Spring 2025

Religion and State 

Instructor: Marie Dallam

Day/Time: M/W/F 1:00 - 1:50 PM

Building/Room: Cate Center RM 101

Description: This course considers religion in conjunction with aspects of American statehood, broadly conceived, and will emphasize the myriad nuances of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. How have Americans understood their identity as citizens in relation to their religious identity? What have they believed about how issues of national concern should reflect particular religious ideals? What does “freedom of religion” really mean, practically and legally, historically and today? In what ways does the First Amendment shape the answers to these questions? With these questions in mind, we will explore topics including:

• Who we are as a nation: Puritan theocratic intentions; the Founding Fathers and the documents they authored; the religious lives of American presidents; conflicts of citizenship rights and religious belief; religious ideals in wartime.

• How we think about American behavior: first amendment cases on issues such as religion in public schools, “illegal” religious ceremonies, the public display of religious symbols, religious rights in the workplace, personal religious identity, censorship, and many others. No prior knowledge of religious history or First Amendment issues is necessary; the course is geared toward beginners in these areas.

Energy in US History

Instructor: Robert Lifset

Day/Time: T/R 12:00- 1:15 PM

Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214

Description: This course uses the prism of energy to examine the history of the United States from the colonial period to the present. We will consider how energy has affected and is affected by, American society, culture, science and technology, politics, diplomacy, and the environment. 

Four broad, thematic questions will recur throughout the semester. First, how has increasing energy use transformed American social life, the economy, and politics? Second, what are the relationships between energy consumption and environmental change?

Third, what are the relationships between scientific discoveries, technological innovation, and social change? And finally, how did the Unite States grow to be the largest consumer of energy in the history of the world? Addressing these questions will reveal the fundamental ways in which energy has shaped American history.

Myth Busting

Instructor: Trina L. Hope

Day/Time: M/W/F 9:00- 9:50 AM

Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101

Description: Myth Busting: Separating Facts from Fallacies about American Social Problems: this course takes on some of the most common myths about social problems in America from the perspectives of History, Media Studies, Sociology, Public Health, Public Policy, and Criminology/Criminal Justice. Topics include crime, poverty/welfare, guns/mass shootings, crimes against children, marriage/families, race/ethnicity, healthcare, LGBTQ issues – with the focus on comparing and contrasting popular/media/common sense assumptions about these issues to the empirical evidence. 

Law & Literature: Lawful Novels of America

Instructor: James Zeigler

Day/Time: M/W/F 10:00 - 10:50 AM

Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 201

Description: This “law & lit” course will focus on a selection of novels published in the United States from the late 19^th century to the present. Course units pair novels with policies and primary source documents from the three branches of the federal government -- the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive – followed by a final unit on a current “hot topic” for governance. With Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (1893) and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), we’ll examine the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which endorsed Jim Crow segregation. Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) connects with the U.S. Congress’s Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924. James Cain’s crime thriller about insurance fraud, Double Indemnity (1935), relates to Social Security legislation of the New Deal. To study the executive branch, we’ll consider FDR’s Executive Order 9066 alongside John Okada’s semi-autobiographical novel about the Japanese Internment Camps, No-No Boy (1957). Subject to revision, the hot topic to conclude this version of Lawful Novels of America is likely to be mass incarceration, especially of women, which is the subject of Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room (2018).

American Social Thought

Instructor: Ben Alpers

Day/Time: T/R 10:30-11:45 AM

Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 101

Description: Stretching chronologically from the seventeenth century to the contemporary United States, this introductory honors course will touch upon a wide variety of big questions that Americans have grappled with throughout our history: What is the good life? What is the good society? How do we know what we know? Underneath all of these concerns is a more local question: What should America be? We will delve into these questions by exploring the ways in which American writers and thinkers have addressed them over the last four centuries. Among the thinkers encountered will be: John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson. Roger Williams, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Grandison Finney, Sarah Grimke. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, George Fitzhugh, Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Jackson Turner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William James, John Dewey, Sidney Hook, Margaret Mead, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Milton Friedman, Martin Luther King Jr., Betty Friedan, Noaman Chomsky, and Samuel Huntington.

Art and Science of American Humor

Instructor: John Banas

Day/Time: T/R 10:30 AM-11:45 AM

Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214

Description: This course is intended to provide you with an understanding of humor in communication. By reading the original source materials, you will be able to learn and draw your own conclusions about theories and ideas related to humor and its effects on a variety of issues, including: relationships, persuasion, identity, media, teaching, and health. In addition to reading and discussion, creating and performing humor will also be required in order to give you an opportunity to express yourself and learn through doing. All of these practices combined will hopefully allow you to gain insight into humor and communication in a way that illuminates important issues in your own life.

What Is Science

Instructor: Rich Hamerla

Day/Time: T/R 7:30- 8:45 AM

Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 180

Description: I want to change the way you think about science! Most of us accept science and scientific knowledge as a privileged form of understanding with powerful implications for the way we live. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with such a view, BUT I want you to enable you to think more critically, or more analytically, about the creation of scientific knowledge, the operation of scientific institutions, and the culture of science in general. To do this we will read a number of books and articles that examine the nature of the scientific enterprise locally, nationally, and globally over time. This literature focuses on science as an evolving and contingent body of knowledge, as a dynamic and powerful way to explore the world, as a professional community, as a culture with its own idiosyncratic conventions, and as a contested source and object of political power.

The Family and Crime

Instructor: Trina L. Hope

Day/Time: M/W/F 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 214

Description:  The Family and Crime: This course will explore the causes of crime, the role of families in crime causation, crime within families (intimate partner violence, child maltreatment), the effects of contact with the criminal justice system on families and communities, and policies relating to the family and crime, examined through the lens of Sociology/Criminology. 

Film Noir

Instructor: Benjamin L. Alpers

Day/Time: T/R 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182

Description: In the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood produced a series of films that told disturbing, psychologically complex stories unlike most mainstream American cinema. Although related to earlier crime and suspense films, such movies as Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, and Kiss Me Deadly, seemed to many to be somehow different: perhaps more critical, perhaps darker (literally and figuratively), perhaps more downbeat. These films seemed to many to be marked by certain common features: twisty plots, the character of the “femme fatale,” low-key lighting, urban settings. By the end of the 1940s, the French had given a name to them: film noir (literally “black film”). This course will view Hollywood film noir in a variety of contexts. We will explore the precursors of film noir, survey Hollywood’s noirs of the 1940s and 1950s, and finally examine the ways in which a variety of filmmakers adapted film noir for their own purposes in later decades.

Please note that the course has a required screening every Monday night at 7 pm. There will be a screening during the first week of classes.

Literature and the Long Civil Rights Movement

Instructor: James Zeigler

Day/Time: M/W/F 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM

Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 201

Description: At the height of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, James Baldwin was the most visible and influential writer in America. This course will investigate and participate in a renaissance of interest in Baldwin’s work that is exemplified by the 2016 documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2016). We will read a lot of his literary fiction and creative nonfiction to discover the sources and style of his importance during his long career, which ran from the late 1940s until the 1980s. While Baldwin will represent for us the intelligence, indignation, and undying activism of the movement for civil rights, other details of his subject position – e.g. Harlem, secular, gay – will encourage us to discern and critique the limitations of nuclear family values in Cold War America and the paternalistic tendencies of the major organizations of the civil rights movement. Taking cues from civil rights historians who argue that recollections of the Black freedom struggle should not be confined exclusively to America or to those incredible years between Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we will investigate how the civil rights movement was related to a long, transnational project of decolonization that remains unfinished.

Music and Medicine

Instructor: Sarah W. Tracy and Amanda Minks

Day/Time: T/R 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM

Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 180

Description: This course uses anthropological, ethnomusicological and historical approaches to analyze how concepts of health, illness, healing, mind and body are related to practices of music and dance, and how these relations vary across cultures.  Students will read and discuss a range of case studies from different parts of the world, with special attention to concepts of “Western” and “non-Western” medicine and interactions between them.  The course aims to de-naturalize the logic of modern Western medicine and help students see beyond their own culture-based assumptions of what constitutes health and healing. By examining the range of ways music, disease, and healing have intersected with one another in different cultures and at different times, the course will enrich students’ understanding of and appreciation for cultural difference, will complicate their understanding of both music and healing practices, and should enable students, including future medical professionals, to think critically and become more sensitive to the effects of cultural difference. 

The Great War and the 20th Century

Instructor: Rich Hamerla

Day/Time: T/R 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM

Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 201

Description: In this class we will study, in depth, the Great War (1914-1918), or what most remember today as World War I or the First World War.  It was a cataclysm that tore Europe apart, resulted in the death of millions, led to total collapse of the existing European order, and reshaped the entire world generally.  It led to the rise of Communism in Russia, laid the foundations for the post-war growth of fascism across much of the continent, was the death knell of the colonialism, and it catapulted the United States into the status of a major world power.  It also planted the seeds of the Second World War that, in another sense, laid the foundation for the Cold War.  In short, the Great War set the stage for the Twentieth Century.  

Writing Workshop

Instructor: Brian Johnson

Day/Time: T/R 12:00 -1:15 pm

Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 201

Description: What is good writing? How can we develop our writing skills? What struggles do intelligent students have to contend with when they are required to write essays? How can we be of service to others as they seek to express themselves through the written word? In "HON 3970: Writing Workshop," we will address these questions and more! Additionally, Writing Workshop will help you refine your own writing practices and will prepare you for work in the Honors College Writing Center

**Class requires additional permissions