Colloquia

Dr. Cowden's students preparing DNA gels to test corn-based foods for genetically modified organisms (GMO's).

Academic Year 2007-2008

HONR 341 / 1939: The Year the World Turned
Dr. Clifton Potter, Professor of History

Scholars often use the term “watershed” to denote a moment in time when events change history forever.  The twentieth century seems to abound in them, and next to 1914, perhaps no year better deserves to be described as a “watershed” then 1939.  From the New York’s World Fair with its view of the “World of Tomorrow” to Hitler’s unwarranted attack on Poland, this course will explore the tapestry of life during the last year of a decade that began in the depths of economic ruin and ended in the abyss of war.  Students will read novels and non-fiction that captured the attention of the American reading public, watch and critique films that packed the theaters, listen to radio broadcasts that enraptured the nation, and read newspapers and magazines from the era.  This multi-dimensional approach to learning from the past will enable us to better understand the choices made by the generation that shaped our present and future.

HONR 342 / Ethics in Sport
Dr. Debbie Bradney, Assistant Professor of Athletic Training

This course examines a variety of ethical issues in American sports.  Concepts such as fair play, good sportsmanship, and cheating are central to the discussion.  Our in-depth analysis of sports leads us to consider the pervasive influence sport has on contemporary American culture.  In addition, the ethical and moral issues surrounding performance enhancing drugs and drug testing are addressed. The complex dynamic of gender and sport is discussed through topics such as Title IX and paternalism in sport.  Finally, we look into violence in sport through sexual abuse, fan behavior, and aggression toward opponents, officials, and spectators.

HONR 343 / Can We Escape from Culture?  Fictional Attempts to Defy Identity
Dr. Kate Gray, Assistant Director, Westover Honors Program, Assistant Professor of English

This course will use works of fiction, ranging from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders to Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable to consider the idea of agency and how humans escape from disciplines of race, class, and gender and other cultural practices.  We will discuss performativity.  Expect mind-bending.  Expect to spend time reading in preparation for class meetings.

HONR 344 / Bring Back the Beat:  Exploring Race, Class, and Gender in Country and Rap Music
Dr. Chip Walton, Assistant Professor of Sociology

This foray into the sociology of music will entertain the role of popular music in the social constructions of race, class, and gender.  Country and rap music evolved out of particular racial/ethnic, class-based, and gendered cultural contexts.  Both types of music are thought to have originally evoked an under-class or working class pathos and have subsequently been appropriated by middle-class performers and listeners.  We will explore what the consequences of such cultural appropriations are for the social constructions of race, class, and gender, as well as examine the origins of both country music and rap music.  We will also consider how both types of music have evolved, been subject to commercialization, and ultimately become decontextualized.  This course will be grounded in critical theory and employ analysis as a means of examining selected musical texts.

HONR 345 / Feed Me: the Ecology and Economics of Modern Agriculture in the United States
Dr. Nancy Cowden, Assistant Director, Westover Honors Program, Associate Professor of Biology

This discussion course focuses on ecological and economic issues relating to modern agriculture.  With the Green Revolution of the 1960’s came increased food yields, increased pesticide application, increasingly perturbed environments, and increased food production costs.  While such increases in the global food supply answered some of the world’s needs, we now rely on a highly subsidized food supply largely dependent on fossil fuel availability.  We will examine the world economic and ecological consequences of our food choices and agricultural practices to biological diversity, genetic engineering, food-borne diseases and more.

HONR 346 / The Elephant in the Room:  The Political, Social and Cultural Impact of Television
Dr .Woody Greenberg, Professor of Communication Studies

From its inception as a mass medium in the 1940s, television has affected the lives of Americans in a variety of ways:  politics, news-gathering, sports, advertising, and popular culture in general have all been changed in important ways.  This seminar examines the history of television from the perspective of how it has impacted on our political and cultural institutions and allows for critical consideration of these phenomena thorough description and analysis.

Academic Year 2006-2007

HONR 341 / Politicizing the Criminal/Criminalizing the Political:  Designing Deviance in Latin America
Dr. Nichole Sanders, Assistant Professor of History

In Latin America, elites have long used shifting, often contradictory, definitions of crime and deviance as a means to control the lower classes.  From the persistent imagery of the bandit, to the repressive forms of torture that have characterized recent regimes, Latin American elites have used violence, crime and punishment to maintain power.  This course explores the history of crime, violence and deviancy, paying particular attention to the way in which class, gender and race have shaped shifting conceptions of who and what is considered criminal and/or deviant.

HONR 342 / Ethics in Sport
Dr. Debbie Bradney, Assistant Professor of Athletic Training

This course examines a variety of ethical issues in American sports.  Concepts such as fair play, good sportsmanship, and cheating are central to the discussion.  Our in-depth analysis of sports leads us to consider the pervasive influence sport has on contemporary American culture.  In addition, the ethical and moral issues surrounding performance enhancing drugs and drug testing are addressed. The complex dynamic of gender and sport is discussed through topics such as Title IX and paternalism in sport.  Finally, we look into violence in sport through sexual abuse, fan behavior, and aggression toward opponents, officials, and spectators.

HONR 343 / Powerful Women: Amazing Lives
Dr. Dorothy A. S. Akubue-Brice, Associate Professor of History

In thinking about leadership and gender, researchers, sociologists, and anthropologists have found that the seemingly neutral classifications of male/female, man/woman, and masculine/feminine take on new and different biological, cultural, and social meanings from one cultural environment to another.  This course will examine the intersections between gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, spirituality, and class through the prism of historical inquiry.  It will address men’s responses to feminism and gender issues in men’s lives. Special attention will be given to the many different ways that the media have construed gender and leadership in different cultural, anthropological, and historical contexts.  The theme “powerful women-amazing lives” enables us to undertake case studies of such women as Joan of Arc, Christine de Pizan, Hildegard of Bingen, and Elizabeth I.

HONR 344 / Imagining the Future:  Utopia, Apocalypse, and Popular Culture
Dr. Mike Robinson, Assistant Professor Communication Studies

Throughout history, cultures have imagined the future in a wide variety of ways: flying future cities gleaming with scientific progress, afterlives of eternal reward or punishment, wastelands devastated by nuclear holocausts, even daily horoscopes. All are attempts to make sense of the past and the present by linking them with the future. This seminar investigates these imagined futures from a cultural studies perspective, combining interdisciplinary and critical considerations of historical and production context, textual analyses of various media from books to films to video games, and audience perceptions and reactions. In imagining the future, we will also automatically consider the definition of humanity and in particular, humanity's relationship to technology.

HONR 345 / The Literature and Rhetoric of Rebellion
Dr. Chidsey Dickson, Assistant Professor of English

Critics of youth culture and partisan hacks of all stripes have denigrated political dissent and cultural rebellion, made both seem like pathology, or cliché. In some cases, people who reject the norms of society in their behavior or words are labeled deviants and imprisoned or medicated. In other cases, as with Kurt Cobain or the Seattle WTO protestors, resistance (a.k.a. “civil disobedience”) is considered a mere pose. This course will examine different kinds of dissent in order to explore when/where/how people have used rebellion trope as leverage on some perceived or actual threat to their autonomy, or as an affront to “injustice.” Whether or not such writers have successfully used the trope to negotiate more agency for themselves or their group or to analyze injustice is still another question—an important question for those who wish to respond to blanket criticisms of rebellion as symptomatic of adolescent disaffection, bohemian ennui, or some other predictable (and trite) psychological dysfunction.

HONR 346 / (Il)legal Shakespeare
Dr. Kate Gray, Assistant Director, Westover Honors Program, Assistant Professor of English

This course looks at the law in and around Shakespeare’s plays, many of which critique laws, legalism, and legalistic thinking, question judgment, and make fools of the law’s agents and ministers. What insights do the plays and their production problems offer into the shifting nature of legal thought in the early modern period concerning entertainment, morality, and the public good? How do these concerns continue to find expression in current American culture?  These are merely a few of the questions we will attempt to answer.