All course descriptions posted below are for Honors College Perspectives/Colloquium/Seminar classes only. For Honors elective course descriptions, please consult the course's catalog entry at ozone.ou.edu
For information about a class's general education standing, please consult the General Education Planner at ou.edu/genplanner
NOTE: Class schedules and descriptions are subject to change
"Perspectives" is a three-credit, interdisciplinary, introductory level seminar that explores a broad issue (or issues) from different perspectives. This course is writing intensive, requiring at least 15 pages of writing per student, and includes a component wherein each student works with an Honors College writing assistant. Specific topics vary based on the professor's area of study.
Instructor: Robert B. Scafe
Day/Time: T/R 3:00 PM - 4:15 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 180
Description: This course explores key scientific concepts and discoveries through accessible, non-technical literature and media. Students will engage with popular science writings, documentaries, and discussions that highlight the impact of science on everyday life, culture, and society. Topics span various disciplines such as biology, physics, astronomy, and environmental science, emphasizing critical thinking and public understanding of scientific ideas. Ideal for students of all academic backgrounds, this course fosters appreciation for the role of science in shaping our world.
Instructor: Andreana Prichard
Day/Time: T/R 10:30-11:45 AM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 180
Description: Historians, social commentators, politicians, and “ordinary” citizens have long recognized that sports are “not just a game.” They reflect a society’s preoccupations and cane be used as an entrée into the study of social, political, and cultural history. For example, the West African nation of Senegal’s 2002 victory over France in the World Cup sparked celebrations throughout the country and across much of the continent. The celebrations were about more than just a win on the soccer field, however; the victory was seen as a conquest over the historic legacies of racism and colonial rule, a confirmation that West Africa could compete with its former colonial master. This class will use examples from the worlds of elite and amateur sports in Africa to challenge stereotypes about the continent and to learn about its complex and dynamic history. We will look at sports indigenous to Africa and global sports in Africa to challenge stereotypes about the continent and to learn about its complex and dynamic history. We will look at sports indigenous to Africa and global sports that Africans indigenized; at sport as a form of social control and as a site of resistance; and at the way that African and Western athletes have used sport as a form of activism for social change. Teams of students will research an articulation of sport in the African context for their final project. Students do not need to have completed any prerequisites in African Studies or to be athletes; they only need to be open to the power of sport to teach about the world and about ourselves.
Instructor: Daniel Mains
Day/Time: TR 9:00- 10:15 AM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 180
Description: This course examines international development as a set of discourses and practices that have been directed towards poor nations, primarily in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, presumably with the intent of improving the quality of life and alleviating poverty. We begin by exploring the historical emergence of development out of colonialism following World War II. Different theories of development will be compared and discussed in terms of their implications for economic change and relations of power between the global north and south. In the second portion of the course, we will examine critiques of development projects in relation to issues of gender, environmental sustainability, non-western cultural knowledge, and power. During the final portion of the course, we will read full-length case studies of development interventions in Uganda and West Africa in order to better understand the complexities of development as they play out in day-to-day life. Additional goals for the course are to explore the relationship between power and development and to consider alternative ways of conceptualizing the desired result of development.
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.
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.
Instructor: David Song
Day/Time: M/W/F 1:00 - 1:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214
Description: This course introduces students to Asian American Studies, as the product of an intellectual and political movement that emerged in response to racism in the United States and American imperialism abroad. Learning through a mix of contemporary research, current issues, and primary historical sources will provide an insightful lens into this field of study, which will allow students to access perspectives that are largely underrepresented in the university. This course is designed so that students with no prior knowledge of Asian American studies will be able to take this class, gaining an appreciation for the selected texts and subject matter. This class attends to “Asian American” issues, as well as shows how the presence of Asian peoples in America (and in Asia) is fundamental to how people understand themselves as American, Afro-American, Chicanx and Latinx, Indigenous and Native, Pacific Islander, and White subjects.
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.
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 19th 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).
Instructor: Sarah W. Tracy
Day/Time: T/R 10:30- 11:45 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214
Description:
What makes an interesting life? What makes a good (auto)biography? In “American Lives” students will explore both the genre of biography and the history of the United States (with some reference to Oklahoma) as they consider how life in America has changed over the previous hundred and fifty years and how the criteria for a “good biography” have likewise evolved since the genre first emerged in classical times. Once derided by social historians for the telling, the “exceptional stories of exceptional men,” biography today seeks to tell larger stories about the political, social, and economic, contexts in which one life – not necessarily a human one – led. The life of Will Rogers, for example, can tell us something about the nature of humor and the entertainment industry in America, as well as Native American politics during the Progressive Era and New Deal. The life of the racehorse “Seabiscuit” similarly offers readers much more than a glimpse into the thoroughbred racing industry during the Depression. It offers important insights into the value of sports in American culture and the American character generally.
Students in this course will be asked to read a selection of important biographies, as well as a monograph on the evolution of biography through the centuries. Like any historian or storyteller, biographers and autobiographers must determine which aspects of their subjects’ lives are important and which are trivial. Writers of biography also wrestle with the ethical issues posed by examining both the professional and personal milestones of their subject; and (auto)biographers often have to deal with their subjects’ living family members and intellectual descendants. Writing the lives of these issues and others as they explore what makes a good (auto) biography.
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.
Instructor: Rich Hamerla
Day/Time: T/R 7:30- 8:45 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 201
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 "Colloquium" is a three-credit, interdisciplinary, discussion-based advanced seminar on a specialized topic, and is best suited for juniors and seniors. The colloquium is writing intensive, requiring approximately 30 pages of writing per student, and the assignments will also involve library research. Topics vary based on the professor's area of study.
Instructor: David Song
Day/Time: M/W/F 3:00 - 3:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 201
Description: This class is about the ethnographic study of schooling and its relation to ethnicity, race, and class in the United States. Since its origins, ethnography has been reoriented toward dominant institutions in the West: not least among them, the education system and its marginalized elements: including the working class, women and girls, ethnic-minority and racially oppressed peoples, and diasporic peoples. Through the lens of ethnography, this course promises to show students how schools function, particularly with respect to maintaining social inequalities of class and race, and illuminate possibilities of institutional change.
Students majoring in ethnic studies, public policy, and public administration will make use of this course by understanding schooling as one major area of society where ethnic, racial, and class inequalities and discourses are made manifest. Students majoring in the social sciences, particularly those considering entering graduate school, will make use of this course by understanding ethnographic research methods and social theory. Students concentrating in education (or generally considering a career as a teacher) will make use of this course by gaining theory- and research-based insights into the social foundations of schooling, as well as the opportunity to reflect upon their future practice.
Instructor: Robert Lifset
Day/Time: TR 12:00 -1:15 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 201
Description: In recent years, scholars have begun to argue that the 1970s are a great watershed in American and world history. Crises in energy and politics made the nation question the viability of basic aspects of American life. And enormous changes took place in American economics, diplomacy, and culture. This course will consider both the crises and the changes and will attempt to draw connections between the economic and political history of the period and its cultural history. Among the topics on which we will focus will be: the legacies of the Sixties, Watergate, the energy crises, the rise of modern conservatism, the rise and fall of New Hollywood cinema, and the urban crisis.
Instructor: Marie Dallam
Day/Time: M 5:00- 7:40 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: What happens after death? No one knows for certain. However, each person's answer to this question reveals something about his/her religious beliefs. Questions about death, then, are intrinsically related to both religion and ethics.
This course will not provide you with "the answers." It will give you the opportunity to think through many of the big questions about death, dying, and grieving processes, both through informative readings and discussions with your peers. This course will not be depressing, but we are likely to have some serious moments.
This class is being offered as part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. Class meets at the Mabel Basset Correctional Facility in McLoud, Oklahoma. Enrollment is limited. If you are interested in enrolling in the class, contact Dr. Dallam directly for more information.
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.
Instructor: Andreana Prichard
Day/Time: TR 1:30 2:45 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 180
Description: Oral sources, or what some scholars refer to as "the heritage of the ears," are central to efforts to recreate the African past, and to better understand its present. Historians value personal recollections and reminiscences, oral traditions, songs, and linguistic data, among other oral sources, for the sophisticated picture they help to paint of the past. This course will introduce students to the theory and method of oral history by allowing them to grapple with how practitioners have used oral sources to write about a range of African actors, from historical elites to marginalized individuals such as rural dwellers, migrant workers, and women; it will also introduce students to the power of oral history as a tool for community development and the advancement of social justice. Legal and ethical issues, the role of digital media, and oral history as activism are central to the contemporary practice of oral history and will be discussed throughout the course. Students will work with African narrators of various backgrounds to produce oral histories for public consumption. Students do not need to have completed any prerequisites in African studies or oral history to be successful in this course; they only need to come to the class with an interest in hearing others' voices.
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.
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.
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.
Instructor: Daniel Mains
Day/Time: T/R 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 101
Description: Much of our lives are devoted to consumption as we shop, earn money to consume, and interact with the things we have purchased. These activities are inseparable from broader social inequalities and issues of fairness. In this course, students read texts ranging from Karl Marx’s analysis of the commodity form to Anne Allison’s ethnography of Pokémon fans in Japan in order to explore the relationship between consumption and fairness in a global context. The course is organized around the relationship between consumption and fairness in a global context. The course is organized around three key questions. What are the reasons why people around the world have resisted consumer culture? What is the role of consumption in forming identities and shaping social hierarchies? What happens when consumption is globalized and can ethical consumption support fairness within global commodity chains? Students will document and analyze their own consumption practices and write a research paper on a topic of their choice.
Any course taught by the Honors College that does not fall into the Perspectives or Colloquium sections will be covered below. These courses count toward your nine hours of Honors elective credit.
These courses count toward your nine hours of Honors elective credit. Check each individual description for how many credit hours each class is worth.
Instructor: Heather R. Ketchum
Day/Time: W 5- 7:40 PM
Building/Room: Dale Hall 103
Description: In partnership with the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the Honors College offers an opportunity for first-year Honors students to participate in laboratory research. This course, the Honors First-Year Research Experience (FYRE) is open to Honors College students from all majors. Through a competitive application process, students are matched with ongoing research projects led by OU professors in numerous disciplines. Selected students will participate in active laboratory research for 8-10 hours per week, culminating in a poster presentation and awards ceremony. The application process occurs in the fall semester, and the research work occurs in the spring semester. Students earn 3 hours of Honors credit for successful completion of the course.
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
Students wishing to graduate with Honors will need to complete nine hours of elective credit.
If there is not an elective course listed that fits your schedule, or your major does not allow for the felxibility required to complete nine hours of Honors electives, you may contract a non-Honors course for Honors credit. The form can be downloaded from our Honors Forms page.
If you have questions, please contact the Honors College main office (405) 325-5291 or make an appointment with an Honors College academic advisor at iadvise.ou.edu
