Recent Honors Courses

FSEM 136 SHAKESPEARE’S “PROBLEMS” ON FILM
The term “problem play” has been applied to various plays of Shakespeare. Whether the generic classification, a plot hole, or misogynistic, homophobic or anti-Semitic stance that might be offensive, these issues are, generally speaking, problems for a contemporary, not early modern, audience. Film adaptations, in order to appeal to contemporary tastes, work to mitigate these problems. In this course, we will focus on three of Shakespeare’s plays that have often been deemed problematic and examine how films have adapted them to suit modern audiences.

FSEM 151 LET FREEDOM RING: THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN AMERICAN LIFE
Few movements in American history have shaped our current events as has the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement. This mass movement, organized by grassroots activists throughout the entire country, challenged America’s racial inequalities in ways that few events in our country’s history have. In this course, we’ll look at the roots of that movement, in the Jim Crow south and the racially segregated north; how the movement changed and responded to national events; how the movement expanded into a larger organized force in the 1950s and 1960s; how the Black Power movement rose out of Civil Rights; and how the movement collapsed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

HNRS 301 HONORS ETHICS
Junior Honors Seminar This course will use major philosophical texts as a springboard for discussing important ethical issues, and thinking about how to apply them within different disciplines. As part of this course, students will create a research proposal for their Senior Honors Thesis.

HNRS 370 SPECIAL TOPIC: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: THE POSTCOLONIAL EXPERIENCE THROUGH NARRATIVES
The course will introduce students to various 20th century novels, stories, and films, written in response to the colonial experience. The class will read a set of outstanding literary works from the Philippines, Argentina, Ghana, and the Dominican Republic. Primary texts include both Anglophone and translated novels, as well as theoretical works

HNRS 370 SPECIAL TOPIC: ENUMERATING ARGUMENTS: MATHEMATICS AND THE WRITTEN WORD
We are accustomed to thinking of writing and mathematics as distinct, sometimes antagonistic, disciplines. However, both are rooted in logic, and both teach skills that strengthen our critical thinking faculties. This class explores writing and mathematics as mutually enriching fields. As we polish our skills in writing about data, we will explore the centrality of mathematics to the process of drawing—and presenting—logical conclusions about important issues, including climate change, immigration, and more. We will study how to report and analyze data, as well as how to persuade others with it. Without data, writing is often empty rhetoric; but without writing, data are sterile numbers in need of interpretation.

HNRS 375 THE TUDOR REFORMATIONS
Tudor England (from the accession of Henry VIII in 1509 to the death of Elizabeth I over a century later in 1603) and the religious revolutions it underwent still engage the modern mind and imagination with its violent and dramatic story. It is marked by the achievements as well as excesses of Henry VIII, and the distinctive way the Protestant Reformation occurred in England; brief attempts at further Protestantization under Edward VI and the brief Catholic Reformation under Mary I, “Bloody” Mary; and a relatively stable religious accommodation achieved by the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. The Reformations of the Tudor monarchs laid the foundation of the modern English religious, political, and national establishment, without which neither the history of Great Britain nor that of America would have unfolded as it did.

The course will examine the people and events which shaped the different kinds of Reformation England underwent, from Henry through Edward, Mary I and Elizabeth I, from a theological, cultural/artistic, social and historical viewpoints. Students will understand the process whereby English politics and religion were changed forever during the Tudor Reformations by examining the period as seen through its chief political, social, economic, and religious events.

The course begins with a brief examination of English Catholicism, and Roman Catholic teaching on justification, sacramental life, and the structure of Church authority (as it was formulated in the Medieval Period) leading to the first successful challenge to it (and the entire structure of Catholicism) by one of its own, Martin Luther. It shows how, despite initial hostility to Protestantism, the confluence of events in Henry VIII’s dynastic and personal lives led to the challenge and eventual transformation (and destruction) of much of English Catholicism, and the creation of its own distinct Christian tradition, the Church of England. By examining the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, which saw complex (and violent) religious and political swings, the course shows how England successfully faced internal and external challenges under Elizabeth I, evaluates her settlement of a the religious situation in the Anglican “Middle Way,” and discusses, using various media, England’s period of cultural and artistic flowering (the “English Renaissance”).