of the most influential texts for the medical Islamic and European traditions up until at least the seventeenth century. These two works exemplify the tension between the body and the soul that is elaborated and developed in all the other texts that we will read. In both texts, the physiological/medical dimension is present, and interacts with the philosophical dimension. This interaction is replicated and amplified in Marsilio Ficino's commentary to Plato's Symposium, written in the fifteenth century, and read extensively by philosophers and writers alike. A selection of medical documents written between the early sixteenth and early seventeenth century will complete the exemplification of the connection of philosophy, medicine, and literature when it comes to the notion of love in the early modern period.

A selection of Italian, French, English and Spanish texts, composed between the beginning of the fourteenth and the end of the seventeenth century, will allow us to address, among others, the following questions:  how are the tensions between body and soul on the one hand and erotic passion and spiritual emotion on the other elaborated in these texts? In which way did Marsilio Ficino's Neo-Platonic fifteenth-century elaboration of the Symposium, affect the literature on love written between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century? Do genre and gender influence the way love is enacted in these works, and how?

What follows is a provisional reading list:

• Plato, Symposium;
• Avicenna, Treatise on Love;
• Marsilio Ficino, On Love;
• Girolamo Mercuriale, Consilia Medica (selections);
• Michel de Montaigne, "On Affectionate Relationships", "On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children", "On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse", in Essays;
• Baldassarre Castiglione, The Courtier (with special focus on book IV);
• Leone Ebreo, Dialogues of Love (Dialogue I; available online throughout CUNY);
• Michelangelo, Rime (selections);
• Louise Labé, Elegies and Sonnets (selections);
• Francisco de Quevedo, Poems (selections);
• William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet;
• Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness;
• Jean Racine, Phèdre;
• Madame de la Fayette, The Princess of Clèves.

Those who can read these texts in the original language are encouraged to do so. The seminar will be conducted in English. Students will be required to give an oral presentation, a written report based on the oral presentation, and a final research paper. Grading will also factor in class participation.

Reading List:

1. Plato, Symposium A Translation by Seth Bernadete with Commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete (University of Chicago, 2001) ISBN: 978-0226042756
2. Marsilio Ficino, On Love, tr. and ed. Sears Jayne (Spring Publications, 1985) ISBN: 978-0882146010
3. Baldassarre Castiglione, The Courtier, tr. J. Singleton, ed. D. Javitch (New York; London: Norton & Company, 2002) ISBN:-0-39397606-8
4. Louise Labé, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. and tr. D. Lesko Baker (Chicago: London: The U of Chicago Press, 2006) ISBN: 978-0226467146
5. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Folger Shakespeare Library (Simon & Schuster, 2004) ISBN: 978-0671722852
6. Jean Racine, Phèdre, tr. M. Rawling Penguin Classics Reprint edition (March 1, 1992) Language: French/English ISBN: 978-0140445916
7. Madame de la Fayette, The Princess of Clèves, tr. Terence Cave  (Oxford UP, 1992) ISBN: 978-0199539178

Professor Elizabeth Beaujour (Classical & Oriental Studies, Russian)
Course Number: HONS 20152
Tuesdays & Fridays: 2:10-3:25 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium will examine the ways in which a variety of intellectual systems attempt to integrate phenomena that challenge their basic assumptions and violate their fundamental structures. Underlying all our other readings will be a number of short but important texts by cultural anthropologists and linguists, such as Mary Douglas, Benjamin F. Lee Whorf, Claude Levi- Strauss, and Steven Lukes.

Each of the five units of the course will involve a comparison. We will begin with a peculiar masterpiece of Russian Literature: Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and read it in conjunction with William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell".  We will then go back to ancient Greece to see how the Aeschylus trilogy and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus find ways to resolve the conflicts between absolutely contradictory obligations and rights.

From Oedipus, it is an obvious segue to a unit on psychoanalysis, where we will read excerpts from Freud and Jung and look at some of Jung's drawings from his recently published Red Book.  Continuing in an associative way, we will then consider the imagery of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (sometimes called the Millennium Triptych), and compare this work with the imagery in twentieth century Surrealist art, particularly works of Magritte, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.

We will close the semester with a comparison that has now become classic: the contrasting visions of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Chinua Achebe's, Things Fall Apart, a comparison underlined by Achebe's acerbic article on Conrad, and nuanced by Conrad's little-known story "Amy Foster."

There will be a short paper which may be revised after the first unit, several brief written responses to some of the pictures, a longer final paper on a topic agreed upon with the instructor (to be begun during the weeks when we are looking at visual material. I will want to see at least one draft before final submission of the paper).This final paper should reflect the interests of the student, and may therefore consider kinds of "irrationality" other than those addressed in the course.

There will also be an odd, one hour, final exam.

Professor Gerald Press (Philosophy)
Guests
Course Number HONS 3079
Mondays and Thursdays: 9:45-11:00 am
Room: 412 West 
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium will be an introduction to many of the most influential ideas, authors, and books of the last 500 years: Darwinism and Evolutionary theory, Marxism and Revolutionary theory, Freud and Psychoanalysis, philosophic rationalism, political realism, reformation theology, the earliest European novel as well as a classic 19^th century Russian novel, and modernism in English literature.

Guest speakers will include Michael Steiper (Anthropology), Elizabeth Beaujour (Russian, Comparative Literature), Diana Conchado (Spanish, Romance Languages, and COH), Richard Kaye (English and COH), Daniel Addison, Justin Garson, and Laura Keating (Philosophy), Philip Alcabes (Public Health), and Vishwa Adluri (Religion Program).

As you can imagine, reading will be heavy and there will be high expectations for class participation; on the other hand, writing requirements will be relatively light: (1) either three 1,000 word essays or two 1,000 word essays and an oral presentation on individual books and authors and (2) a 2,500 word term paper bringing together books and ideas from different disciplinary perspectives.

Readings

• Cervantes, Don Quixote
• Machiavelli, The Prince, Discourses on Livy (Selections)
• Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (selections)
• Descartes, Philosophical Writings (selections)
• Martin Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, The Freedom of a Christian, Prefaces to the New Testament
• Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (selections)
• Darwin, selections from The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man
• Marx, selections from "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," "Theses on Feuerbach," "The German Ideology," "The Communist Manifesto," "On the Jewish Question"
• Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
• Freud, selections from works such as The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, Totem and Taboo
• T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Richard Kaye (English)
Course Number: HONS 2011Z
Mondays and Wednesdays: 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

The question of what it means to be human lies at the core of Western philosophical and scientific inquiry. As conceptualized in the Western tradition, "humanity" typically has been defined in opposition to the animal, which is said to lack the rationality, consciousness, and language that we adduce as the clearest evidence of our difference from beasts. However, recent scientific research has raised fundamental questions regarding the relationship between humans and animals. This course explores the science, ethics, aesthetics, and politics animating the relations between animals and humans with attention to British and American literary representation from the nineteenth century to the present as well as to current theoretical debates on animal rights, ecological ethics, and "post-humanist" philosophy.

We will begin with Jeremy Bentham's landmark section of his 1789 "The Principles of Morals and Legislation" on the "rights of non-human animals" and then explore excerpts from Darwin's 1859 "The Origin of Species" and 1871 "The Descent of Man." We will consider Rudyard Kipling's richly allegorical "The Jungle Book" (1894) and H.G. Wells' fantastical dystopian and anti-vivisectionist "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1896).  Throughout Britain, anti-vivisectionist critiques forged a connection between Englishness, egalitarian ideals, kindness to animals, and anti-colonial politics, a set of connections also explored in the Russian writer Turgenev's 1854 story about serfdom, "Mumu."  Recent contemporary debates dealing with animal consciousness, the ethical treatment of animals, and the rights of non-human creatures will be considered through readings in behavioral science, psychology, religion, philosophy and the law through the writings of Peter Singer, Vickie Hearne, Barbara Hernstein Smith, Sandra Harding, Josephine Donovan, Temple Grandin, Richard Posner, Daniel Dennett, Steven Wise, and Donna Haraway.

We will explore three films that meditate on the question of the animal-human divide: Robert Bresson's 1966 "Au Hazard, Balthazar," Werner Herzog's 2005 "Grizzly Man," and Louie Psihoyos's 2009 documentary "The Cove."

Requirements: a mid-term paper and a final paper.

Professor Gerald Press (Philosophy)
Course Number: HONS 20130
Tuesdays and Fridays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Plato is usually thought of as a philosopher; but from the philological standpoint he was a poet as well. In fact, his dialogues are widely considered the best Attic Greek ever written. Besides the philosophical ideas and arguments in them, the dialogues are stories, comic and tragic dramas of astonishing brilliance in some cases. The dialogues are not history, though they are often taken to be; and Plato is not a historian, though some modern readers - anachronistically - fault him for this. Nevertheless, the dialogues can be used, with caution, as sources for the reconstruction of Greek political and cultural history. Moreover, a grasp of the dialogues as poetry or philosophy requires some knowledge of their historical contexts.

In this colloquium, we will read Plato in an interdisciplinary way, from the standpoints of history, literature, and philosophy. This will illustrate an approach that can be fruitfully applied as well to other "great books" and great authors. I hope that students will come to appreciate that what Plato is doing in the dialogues transcends modern disciplinary distinctions.

We will read some of the shorter dialogues, such as Ion, Euthyphro, and Apology, and some of the medium-length dialogues, such as Meno, Protagoras, and Phaedrus. We will note differences between the more richly literary and dramatic, such as Symposium, Protagoras, and Phaedrus, and the more dryly argumentative, such as Parmenides and Republic, of which we will read not only the central books 5 - 7, but also the important books 1 and 10.

Students will have guided practice in the research methods of history, literature, and philosophy, and will be encouraged to create final projects that relate Plato to their individual majors or areas of interest.

We will also listen to some music and look at some attempts to perform the dialogues on stage and in films, and, if possible, attend a local performance.

Required work and grades

1. Each student will be required to write a short (800-1,000 word) paper on a topic reflecting each section of the course. Short papers will constitute 40% of the course grade.
2. Students will also be required to write a term paper of 3,000-4,000 words or produce an equally substantiual creative product. Term papers may be research papers or non-research interpretative papers. Instructor will provide individual guidance on all phases of term paper writing. Term papers will constitute 40% of the course grade.
3. 20% will reflect student's participation and contribution to in-class on on-line discussions.

Professor Lynne Greenberg (English)
Course Number: HONS 20135
Mondays and Thursdays: 2:45-4:00 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of law and literature.  We will read several genres of literary works (poems, plays, short stories and novels) spanning several centuries alongside a wide range of primary legal materials, including statutes, case holdings, legislative records and critical legal theory.  Bringing together literary and legal texts, the course will examine the ways in which the two can mutually illuminate each other.  All of the works chosen are fundamentally concerned with questions of law, justice and equity, legal institutions and the risk of abuse of legal power.  Many challenge conventional assumptions about the social and cultural consequences of the law.  Several of the works also offer literary indictments of legal injustice, interrogating the supposed objectivity and fairness of the legal system-its adjudication, enforcement and methods of punishment.  The works often suggest that the idea of justice is complex and problematic and that questions of guilt and innocence cannot always be easily answered.  A significant portion of the semester will be devoted to questioning the racial and gender equality of the American legal system, both historically and presently.  Class discussions will explore such issues as: How does the work offer a critique of the law or of legal institutions?  What are the legal methods of control used to subordinate a particular group of individuals?  How should the law be enforced-rigidly or flexibly?  How does the law work to enforce particular cultural values?  How does punishment measure against the need for human dignity?  What roles do culture, class, and gender play in crime and punishment?  What are the psychological and sociological consequences of punishment?

Course requirements will include an oral report, a mid-semester paper, and a final research paper. Grading will also factor in class participation.

The following is a tentative book list:

• Herman Melville, Billy Budd; 
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlett Letter; 
• Susan Glaspell, Trifles; 
• Henry Miller, The Crucible; 
• Alice Childress, The Wedding Band; 
• John Okada, No-no Boy; 
• Sue Miller, The Good Mother.

Professor Janet Neary (English)
Professor Mariann Weierich (Psychology)
Course Number: HONS 3011N
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

In this course we will examine a broad range of cultural production from the 19th century to the present pitched at the intersection of race and visual culture. Focusing primarily on African American art and literature, we will examine cultural producers' responses to the experience of visual objectification alongside psychological research on cognition, perception and affect. Beginning with the subjective nature of sight, the course addresses African American authors and artists as theorists of perception and pairs their examination of stereotype, for example, with an examination of the neurocognitive science of categorization. We will examine the ways authors and artists use representation (external) across media and genre-photography, animation, narrative, film, news media-to intervene in racial discourse while investigating the science of visual perception (internal) and the possibilities of transforming individual and collective responses to visual material over time. Throughout, we will examine scientific treatments of how and why visual representations of race are experienced differently by different people (between and within race) and will consider ways of mobilizing both art and science towards the goal of social justice. Readings and artwork under consideration will be loosely organized around four critical flashpoints that have come to organize scholarship on African American visual culture: the claim that African Americans have been primarily the object, rather than the subject of visual discourse; the ambivalent effects of abolitionist iconography; the subjective nature of looking; and the problem of depicting black suffering. Art and literature under consideration will span from the early 19^th century through our contemporary moment.

Requirements include attentive reading and engaged participation in class discussion, participation in BlackBoard forum discussions before each class, an assignment addressing contextualization, an in-class midterm exam, and a final research paper.

Representative Readings and Visual Texts

• Psychology and Related Perspectives
  • Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., & Kurzban, R. (2003). Perceptions of race. Trends in Cog Sci, 7, 173-179.
  • Eberhardt, J.L., Dasgupta, N., & Banaszynski, T.L. (2003). Believing is seeing: The effects of racial labels and implicit beliefs on face perception. Personality and Social Psych Bulletin, 29, 360-370.
  • Sturken, M., & Cartwright, L. (2017). Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 3rd Edition. New York, Oxford University Press.
• Critical Readings
  • John Sekora. "Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative," Callaloo 32 (1987): 482-515.
  • Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, "Introduction," Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity.
• Slave Narratives
  • Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) pp. 1-24.
  • Mattie Jackson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson (1866).
• Art Works
  • Willie Cole, "Stowage," woodcut (1997).
  • Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Couple in a Cage (film).
  • Ken Gonzales-Day, Erased Lynching series, photographs (2000-2013).
  • Hank Willis Thomas, "Absolut Power," inkjet print on canvas (2003); "Absolut No Return," photograph (2008); "Hang Time Circa 1923," inkjet on canvas (2008).

Professor Linda Alcoff (Philosophy)
Professor Rolando Perez (Romance Languages, Spanish)
Course Number: HONS 30138
Tuesdays and Thursdays: 4:10-5:25 pm
Room: 412 West 
3 hours, 3 credits

Latin America's rich tradition of essay writing, philosophical debate, and cultural criticism spanning several hundred years has received too little attention in North America. Collectively, this tradition is sometimes referred to as pensamiento, or 'thought,' to mark it as a broader domain of public discourse than that which occurs only within academic institutions. The Cuban José Martí, for example, one of the greatest thinkers of Latin America, wrote much of his writings for journals and newspapers. The Argentinian Faustino Sarmiento wrote his most influential work in a form that is part memoir, part travel writing. The founding conceptualization of human rights that emerged from the discussion between Spanish priests Las Casas and Sepúlveda was developed in the form of theological debate in church courts. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's critical commentary on the Conquest takes the form of a historical account. The world-renowned Chilean Pablo Neruda used the poetic form to convey the values of the Conquest, and the historical uniqueness of the peoples and cultures it helped to produce. And Peruvian theorist José Carlos Mariátegui developed his ideas through a sociological analysis of how to make radical social change in Peru.  Each one of these thinkers, whether through literature or philosophical analysis, has contributed to a body of knowledge that constitutes a philosophical outlook on the history and culture of the region that is crucial for an understanding of present day Latin America. The object of this course, then, is to explore the way in which questions of colonialism, politics, economics, human rights, etc., have been dealt with across disciplines and genres. And as such, many of the texts we will read operate simultaneously as philosophy, as essays, and as literature. Our team-teaching approach, based on our diverse academic specializations and teaching experience, will help students learn to read the texts through multiple frames of analysis.  These will most likely include the following:  Tzetvan Todorov, The Conquest of America; Latin American Philosophy for the 21^st Century edited by Jorge Gracia and Elizabeth Millan-Zaiber; Gloria Anzaldua Borderlands/La Frontera;  Cesar Vallejo Tungsten;  Pablo Neruda Canto General; Enrique Dussel Twenty Theses.  Thus, the course will draw out the lessons of methodology that can be found in these diverse modes of argumentation.

Course  Requirements:
There will be two short paper assignments (2-3 pages each), one mid-term, and one final paper. The final paper will be turned in as a draft for revision based on comments from the instructors.

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Vishwa Adluri (Philosophy)
Course Number: HONS 2011P
Tuesdays and Fridays: 2:10-3:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This course explores the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory and theories of modernity. The Ramayana tells the story of the hero and heir apparent Rama-his pedagogy, initiation, maturity, conquest, exile, and battle to recover his wife, before he can be installed as the rightful king of the ideal, just polity. We will contrast Rama's experiences with Oedipus's. How does Rama's journey differ from Oedipus's? What is the role of initiation in maturity? How do Rama and Oedipus, each in their own way, offer alternatives to and parables for modernity, understood as an anti-heroic age (Nietzsche)? And how do psychoanalytic insights permit us to simultaneously recover the heroic perspective and offer a diagnosis of modernity?

Reading List:

• SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN BK VII, Author: LACAN /MILLER (ED), ISBN: 9780393316131
• OEDIPUS TYRANNUS, Author: SOPHOCLES/ MEINECK, ISBN: 9780872204928
• CONCISE RAMAYANA OF VALMIKI (P), Author: VENKATESANAND, ISBN: 9780887068638

Required texts:

• Swami Venkatesananda, The Concise Ramayana of Valmiki
• Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, vol. 7
• Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus (Meineck and Woodruff trans.)

Course Requirements:

1. All students are responsible for a mid-term paper (10 pages min.) which counts toward 50% of their grade.
2. The mid-term paper will be on one of two questions pertaining to general aspects of Hinduism. I will distribute the questions in class one week before the paper is due. You are required to edit your papers for correct spelling and grammar. I reserve the right to reject any paper that does not meet these standards.
3. You will have the option of rewriting your mid-term paper for a better grade if you wish. I do not accept late assignments.
4. There will also be a final exam with two short questions. The final exam is 30% of your grade.
5. Regular reading counts toward 10% of your grade.
6. Class participation counts toward a further 10% of your grade.
7. Regular attendance is required; any student who misses more than three classes without notice will have to see me before he/she can continue attending. I take attendance for every session.

Course Policies:
Every student is required to meet with me at least once a semester during office hours to discuss his/her progress.

Professor Ronnie Ancona (Classical and Oriental Studies)
Course Number: HONS 20162
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Objective:
The purpose of this course is to explore the contradictory and compelling figure of Medea in literary and artistic sources from ancient Greece and Rome and the contemporary world. This will be accomplished through close examination of a wide range of literary and artistic works as well as through selected secondary readings. Students will come to know "Medea" in all of her complexity through the sources themselves, class discussion, and written response.

Overview:
The figure of Medea is hard to define and that is part of her attraction. Variously seen as the lovely foreign Colchian princess who aids the Greek hero Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece, a magical witch, a murderous, vengeful woman, a wife left and betrayed in Corinth, a rational, careful, planner and an irrational, emotional force, she resists pinning down. Local princess who helps visiting hero, is later betrayed by him, and then kills their mutual children is only one version, although a very popular one.  While there are earlier appearances of Medea, Euripides' 5th century BCE Greek play provides her best known depiction. She is then reinterpreted in Hellenistic Greek epic as well as in Roman poetry and drama. Contemporary artists working in different media have been powerfully drawn to Medea. The fact that "the Medea story" resonates with issues of women, the other, family, power, emotion, and reason explains its continuing appeal. The varied "Medeas" that have emerged over time are testimony to the fact that her story invites multiple, diverse, and passionate responses.

Schedule:
Part One: The early context of Medea in art, myth and literature.   Euripides' Medea: the play itself and its literary, historical, and social context. The Greco-Roman Medea Tradition after Euripides. Part Two: Modern Receptions of Medea in Literature, Art, Music, and Dance.

Sources:
Ancient literary sources include Euripides, Apollonius, Seneca, and Ovid. Contemporary artistic sources include film by Jules Dassin, dance by Martha Graham, sculpture by Noguchi, and music by Theodorakis. The edited volume, Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, will provide useful commentary.

Requirements:
Attendance and class participation; study sheets- written responses to questions from assigned reading, viewing, and listening; two papers, each about 7-8 pages- drafts receive comment, final versions graded; final exam- factual and interpretive response; class visit to the Noguchi Museum, Long Island City.

Reading List:

• Medea Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philoso, Author: James J. Clauss, Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr, Year Published: 1997;  9780691043760
• Medea, Author: Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr, Year Published: 1986;    9780801494321
• Jason & the Golden Fleece, Author: Rhodius Apollonius, Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr, Year Published: 2009;  9780199538720
• Cawdor/Medea A Long Poem After Euripides a New Dir, Author: Robinson Jeffers, Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, Year Published: 1970;  9780811200738
• Medea: Methuen Student Edition With Commentary & N, Author: Euripides, Publisher: Hackett, Year Published: 2008;  9780872209237

Professor Anna Akasoy (Classical & Oriental Studies)
Professor Nebahat Avcioglu (Art and Art History)
Course Number: HONS 3011H
Mondays and Thursdays:  9:45-11:00 am
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium proposes a critical thematic and historical overview of architectural, social, political and cultural aspects of cities in the Middle East from the seventh century to the present. Often described as "Islamic" since the 19th century by Orientalists seeking religious authenticity these cities were either inherited or founded at various times and under different circumstances by Muslims and became powerful cosmopolitan centers. Pointing to the rhetoric surrounding the "Islamic city" in the West, which describes it as a physically haphazard, socially segregated and culturally exotic space (or stagnant, traditional and despotic), we will engage with the challenges of understanding the city in its own terms. While we will focus on some of the traditional centers in the Islamic world (such as Istanbul, Cairo, Isfahan, Damascus, and Baghdad), we will also discuss the remaking of Beirut, Abu Dhabi, and Mecca as well as engaging in comparative exercises with European and North American cities.

Proceeding in a chronological order and identifying the most important topics in the study of the "Islamic city", we will

• discuss early urban developments under Muslim rule, whether in pre-existing cities or newly established settlements, exploring which cultural, political, social and religious elements shaped them (e.g., preexisting architectural models, building regulations in medieval Islamic law)
• discuss the relationship between architecture, urban structures, and social and political realities (e.g., the location of power in the city or segregation based on gender, ethnicity, or religion)
• explore the unique urban constellations of material wealth, cosmopolitanism, and critical intellectual mass for political, social, material, and cultural dynamics in Islamic history
• consider representations of cities in visual images, such as maps and panoramas, and in literature produced in the West and in the Islamic world and explore the reputations of different cities
• as we move into the modern and post-modern periods, explore the impact of colonialism, post-colonialism, literary representations such as Orhan Pamuk's writings about Istanbul and Alaa al-Aswany's novel about Cairo

Requirements: In addition to three short reaction papers and a final research essay, students will be asked to work regularly in groups in order to apply general questions to specific cities of the Islamic world and in order to collect, evaluate and display visual and textual material in form of posters and oral presentations.

Select bibliography:

• Urban Theory Beyond the West: A World of Cities, eds. Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne, Routledge: 2011.
• The City in the Islamic World, eds. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Renata Holod, Attilio Petruccioli, Andre Raymond, Brill: 2008.
• Cities in the Pre-Modern Islamic World: The urban impact of religion state and society, eds.  Amira K. Benison and Alison Gascoigne, Routledge, 2007.
• Stefano Bianca, Urban Form in the Arab World: Past and Present. New York :2000.

Professor Hal Grossman (Library)
Professor Marlene Hennessy (English)
Course Number: HONS 3011M
Wednesdays: 10:10-1:00 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

Books have been a symbolic and mythic force central to the history of human culture and society.  This THHP colloquium will be an introduction to the history of the book and will consider the role and function of the book as material object, artifact, and social force.  Major themes include the techniques of book production, with a special focus on the evolution of the medieval book and the transition to print culture.  Beginning with books and libraries in Antiquity and early writing materials including wax tablets and papyrus, we will examine how scrolls and copying functioned in the ancient world and how the shift from orality to literacy influenced human consciousness.  We will then delve into the rise of the codex and its role in the triumph and dissemination of Christianity in the West.  To that end, we will look at how the parchment of medieval books was prepared, folded, pricked, ruled and bound, and also what scripts were employed in different codices.  The course then explores various topics in the book arts, from the book of hours (a medieval best-seller) to the invention of printing and woodcuts as well as the wondrous, enigmatic emblem books of the 17^th century.

More modern social questions we will engage with include how the spread of printing was connected to the Protestant Reformation; the role of publishing in the rise of American national consciousness in the 18^th century and in setting the stage for the French Revolution; and the birth of corporate publishing in the 19^th century.  To that end, we will broadly consider related topics such as authorship, popular and learned readership, libraries and censorship. Of special interest will be the history of book illustration and intersections of words and pictures across literary genres. The scope of the course will also encompass other global histories of the book through topics such as Incan cord writing and Mayan codices; the central role of the book in the spread of Islam; the invention of paper in China; and books in sub-Saharan Africa.  We will also briefly explore later, more recent iterations of the book, including 20^th-century artists' books, ephemera, graphic novels, comics, fanzines, "blooks" (objects that look like books but aren't books), e-books, and hyper-text.  Students will be encouraged to find literary and historical topics for their final research paper and to relate the social role of books to their physical characteristics.

Site visits to special collections in the New York City area will be an essential part of the work of the course, as we will take a hands-on approach to book history that allows students to work with original materials. We will hold class meetings in situ at New York Academy of Medicine Library Rare Book Room; Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Fales Library and Special Collections at NYU; Pierpont Morgan Library; and the Grolier Club Research Library. Students will be expected to develop individual research projects on some aspect of book history related to the course and, in some instances, may choose to write about books and other archival materials encountered on our site visits.

Requirements: short essay and presentation (3 pp; 5-7 mins); take-home Midterm (3-5 pp); research paper (14-16 pp).

Selected Readings:

• The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (Routledge, 2006);
• Roderick Cave and Sara Ayad, The History of the Book in 100 Books. The Complete Story from Egypt to e-book (Firefly, 2014);
• A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections about the Book and Writing, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay (Granary, 2000);
• The Book: A Global History, ed. Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Wooudhuysen (Oxford, 2013);
• Raymond Clemens and Tim Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Cornell, 2007), among others.

Professor Allan Frei (Geography)
Professor Steven Greenbaum (Physics and Astronomy)
Course Number: HONS 30131
Mondays and Wednesdays: 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: 412 West 
3 hours, 3 credits

Climate change and national and international energy security issues are as important as ever, transcending politics and the recent change in U.S. Administration. This course combines the efforts of two faculty members from different departments with expertise in energy technology and in environmental and ecological consequences of our energy choices. The energy portion of the class will begin with the fundamental concept of energy as the capacity to do mechanical work, which forms the basis of transportation, electricity for industrial and home use and residential heating and cooling. We will cover energy generation schemes, from fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewable (wind and solar) sources as well as infrastructure issues such as electrical transmission, storage, and the opportunities and challenges of widespread adoption of electric cars and buses.

The environmental portion of this course will address the environmental impacts of energy production in the context of coupled human and natural systems. Such interactions, which have long been a key area of interdisciplinary study for geographers, include processes related to the earth sciences (e.g. atmospheric science, hydrology, geology, ecology) as well as social sciences (e.g. history, economics, political science) and even humanities (e.g., environmental philosophy). The earth sciences will be covered in lectures that address specific categories of energy-related environmental problems and their ecological impacts. The social sciences will be covered in the context of a case study of a 1960s proposal by Con Edison to build a pumped storage hydroelectric plant for New York City at Storm King Mountain in the Hudson Valley. Topics to be covered include: Systems thinking; Air pollution; Water pollution; Acid precipitation; The global carbon cycle and climate; Case study: Storm King Mountain proposed pumped storage plant.

There will be one field trip with a second one optional:

1. "Big Allis" - Ravenswood Generating Station natural gas-fired electric power plant in Queens
2. Storm King Mountain, NY (optional)

Profs. Greenbaum and Frei will give lectures on alternate weeks of a two class per week schedule (and attend each other's lectures). Course grades will be based on an in-class midterm, in-class final, and a team (3-4 students/team) presentation on topics to be determined.  Some examples are: cost analysis of a nuclear power plant (of course including regulatory issues); deepwater carbon sequestration strategies; computer modeling and simulation of atmospheric carbon-driven climate change; case studies in geographic and political issues in the siting of nuclear, hydroelectric, and/or solar energy facilities. The minimum prerequisite for this class is one year of high school physics or high school chemistry (some review may be required!)

Required Text: Energy and the Environment, 3^rd Edition, Ristinen, Kraushaar, Brack, Wiley; ISBN: 978-1-119-17923-8

Required Reading: (will be provided to students) selected chapters from Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism, Robert Lifset, U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2014, ISBN-13:978-8229-7955-5 (electronic)

Other readings to complement the text will be provided.

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Philip Alcabes (Department of Nutrition and Public Health)
Course Number: HONS 2011W
Tuesdays and Fridays: 9:45-11:00 am
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium draws from sociology, psychology, history of medicine, and literature to examine the concept of madness. We will take especial interest in the methods used for managing what is labeled as psychic aberration in contemporary society.

The mad have been part of the human social landscape throughout recorded history. Egyptian papyri show that madness was related to the spirit world as early as 2000 BCE. In both ancient Hebrew and Greek, the word for "prophesy" is derived from the same root as the word for "raving" - prophesy was a kind of madness that came from possession by divine spirits. Melancholy, famously attributed to black bile by the ancient Greeks, was part of the spectrum of madness, or a version of it.

Today, we think of madness as an abnormality of behavior reflecting chemical or neurological dysfunction in the brain. It's a pathology. Melancholy is now "depression," a different derangement of the brain's chemistry and/or neural structure. Both comprise a number of different diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the "Bible" of abnormal psychology.

How did we go from a spiritual understanding of madness to a technical one? How did madness become political? Why did madness and melancholy become "mental illness" - and prompt the development of mental asylums, psychotherapies, and, most recently, psychotherapeutic drugs like Thorazine, Lithium, Adderall, and Prozac? What are the benefits of this change in conceptualization? What are the costs? What will we think of madness in the future?

Writing:

• Three short (1000- to 1500-word) essays, one of which to be revised and resubmitted.
• One longer (2500-word) term paper, including draft and revision.
• Some low- or no-stakes weekly writing assignments on required reading.
• Short reports on in-class debates.

Grading:

• Short papers, 15%;
• Revision of one short paper, 20%;
• Term paper 45%;
• Debates 10%;
• Participation 10%

Partial Reading List:

1. Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy (2007)
2. Foucault, History of Madness, Part I (1972, English translation 2006 by Murphy & Khalfa)
3. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 1917
4. Goffman, Asylums (1961)
5. Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted (1994)
6. Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
7. Plath, The Bell Jar (1971)
8. Porter, Madness: A Brief History (2003)
9. Rothman & Rothman, The Willowbrook Wars: Bringing the Mentally Disabled into the Community (1984)
10. Taylor, The Last Asylum (2015)

Professor Richard Kaye (English)
Course Number: HONS 20163
Mondays and Thursdays: 4:10-5:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Modernism was a radical European and American literary and cultural phenomenon that was powerfully related to the energies-scientific, technological, philosophical, psychological, and political-that we associate with modernity. Modernist artists typically cherished intellectual difficulty, lyrical discordance, formal abstraction, and heightened subjectivity, as "realism" came under skeptical and sometimes ferocious attack. This class closely explores five representative figures who helped transform literature, music, and painting in the twentieth century: Pablo Picasso, Claude Debussy, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. We will consider Eliot's radical break with nineteenth-century poetics in such works as "The Waste Land," Lawrence's scandal-generating erotic fiction such as Women in Love, and Woolf's experiments in highly subjective human consciousness in fiction such as To the Lighthouse.  With a consideration of Debussy's The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, performed in Paris in 1911 and banned by the Catholic Church for its bold depiction of a Christian saint performed by a woman, the renowned Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein, we will focus on modernist spectacle. We will consider Picasso's scandal-generating 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon-like The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a work tied to erotic scandal (the painting is set in a bordello and its female figures are prostitutes). We will explore, too, how modernist artists rebelled against, but also drew from, their creative precursors. Some critics argue, for example, that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was a response to Matisse's Le Bonheur de Vivre and Blue Nude. Advanced photographers, meanwhile, struggled both to assimilate and to reject the conventions of painting, as photography's fetishization of the "real" militated against the growing impulse towards abstraction in the visual arts.  How modernists reacted to one another's artistic work is another issue we will explore, whether in the Paris-based Gertrude Stein's exuberant endorsement of Picasso or Eliot's characterization of Lawrence as a "heretic." From Surrealism and Dada to Futurism and Imagism, competing artistic movements flourished across Europe and America, with modernist writers ranging across the political spectrum. Woolf's A Room of One's Own staked out a claim for a feminist literary tradition and Picasso created an anti-fascist masterpiece in his 1937 Guernica. Meanwhile, Eliot and Lawrence frequently embraced reactionary politics. The class will consider such manifestos of modernism as Woolf's attack on what she called the "Georgian" novel (published during the reign of King George) and Eliot's defense of "impersonality" and "tradition" over "convention" in poetry. Important, as well, will be our class's examination of how new systems of thought (Einstein's advances in physics altered conceptions of time and space, Freud's invention of psychoanalysis as mining a hidden psychological reality, and Bergson's philosophical investigations into time and consciousness as subjectively experienced) shaped-and were shaped by--modernist works of art.  Finally the class will explore the critique of modernism offered by post-modernist critics, who question the modernist movement's posture of "difficulty," deliberate obscurity, universalism, and claims of revolutionary break-through in the arts. In addition to primary readings, the class will take up the writings of such major critics, scholars, and writers as Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, R.P. Blackmur, Meyer Schapiro, Roger Shattuck, Charles Rosen, Linda Nochlin, Rosalind Krauss, Susan Sontag, John Richardson, and Mary Ann Caws.

Requirements: A mid-term paper and a final paper.

Professor Maria Luisa Fischer (Romance Languages, Spanish)
Professor Mary Roldan (History)
Course Number: HONS 3011A
Wednesdays: 10:10-1:00 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Dirty wars, civil wars, drug wars, and widespread repression have taken place in several Latin American societies in the twentieth century.  This course examines the contexts and effects of political and social violence in Latin America during the '60s and '70s through the years of democratic transition in the '80s.  What is the legacy of violence and how has it shaped individual and collective notions of citizenship, justice, identity, politics, and history?  What are the causes of violence and how does it operate? How do individuals/nations remember violence and how do those memories shape imagination, a sense of self, interactions with others, and understandings of power? How do societies deal with the aftermath of violence and the need to achieve reconciliation or give voice to the impact of traumatic events of national scope?  A central premise of the course is that how violence is narrated matters, constituting a powerful means of resisting oblivion, recuperating memory, or even, perpetuating violence (for instance, when certain acts, memories, or responsibilities are erased.) Narrating violence can be a way of establishing voice, asserting agency, and imbuing seemingly incomprehensible experiences with meaning.  We will explore these issues from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective (literature, history, art) focused on close readings of monographs, memoirs, official documents, novels, poetry, photography, and film in countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Colombia.  Our point of departure is the era defined by the Cold War, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, and the rise of Liberation Theology through the emergence of unarmed activism, guerrilla warfare, authoritarian repression, and national projects of reconciliation.  We will endeavor to understand young leftist political cultures, anti-subversion state doctrines, and the ulterior revalorization of human rights and the resurgence of a democratic ethos as a way of rebuilding coexistence in the national experiences studied.

If you are interested in the course, these two videos will be of interest:

• Doris Salcedo: On the Importance of Memory
• Bennedetti and Allende: memory, violence and activism [in Spanish]

Course Requirements:
There will be 3-4 short paper assignments (2-3 pages each), an oral presentation, and a final paper. A final paper proposal is to be approved by the instructors by mid-November, and an 8-10 page final essay will be due during the examination period in mid-December.

Professor Derrick Brazill (Biological Sciences)
Professor Sylvia Tomasch (English)
Course Number: HONS 3011E
Mondays and Thursdays: 2:45-4:00 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

Why zombies? Why vampires? Why zombies and vampires now? Audiences seem unable to resist the onslaught of the undead in fiction, film, television, video, graphic novels, etc., but zombies and vampires don't just live (or not live) in popular culture. There are also important connections to pressing issues in contemporary science. In this this course therefore, we'll consider vampires and zombies in terms of folklore, history, politics, gender, race, and biology (to name just a few issues that will arise during the semester). Because of the wide range of materials and approaches, students will have opportunities to focus on the areas of greatest interest to them.

In this course, we will try to understand the cultural aspects underlying the historical and contemporary popularity of the undead, to understand the biological cognates of the undead found in nature, to understand the connections between modern issues in science and biology, and the resurgence of popular interest in the undead.

Requirements:
Everyone is expected to be an active contributor, in class and on the website. You're expected to come on time, be prepared, with the text in hand, ready to contribute to discussion in an informed and positive fashion.

Grading:

• Participation (15%);
• Presentations (20%);
• Four formal writing assignments (15% each; 60% total);
• Weekly informal responses;
• Quizzes and in-class informal writing

Required Texts

• Novels
  1. Max Brooks, World War Z
     
  2. Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, Carmilla
     
  3. Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
  4. Bram Stoker, Dracula
  5. Anne Rice, Interview with A Vampire
• Books
  1. Stuart Hill, Emerging Infectious Disease
     
  2. Kelly A. Hogan, Stem Cells and Cloning
  3. Michael A. Palladino, Understanding the Human Genome Project

  Articles (available via Blackboard)

  • Paige Brown, "Zombie Ants and a Cultural Obsession," Scientific American
  • Berdoy et al., "Fatal attraction in rats infected with Toxoplasma gondii," The Royal Society
  • Eric Michael Johnson, "A Natural History of Vampires," Scientific American
  • Nick Lane, "Born to the Purple: the Story of Porphyria," Scientific American
• Films
  • I Am Legend;
  • I Walked with A Zombie;
  • Omega Man;
  • The Last Man on Earth;
  • 28 Days Later;
  • Twilight;
  • Vampyr;
  • Warm Bodies;
  • White Zombie

Professor Larry Shore (Film and Media)
Professor Carolyn Somerville (Political Science)
Course Number: HONS 30167
Mondays and Wednesdays: 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: 412 West 
3 hours, 3 credits

This course will examine the events and forces that have shaped the history of South Africa and Southern Africa and America's special relationship with South Africa.

We will compare and contrast the history of white supremacy - and the anti-racist struggles- in the United States and South Africa. Black-white relations have been central to the historical narratives of both countries. A vehicle for doing this will be the documentary film RFK in the Land of Apartheid: A Ripple of Hope which was shown on PBS.

The course will consider the history of the expansion of Dutch and British colonialism and eventual Afrikaner rule in South Africa culminating in the system of Apartheid and the opposition that it spawned. This will lead to an analysis of the dramatic transformation that took place in South Africa from February 1990 to April 1994- ­the negotiated end of Apartheid and the first democratic elections. We will also analyze the 20 years of South African democracy, the current situation, and possible future scenarios in South Africa and the region.

In general, South Africa, and its recent history, provides a useful comparative case study for other countries that have made the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy.  The course will also study developments in other countries in Southern Africa and past and present United States policy towards South Africa, the region and Africa in general.  We will also consider South Africa's post-Apartheid role as a regional and continental power.

The course will culminate in The Southern Africa Simulation Game. This exciting simulation game has been run every time this course has been taught since the early 1980s. With faculty guidance, students select and research team and individual roles based on the important players in the South African and regional situation. The simulation game is conducted on a weekend at the end of the semester. It has very carefully constructed rules and controls and begins with an interesting scenario projected some time into the near future. More details will be provided in class.

Grading for the class is based primarily on a research paper and preparation for and the participation in the simulation game.

This course satisfies Pluralism and Diversity Requirement, Group A.

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Spiro Alexandratos
Course Number: HONS 2011H
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Reality is a concept that has been the focus of philosophers and scientists. What is reality? Is what we observe exactly as we see it? The problem of defining Reality is tied to the search for knowledge. From the earliest times, we asked "Ti esti?" (What exists?), then "How do you know?" followed by "Are you certain?"

This course explores philosophical and scientific views of reality and how we approach the question of knowledge in the Western tradition from antiquity to the present.

We begin at the beginning, with the pre-Socratic philosophers, then, in a seamless arc, proceed to the search from the perspective of scientists in modern times.

Course Objective: to understand what it means to know; to know Reality; and whether we can be certain of what we know.

Assigned Readings:

1. Plato - the Theaetetus
2. Rene Descartes - Meditations on First Philosophy
3. George Berkeley - A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (chapters 1 - 24)
4. Lord Rayleigh - The Discovery of Argon (Nobel Lecture, 1904)
5. John Dewey - The Quest for Certainty (chapters I - III)

Requirements: biweekly essays (2-pages), one oral assignment, one mid-term, one final exam

This course is self-contained; it does not have prerequisites in either philosophy or science. Brilliant lectures and intense discussions provide all that can be known.

Professor María Hernández -Ojeda
Course Number: HONS 2011J
Tuesdays and Fridays: 12:45-2:00 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This course will examine, in English, the literary and artistic cultural production inspired by this fascinating historical conflict of international significance. Students will read texts by major authors, watch films and documentaries that reflect this event, and discuss symbols and images of the War. For their final project, students will visit the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives to research the invaluable documentation that this institution offers, and choose a topic for their final paper. In this course, students will learn about the historical, political, and cultural contexts that surround the readings, films and art studied during the semester.

Course Requirements:

Writing requirement: Students will write one final paper based on their archival research at the Abraham Lincoln Brigade archives. It will be approximately 10-12 pages long. They will also write a two-page commentary on Blackboard for each one of the seven films assigned. I will revise every writing assignment at least once before final submission.

Midterm and Final Exam: The format of the midterm and final exam may include any combination of the following: short-answer identifications, passages for commentary, and long essay questions.

Oral presentation: Students will prepare a presentation individually for the class using PowerPoint. This oral evaluation should last no more than fifteen minutes and no less than ten. The presentation will focus on their research for the final essay.

Sample works to be studied:

1. Novel: Cercas, Javier. Soldiers of Salamis
2. Poetry: Neruda, Pablo. Five Decades: Poems: 1925-70
3. Testimonial Narrative: Hemingway, Ernest. The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War
4. Interdisciplinary Essay: Labanyi, Jo. "Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War"
5. Theory: White, Hayden. "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact"
6. Film: Pan's Labyrinth/ El laberinto del fauno
7. Documentaries: The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War
8. Art: Guernica by Pablo Picasso
9. Posters and Photography: Capa, Robert. Death in the Making
10. Music: Miguel Hernández by Joan Manuel Serrat

Professor Mary Anne Cartelli (Classical and Oriental Studies; Chinese)
Course Number: HONS 2011T
Tuesdays and Fridays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

The Silk Road was the overland trade route that connected China to the West from the first to seventeenth centuries C.E. In actuality, the Silk Road did not consist of one road, but rather a variety of routes on the Eurasian continent. These routes were major conduits of cultural exchanges between Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, and were a significant stimulus for early globalization. The Silk Road gets its name from the export of Chinese silk. However, it also promoted the transmission of other commodities, as well as science, technology, agriculture, cuisine, art, literature, and religion among the cultures on its path.

In this course we will examine the Silk Road's major contributions to the development of Chinese culture, as well as its influence on world civilization. Major themes will include the transmission and exchange of science, technology, agriculture, cuisine, art, literature, and religion between East and West. We will analyze and discuss primary sources from ancient Silk Road cultures, including court histories, geographies and philosophical treatises, letters, travelers' accounts, inventories, inscriptions, laws, and religious texts, along with major works of art and archaeological finds to achieve a deep understanding of this important intercontinental link.

Requirements will include a major research paper (about 4000 words) with proposed thesis, outline, and first draft, an oral presentation paper (about 1000 words), and a book review (about 1000 words) from a recommended list provided by the instructor. Oral presentations will be based on the weekly course topics. Suggested research paper topics will be posted on the course website. Students will present their research papers for discussion during the final week of the course.

Readings (in alphabetical order) will be drawn from the following books:

• • E.N. Anderson, The Food of China (1990);
  • Charles Benn, China's Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty (2002);
  • Richard Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road (1999);
  • Stephen G. Haw, Marco Polo's China: A Venetian in the Realm of Khubilai Khan (2009);
  • Peter Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road (2006);
  • E.E. Kuzmina, The Prehistory of the Silk Road (2007);
  • Jung-en Liu, Six Yuan Plays (1972);
  • Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History (2010) and The Silk Roads: A Brief History with Documents (2012);
  • Victor Mair, Tun-huang Popular Narratives (1983);
  • Qiang Ning, Art, Religion, and Politics in Medieval China: The Dunhuang Cave of the Zhai Family (2004);
  • Edward Schaefer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics (1963);Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade (2003);
  • Robert Temple, The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, & Invention (2007);
  • Arthur Waley, Ballads and Stories from Tun-huang (1960);
  • James C. Y. Watt and Anne E. Wardwell. When Silk Was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese Textiles (1997);
  • Roderick Whitfield et al, Cave Temples of Mogao: Art and History on the Silk Road (2000);
  • Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road (2015);
  • Sally Wriggins, The Silk Road Journey with Xuanzang (2004).

Professor Christa Acampora (Philosophy)
Course Number: HONS 2011V
Wednesdays: 10:10-1:00 pm
Room: 215HW
3 hours, 3 credits

During the past two decades, scholars, researchers, and clinicians have come to recognize that among the injuries deployed service members may experience are those affecting one's sense of oneself as a moral being and one's place in a moral community; this is the heart of what is called moral injury. While there is no fixed definition of the phenomenon, consensus is emerging that moral injury is distinct from post-traumatic stress and resistant to therapeutic measures that have proven effective for treating those who have experienced trauma. Moral injury is global. It may-but does not necessarily-arise from guilt about something one has done or one's inability or failure to act in a way one believes one should. It can be triggered by betrayal by one's command or comrades. It often entails a loss of trust and hope, and it might further be described as an injury to one's humanity. This class explores the idea of moral injury in the context of the experience of war drawing on European and American perspectives.

Moral injury, as currently examined in scholarly, clinical, and therapeutic communities is related to but distinguished from: moral distress, experienced when one is uncertain or ambivalent about what should be done; moral conflict, when what is called for conflicts with other moral beliefs; and moral contradiction, when it is the case that satisfying one moral belief presents a contradiction with another that is also, perhaps equally, affirmed.

The scope of moral concern in war is much broader than the dilemma of the moral status of killing in war, simply stated, and moral injuries are sustained beyond commission of specific actions that would be immoral in a non-combat environment. Moral injuries arise from critical compromises to the webs of care and concern-and our access to them-that make meaningful and enriching social interaction possible. Such injuries result in malformed relationships, withdrawal, and the inability to form new attachments with others.

Moral injuries often become apparent only after deployed service members return home. Once home, in a context that should be safe, veterans are susceptible to re-injury. In taking up these concerns, we can guard against the stereotype of returning service members as "broken" while recognizing that the response of the community to service members after war is potent and pregnant with moral risk. What does reciprocity look like in these distinctive cases? What are appropriate responses? What is a helpful way to respond to persons who are the most proximal causes of the activities of war-the persons who may feel the greatest weight of responsibility- even though such responsibility is arguably shared by the society that authorizes such engagements? And what do such persons expect and need from their command, their comrades, their most immediate and, in this, most intimate, communities?

Dialogue is a form of reciprocity that draws out and shares the wealth of insight into human experience that endows it with meaning. It is a necessary if not sufficient condition for expansion of and reintegration in the moral community. Engaging in dialogue about the experience of war and the profound ways in which war experience can be transformative extends opportunities to be plunged into a kind of doubt that comes only from confronting extraordinary ambiguity, when life hangs in the balance. Such doubt may be edifying and potentially ennobling because it provokes us in truly distinctive ways to search for answers. Students will have opportunities to engage in this kind of exchange in class and at public events that include veteran participants.

Course Requirements:

1. Four reflection papers will form the basis of discussion for each module and will allow students to reflect basic comprehension. These will be assessed on the basis of a rubric, 40%;
2. Facilitate a class discussion for a portion of a class meeting, based on a prior meeting with the instructor, 10%;
3. A final paper on a topic of choice (with approval in advance, due in stages), comprising 30% of the grade for the term;
4. Engaged participation, including attendance at events outside of class, graded using a rubric, 20%.

Professor Sandra Clarkson (Mathematics and Statistics)
Professor Steve Gorelick (Film and Media Studies)
Course Number: HONS 3011H
Mondays: 5:35-8:05 pm
Room: 1042 East
3 hours; 3 credits

In a world of uncertainty, randomness, and contradictory versions of "truth," informed decision-making by individuals and institutions can be frustrating and confusing.  People want to make fair and wise decisions, but the flood of information available in the digital age, as well as the seeming absence of unambiguous answers, can frustrate even the most vigilant citizen.  When can we be confident that we have enough evidence to decide? What types of evidence can or should we rely on in a specific situation? Should some forms of evidence be considered more legitimate and authoritative than others? Are there times when it might be in our interest, even crucial, to make a decision before we believe we have adequate evidence? Put most simply and directly, how do we know what we know and when we know it?

The course will be an exploration of the widely diverse forms of evidence that are available for decision-making in a complex world. While a special emphasis will be placed on the evidence that can be inferred from statistics and other quantitative data, a myriad of other forms of evidence will be defined, explored, and compared.

Consider a jury trying to decide the guilt or innocence of an accused burglar. Criminal law has very specific rules in which some forms of evidence are inadmissible, while others are required to prove guilt. But think of just how many different types of evidence might come up in the course of a trial. Many people think of physical, forensic evidence in the age of CSI. But circumstantial evidence, eyewitness testimony, expert testimony, the defendant's previous record, the words spoken by the accused during interrogation, and even statistical evidence are also frequently introduced.   How does a jury distinguish the different types of evidence introduced and decide which should be believed? Why do some of the most popularly accepted forms of evidence - confessions, identification of suspects by victims - turn out to be so fallible and problematic?

The problem of evidence is also central in the realm of public policy-making. No one would dispute that public health and safety is an important objective of law and policy. But the era of evidence-based science and medicine presents us with a seemingly infinite number of sometimes-contradictory studies. Does caffeine improve focus or does it aggravate existing cardio-vascular conditions? Do changes in speed limits and driving ages affect the rate of automobile accidents? Do age restrictions on the purchase of tobacco reduce use? Not surprisingly, each of these and many other questions yield contradictory evidence, and the class will explore the intricacies of data and the sometimes hidden and variables that explain these contradictions.

Finally, the class will examine the significant issues and problems that arise when complex evidence enters the public sphere and is interpreted, shaped and sometimes distorted in news and media accounts.

Some mathematics and statistics will be illustrated in class, but students will not be assessed on those skills.  The course will require extensive reading, writing and discussion.

Pre-requisite:  One college-level math course or permission of one of the instructors.

Professor Sam Di Iorio (Romance Languages, French)
Professor Amy Moorman Robbins (English)

Course Number: HONS 3011K
Mondays and Thursdays: 4:10-5:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours; 3 credits

Combinatory aesthetics - montage in film, collage in visual art, the hybrid text in literature and poetry - have been central to avant-garde movements since the dawn of modernism.  Foundational texts like Charles Baudelaire's Petites poèmes en prose (1869) wed formal experimentation with an uneasy fascination for the rapid industrial, technological, and economic changes that characterize what Eric Hobsbawm has called western history's Age of Capital.  Modernism and, more specifically, the avant-garde sought new forms to articulate the subjective experience of modernity: its social conditions, its intellectual horizons, its structure and its texture.  In many cases, artists, writers, and filmmakers shaped and responded to the feeling of the new through hybrid means, triangulating connections between the developing world, the written word, and nascent fields of visual representation.  Later in the 20^th century, the search for new forms leads to the creation of texts and images that defy bourgeois expectations for consolation in the arts and that reflect the chaos created by global warfare, scientific innovation, mass movements of peoples across international borders, and the economic depravity of the alienated worker, as well as a general sense that, in the words of Yeats, "the center cannot hold" ("The Second Coming").

This course proposes to study the combinatory aesthetics which accompany these tremendous shifts in Western culture.  We begin with foundational 19^th century texts, including writing by Baudelaire and Lautréamont, moving into the proto-surrealist work of Guillaume Apollinaire, the cubist poetics of Gertrude Stein, and the tenor and form(s) of the manifesto, and arriving at early and mid-century films by Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, and Nicole Vedrès that extend the mixed aesthetic of montage.  Later in the semester, we will consider the linguistically experimental writing of the Language movement and the hybrid poetics rooted in that tradition of experimentation, concluding the course with more recent projects by Jean-Luc Godard that emerge from this modernist trajectory.

Professor Vishwa Adluri (Religion)
Professor Robert Seltzer (Jewish Social Studies)
Course Number: HONS 3011L
Mondays and Thursdays: 2:45-4:00 pm
Room: 412 West 
3 hours, 3 credits

"Revelation: East and Near East" compares and contrasts religious ideas and traditions of Hinduism and Judaism. These complex traditions, each of at least three millennia old, have much in common but also notable contrasts on such matters as a holy life and the cosmic dimension of human existence. Hinduism and Judaism both originated and remained closely connected to their ancient original cultural traditions, in contrast to their "daughter religions," Buddhism and Christianity, which made great efforts to break away from that matrix. Hinduism and Judaism remained tied to their classical languages Sanskrit and Hebrew and to the literary compilations of the teachings of their sages, even though they expanded their socio- historical connections and forms of expression in the course of many centuries. There are similarities between the Indian and Jewish traditions on religious leadership, hermeneutics, ritual practices, and so forth. In this course, we take a comparative look at these two traditions, focusing especially on their relationship to modernity. Why were Hinduism and Judaism regarded as instances of non-modern traditions, paradigmatically in need of reform? How did they adapt to the challenge of modernity? What were they trying to preserve? And what role did Buddhism and Christianity play in modern critiques of Hinduism and Judaism? We shall focus on three areas: (a) the relation of reason to faith; (b) the relation of revelation to exegesis; and (c) the relation of law to ethics.

Required Texts:

• The Jewish Study Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• The Upaniṣads: A New Translation by Patrick Olivelle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Course Requirements:

1. Class Presentation (30%): All students are required to present a paper in class on a topic related to the subject of the course and of special interest to the student. Topics should be chosen in consultation with the instructors at the beginning of the semester. A week before your presentation is due, you should submit a one page presentation proposal, which we will comment on. These comments must be incorporated into your in class presentation. On the day of the presentation, you must have a hand-out ready for distribution in the class.
2. Term paper (40%): All students are responsible for a term paper (10 pages minimum). The term paper should be a fuller exposition of your presentation topic. Your paper should be in proper academic formatting, using a standard citation style. It should be edited for grammar and accurate spelling.
3. Final exam (30%): The final exam will consist of three questions. You may answer any two of them. The answers must be essay style.
4. Regular attendance is required; any student who misses more than three classes without notice will have to see us before he/she can continue attending. Attendance will be taken every session.

Course Policies:

• Every student is required to meet with the instructors at least once a semester during office hours to discuss his/her progress.
• Acts of academic dishonesty (e.g., plagiarism, cheating on the final exam, obtaining unfair advantage, and falsification of records and official documents) are serious offenses. You must cite all sources used (e.g., websites, books, or other materials) in footnotes or in parentheses. Students found guilty of plagiarism will automatically receive a grade of "F" for the course and will be reported to the Dean.
• The use of electronic devices (laptops, cellular phones, etc.) is not permitted in class without explicit permission.
• Please inform us in advance if you have any disabilities requiring special arrangements.

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Richard Belsky (History)
Course Number: HONS 2011R
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

In this colloquium we will examine Chinese foodways from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. We will familiarize ourselves with the richness and complexity of Chinese cuisine, and consider what is distinctively Chinese about Chinese food.· We will examine the history of food and eating in China and explore how it has developed and evolved over time.· We will look critically at the metaphorical uses of food and food consumption in Chinese late-imperial, and contemporary literature and film.· We will consider food and eating as components of Chinese medicine and traditional conceptions of health and bodies.· We will also investigate contemporary issues surrounding food and eating, including food and Chinese identity, Chinese food abroad (how it is altered and how it is adopted within other cultures, especially in the US and Japan), changing patterns of food production and consumption within China, and the problem of food safety and security.· The goals of this course include both taking food/eating as a means by which to better understand China; establishing this approach as a model to consider the foodways of other cultures, and finally enriching your learned appreciation of Chinese food for the rest of your lives.·

Students will be expected to write numerous short papers and one longer (12-15 page) research paper.· Class participation in discussions of readings will be required, and we will also see if we can find some way to fit a few tastings in as well.

Possible readings and viewings include:

• Anderson, Eugene N. The Food of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
• Chang, K. C., (edited). Food in Chinese culture: anthropological and historical perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
• Chen, Nancy, N. Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health (New York, Columbia University Press, 2009).
• Farquhar, Judith. Appetites : food and sex in postsocialist China (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2002).
• Lu Xun, "Diary of a Mad Man" 1918.
• Mintz Sidney W. and Du Bois, Christine M.· "The Anthropology of Food and Eating" Annual Review of Anthropology , Vol. 31, (2002), pp. 99-119. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132873
• Watson , James L; and· Caldwell, Melissa L. (ed). The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating : A Reader (Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2005.
• --- (ed.) Golden Arches East : McDonald's in East Asia (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2006.)
• Tampopo (タンポポ); written and directed by Juzo Itami. 1986.
• Eat drink man woman / Samuel Goldwyn Home Entertainment; Central Motion Pictures presents in association with Ang Lee Productions and Good Machine ; an Ang Lee film. 1995.

Reading List:

1. E. N. Anderson, The Food of China (Yale University Press, 1990) ISBN-13: 978-0300047394
2. * Yong Chen, Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America (Columbia University Press; Reprint edition, 2014) ISBN-13: 978-0231168922
3. Erling Hoh & Victor H. Mair, The True History of Tea Hardcover (Thames & Hudson, 2009) ISBN-13: 978-0500251461
4. * George Solt, The Untold History of Ramen: How Political Crisis in Japan Spawned a Global Food Craze (University of California Press, 2014) ISBN-13: 978-0520282353
5. * Roel Sterckx, Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2015) ISBN-13: 978-1107547780
6. Q. Edward Wang, Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History Cambridge University Press (January 26, 2015) ISBN-13: 978-1107023963; Hunter Main Library Stacks GT2949 .W36 2015
7. Isaac Yue & Siu-fu Tang, Scribes of Gastronomy: Representations of Food and Drink in Imperial Chinese Literature (Hong Kong University Press, 2013) ISBN-13: 978-9888139989; Hunter Main Library Stacks PL2263 .S37 2013

* available as ebooks for free for Hunter students

Professor Bernadette McCauley (History)
Course Number: HONS 2011Q
Wednesdays: 10:10-1:00 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Most American women religious, popularly referred to as nuns, have not worn a traditional habit for forty years but the image of that woman, in a stiff headpiece and veil and heavy serge dress, is entrenched in the collective memory of Americans whether they were raised as Catholics or not, and reinforced on calendars, greeting cards, bobble-heads dolls, and refrigerator magnets. Moreover, there is a popular perception that by the 1960's the decision to enter a convent was no longer a meaningful life choice. Why would a liberated American woman choose a life which demanded vows that included chastity and obedience? Critics claimed that the religious life was more than out-dated, it was antifeminist. But the "Nuns on the Bus" tour of the recent past reminded Americans that sisters were still around and that they had something to say. Still, often by their own choosing, women religious remain under the radar for most of us even as we buy those cocktail napkins of Sister Mary Margarita.

In this course we will work at de-mystifying nuns through an investigation of the realities of their lives, past and present. Our readings will include literature from anthropological, historical, medical and sociological perspectives, first-person accounts, observations of convent life by outsiders, and promotional materials. We will evaluate popular culture depictions including ephemera, films and novels, and talk to women who have been and remain engaged in the religious life.

The class will conduct a shared research project investigating the experiences of three Hunter graduates who chose this life in the early twentieth century, and attempt to reconstruct the paths that took these women both to Hunter and the convent. In individual research projects students will investigate specific topics, such as, religious practices of the era, the development of higher education for women, the influence of class and ethnicity on choices available to women. Your own work will result in a documented final research paper which will be 25% of the final grade. Other written work will include several short essays on readings. There will be a midterm exam, and an oral presentation of individual work to the class.

Required readings include: Carole Garibaldi Rogers, Poverty, Chastity and Change: Lives of Contemporary American Nuns (1999); Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede (1969); Joan M. Williams, Hunter College (2000); selections from The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836); Kathleen Sprows Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (2009); Mary J. Henold, Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the Catholic Feminist Movement (2008); Sueellen Hoy, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago's Past; Elizabeth Kuhns, The Habit: A History of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns (2003); Richard Russo, The Whore's Child (2002); Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Monroe, Michigan Building Sisterhood: A Feminist History of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (1995); David Snowdon, Aging with Grace: What the Nuns Study Teaches Us About Leading Longer, Healthier and More Meaningful Lives (2001).

Please read In This House of Brede for our first class. (It's terrific!)

Reading List:

1. Rogers, Carol Garibaldi. Habits of Change
2. Godden, Rumer. In This House of Brede
3. Hoy, Suellen. Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago' s Past
4. Williams, Joan M. Hunter College

Professor Timothy Bromage (Biomaterials & Biomimetics, NYU)
Course Number: HONS 2011U
Thursdays: 5:35-8:05 pm
Room: 1022 North
3 hours, 3 credits

What is Complexity?

This course is about complexity science and the tools for scrutinizing complex systems that embody many of the world's greatest challenges. Underlying the order of natural systems and the simple rules they would appear to follow, is complexity born from the large number of objects under consideration and the functional connections, or links, between these objects at hierarchies of scale. The science of complexity, and goal of this course, concerns how to evaluate such systems as diverse, interdependent, connected, and adapted networks so that we may better understand how the objects of a disparate array of systems become self-organized, robust to disruption, and connected by links that increase in number/length according to common mathematical power laws. Most of the world's top challenges are complex system problems, and thus topics for discussion will be drawn from the physical, biological, and social systems. The class shall capitalize on the collective self-organized behaviors of its participants in the search for natural patterns harboring complexity and, in small-group teams, shall each ask and address a big question of their choice.

Students who successfully complete this course will:

• Identify a complex system by its topology, or structure, as something different from a system that is simply complicated;
• Discourse on the robustness and vulnerabilities of complex systems, and to identify circumstances that may potentially lead to system, or cascade failure;
• Learn to make a map and evaluate complex systems, becoming acquainted with software programs used in network analysis;
• Gain an appreciation for a variety of disciplines occupied with complex systems, including fields within the physical, biological, and social sciences;
• Work in teams to apply principles and acquired skills to assess the reasons why specific complex systems are "broken" in efforts to fix them;
• Communicate knowledge of complex systems effectively through writing assignments and term projects.

Teams will self-organize (following a "six-degrees of separation" game played in the first week of the course) and work on a final project with the aim to provide solutions suggested to resolve complex system failures. Presentations by each team will facilitate class discussions and encourage diverse perspectives on the subject matter. There will be required reading (7-8 books), writing assignments, and a team project (2-3 members) with class presentation of the project. Two midterm examinations will be held at 1/3 and 2/3 of term.

Reading List:

1. Ball, Phillip. Why Society is a Complex Matter. Springer-Verlag, Berlin. 2012. 978-3-642-28999-6 (Print) 978-3-642-29000-8 (Online)
2. Barabási, Albert-László. Linked. Plume publishing (the Penguin Group), New York, USA. 2003. 9780452284395
3. Firestein, Stuart. Ignorance. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 2012. 978-0199828074
4. Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. Little, Brown & Company, New York. 2002. 978-0316346627
5. Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction. 2008. 978-1603580557
6. Mitchell, Melanie. Complexity. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 2009. 978-0199798100
7. Strogatz, Steven. Sync. Hyperion, New York. 2003. 978-0786887217

Professor Joanne Spurza (Classical and Oriental Studies)
Professor Robert White (Classical and Oriental Studies)
Course Number: HONS 3011J
Mondays and Wednesdays: 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

"Much more is learned from studying bits of broken pottery than from all the sensational finds. Our job is to increase the sum of human knowledge of the past."
~ the archaeologist Sir Joseph Whemple in The Mummy (1932)

"Archaeology is the search for facts, not truth. If you want truth, philosophy class is right down the hall . . . X never marks the spot."
~ Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

This course explores the portrayal of archaeology and archaeologists in popular film - a distinct subset of the much larger subject of "antiquity in film." The conventional image of archaeology enshrined in the pre-cinematic popular culture of novels, painting, drama, newspapers and magazines is an inheritance that cinematic versions never entirely discard; in the world of film, archaeological excavations routinely are saturated with elements of horror, superstition, time travel, science fiction and the occult. Equally durable are the historical influences of such spectacular discoveries as the tomb of Tuthankhamen by Howard Carter in 1922 (extensively photographed and filmed by Harry Burton) and the excavations of the Royal Cemetery of Ur in Mesopotamia by C. Leonard Woolley (1922-1934). Beyond all the clichés of exotic scenery and the stereotypes of treasure-hunting, however, these films address difficult issues of cultural appropriation and patrimony, Eurocentric colonial imposition, imperial elitism - balancing the noble search for hidden knowledge on the one hand, with plunder and betrayal of the indigenous and the sacred on the other.

Weekly film screenings focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the evolving cinematic image of archaeology: some of the earliest renditions (Cleopatra (1934); The Mummy (1932) vs. The Mummy (1999)); modern classics (Spartacus (1960); Cleopatra (1963); Gladiator (2000)); popular successes (The Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the rest of the Indiana Jones trilogy; Lara Croft Tomb Raider (2001); less well-known European and Egyptian examples (Al Mummia (The Night of Counting the Years) (1969); Fellini's Roma (1972); L'Amour et Mort (1984)); as well as movies in which archaeological investigation plays the significant, symbolic backdrop to personal drama (Viaggio in Italia (1953); A Month in The Country (1988)). Analysis of each film is supplemented by reading assignments in the now-abundant critical literature on the subject, by related novel, and by apposite selections from ancient literary sources (e.g., Herodotus, Histories Book 2: ancient Egypt as the 'Other' to a foreign visitor).

Grading is based on:

1. active participation in class discussion;
2. weekly quizzes;
3. a mid-term examination;
4. two writing assignments, one shorter (ca. 6 pages), and a longer research paper (ca. 12 pages) due at the end of the semester.

Selective Bibliography

• Day, David, 1997. A Treasure Hard to Attain: Images of Archaeology in Popular Film, with a Filmography. Langham, MD and London: Scarecrow Press.
• Russell, Miles, ed., 2002. Digging Holes in Popular Culture: Archaeology and Science Fiction. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
• Trümpler, Charlotte, ed., 2001. Agatha Christie and Archaeology. London: British Museum Press.
• Wyke, Maria, 1997. Projecting the Past. Ancient Rome, Cinema and History. London: Routledge.

Novels

• H. Rider Haggard, She (made into two films)
• Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia (the Hassanieh dig in Iraq, made into a TV movie)
• Elizabeth Peters, Crocodile on the Sandbank (Egypt)
• Ngaio Marsh, When in Rome (San Clemente, the Villa Giulia)
• Barry Unsworth, Land of Marvels (also Mesopotamia)

Reading List:

1. Haggard, H. Rider. She.Penguin Classics.
2. Christie, Agatha. Murder in Mesopotamia. Harper Collins.
3. Peters, Elizabeth. Crocodile on the Sandbank. Grand Central.

Professor Justin Garson (Philosophy)
Professor Jason Young (Psychology)
Course Number: HONS 30136
Tuesdays and Fridays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL THINKING is a contemporary look at highly topical (and sometimes controversial) questions of how human evolution may have influenced how humans frame the world around them. Included in the issues to be covered:

1. Free will vs. determinism: There have been numerous treatises on the notion of free will and how it can best be defined and delimited in human experience. Folding in an evolutionary perspective adds the consideration of a) are there evolved limits on our ability to experience free will, and 2) what evolved within our brain's architecture that makes free will seem important to us-that is, how does free will confer survival value? Does our exploration of human experience at the neuroscientific level necessarily imply that everything is determined, or does neuroscience still leave room for the self-control required by free will?
2. Religious belief: Why do religious beliefs exist? What functions do they serve? We will discuss the various facets of religious beliefs, including their social function (they bring people together), their explanatory function (they help solve Big questions and reduce the sense of unpredictability about the world), and their cognitive function (as our brains evolved and our ability to question and analyze improved, did we "invent" new things to think about to take advantage of this new processing power in our heads)? This discussion will NOT focus on whether or not God (or some deity) exists, but instead will focus on peoples' considerations of religious beliefs.
3. How can we understand psychiatric classifications using the lens of human evolution?: As part of our evolved social nature, how critical is it that we define "normal" behavior (and if so, how mutable is the idea of "normalcy"?) That is, how does this notion of normalcy confer survival value?·· The flip side of this is what can be defined as dysfunctional behavior and how useful/accurate are we at classifying it? And how might the evolutionary lens lead us to (re)think about psychiatric labels?

In all of our discussions, in addition to the regular classroom management program of Blackboard, we'll also utilize (and reflect upon) several contemporary social media. The course will begin with a general focus on key features of evolutionary theory before turning to the targeted areas mentioned above. In the final third of the course, students will give oral reports on a topic of social thinking of their choice. In addition, students will be divided into small groups that take responsibility for each week's class discussions on a rotating basis.

Grades will be based on class participation, two short take-home essays, a term paper, and an oral presentation.

Readings:
While there will be numerous articles assigned each week, the following book is required for the first couple of weeks' discussion on the overview of evolutionary theory.

• Wilson, D.S. (2007). Evolution for Everyone. Random House: New York

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Tanya Agathocleous (English)
Course Number: HONS 2011R
Mondays and Thursdays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This course looks at the relationship between empire and the transnational circulations of texts in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the British Empire between 1857 and 1945. The British Empire relied on military power to maintain control of its territories, but also on the power of print. Bibles, textbooks, literature, maps, periodicals, photographs, and political pamphlets were all important to the way imperial power was justified and administered, as well as to the way it was contested by colonial subjects. While Thomas Macaulay argued that "a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia" in his attempt to influence educational policy in India, Mohandas Gandhi ran a printing press in South Africa from which he published a protest newspaper Indian Opinion and eventually the pamphlet Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), one of the key texts of Indian nationalism. The course will examine ideas about empire within texts (such as Jane Eyre) as well as the role that various kinds of texts and archives played in the governance of empire. It will draw on the disciplines of literature, history, art history and anthropology. Readings will include novels such as Jane Eyre and Kim; poetry and periodicals by both British and Indian authors; and secondary texts drawn from postcolonial and empire studies, as well as nineteenth-century studies (including writing by Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Isabel Hofmeyr, Antoinette Burton, and Gauri Viswanathan among others). Alongside literary texts, we will look at sociological and political writings, maps, photographs, and paintings that helped both to shape and contest empire.

Requirements:
One short paper in the first part of the semester (5-7 pages) and a long research paper (12-15 pages, submitted in draft and then final form), as well as an annotated bibliography and an abstract of the paper, submitted beforehand, and weekly contributions to the class website.

Reading List:

• Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre; Penguin Classics
• Kipling, Rudyard. Kim; Broadview Press
• Said, Edward. Orientalism - Introduction and first two chapters (background reading over January)

Contact Prof. Tanya Agathocleous at tagathoc@hunter.cuny.edu for the PDFs

Professor Philip Alcabes (Visiting Professor)
Course Number: HONS 20149
Tuesdays and Fridays: 9:45-11:00 am
Room: 1042 East
3 hours, 3 credits

Part of modern thriving, for us in the affluent part of the world, is our capacity to make use of human tissue. We can survive surgeries because of blood transfusion. We can transplant kidneys, hearts, livers, lungs, and corneas into people whose own organs no longer work properly. People who can't conceive and deliver a baby on their own can become parents. All sorts of new medical interventions are possible because of research carried out on human tissue - from donated organs that can't be transplanted, from biopsies, from blood samples, and from fetuses that were never born. All of this would have seemed like a fantasy just a few generations ago. Now it's routine.

In this interdisciplinary colloquium, we will pose two main questions: What concerns arise when people make use of the bodies, organs, or tissues of other people for physical benefit? How should those concerns be dealt with? We will learn the basics of the technological changes that allow these new procedures to take place, examine different moral perspectives that might help us take a stand on the ethics of different procedures, and consider policy options that would limit the ways these procedures are used, oversee them, or even ban them outright.

You are expected to read extensively, write, and discuss - with the aim of helping the class's effort to identify problems that arise when we make use of others' bodies to further our own welfare, and to understand how contemporary society deals with these problems. We will try to reach some conclusions about fair and just policies for accommodating the use of other people's bodies (organs, tissues, etc.).

Readings:

• Derrida, On Hospitality
• Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

Reading List:

• Sanders, Michael. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2013 - BACKGROUND READING OVER JANUARY

Professor Martin Chodorow (Psychology)
Course Number: HONS 20151
Mondays and Wednesdays: 7:00-8:15 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

About sixty years ago, researchers in several disciplines realized that they were asking similar questions about the human mind but were using quite different approaches in their attempts to find answers. They began to discuss the ways in which their efforts might complement one another. From these discussions emerged Cognitive Science, the interdisciplinary study of the human mind from the perspectives of psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience, and philosophy.

In this course, we will examine four areas of current debate in Cognitive Science:

1. Mental Architecture: What is the structure of the mind? Is it a unitary cognitive system, or does it consist of separate, independent modules?
2. Language Acquisition: How much of human language is innate, and how much is acquired through experience?
3. Philosophy of Mind: What is a mental state? Must it be identical to a physiological state? Could a machine ever have a mind?
4. Reasoning and Decision Making: How rational are human beings?
5. Mental Representation: To what degree are mental representations symbolic and rule-based? To what extent are they non-symbolic, probabilistic, and associative?

Course requirements:
The format of the course will be lecture and discussion. Grades will be based on three short written assignments (4-6 pages each) and a term paper (15 pages). Readings will be drawn from primary and secondary sources.

Professor Marlène Barsoum (Romance Languages, French)
Course Number: HONS 20160
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

In recent times, we have seen a heightened preoccupation with the question of war which consequently has become a prevalent topic in multiple domains. The discourse on war, which can be both historical and figurative, will reevaluate relationships between the individual and the collective and their confrontation with the other. Such a discourse raises questions on perception of "otherness," ­ the operative metaphor in discussions surrounding war. By considering this question, it is possible to begin an inquiry on analogous notions of "identity," "fanaticism," and "imperialism," and examine the tropes of "violence," "madness," "women's activism," and the "child's perception of war."

The primary objective of this course is to address many issues pertaining to war through a combination of theoretical, fictional, and visual works (films). We will analyze the representation of a multiplicity of wars (WWII, the Algerian War of independence, the civil war in Lebanon, etc.), as "a structure of feeling" and as an objective reality by writers who have either lived through or who have been affected by these conflicts. The reading of novels by Chedid (Lebanon/Egypt/France), El-Sheikh (Lebanon), Kristof (Hungary/ Switzerland), Mahfouz (Egypt), Nemirovsky (France), Yacine (Algeria), will open up discussions on the origin, nature, and results of war with reference to both cultural particularity and worldwide scope.

Grading will be based on two 10-page papers, a midterm, oral presentations, and participation in class discussions.

Reading List:

1. Chedid, Andrée. The Return to Beirut (trans. Ross Schwartz). Serpent's Tail, 1989.
2. El Sheikh, Hanan. Hekayat Zahra (The Story of Zahra)(trans. Peter Ford) Doubleday, 1996.
3. Kristof, Agota, The Notebook (trans. A. Sheridan 1986)
4. Maalouf, Amin. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. Arcade Publishing, 2001
5. Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journeys of Ibn Fattouma. (trans. Denys Johnson-Davies). Doubleday, 1992.
6. Nemirovsky, Irene, Suite Française. (Vintage) (trans. Sandra Smith, 2006).
7. Yacine, Kateb, Nedjma. (trans. Richard Howard 1991) University of Virginia Press.

Professor Adele J. Haft (Classical and Oriental Studies)
Professor Gavin Hollis (English)
Course Number: HONS 30151
Tuesdays and Fridays: 12:45-2:00 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Concoctions of science and art, maps are tangible images of a society's knowledge and view of the world. This illustrated, interdisciplinary seminar analyzes the roles that maps have played in selected works from the late sixteenth century to the early twenty-first century: paintings, engravings, films, anatomical treatises, works of anthropology and geography, travel writing, memoirs, poetry, drama, and novels. We will explore the intersections of visual art and literature, history and anthropology, psychology and science (cognitive mapping, cartography, geography, and anatomy). Combining historical, thematic, and theoretical approaches to cartography, we will ask: What is cartography? How do we read and encounter maps? What cultural work do they perform? What power do they (and their users) hold? How do cultures determine what maps mean and how they signify, what they depict and what they omit, and what their relationship is to the world they claim to represent?

In Part I of the seminar, map historian Norman Thrower's Maps and Civilization provides an introduction to the history of cartography ("Western" and otherwise) to underpin the historical and political contexts of the works we'll encounter. Geographer Denis Wood's The Power of Maps analyzes ways in which the map is and is not the territory that it depicts; while selected poems, combined with the memoirs of map historian/theorist J.B. Harley, explore the intersections among "real world" maps, cognitive mapping, and autobiography. PartII examines the historical, political, and religious contexts of pre-modern cartography through the lens of Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. PartIII asks how both landscapes and bodies are conceptualized through Shakespeare's King Lear and John Donne's poetry; and then through the protagonist's peregrinations in The City of Glass by Paul Auster. In Part IV, scientist Thomas Harriot's account A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia and Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland, Brian Friel's play Translations, Kei Miller's The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, and selected works of feminist poets emphasize how maps are employed to demarcate and lay claim to territories-and to their inhabitants. Finally, anthropologist Hugh Brody's account of the mapping of the Pacific Northwest, Maps and Dreams, and Vincent Ward's film A Map of the Human Heart help us investigate the relationship between Western and non-Western mapping traditions.

Course Requirements:

• Participation (includes presenting discussion questions & summarizing two of your papers: 20%),
• final exam (20%),
• and three papers of 5-7 typed pages (approximately 20% each). The final paper has two due dates; if submitted by the first date, it may be revised based on comments from the instructors for final submission on the second.

Reading List:

1. Paul Auster, City of Glass (New York Trilogy). Penguin
2. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose. Mariner Books
3. Brian Friel, Translations: A Play. Faber & Faber
4. Thomas Harriot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Dover Thrift
5. Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map A Way to Zion. Carcanet Press
6. William Shakespeare, King Lear. The Pelican Shakespeare
7. Norman Thrower, Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society. University of Chicago Press, 3^rd edition -BACKGROUND READING OVER JANUARY
8. Denis Wood, with John Fels, The Power of Maps. Guilford Press

Selected poetry, theoretical and historical writing, and short stories available on Blackboard

Optional Text:
Adele J. Haft, Jane G. White, Robert J. White, The Key to the Name of the Rose: Including Translations of all Non-English Passages. University of Michigan Press

Professor Gerald Press (Philosophy)
Guest Lecturers
Course Number: HONS 30179
Mondays & Thursdays: 4:10-5:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium will be an introduction to many of the most influential ideas, authors, and books of the last 500 years: Darwinianism and Evolutionary theory, Marxism and Revolutionary theory, Freud and Psychoanalysis, rationalism, political realism, reformation theology, the earliest European novel as well as a classic 19^th century Russian novel, and modernism in English literature.

Guest speakers will include Michael Steiper (Anthropology), Elizabeth Beaujour (Russian, Comparative Literature, and COH), Diana Conchado (Spanish, Romance Languages, and COH), Nico Israel (English and COH), Daniel Addison, Carol Gould, and Laura Keating (Philosophy), Philip Alcabes (Public Health and Provost's Office), and Vishwa Adluri (Religion Program).

As you can imagine, reading will be heavy and there will be high expectations for class participation; on the other hand, writing requirements will be relatively light: (1) either three 1,000-word essays or two 1,000-word essays and an oral presentation on individual books and authors and (2) a 2,500-word term paper bringing together books and ideas from different disciplinary perspectives.

Readings

• Cervantes, Don Quixote
• Machiavelli, The Prince, Discourses on Livy (selections)
• Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (selections)
• Martin Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, The Freedom of a Christian, Prefaces to the New Testament
• Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (selections)
• Darwin, selections from The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man
• Marx, selections from "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," "Theses on Feuerbach," "The German Ideology," "The Communist Manifesto," "On the Jewish Question"
• Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
• Freud, selections from works such as The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, Totem and Taboo
• T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

Reading List:

1. Niccoló Machiavelli. The Prince & The Discourses (Modern Library) ISBN 0075535777
2. Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, Don Quixote. Tr. Edith Grossman. (NY: Harper Collins, 2003) ISBN 0060188707
3. Galileo Galilei, Essential Galileo. Ed Finochiaro. Hackett ISBN 9780872209374
4. René Descartes, Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. 1. Tr. Cottingham et al. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985. paperback ISBN 052128807X
5. Charles Darwin. Darwin: Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Philip Appleman. (NY: Norton, 2000) ISBN 0393958493
6. Martin Luther, Selections from his Writings. Ed. John Dillenberger. (NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1961 and later editions). ISBN 0385098766
7. Voltaire. Philosophical Letters. Tr. Leigh. Hackett, 2007. ISBN 978-0-87220-881-0.
8. Karl Marx. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert Tucker (NY: Norton, 1971) ISBN 0393099652
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground. (NY: Dover, Thrift Edition, 1992). ISBN 048627053X
10. Sigmund Freud. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. A. A. Brill. (NY: Modern Library, 1995) ISBN 067960166X.
11. T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Poems. (NY: Dover, Thrift Edition, 1998). ISBN 0486400611

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Robert J. White (Classical & Oriental Studies)
Course Number: HONS 2011B
Mondays: 5:35-8:05 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Reading List:

• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (A Harvest/HBJ Book) ISBN 0-15-662863-5
• The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco (A Harvest Book/Harcourt, Inc.) ISBN 978-0-15-603043-4
• Memory by Philippe Grimbert (Simon and Schuster) ISBN 978-1-4165-6000-5
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Vintage International) ISBN 978-1-4000-9594-0
• W, or The Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec (David R. Godine, Publisher) ISBN 978-1-56792-158-8
• Memory, A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan K. Foster (Oxford University Press) ISBN 978-0-19-280675-8
• A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro (Vintage International) ISBN 0-679-72267-X
• Swann's Way by Marcel Proust--Lydia Davis, translation (Penguin Books) ISBN 978-0-14-243796-4

Professor Elizabeth K. Beaujour (Classical & Oriental Studies, Russian)
Course Number: HONS 20152 
Tuesdays and Thursdays: 4:10-5:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium will examine the ways in which a variety of human systems attempt to integrate phenomena that challenge their basic assumptions and violate their fundamental structures. Underlying all our other readings will be short texts by cultural anthropologists and linguists:  Mary Douglas, Claude Levi- Strauss, and Steven Lukes.

Each of the five units of the course will involve a comparison. We will begin with a peculiar masterpiece of Russian Literature: Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and read it in conjunction with William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell".  We will then go back to ancient Greece to see how the Aeschylus trilogy and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus find ways to resolve the conflicts between absolutely contradictory obligations and rights.

From Oedipus, it is an obvious segue to a short unit on psychoanalysis, where we will read excerpts from Freud and Jung and look at some of Jung's drawings from his Red Book.  Continuing in an associative way, we will then consider the imagery of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (sometimes called the Millennium Triptych), and compare this work with the imagery in twentieth century Surrealist art, particularly works of Magritte, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.

We will close the semester with a comparison that has now become classic: the antithetical visions  of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Chinua Achebe's, Things Fall Apart,."

There will be a short paper after the first unit,. This paper may be revised.  You will be asked to write several brief responses to some of the paintings,  and a longer final paper on a topic agreed upon with the instructor (to be begun during the weeks when we are looking at visual material. I will want to see at least one draft before final submission of the paper).This final paper should reflect the interests of the student, and may therefore consider kinds of "irrationality" other than those addressed in the course.

There will also be an odd, one hour, final exam.

Reading List:

• Bulgakov, M. (trans Burgin & O'Connor); The Master & Margarita
• Zamiatin, E. We
• Aeschylus, Aeschylus I
• Sophocles, Sophocles I
• Euripides, Euripides V
• Freud, S. Intro Lectures on Psychoanalysis
• Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness
• Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart

Professor Gerald Press (Philosophy)
Course Number: HONS 20130
Tuesdays and Fridays: 12:45-2:00 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Plato is usually thought of as a philosopher; but from the philological standpoint he was a poet as well. In fact, his dialogues are widely considered the best Attic Greek ever written. Besides the philosophical ideas and arguments in them, the dialogues are stories, comic and tragic dramas of astonishing brilliance in some cases. The dialogues are not history, though they are often taken to be; and Plato is not a historian, though some modern readers - anachronistically - fault him for this. Nevertheless, they can be used, with caution, as sources for the reconstruction of Greek political and cultural history. Moreover, a grasp of the dialogues as poetry or philosophy requires some knowledge of their historical contexts.

In this colloquium, we will read Plato in an interdisciplinary way, from the standpoints of history, literature, and philosophy. This will illustrate an approach that can be fruitfully applied as well to other "great books" and great authors. I hope that students will come to appreciate that what Plato is doing in the dialogues transcends modern disciplinary distinctions.

We will read some of the shorter dialogues, such as Ion, Euthyphro, and Apology, and some of the medium-length dialogues, such as Meno, Protagoras, and Phaedrus. We will note differences between the more richly literary and dramatic, such as Symposium, Protagoras, and Phaedrus, and the more dryly argumentative, such as Parmenides and Republic, of which we will read not only the central books 5 - 7, but also the important books 1 and 10.

We will also look at some attempts to perform the dialogues on stage and in films, and possibly attend a local performance.

Required work and grades

1. Each student will be required to write a short (800-1,000 word) paper on a topic reflecting each section of the course. Short papers will constitute 40% of the course grade.
2. Students will also be required to write a term paper of 3,000-4,000 words. Term papers may be research papers or non-research interpretative papers. Instructor will provide individual guidance on all phases of term paper writing. Term papers will constitute 40% of the course grade.

20% will reflect student's participation and contribution to in-class on on-line discussions.

Required Books

• Essential Dialogues of Plato. Tr. Benjamin Jowett. Ed. Blas. Barnes and Noble, 2005. ISBN 159308269X
• Great Dialogues of Plato. Tr. W. H. D. Rouse. Signet Classics, 1999. ISBN 9780451527455.
• Xenophon. Conversations of Socrates. Tr. Tredennick and Waterfield, Penguin. ISBN 0-14-044517-X
• Four Plays by Aristophanes: The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; Lysistrata. Tr. William Arrowsmith. New American Library. ISBN 0452007178

Recommended

• G. A. Press, Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum. 2007. ISBN: 0-8264-9176-6.

Professor Sarah Chinn (English)
Professor Ida Susser (Anthropology)
Course Number: HONS 3011B
Mondays and Wednesdays: 4:10-5:25 pm
Room: C103 North
3 hours, 3 credits

Cities are transformative public spaces where new ideas are sown, exciting movements begin, and people meet one another and embark on new lives. The experience of the city is especially life-changing for women, whose workplaces and urban environments have been shaped by changing ideas about women and the relationship between public and private spheres.

This course will explore both literary and social scientific representations of women's experiences in major cities in Europe and the United States. Beginning with the first major wave of urbanization in England and France in the mid-19^th century and then moving to New York and Chicago at the end of the 19^th and early decades of the 20^th century, we will look at women's relationships to labor movements, financial booms and busts, political activism, and the ongoing pressures of domesticity. We will integrate literary texts that anchor the course with other kinds of materials: manifestos, visual representations of working women, autobiography, sociology, history, and political science, including documents from reform movements.

Requirements:

• Participation: Students will participate in an online discussion board, and will be required to contribute at least once every week, as well as participating in class discussion (10%). They will also work in groups on oral presentations based on research about the historical, political, and cultural contexts of the readings for that unit (15%).
• Writing:
  • Each week, two students will pose discussion questions to the class, as part of the writing requirement (10%).
  • Midterm essay of 6-8 pages; students will have the opportunity to write in drafts and revise (25%).
  • Final essay of 14-16 pages (40%); students will have the opportunity to write in drafts.

Selected Readings:

• Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Projects;
• David Harvey, Paris: The Capital of Modernity;
• Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860;
• Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918;
• Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie;
• Edith Warton, The House of Mirth;
• Anzia Yezierska, Salome of the Tenements

Professor Anna Akasoy (Classical & Oriental Studies)
Professor Nebahat Avcioglu (Art & Art History)
Course Number: HONS 3011H
Mondays and Thursdays: 9:45-11:00 am
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium proposes a critical thematic and historical overview of architectural, social, political and cultural aspects of cities in the Middle East from the seventh century to the present. Often described as "Islamic" since the 19^th century by Orientalists seeking religious authenticity, these cities were either inherited or founded at various times and under different circumstances by Muslims and became powerful cosmopolitan centers. Pointing to the rhetoric surrounding the "Islamic city" in the West, which describes it as a physically haphazard, socially segregated and culturally exotic space (or stagnant, traditional and despotic), we will engage with the challenges of understanding the city in its own terms. While we will focus on some of the traditional centers in the Islamic world (such as Istanbul, Cairo, Isfahan, Damascus and Baghdad), we will also discuss the remaking of Beirut, Abu Dhabi and Mecca as well as engaging in comparative exercises with European and North American cities.

Proceeding in a chronological order and identifying the most important topics in the study of the "Islamic city", we will

• discuss early urban developments under Muslim rule, whether in pre-existing cities or newly established settlements, exploring which cultural, political, social and religious elements shaped them (e.g. preexisting architectural models, building regulations in medieval Islamic law)
• discuss the relationship between architecture, urban structures and social and political realities (e.g., the location of power in the city or segregation based on gender, ethnicity, or religion)-          explore the unique urban constellations of material wealth, cosmopolitanism and critical intellectual mass for political, social, material and cultural dynamics in Islamic history
• consider representations of cities in visual images, such as maps and panoramas, and in literature produced in the West and in the Islamic world and explore the reputations of different cities
• Moving into the modern and post-modern periods, explore the impact of colonialism, post-colonialism, literary representations such as Orhan Pamuk's writings about Istanbul and Alaa al-Aswany's novel about Cairo

Requirements:

• 1 Research paper;
• 1 presentation;
• short in-class exercises such as analyzing an image, city plan or building

Select bibliography:

• Urban Theory Beyond the West: A World of Cities, eds., Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne, Routledge: 2011.
• The City in the Islamic World, eds., Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Renata Holod, Attilio Petruccioli, André Raymond, Brill: 2008.
• Cities in the Pre-Modern Islamic World: The urban impact of religion, state and society, eds., Amira K. Benison and Alison Gascoigne, Routledge, 2007.
• Stefano Bianca, Urban Form in the Arab World: Past and Present. New York: 2000.

Professor Anthony Browne (Africana & Puerto Rican/Latino Studies)
Professor Roseanne Flores (Psychology)
Course Number: HONS 30148
Tuesdays and Fridays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This interdisciplinary course explores how sociology and psychology explain persistent poverty and the attendant effects on individuals, communities and American society. Theories and concepts from both disciplines are utilized to examine the nature and extent of poverty in the U.S., its myriad causes and consequences, as well government programs and policies. Emphasis will be placed on understanding the intersectionality of class, race/ethnicity and gender.  Questions to be addressed include: What is poverty? Why is U.S. poverty higher than other industrialized nations? What are the perceptions of the poor by the non-poor? What is the effect of poverty on children and families? What are individual and structural explanations of poverty? And what is the psychological impact of being poor in an affluent society? Emphasis will be placed on urban poverty and the role of the state and civil society its amelioration.

Readings:

• Mark Rank, One Nation Underprivileged. Oxford University Press. 2006 - Required
• David Shipler, The Working Poor. Vintage. 2005

Grading for this course is based primarily on a research paper, midterm and final exam, and class participation.

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Marlene Hennessy (English)
Course Number: HONS 2011L
Tuesdays & Fridays: 12:45-2:00 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium will examine a broad range of texts written on the topics of sex and gender in the Middle Ages.  From medical writings to mystical treatises, from the scandalous fabliaux to the orthodox lives of the saints, the texts read in this course will be used to explore some of the dominant ideas about gender and sexuality, as well as the often paradoxical discourses of misogyny, present in medieval literature, art, religion, and culture.  The material will first be contextualized by looking at classical and early Christian ideas of sex and gender, with special focus on theories of reproduction and sexual function.  Throughout the course these subjects will be approached from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing upon research in literature, history, art history, and the history of science.  Two films will be included in the syllabus, as will several musical recordings of the songs of the Women Troubadours, the chansons de toile (women's weaving songs), and the musical compositions of the polymath and composer Hildegard of Bingen.  Texts to be read include works by major authors such as Sappho, Ovid, Juvenal, Galen, Aristotle, Marie de France, Heloise and Abelard, and Richard Rolle.  In addition, we will read several anonymous texts, including "The Ballad of a Tyrannical Husband," and (in translation) the Anglo-Latin Book of Monsters.  Topics to be studied include: blood, body, and Christian materiality; chaste marriage and clerical sexuality; the erotics of courtly love; transgender persons and hermaphrodites; the sexuality of Christ; medical theories of pleasure and contraception; and masculinity in the earliest Robin Hood texts.  Special attention will be devoted to the iconography of sex and gender in medieval visual traditions such as manuscript painting.  We will also engage with recent developments in criticism (including historical, literary, feminist, queer, and art historical approaches) by authors such as Judith Bennett, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Leo Steinberg, Michael Camille, Carolyn Dinshaw, Dyan Elliott, and Ruth Mazo Karras, among others.

Requirements: one research paper (10-12 pages, submitted in two drafts); one 20-minute oral report based on one of the optional readings for the week on the syllabus, which is handed in as a 3-page written essay, and various in-class writing assignments.

Professor Catherine Coppola (Music)
Course Number: HONS 2011M
Tuesdays & Fridays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 406 North
3 hours, 3 credits

This course examines four of Mozart's operas as musical transformations of provocative literary sources. Starting with The Marriage of Figaro, we will read the socially and politically charged play by Beaumarchais, as well as segments that were cut from the original and which add to our understanding of the gender relationships among the characters. These insights will be applied to text-music relations in Mozart's music. Next will be Don Giovanni-the opera that was commissioned in response to Figaro's remarkable success.  Here the literary antecedents widen to several 17^th-century stories, notably Moliere's Don Juan and Molina's The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest. Early 19^th- century reinterpretations include the story by E. T. A. Hoffmann.

Così fan tutte stems from an even more complex array of sources ranging from Ovid to Ariosto and Shakespeare. In one case an older story overlaps with a theatrical contemporary, that is, the use of an episode from Cervantes' Don Quixote as the basis for Anfossi's Il curioso indiscreto, a Viennese operatic precedent that was known to DaPonte and Mozart. A layered interpretation is especially fruitful for Così, which has been described as everything from "most puzzling," "most disturbing," and "most artificial" to "most beautiful" of Mozart's operas, while the story was often criticized as unworthy of Mozart's music. The story is also a sticking point for The Magic Flute, much of which functions on a symbolic level, and in which misogynist and racist notions are particularly problematic. Complicating matters, it is a Singspiel that is based on a German fairy tale as well as a French imitation of an Egyptian story, the author of which made the false claim that it was based on a Greek manuscript!  Striking changes to the original fairy tale are crucial to the operatic version by librettist Emmanuel Schikaneder, especially in its depiction of the Queen of the Night, one of Mozart's most enigmatic female roles.

We will trace sometimes surprising notions about gender issues-notably, that Mozart and DaPonte were not as backward as some might suggest, while current society is not nearly as progressive as most would want to believe. Contemporary figures such as Amanda Knox, Chris Rock, and Hillary Clinton will provide case studies that support the pursuit of a continued discussion of feminist issues in Mozart operas. Critics who object to such discussion often justify their view with the idea that times were different then, that the authors, composers, and librettists were not thinking about such issues, and that in any case the situation is better now.  Our study of the literature and music will question these fallacies surrounding context and change.

Readings will be taken from the literary sources mentioned above, as well as from the secondary literature. Students will also view and respond to operatic scenes both in written and in discussion assignments. Where possible, the class will attend live performances of the operas. There will be four essays (one on each of the four operas) and a final 15-page paper.

Professor Cynthia Roberts (Political Science)
Course Number: HONS 2011N
Mondays & Wednesdays: 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Nearly 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains a major world actor and is more integrated into the international system that at any point in its history. It retains the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, possesses large reserves of oil and natural gas, boasts the world's sixth largest economy, and enjoys veto power in the UN Security Council. However, as Russia created markets and globalized, it failed to liberalize its political institutions and suffers from extreme corruption rare among economies ranked in its high per capita income level.  Moreover, despite extensive cooperation with other states, its behavior in the former Soviet space is hegemonic, even imperialistic and aggressive. Many of Russia's weaknesses have historical or structural roots, such as its chronic backwardness punctuated by problematic bursts of modernization as well as its demographic and economic problems.  Russia also displays a recurring tendency in its quest for security and international status to make others insecure.

This course will explore these issues as they emerge in the intersection of Russia's domestic and foreign policies. The focus will be on contemporary Russia and its place in the current international arena with forays into historical patterns, the legacies of the post-Soviet political transition as well as pressing economic and demographic challenges. Students will engage these topics through assigned readings (which include works by both Western and Russian scholars},class discussion, oral presentations, papers, and an essay examination.

Requirements:

• 2 papers: The first paper will be a review essay on a book to be read over January break. Students will select from a list of works (primarily in the social sciences) or petition to substitute a suitable alternative. The second paper will analyze an issue or puzzle related to one of the topics covered in the course.
• Final Examination
• Oral Presentations

Assigned Readings:

• Articles and book chapters drawn from recent scholarship on Russia.
• All or portions of the following books:
  • Treisman, Daniel. The Return: Russia's Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev. Simon and Schuster, 2012.
  • Ledeneva, Alena V. Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  • Gaddy, Clifford G., and Barry Ickes. Bear Traps on Russia's Road to Modernization. Routledge, 2013.
  • Gvosdev, Nikolas K.,and Christopher Marsh. Russian Foreign Policy: Interests, Vectors, and Sectors. CQ Press, 2014.

Professor Vishwa Adluri (Religion)
Course Number: HONS 2011P
Mondays and Thursdays: 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This course offers an introduction to the Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata. We will begin with a brief look at the Sanskrit language, its writing system (Devanāgarī), its place as one of the oldest Indo-European languages, and its influence on the literature, culture, and artistic history of India. The main part of the course will focus on the Sanskrit epic’s phenomenal influence on Indian traditions of literature, drama, art and iconography. The Mahābhārata includes almost every popular myth of Hinduism in some form, including the story of the churning of the ocean by the gods and demons and the story of the great eagle Garuḍa’s flight to obtain the elixir of immortality. Even today, its role in Indian life is ubiquituous: dance traditions such as Kathakali from the south Indian state of Kerala, for instance, still perform a repertoire that is largely based on the Mahābhārata. The Mahābhārata largely gave rise to the tradition we know today as Hinduism, creating in the process not only its philosophical and textual basis, but also a well-developed liturgy, temple tradition and iconography. In this course, we shall read a selection of popular narratives from the Mahābhārata and explore how the epic articulates and redefines the Hindu experience.

Required Texts:

• van Buitenen, J. A. B., trans. The Mahābhārata: I. The Book of the Beginning. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1973.
• Smith, John D., trans. The Mahābhārata. Abridged and Translated. New York: Penguin, 2009.Additionally, I will provide excerpts from other books of the Mahābhārata; you do not need to purchase these books.

All textbooks are available at Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers who also has a limited number of used copies available at lower prices.

Course Requirements:

1. All students are responsible for a mid-term paper (10 pages min.) which counts toward 50% of their grade.
2. The mid-term paper will be on one of two questions pertaining to general aspects of Hinduism. I will write the questions in class one week before the paper is due. You are required to edit your papers for correct spelling and grammar. I reserve the right to reject any paper that does not meet these standards. You will have the option of rewriting your mid-term paper for a better grade if you wish. I do not accept late assignments.
3. There will also be a final exam with two short questions. The final exam is 30% of your grade.
4. Regular reading counts toward 10% of your grade.
5. Class participation counts toward a further 10% of your grade.
6. Regular attendance is required; any student who misses more than three classes without notice will have to see me before he/she can continue attending. I take attendance for every session.

Course Policies:
Every student is required to meet with me at least once a semester during office hours to discuss his/her progress.

Professor Lisa Anderson (German)
Professor Omar Dahbour (Philosophy)
Course Number: HONS 3011G
Mondays & Thursdays: 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

The twentieth century is conventionally identified with the death of traditional European politics and culture, and its replacement by new forms of government, economy, communication, and media from the United States and the Soviet Union. But what if it should turn out that some of the most radical political ideas, and the most modernist artistic experiments, were actually produced in the heart of "old" Europe? This what if is the "lost promise" of what today is called Weimar Germany: exploring it will be the mission of this interdisciplinary course.

In order to understand the political and cultural history of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) in Germany, we will:

• Trace the historical trajectory that took Germany from World War I into a failed revolution, a short-lived democratic republic, and the rise of Nazism.
• Consider literary texts that reflect the cultural and political struggles of the interwar years, as Germans negotiated among monarchism, soviet-style Marxism, and parliamentary democracy.
• Examine Expressionist and New Objectivist artworks that contextualize the cultural openness and financial prosperity of the "Golden Twenties" within the lingering effects of Germany's war guilt and crushing reparations.
• Read political and philosophical essays that introduced both radical alternatives to liberal democracy as well as new philosophical concepts (e.g., existential phenomenology, critical theory).
• Watch such films as Metropolis, The Blue Angel, Nosferatu, and M, which illustrate the origins of film aesthetics.
• Listen to musical compositions that demonstrate the invention, in these years, of new forms of film music and musical theater.

Requirements

• Attendance & Participation
• 2 Essays
• 1 Biographical Report/Presentation

Required Reading

• Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy
• Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After
• Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera and selected poems
• Thomas Mann, "Reflections of an Unpolitical Man" and The Magic Mountain (excerpts)
• Ernst Toller, I Was A German
• Additional texts in a course packet or on e-reserve

Recommended Reading

• Peter Gay, Weimar Culture
• Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918 to 1923
• Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures

Reading List:

1. Gay, Peter.  Weimar Culture, Norton; ISBN: 9780393322392 – Background reading during January
2. Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany, Princeton University Press; ISBN: 9780691140964
3. Brecht, Bertolt.  The Threepenny Opera, Penguin; ISBN: 9780143105169
4. Mann, Thom. The Magic Mountain, Vintage, International; ISBN: 9780679772873
5. Weber, Max.  The Vocation Lectures, Hacket Publishing ISBN: 9780872206656

Professor Philip Alcabes (Adelphi University)
Professor Sandra Clarkson (Mathematics and Statistics)
Course Number: HONS 3011G
Mondays & Thursdays: 4:10-5:25 pm
Room: 522 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Life is thick with risk today. The Ebola outbreak, terrorist attacks, charter bus crashes, drunken drivers, airplane pilot errors, gluten, secondhand smoke... The list of threats to life and health seems to get longer, and the evasive actions recommended get increasingly extreme.

And risk takes many forms. There is risk to safety and security: our civilization is said to be threatened by powerful forces like climate change, emerging viruses, and radical fundamentalism. There is investment risk. And there are the little risks of everyday life: Buy a thrift-shop coat and risk it falling apart or pay the higher price for a new one? Take the chance of waiting for an express on the Lexington line at 42^nd St. or to stay on the downtown local? Leave the umbrella home and risk getting wet, or take it along and risk leaving it in a classroom.

What makes possibilities seem risky? How do we understand "risk" today? How does our sense of risk accord with real probabilities of events - with the implacable randomness of nature? How can we apply a single concept of randomness to both the nearly impossible (shark attack) or the nearly certain (express will be too slow or too crowded), and everything in between? Finally, what does risk tell us about how we think, how society works, and how we think it should work?

This course explores the idea of risk in relation to the concept of random events. It traces the history of thought about probability, the development of the concept of risk (first in ship insurance, later in life insurance), and the adoption of the risk concept by other fields of great social importance, notably finance and the study of disease occurrence, called epidemiology. And it examines how risk figures in social decision making today, exploring why some people say we live in a "risk society." Some arithmetic exercises will be done in class, but students will not be required to master complex probability equations. The course will require extensive reading and writing.

Pre-requisite: One college-level math course.

Assignments:

• Five short papers (750-1000 words). Required but not graded. Each instructor will read each paper and write comments. Each student works with another student as editing partner, to revise papers after receiving instructors' comments.
• One "perfect" short paper: Revised version of one of the five short paper. This paper is graded.
• Three in-class writing tests: A paragraph or two on material from assigned readings.
• Term paper.
• Blackboard discussion board postings.

Recommended (not required) reading: (Required readings to be distributed in class)

• John Graunt, Observations on the Bills of Mortality, 1662.
• William Rothstein, Public Health and the Risk Factor, 2003.
• F.N. David, Games, Gods, and Gambling, 1998.
• Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, 1999.
• Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, 1984.
• Richard J. Cleary and Norean Radke Sharpe, "Randomness in the Stock Market" in Statistics: A Guide to the Unknown 4th ed., pp 359 - 372. Brooks Cole, 2006.
• Natalie Angier, "Probabilities: For Whom the Bell Curves", in The Canon, pp 47 - 70, 2007.
• Sven Ove Hansson, "Seven Myths of Risk" in Risk Management, vol 7, No. 2, pp 7 - 17.
• Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Clovic, Sarah Lichtenstein, "Lay Foibles and Expert Fables in Judgments about Risk" in The American Statistician Vol. 36, No. 3, Part 2, 1982.
• Deborah Lupton, Risk, 1999.
• Selections from Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, 1992.
• Selections from Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear, 1997.
• Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory, 1992.

Course Number: HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Unavailable.

Professor Spiro Alexandratos
Course Number: HONS 2011H
Mondays & Thursdays; 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

The search for knowledge of all that we see has been central to humanity ever since we first learned to ask "What is?" As this search proceeded over the centuries, we then asked "Are you certain?" This course provides an overview of this search in the Western tradition and how we approach the question of certainty.

We begin at the beginning, with epistemology: before we can address the search for knowledge, we have to ask "What is knowledge?"

We will discuss how philosophers since Plato have answered this question, and then proceed to the search itself from the perspective of philosophers and scientists.

The course objective is to understand what it means to know something and whether we can be certain of what we know.

Requirements:
Weekly essay (2-pages, double-space, in which you reflect on (not summarize) the previous week's lecture), one oral assignment, one mid-term + one final exam. Both exams are open-notes / open-book.

Assigned readings: (PDF's provided)

• Plato - Theaetetus; Book V of the Republic
• Rene Descartes - Meditations on First Philosophy
• George Berkeley - A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (principles 1-24)
• John Dewey - The Quest for Certainty (chapters I - III)
• Lord Rayleigh - The density of gases in the air and the discovery of argon, Nobel Lecture (1904)

There are no pre-requisites in either philosophy or science. Come as you are.

Professor Maria Hernandez-Ojeda (Romance Languages, Spanish)
Course Number: HONS 2011J
Tuesdays & Fridays; 12:45-2:00 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This course will examine, in English, literary and artistic works of international significance inspired by the Spanish Civil War. Students will read texts by major authors, watch films and documentaries that reflect this event, and discuss symbols and images of the War. For their final project, students will visit the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives to research the invaluable documentation that this institution offers, and choose a topic for their final paper. Students will learn about the historical, political and cultural contexts that surround the readings, films and art studied during the semester.

Course Requirements:

• Writing requirement: Students will write one final paper based on their archival research at the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. It will be approximately 10-12 pages long. Furthermore, they will write a two-page commentary on Blackboard for each one of the seven films assigned. I will revise every writing assignment at least once before final submission.
• Midterm and Final Exam: The format of the midterm and final exam may include any combination of the following: short-answer identifications, passages for commentary, and long essay questions.
• Oral presentation: Students will prepare a presentation individually for the class using PowerPoint. This oral evaluation should last no more than fifteen minutes and no less than ten. The presentation will focus on their research for the final essay.

Sample works to be studied:

• Novel: Cercas, Javier. Soldiers of Salamis
• Poetry: Neruda, Pablo. Five Decades: Poems: 1925-70.
• Testimonial Narrative: Hemingway, Ernest. The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War.
• Interdisciplinary Essay: Labanyi, Jo. "Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War."
• Theory: White, Hayden. "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact"
• Film: Pan's Labyrinth/ El laberinto del fauno.
• Documentaries: The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
• Guernica by Pablo Picasso
• Posters and Photography: Capa, Robert. Death in the Making.
• Music: Miguel Hernandez by Joan Manuel Serrat,

Professor Geoffrey Burleson (Music)
Course Number: HONS 20163
Mondays and Wednesdays; 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: 405 North
3 hours, 3 credits

From the late 1880s through the 1920s and beyond, musical style and substance in North America and Europe was irrevocably changed by the influx of three unstoppable influential tidal waves: the flourishing of (1) "exoticism" via music, art and aesthetics of East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa; the birth, development and ensuing mania of (2) jazz in the U.S. and Europe, and the many-layered influences and exponential growth of (3) technology, both for creative and destructive purposes. These currents reached their apex in the 1920s, a decade simultaneously referred to as the Jazz Age and the Machine Age.

Jazz Age/Machine Age will explore the influence of non-western music, art and philosophy, as well as technology, on music in the U.S. and Europe, using as wellsprings the Paris Exposition of 1889 (where music of Indonesia and other Asian cultures, as well as a futuristic "Gallery of Machines" were first encountered by over 32 million European visitors), the birth and flourishing of jazz in both the U.S. and Europe, and the beginnings of "machine-age music", reflecting a multiplicity of directions, such as the invention and inclusion of electric and electronic instruments into musical ensembles, and the resulting explosion of new musical styles and directions. The slow but inexorable breakdown of barriers between "high" and "low" music and art, and the influence of film on musical coding and syntax, will be central interrelated topics for this course. Beginning with the radical French Impressionist composer Claude Debussy, the music of a number of significantly relevant composers and improvisers from the concert, jazz and popular realms from 1890-present will be central to the course, in part as catalysts for developing movements arising out of the aforementioned areas of influence. Class discussion will involve understanding and analysis of revolutionary aspects of the musical works being examined, incorporation of non-western European influences in the works themselves, the forging and development of new styles and genres resulting from synthesis of different stylistic ingredients and influences, and their musical and societal impact, as well as their interrelationships with art forms other than music.

Prerequisites:
Students who do not read music or play an instrument should have taken either MUSHL 101 or MUSTH 101 or obtain permission from Professor Burleson.

Some Major Musical Works and Currents to Be Examined During the Semester:

• Indonesian Gamelan Music and Japanese Shakuhachi Music
• Works of French Impressionist Composers Claude Debussy & Maurice Ravel
• Igor Stravinsky: Le sacre du printemps
• George Antheil/Fernand Léger/Man Ray/Dudley Murphy: Ballet mécanique
• Louis Armstrong: Hotter Than That
• George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
• Duke Ellington: score for "Anatomy of a Murder"
• Bernard Herrmann: Psycho Suite
• Frank Zappa: G-Spot Tornado

Professore Richard Stapleford (English)
Course Number: HONS 20194
Tuesdays; 5:35-8:05 pm
Room: 1602 North
3 hours, 3 credits

The idea that ancient Rome, a political institution of unparalleled size and duration, could simply "fall" is a commonplace assumption in our view of Western history. Yet a cursory glance at reality calls that assumption into question. Today the majority of Westerners speak a dialect of Latin, our legal systems are based on those of the Roman Empire, our literary forms are modeled on those of the Romans, and a good part of our artistic efforts are based on principles developed in Rome. Furthermore, though historians love to debate the issue, no moment of collapse is agreed upon, with suggestions varying over four centuries from the 200s to the 500s.  It seems then, that the "fall" is a metaphor intended to locate the historical development of the Roman Empire in a context relevant to the modern world.

What really happened to Rome? The methodology of this course is to examine history in order to distinguish historical fact from myth. We will examine testimony from the ancient world: historians, poets, theologians, politicians, artists and architects. The synthesis of these voices creates a different picture from the "decline and fall" metaphor. And, no less important, the process of examination and discovery will inform our view of all our "history." We will find that history is an invention, tailored to suit the needs of the culture that produces it.

The course will be conducted as an enlivened lecture, a colloquium inviting the participation of each member of the class. It will demand regular readings from various sources, ancient and modern, and the development of analytical skills in art and literature. Four papers addressing different aspects of the investigation will be required.

Professor Derrick Brazil (Biological Sciences)
Professor Sylvia Tomasch (English)
Course Number: HONS 3011E
Tuesdays and Thursdays; 2:45-4:00 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Why zombies? Why vampires? Why zombies and vampires now? Audiences seem unable to resist the onslaught of the undead in fiction, film, television, video, graphic novels, etc., but zombies and vampires don't just live (or not live) in popular culture. There are also important connections to pressing issues in contemporary science. In this this course therefore, we'll consider vampires and zombies in terms of folklore, history, politics, gender, race, and biology (to name just a few issues that will arise during the semester). Because of the wide range of materials and approaches, students will have opportunities to focus on the areas of greatest interest to them.

In this course, we will try to understand the cultural aspects underlying the historical and contemporary popularity of the undead, to understand the biological cognates of the undead found in nature, to understand the connections between modern issues in science and biology, and the resurgence of popular interest in the undead.

Requirements:
Everyone is expected to be an active contributor, in class and on the website. You're expected to come on time, be prepared, with the text in hand, ready to contribute to discussion in an informed and positive fashion.

Participation (15%); Presentations (20%); Four formal writing assignments (15% each; 60% total); Weekly informal responses;

Quizzes and in-class informal writing

Required Texts:

• Novels
  • Max Brooks, World War Z; Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, Carmilla; Richard Matheson, I Am Legend;
  • Bram Stoker, Dracula; Anne Rice, Interview with A Vampire
• Books
  • Stuart Hill, Emerging Infectious Disease;, Kelly A Hogan, Stem Cells and Cloning; Michael A. Palladino, Understanding the Human Genome Project
• Articles (available via Blackboard)
  • Paige Brown, "Zombie Ants and a Cultural Obsession," Scientific American
  • Berdoy et al., "Fatal attraction in rats infected with Toxoplasma gondii," The Royal Society
  • Eric Michael Johnson, "A Natural History of Vampires," Scientific American
  • Nick Lane, "Born to the Purple: the Story of Porphyria," Scientific American
• Films
  • I Am Legend; I Walked with A Zombie; Omega Man; The Last Man on Earth; 28 Days Later; Twilight; Vampyr; Warm Bodies; White Zombie

Professor Sandra Clarkson (Mathematics and Statistics)
Professor Steve Gorelick (Film and Media)
Course Number: HONS 3011F
Thursdays; 5:35-8:05 pm
Room: 1042 East
3 hours, 3 credits

In a world of uncertainty, randomness, and contradictory versions of "truth," informed decision-making by individuals and institutions can be frustrating and confusing.  People want to make fair and wise decisions, but the flood of information available in the digital age, as well as the seeming absence of unambiguous answers, can frustrate even the most vigilant citizen.  When can we be confident that we have enough evidence to decide? What types of evidence can or should we rely on in a specific situation? Should some forms of evidence be considered more legitimate and authoritative than others? Are there times when it might be in our interest, even crucial, to make a decision before we believe we have adequate evidence? Put most simply and directly, how do we know what we know and when we know it?

The course will be an exploration of the widely diverse forms of evidence that are available for decision-making in a complex world. While a special emphasis will be placed on the evidence that can be inferred from statistics and other quantitative data, a myriad of other forms of evidence will be defined, explored, and compared.

Consider a jury trying to decide the guilt or innocence of an accused burglar. Criminal law has very specific rules in which some forms of evidence are inadmissible, while others are required to prove guilt. But think of just how many different types of evidence might come up in the course of a trial. Many people think of physical, forensic evidence in the age of CSI. But circumstantial evidence, eyewitness testimony, expert testimony, the defendant's previous record, the words spoken by the accused during interrogation, and even statistical evidence are also frequently introduced.   How does a jury distinguish the different types of evidence introduced and decide which should be believed? Why do some of the most popularly accepted forms of evidence - confessions, identification of suspects by victims - turn out to be so fallible and problematic?

The problem of evidence is also central in the realm of public policy-making. No one would dispute that public health and safety is an important objective of law and policy. But the era of evidence-based science and medicine presents us with a seemingly infinite number of sometimes-contradictory studies. Does caffeine improve focus or does it aggravate existing cardio-vascular conditions? Do changes in speed limits and driving ages affect the rate of automobile accidents? Do age restrictions on the purchase of tobacco reduce use? Not surprisingly, each of these and many other questions yield contradictory evidence, and the class will explore the intricacies of data and the sometimes hidden and variables that explain these contradictions.

Finally, the class will examine the significant issues and problems that arise when complex evidence enters the public sphere and is interpreted, shaped and sometimes distorted in news and media accounts.

Some mathematics and statistics will be illustrated in class, but students will not be assessed on those skills.  The course will require extensive reading, writing and discussion.

Pre-requisite:
One college-level math course or permission of one of the instructors.

Course Number: HONS 301.99
Hours to be arranged
3 hours, 3 credits

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once and does not count towards the three Honors Colloquia required of every member of the Program.

HONS 301.99 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Roger Persell (Biological Sciences)
Course Number: HONS 201.1G
Mondays & Thursdays; 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Using historical, thematic, scientific and artistic approaches, we will explore “anatomy”: the interior structure that gives meaning to our surface perceptions. Anatomy is not only the branch of biology that names bones and muscles; it’s the totality of what lies beneath everything to give the surface its form and function. Freud, for example, attempted an anatomy of the mind to uncover deeper truths about our own irrational behavior.

From the first illustrated anatomy in the 15^th century to contemporary digital work in forensic, cinema, video games, and medicine, we will try to discover when anatomical analysis is art and when it’s science, but we’ll soon see that an artistic “right-brain” appreciation and a scientific “left-brain” understanding come together to form our most complete picture of ourselves. Divisions between science and art break down in the search for the fullest possible comprehension of what we are most interested in, ourselves.

There are no special prerequisites or co-requisites for this course except an eagerness to try your own hand at creating a visual work of anatomy and to read and write about occasionally challenging articles. Grading is based on timely assignments and intensive class participation. Late work is unacceptable. A background in art and skill in drawing are not requirements for a good grade, but effort is.

Students will do 3 short projects that involve both art and science (15% each). We’re fortunate in having a professional science illustrator, Ms. Robin Sternberg, join the class to help with basic anatomical renditions of expressive human structures. Each project will be accompanied by a 2-3 page essay on the relationship of the anatomy to its function. Students will also choose their own term-paper project (35%) for a fuller exploration of how science and art come together to illuminate a subject, for example the digitization of tiger anatomy in the movie The Life of Pi. Term papers will be between 12-15 pages and can include multi-media work. Since regular participation is emphasized (20%), missing more than 1-2 classes is likely to take a toll on a student’s grade.

Readings:

1. Rifkin, BA, Ackerman, MJ, Folkenberg, J. Human Anatomy: A Visual History from the Renaissance to the Digital Age. (2006) Harry N. Abrams. (required)
2. Kandel, E. The Age of Insight. The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain. (2012) Random House. (required)
3. Regular articles will be assigned on current aspects of anatomy, for example (the list is not complete):
   1. Gorman, J. (Nov 12, 2012) “Jane Doe Gets a Back Story.” The New York Times
   2. Cavalcanti, DD, MD et al. (2011) “Anatomy, Technology, Art, and Culture: Toward a Realistic Perspective of the Brain.” Neurological Focus.
   3. Bhullar, B-A, et al. (2012) “Bird have paedomorphic dinosaur skulls.” Nature, doi:10.1038/nature11146
   4. Wood, B. (August 2012) “Facing up to complexity.” Nature (488: page 162).

Professor Elizabeth Beaujour (Russian)
Course Number: HONS 201.52
Tuesdays & Thursdays; 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium will examine the ways in which a variety of intellectual systems attempt to integrate phenomena that challenge their basic assumptions and violate their fundamental structures. Underlying all our other readings will be a number of short but important texts by cultural anthropologists and linguists, such as Mary Douglas, Benjamin F. Lee Whorf, Claude Levi- Strauss, and Steven Lukes.

Each of the five units of the course will involve a comparison. We will begin with a peculiar masterpiece of Russian Literature: Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and read it in conjunction with William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell".  We will then go back to ancient Greece to see how the Aeschylus trilogy and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus find ways to resolve the conflicts between absolutely contradictory obligations and rights.

From Oedipus, it is an obvious segue to a unit on psychoanalysis, where we will read excerpts from Freud and Jung and look at some of Jung's drawings from his recently published Red Book.  Continuing in an associative way, we will then consider the imagery of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (sometimes called the Millennium Triptych), and compare this work with the imagery in twentieth century Surrealist art, particularly works of Magritte, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.

We will close the semester with a comparison that has now become classic: the contrasting visions of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Chinua Achebe's, Things Fall Apart, a comparison underlined by Achebe's acerbic article on Conrad, and nuanced by Conrad's little-known story "Amy Foster."

There will be a short paper which may be revised after the first unit, several brief written responses to some of the pictures, a longer final paper on a topic agreed upon with the instructor (to be begun during the weeks when we are looking at visual material. I will want to see at least one draft before final submission of the paper).This final paper should reflect the interests of the student, and may therefore consider kinds of "irrationality" other than those addressed in the course.

There will also be an odd, one hour, final exam.

Professor Richard Kaye (English)
Course Number: HONS 201.63
Mondays and Thursdays; 4:10-5:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Modernism was a European and American literary and cultural phenomenon that was powerfully related to the energies - scientific, technological, psychological, and political - that we associate with modernity. This class closely explores five representative figures who helped transform literature, music, and painting: Pablo Picasso, Richard Strauss, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. We will consider Eliot's radical break with nineteenth-century poetry in such works "The Waste Land," Lawrence's boldly erotic fiction such as "Sons and Lovers" and "Women in Love," and Woolf's experiments in subjective human consciousness in such fiction as To the Lighthouse.  In addition, we will focus on the modernist spectacle of Strauss's Salome, based on an Oscar Wilde play and also the subject of a work by Picasso. We will consider Picasso's scandal-generating 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, like Salomé, a work based on erotically scandalous subject matter (the painting is set in a bordello and its female figures are prostitutes). We will explore, too, how modernist artists rebelled against, but also drew from, their creative precursors (Some critics argue, for example, that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was a response to Matisse's Le Bonheur de Vivre and Blue Nude, while advanced photographers struggled both to assimilate and reject the conventions of painting.)  The class will consider such manifestos of modernism as Woolf's attack on the Edwardian novel and Eliot's defense of "impersonality" and "tradition" over "convention" in poetry. Important, as well, will be our class's examination of how new systems of thought (Einstein's advances in physics, Freud's invention of psychoanalysis, and Bergson's philosophical investigations into time and consciousness) shaped modernist works of art.  When appropriate, the class will consider the writings of such critics as Walter Benjamin, R.P. Blackmur, Meyer Schapiro, Rosalind Krauss, Charles Rosen, Erich Auerbach, John Richardson, and Mary Ann Caws.

Requirements:
One oral report, an 8-10 page mid-term paper, and a final 10-12 page paper. The course will include a class trip to the Museum of Modern Art.

Professor Lynne Greenberg (English)
Professor Rosa Squillacote (Political Science)
Course Number: HONS 301.1D
Fridays; 9:45 am-12:15 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This course introduces the interdisciplinary fields of law and literature with a particular focus on gender. We will read several genres of literary works (poems, plays, short stories and novels) spanning several centuries alongside a wide range of legal materials, including statutes, case law, and critical legal theory. Bringing together literary and legal texts, the course will examine the ways in which the two can mutually illuminate each other to provide an understanding of how social and political culture acts on gender. All of the works chosen are fundamentally concerned with questions of gender and access to law, justice and legal institutions and the historical treatment of and biases against women in the legal justice system. This class will begin by examining the legacy of the British legal system on American laws and the legacy of slavery on contemporary social and political roles, and whether this legacy of gender discrimination under the law has ongoing force and relevance in our contemporary legal system.

Several of the works chosen offer literary indictments of legal injustice, interrogating the supposed gender neutrality, objectivity and fairness of the legal system-its adjudication, enforcement and methods of punishment. The works often suggest that the idea of justice is complex and problematic and that questions of guilt and innocence cannot always be easily answered. Even the notion of "womanhood" will be complicated by some of the historic and contemporary texts assigned. Class discussions will explore such issues as: How does the work offer a critique of the law or of legal institutions? How can we critique legal institutions' responses to women's political needs, specifically? How does the law work to enforce particular cultural and social values? What roles do class and race as well as gender play in crime and punishment? Class requirements will include a midterm 5-7 page essay written in draft form and a final 12-15 page term paper with an option to revise.

Professor Gerald Press (Philosophy)
Course Number: HONS 301.79
Tuesdays & Fridays; 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 410 West
3 hours, 3 credits

This colloquium will be an introduction to many of the most influential ideas, authors, and books of the last 500 years: Darwinianism and Evolutionary theory, Marxism and Revolutionary theory, Freud and Psychoanalysis, rationalism, political realism and utopianism, Reformation theology, and literary developments from the birth of the European novel to Modernism.

Guest speakers will include Roger Persell (Biology), Elizabeth Beaujour (Russian, Comparative Literature, and Chair, THHP), Diana Conchado (Spanish, and Co-chair, THHP), Nico Israel (English) Frank Kirkland, Omar Dahbour, and Alan Hausman (Philosophy), Vishwa Adluri (Religion Program)

As you can imagine, reading will be heavy and there will be high expectations for class participation; on the other hand, writing requirements will be relatively light: (1) either three 1,000 word essays or two 1,000 word essays and an oral presentation on individual books and authors that we have read and (2) a 2,500 word term paper bringing together books and ideas from different disciplinary perspectives among the books and authors read.

Readings:

• Cervantes, Don Quixote
• Machiavelli, The Prince, Discourses on Livy (Selections)
• Thomas More, Utopia
• Martin Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, The Freedom of a Christian, Prefaces to the New Testament
• Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (selections)
• Darwin, selections from The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man
• Marx, selections from "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844." "Theses on Feuerbach," "The German Ideology," "The Communist Manifesto," "Onthe Jewish Question"
• Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
• Freud, selections from works such as The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Totem and Taboo
• T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

Course Number: HONS 301.99
Hours to be arranged
3 hours, 3 credits

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once and does not count towards the three Honors Colloquia required of every member of the Program.

HONS 301.99 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

Professor Richard Belsky (History)
Course Number: HONS 201.1D
Mondays and Thursdays; 11:10-12:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

In this colloquium we will examine Chinese foodways from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. We will familiarize ourselves with the richness and complexity of Chinese cuisine, and consider what is distinctively Chinese about Chinese food.· We will examine the history of food and eating in China and explore how it has developed and evolved over time.· We will look critically at the metaphorical uses of food and food consumption in Chinese late-imperial, and contemporary literature and film.· We will consider food and eating as components of Chinese medicine and traditional conceptions of health and bodies.· We will also investigate contemporary issues surrounding food and eating, including food and Chinese identity, Chinese food abroad (how it is altered and how it is adopted within other cultures, especially in the US and Japan), changing patterns of food production and consumption within China, and the problem of food safety and security.· The goals of this course include both taking food/eating as a means by which to better understand China; establishing this approach as a model to consider the foodways of other cultures, and finally enriching your learned appreciation of Chinese food for the rest of your lives.·

Students will be expected to write numerous short papers and one longer (12-15 page) research paper.· Class participation in discussions of readings will be required, and we will also see if we can find some way to fit a few tastings in as well.

Possible readings and viewings include:

• Anderson, Eugene N. The Food of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
• Chang, K. C., (edited). Food in Chinese culture: anthropological and historical perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
• Chen, Nancy, N. Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health (New York, Columbia University Press, 2009).
• Farquhar, Judith. Appetites : food and sex in postsocialist China (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2002).
• Lu Xun, "Diary of a Mad Man" 1918.
• Mintz Sidney W. and Du Bois, Christine M.· "The Anthropology of Food and Eating" Annual Review of Anthropology , Vol. 31, (2002), pp. 99-119. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132873
• Watson , James L; and Caldwell, Melissa L. (ed). The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating : A Reader (Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2005.
• --- (ed.) Golden Arches East : McDonald's in East Asia (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2006.)
• Tampopo (タンポポ); written and directed by Juzo Itami. 1986.
• Eat drink man woman / Samuel Goldwyn Home Entertainment; Central Motion Pictures presents in association with Ang Lee Productions and Good Machine ; an Ang Lee film. 1995.

Professor Manfred Kuechler (Sociology)
Course Number: HONS 201.1F
Mondays & Thursdays; 1:10-2:25 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

In this course, we will discuss processes and issues related to the size and the composition of the population of countries around the world.  We will look at birth rates, life expectancy and mortality, and migration as the three basic factors determining population change. Beyond mere description -- we will look at the connection between economic wealth/level of development and key demographic indicators comparing "more developed" and "less developed countries" and the ongoing efforts by the United Nations to improve life in the less developed countries ("Millennium Development Goals"). We will discuss the social, economic, and political consequences of demographic trends like "population aging" and "declining birth rates" in both less and more developed countries.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the course, students should

• Have a good grasp of the basic concepts in demography (fertility, life expectancy, mortality, migration) and be aware of the problems with measuring these concepts;
• Know where to find and retrieve demographic data from online data bases like those maintained by the US Census and UN Population Division and intended for use by the general public;
• Understand the links between population changes and select social problems and public policies like the effect of declining birth rates on the composition of the work force and - in turn - providing for the elderly;
• Understand the relation between economic wealth and public health of countries and - more generally -- the role of demographic factors in the development of countries.

Required Readings:

Dudley L. Poston and Leon F. Bouvier: Population and Society - An Introduction to Demography. Cambridge University Press. 2010.

In addition, we will use various reports published by international agencies and independent research institutes.

Writing Requirements:

Each student will be assigned two specific countries (one less developed, one more developed) and will have to write a demographic country profile on one of them based on searches of primary data sources. This will be a fact-based research paper including suitable visualizations (charts/graphs) and proper attribution of sources using hyperlinks. The net text (not counting charts and tables, bibliography) is expected to be about 1500 words (roughly 6 pages).

Method of Evaluation:

The final course grade will be based on three components: short online quizzes based on the assigned reading (20%), a midterm classroom exam (30%), country profile paper (20% based on initial submission,
30% based on final submission) in lieu of a final exam.

Professor Diana Conchado (Romance Languages, Spanish)
Course Number: HONS 201.31
Tuesdays & Fridays; 12:45-2:00 pm
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

In this course, we will examine representative manifestations of Don Juan in the arts and the voluminous commentary these diverse works have inspired. Beginning with his birth during the Spanish Counterreformation in Tirso de Molina's denunciatory play, we will accompany Don Juan up to our own day as he crosses cultures and centuries with the same swift agility with which he transgresses the bounds of morality. The theater, poetry, novel, essay, music, opera, ballet, film and the plastic arts have all attempted to capture this elusive character. How does each genre, age, and creator interpret and recreate the legendary seducer? As we try to define the constants and variables in these representations, each work will be addressed with attention given to its own particular form and context. As complement and stimulus to our discussion of the various reworkings of the myth, we will look at interpretations of Don Juan and donjuanism offered by several disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, in addition to criticism specific to the medium/work in question, and the problematization of the issues involved in transcultural comparative analyses. The idea of seduction-not only as presented in the works, but also in terms of Don Juan's seduction of Western culture, will be central to our discussion. What does he have that keeps us coming back?

Writing requirements:

• 2-3 short papers on specific works/interpretations
• Mid-term exam: application of theoretical concepts to works studied thus far
• Final paper: analysis of a work not discussed in class that is either an acknowledged reworking of the legend or a work the student deems representative of the myth in some way. The work chosen and the methodological approach employed are to be discussed with the instructor beforehand.
• Final presentation: students will make a presentation of the work studied for the final paper and give a brief synopsis of their research to the class

Primary works to be studied (with more to follow, preferred editions and translations will be announced):

• Tirso de Molina (attributed) El burlador de Sevilla (ca. 1619)
• Molière, Dom Juan ou le festin de Pierre (1665)
• Mozart and DaPonte, Don Giovanni (1787)-because the opera is so fundamental to our work, it is suggested that students familiarize themselves with it by listening and watching at least one recorded performance (which instructor will facilitate) during the winter break.

Professor Andrew Polsky (Political Science)
Guest Lecturers
Course Number: HONS 301.1C
Mondays & Wednesdays; 2:45-4:00 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Leadership has been a focus in the study of politics since ancient times and remains a central theme across the social sciences.  For all the attention, though, scholars differ over the importance of leaders and the role they play, with views that range from the "Great Man" conception of history to perspectives that reduce leaders to conduits of other forces and factors.  Scholars have also disagreed about the significance of leadership styles, the relationship between leaders and their supporters, how important formal authority is to the exercise of leadership, and more.  This course examines political leadership from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.  We begin with classical views of leadership that mix analysis with prescription.  Next we consider influential contemporary approaches to leadership, works that have framed how scholars in sociology, political science, and psychology conceptualize leadership and its impact.  We will engage concepts such as charisma, opportunity structure, and "followership," as well as how leadership is influenced by gender, race and ethnicity, and culture.  We then turn to leadership in specific empirical settings - leadership in different national contexts, crisis and wartime leadership, and grassroots leadership in social movements.

Readings:
We will read two books and many articles/chapters over the course of the semester.  The books are Nannerl O. Keohane, Thinking about Leadership (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2010) and Andrew J. Polsky, Elusive Victories:  The American Presidency at War (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2012).  Relatively inexpensive used copies are available online.

Course Objectives:
This course has both a substantive focus and skill development goals.  The syllabus is designed to introduce you to influential analytical perspectives on political leadership that can illuminate broad historical patterns and contemporary trends.  In substantive terms, at the end of the term you will know a good deal more about theories of political leadership, scholarly debates about the influence of political leaders, variations in leadership roles, influence, and expectations across political systems, how crises promote or constrain the exercise of agency by leaders, and how followers in participatory settings shape leadership.  At the same time, this course aims to improve your critical thinking skills, understood here to mean your capacity to (1) grasp abstract concepts and theories, (2) appreciate how such concepts and theories can be translated into concrete empirical claims about leadership, and (3) grapple with the difficulty of using evidence to evaluate the validity of these claims.

Requirements:
Written work for the course consists of two essay exams (each 25% of the course grade) and one research-based comparative review essay of 3600-4500 words (25%).  In addition, students will be graded based on class participation (25%), which will reflect attendance, short response papers, and contributions to discussions.

Professor Tamara Green (Classical & Oriental Studies)
Professor Robert White (Classical & Oriental Studies)
Course Number: HONS 301.1B
Mondays & Wednesdays; 5:35-6:50 pm
Room: 412 West
3 hours, 3 credits

Painting, literature, music, film-all the arts—have drawn deeply on the wellspring of Greek mythology-myths of Alcestis, Dionysus, Orpheus and Eurydice, Prometheus, and Electra.  This course will examine in depth several Greek myths and show how and why Western artists throughout the ages have used and transformed them.  Sometimes, the myth has been employed as a structuring device; at other times, as artistic embellishment.  Often, a mythological parallel is suggested as an analogy or contrast to the world in which the artist lived.  Among the works to be discussed are: Euripides' Bacchae, Electra, and Alcestis; Mann's Death in Venice; Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire; Boffa's You're an Animal, Viskovitz; Frisch's Homo Faber; Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound; Shelley's Frankenstein; Sartre's The Flies; Atwood's The Penelopiad; and T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party.  Among the films viewed: Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire, Marcel Camus' Black Orpheus, and the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Requirements:
Three essays six pages in length are required.

Course Number: HONS 301.99
Hours to be arranged
3 hours, 3 credits

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once and does not count towards the three Honors Colloquia required of every member of the Program.

HONS 301.99 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.