Honor Scholar Program - Current Seminars
Spring 2026 Honor Scholar Seminars
Reading Courses
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
HONR 200A: Reading Course with Professor Anqi Liu
This course uses Liu Cixin’s award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem as a springboard for critical inquiry into humanity’s place in the universe and the fragility of civilization. Blending hard science and speculative imagination, the novel challenges us to confront questions that cut across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences: What does it mean to make ethical choices when the survival of our species is at stake? How do scientific paradigms shape political systems and cultural values? Can technological progress outpace our moral evolution—and what happens if it does not?
Through close reading and weekly discussions, the class will analyze the novel’s treatment of scientific discovery, environmental collapse, political extremism, and global cooperation. We will situate the text in modern and contemporary Chinese society, but our conversations will reach beyond China to examine universal dilemmas about knowledge, power, and human futures. You are encouraged to draw connections between the novel and your own disciplinary interests, from physics to philosophy, ecology to ethics.
Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown
HONR 200B: Reading Course with Professors Jordan Sjol and Amy Sojot
Voluntourism, the practice of blending travel with volunteer work, often in low—or medium-income countries, has sparked considerable debate about whether it benefits or harms the communities receiving assistance. This course will explore the dangers and the advantages of voluntourism and volunteerism. We will clarify the differences between voluntourism and volunteerism, and investigate the ethics associated with voluntourism. To better understand the origins of voluntourism, we will examine the history of inequalities, particularly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Following this, we will explore the growth of the volunteer industry and its objectives, and discuss the ethical concerns related to voluntourism. One crucial question we aim to answer is: How can we transform good intentions into actions that create meaningful change?
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All by Friedrich Nietzsche
HONR 200C: Reading Course with Professor Smita Rahman
This course explores Nietzsche’s "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", one of the most influential and challenging works in modern thought, celebrated for its poetic philosophy and enduring intellectual significance. Students will engage with Nietzsche’s visionary ideas of self-overcoming, the central concept of eternal return, and the ethics of affirmation, examining how these concepts confront the reactive politics of 'ressentiment', the weight of the past, and the desire for revenge in human and democratic life. Through close readings, class discussion, and supplementary texts, students will investigate how Nietzsche’s philosophy shapes ethical, political, and cultural thinking, while considering the aesthetic and literary forms through which an ethos of affirmation is expressed.
Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop by Imani Perry
HONR 200D: Reading Course with Professor Robert Dewey
From its origins in the Bronx, New York, over 50 years ago, hip hop music grew from local roots to become a global phenomenon. This course analyses rap music as an innovative art form through Imani Perry’s, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics of Hip Hop. Through her book chapters the course will explore the relationships between art and audiences, race and stereotypes, gender and representation, words and meaning, oppression and violence, cultural production and capitalist consumption. In addition to completing readings students will critically analyze music, lyrics and video.
Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner
HONR 200E: Reading Course with Professor Deborah Geis
Michelle Zauner is the lead singer of a popular band called Japanese Breakfast, but she is actually Korean-American, and her 2021 memoir, Crying in H Mart, received wide praise from critics. In this book, Zauner tells the story of what happened when she, a rebel, went to care for her more traditional Korean mother and how the experience transformed not only her understanding of Korean cooking, but also their relationship. This book belongs to the genre of the “food memoir” that includes celebrated authors from M.F.K. Fisher to Julie Powell; close study of a food memoir teaches us a great deal about the cultural background of a writer, and it also invites us to consider more closely how our own attitudes about food and cooking may be developed and transformed. In this course, we will read carefully through Zauner’s book and will also look at some supplementary materials; we will taste Korean food (both literally and figuratively); and students will complete a short oral presentation and a final project.
Seriously Mad: Mental Distress and the Broadway Musical by Aleksei Grienenko
HONR 200F: Reading Course with Professor Dennis Sloan
Aleksei Grienenko's SERIOUSLY MAD: MENTAL DISTRESS AND THE BROADWAY MUSICAL brings together scholarship in psychology, psychiatry, music, theatre, and dance to explore how the Broadway musical has made use of evolving understandings of mental pain, trauma, and unhappiness. Readings and class meetings will discuss musicals including NEXT TO NORMAL, A STRANGE LOOP, SWEENEY TODD, MAN OF LA MANCHA, GYPSY, AND LADY IN THE DARK. Students will explore the intersection of science and the arts and reflect on the social and cultural roles of musical theatre.
Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory by Janet Malcolm (2023) and (2023) and Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes (1980)
HONR 200G: Reading Course with Professor Marnie McInnes
These two short, well-known books about photography make an intriguing pair. Janet Malcolm focuses on private photographs, including one of herself as a child leaning out of the window of a train, when she and her family escaped from Nazi-occupied Prague. Roland Barthes focuses on photos published in the news or exhibited on museum walls, puzzling over what makes the photograph differ from other forms of representation.
Both authors encourage us to think about the role that photos play in our lives, and both pose questions about how we should understand the photograph. Is it a work of art? A piece of evidence? A proxy for memory? -- or, as Barthes believes, something dangerous and sharp, an object that is less likely to please than to wound us?
As we talk over these questions, we’ll also reflect on photos of our own drawn from family albums and online collections. At the end of the eight weeks, you’ll have a chance to pull your stories and ideas together in a brief photobook of your own.
Interdisciplinary Seminars
Chicagoland
HONR 300Aa: Arts and Humanities Seminar with Professor David Gellman
Chicagoland encompasses a historical landscape that transcends a major U.S city’s boundaries to include city, suburbs, and a vast hinterland. As a central place, Chicago has drawn together people and material resources from around the world by every kind of transportation imaginable: rivers, roads, and canals, planes, trains, and automobiles. This course examines the story of Chicagoland in a thoroughly interdisciplinary fashion, putting history in dialogue with the arts. Through the eyes and ears of a variety of writers, musicians, architects, actors, and scholars, we will see and hear how greater Chicago has made, remade, broken, and re-formed itself across two centuries and into our own time.
[Cultural Studies of] Satan Then & Now
HONR 300Ab: Arts and Humanities Seminar with Professor Justin Glessner
Across various times and places, the concept of “the satan”—found in texts like Job 1:6 (Hebrew: השטן; “the adversary”)—has consistently proven to be a rich source of intellectual engagement: Satan, it seems, is “good to think with” (then and now). This course employs transdisciplinary approaches to investigate the contours and functions of the (sometimes-mundane, sometimes-magnificent, always-interesting) satanic imaginary as expressed in literature throughout history. Tying together select ancient (then) expositions from Abrahamic traditions (Judaism | Christianity | Islam) with select (now) [more] contemporary expressions, we will explore the host of positions and interests such voices bring to their discourses on Satan (and the satanic). How might we contextualize the diverse ways that “then and now” folk relate to the satanic? What discourses and relations of power are at work in “then and now" satanic musings? More broadly, how might we imagine our relationships with the “then and now" satanic imaginary, while growing in (self-)critical awareness of the ideological/contextual nature of engaging with the past, present, and future? Come and see!
Molecular Motors
HONR 300Ba: Science and Mathematics Seminar with Professor Jacob Hale
Do a Google video search for kinesin or F1 ATPase. What did you find? Though they look like alien robots, those are mechanical motors made out of protein and you have thousands of them in every cell of your body! A broad range of disciplines come together to understand these amazing machines. Using basic ideas from physics and statistics we will dig deep into what humans have learned about these motors so far and propose verifiable questions about what still remains a mystery. In our time together there will be discussion and interactive lectures. We will also do experiments along with analyzing primary literature about the structure and function of these tiny motors. For the final project you will use 3D printing to create and analyze models of your own design, synthesizing everything you have learned in the course.
Culture in Context and Conflict
HONR 300Ca: Social Science Seminar with Professor Rebecca Schindler
The trade in cultural heritage, both licit and illicit, is one of the most lucrative global markets. Historically, that market has been fueled by imperialism and more recently by military conflict. For archaeologists and anthropologists, the collecting of cultural heritage presents a dilemma. On the one hand, museums and collectors preserve, protect, and make accessible objects from around the world; on the other hand, undocumented excavation of artifacts destroys context, making the reconstruction of the social, economic, and political significance of past cultures impossible. This course explores several related topics: who has rights and responsibilities regarding the preservation and protection of cultures? How does the art market function and what role does the museum industry play in that market? And, what international laws and policies govern the protection of culture?
Rhetoric & Popular Culture
HONR 300Cb: Social Science Seminar with Professor Matt Meier
This course engages the rhetorical tradition as a way of understanding and interrogating popular culture. Unlike other courses in rhetoric, this course is not concerned with the obviously important; rather, it regards the everyday, the ordinary, and the mundane as significant sources of persuasion and influence. The overarching concern for the course is not popular culture for its own sake. Instead, the course seeks to understand what popular culture does and how it contributes to the construction of our social reality.
God at War & Peace
HONR 300Cc: Social Science Seminar with Professor Rachel Goldberg
Religion can be a call to war and an inspiration for peace. Religion is also the source of most of the world's moral norms about peace and forgiveness, (for good and for ill), and has been an important root for positive social change and nonviolence, through, for instance, the deeply faith-based work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi. As you might guess, religion can be one of the more powerful influences in conflict. In fact, some argue that religion is so often used as an excuse for violence and hatred that ending all religions would significantly reduce incidences of war (Richard Dawkins). Others, however, argue that religion may also be the best way to resolve or respond to some of the deepest and most troubling conflicts of our time. For instance, R. Scott Appleby says that "the parts of Islam and Christianity that speak for openness, diversity, and unity have been ‘a woefully underdeveloped resource in conflict resolution in general.’”
The class will explore the underlying questions shaping these debates, including how religious identity, theology, psychology, and religious moral norms serve both as a source of inner guidance, and as ideological tools for dominance. We will examine various explanations for how religion is being used as a source of division, and why and how that succeeds. Some wonder if the danger is that with increasing success, selective religious interpretations are being used to escalate conflict with a goal of creating new, theocratic regimes and movements.
Interpreting Science and Technology in the Modern World
HONR 300Cd: Social Science Seminar with Professor Howard Pollack-Millgate
In this seminar, we will approach modern European science and technology from a socio-cultural viewpoint, seeing scientific methods and theories as both products and producers of larger social contexts (including their institutional and commercial backgrounds, their bases in cultural traditions, and the uses to which they are put). We will focus on case studies from the German scientific tradition in its European and global contexts as well as lessons drawn from them to apply to our current technological age. Coinages like sustainability, empathy, and aspirin were originally German words (as were racial hygiene, blitzkrieg, and heroin). German-language scientists emerged in the 19th century as worldwide experts in a number of fields (e.g., physics, chemistry, public health, psychology, and biology) and German technology gained worldwide importance in various industries (automobiles, mechanical and chemical engineering) and was also of key importance in many of the political and military disasters of the 20th century. Equally important for our investigations will be German social critiques of where science seems to be heading as well as alternative models of natural science and technology. Using a variety of text-types, we will explore together both the fascinating details of some of these developments as well as the larger social implications of living in “an age of science.” Though any scientific expertise is welcome, it is not necessary for the class; in fact, we will be trying to see that there is perhaps less distance between natural science and social structures than our distribution requirements suggest.
Honor Scholars: You may petition to have this course serve as your Honor Scholar Science & Math Area Seminar; it cannot, however, count towards the SM Exploratory Foundations requirement. Petitions should be emailed to the Program Directors: Prof Schindler and Amy Welch for prior approval.