Honors Colloquia - Spring 2024

Click on a course name to read a description.

All course materials can be purchased at Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers, located at 939 Lexington Avenue.

Course Descriptions

"The Good War": Representations of the Spanish Civil War in Literature, Film, & Art

Professor Maria Hernandez-Ojeda (Romance Languages, Spanish)

HONS 2011J
Tuesdays & Fridays; 1:00-2:15 p.m.
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

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Reframing Opera: Gender, Race, and Class

Professor Catherine Coppola (Music)

HONS 2012D
Mondays and Wednesdays; 5:30-6:45 p.m.
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%

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Mind, Medicine, and Culture

Professor Farzad Amoozegar (Music)

HONS 2012N
Mondays and Thursdays; 2:30-3:45p.m.
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.

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Rethinking Visibility

Professor Nijah Cunningham (English)

HONS 2012P
Wednesdays; 11:30-2:15p.m.
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

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social practice//art, science, & mapping the collective body

Floor Grootenhuis, Artist in Residence (Biological Sciences)

Guest Speakers

HONS 3011X
Tuesdays and Thursdays; 4:00-5:15 p.m.
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.

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Poverty in the United States: Sociological & Psychological Dimensions

Professor Anthony Browne (Africana & Puerto Rican/Latino Studies)
Professor Roseanne Flores (Psychology)

HONS 30148
Tuesdays and Fridays; 11:30-12:45 p.m.
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.

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Interdisciplinary Independent Study

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.

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Advanced Interdisciplinary Study

HONS 49151
6 hours, 6 credits
Hours to be arranged

Upon completion of 90 credits, certified Honors Program students may be admitted by the Council on Honors to Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, with the opportunity of engaging in advanced independent study under the Council's supervision. A project for a thesis or other appropriate report of the results of the student's research is presented to the Council, which must approve it the semester previous to registration. Three sponsors, from at least two departments, one of whom must be a member of the Council on Honors, will supervise the work. The final product must be approved by all three sponsors and the Council.

HONS 49151 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

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