Courses

Fall Semester information

200A: Honor Scholar Reading Course:The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter

This course explores memory, exile, and identity through Alice Zeniter's The Art of Losing, a novel that follows a family's journey across generations from Algeria to France. Through the lens of Francophone literature and cultural narratives, students will examine how colonial legacies, migration, and historical silence shape personal and collective memory. Discussions will focus on how the novel engages with broader questions of belonging, loss, and the ways in which the past continues to shape the present.

200B: Honor Scholar Reading Course:Ours to Explore: Privilege, Power and the Paradox of Voluntourism by Pippa Biddle

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?

200C: Honor Scholar Reading Course:How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr

In an era defined by unprecedented connectivity, we often assume that more information equates to greater understanding. Yet, Nicholas Carr's "Superbloom" challenges this prevailing narrative, arguing that the relentless surge of digital communication breeds confusion, erodes empathy, and amplifies our worst instincts. This honors course will engage in a critical exploration of Carr's thesis, examining the psychological and societal consequences of our hyper-connected world.

200D: Honor Scholar Reading Course:Seeing like a State by James Scott

Why do well-intentioned, well-funded, mega plans to improve the human condition go wrong? In this modern classic work in Political Science, James Scott draws on cases as varied as forestry, taxation, census and city planning to make an argument for the value of multiple perspectives. As we read and discuss the book, we will turn to contemporary debates and policies about improving 'government efficiency' and see how we can apply the book's insights to projects that aim to solve complex issues such as immigration, currency management, and corruption.

Spring Semester information

200A: Honor Scholar Reading Course: Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

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.

200B: Honor Scholar Reading Course: Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution

Why does democracy feel so fragile today? Undoing the Demos asks how neoliberalism--an ideology that treats people, institutions, and democratic life itself as forms of capital to be managed, optimized, and competed over--reshapes politics, culture, and even our own identities. Reading this modern classic a decade after its publication, we investigate how its insights resonate today, examining the force of neoliberal reasoning in media, culture, and contemporary democratic crises.

200C: Honor Scholar Reading Course: Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All

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.

200D: Honor Scholar Reading Course: Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop

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.

200E: Honor Scholar Reading Course: Michelle Zauner Crying in H-Mart

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.

200F: Honor Scholar Reading Course: Aleksei Grienenko, Seriously Mad: Mental Distress and the Broadway Musical

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.

200G: Honor Scholar Reading Course: - Janet Malcolm, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory (2023) and Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980)

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.