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Past Honors Seminars

Fall 2009 | Spring 2009 | Fall 2008 | Spring 2008 | Fall 2007

Fall 2009

Separate and Unequal? Race and Class in Postwar America to the Present
With the historic election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, Americans are re-thinking issues of race, class, and opportunity in America. This seminar examines the issues of race and class in postwar (1945+) America, as intersecting systems of inequality and difference that have shaped American life and influenced global ideas of equality in the United States. We begin with a historical look at the different ways that race and class have been thought about and debated in American society—such as the classification of Irish immigrants as non-white, Scandinavian immigrants as Slavs, and the idea that the poor are biologically different from wealthy people. The course then examines the cold war and civil rights debates to see how these ideas were transformed, or reinforced. We then focus on the post 1960s debates around poverty, race, class and opportunity in American society and examine how these ideas have shaped current understandings of race, class, and politics in the United States. We conclude with a contemporary discussion of race and class issues seen through the lens of popular culture, such as Spike Lee’s films, and the racial and class politics of Eminem’s film 8 mile.
Instructor: David Karjanen

Thursday at 4: Across the U and Beyond
The course is built around the Institute for Advanced Study’s Thursdays at Four series. In this series scholars and artists present their work--a wide spectrum of topics is covered, and it varies every semester. Students in the seminar attend all the Thursday presentations, and then we meet in seminar on Tuesdays to talk about the presentations specifically, and more generally about how different sorts of research and creative activity are pursued at the University and how scholars in different disciplines communicate what they do. For many of the presentations we have background reading, and as schedules permit the presenters will attend the seminar following their presentation to talk in depth with the students. The objectives of the class are to familiarize you to the wide range of intellectual life at the University, engage you in the intellectual life of the University, and introduce you to different kinds of academic reading, writing, and modes of presentation.
Instructor: Susanna L. Smith

You Are Buddha: Zen of Peace
This course will discuss the moral and secular philosophies of Buddhism and its implications for our day-to-day living. It will focus on Buddhist ethics and various techniques for obtaining peace at various levels—individual, societal, global and universal. The goal of the course is to create awareness and understanding of the Buddhist ethical principles and methods and to promote skills for obtaining peace for personal health.
Instructor: Indira Y. Junghare

The Psychology of Paranormal Phenomena
Research has shown that most Americans hold one or more supernatural, paranormal, or pseudoscientific beliefs. These include beliefs in mind reading, fortune telling, psychokinesis, remote viewing, therapeutic touch, out-of-body experiences, alien abduction, and cryptozoology. This course has two goals: The first is to introduce students to critical thinking and behavioral research methods. The second is to critically evaluate the evidence for a variety of supernatural, paranormal, and pseudoscientific claims. Students will design and carry out their own experimental tests of these claims.
Instructor: Charles R (Randy) Fletcher

Food and Drug Safety: Who Can You Trust?
Each time you pick up the newspaper, you are likely to find an article describing concerns about food or drug safety. Often, new studies are released that contradict the findings of previous studies. For example, hormone replacement therapy for post menopausal women has been through repeated cycles of recommendation and rejection over the past 30 years. How does the consumer know which study to believe?
Consider the case of Vioxx, a non-prescription pain reliever and anti-inflammatory drug, which was widely prescribed and earned billions of dollars for Merck. Five years after its introduction, Vioxx was linked to heart disease and withdrawn, and Merck lost billions in lawsuits. How did Vioxx go from wonder drug to potential poison? Why did the safety testing not reveal this serious complication?
This seminar will introduce students to the processes of food and drug testing, basic statistical analysis, and elementary biochemistry. Students will use the primary literature to research safety studies, and to learn how the body metabolizes foods and drugs. The course is designed for non-science majors, but a background in high school chemistry is required.
Instructor: Paul Siliciano

A Novel Environment: Environmental Topics Explored through Popular Literature
This course will explore topics in ecology, evolution, and environmental science through reading two novels, Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver and The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols. A main focus of the course will be on science topics; human environmental behaviors, however, are only partially guided by science. Economics, socioeconomics, culture, local history, and interpersonal relations are arguably more influential than science in determining how humans use environmental resources and alter landscapes and ecology. This course uses popular fiction to generate interest in ecological topics, evolutionary biology, and environmental science within the context of a human story. Topics of exploration will include natural selection, sexual selection, kin selection, keystone predators, agricultural use of pesticides, water shortages and rights, environmental decision-making, and environmental justice. Students will research scientific and environmental topics, present their findings to the class, and lead discussions about these topics.
Instructor: Deena Wassenberg

Signs and Symbols in Chinese Culture
This class will focus on studying the interpretation of Chinese signs and symbols, and particularly the relationship between pictographs and written characters in Chinese culture. Class content is based on theories of visual communication, and symbolism in visual icons and images. It will focus on examining the elements involved in the perceptual process of the interpreter. Additionally, this course will examine design elements such as the use of form, line, color, and shape in Chinese symbols relative to social and cultural influences.
Instructor: Sauman Chu

Computer Programming from the Classical Era to the 21st Century
(Prerequisites: Math 1271 and knowledge of programming in a C-like language) This course is intended for students who know at least one imperative programming language such as C, C++, or Java, and wish to improve their programming skills. Each session will start with a 15-minute lecture by a student describing the biography of a programming teacher (who range from Archimedes to 20th century pioneers). The course content includes: programming paradigms: functional, imperative, and rule based; elements of propositional calculus and validation of inputs; time complexity and trading time for space–use of arrays; errors in numerical computation, examples in computation of π and series evaluation; number theory and application to RCA encryption; introduction to backtracking.
Instructor: Krzysztof Frankowski

The Deep Underground Sky
During the past several decades, efforts to better understand the Universe have motivated multiple experiments in deep underground laboratories, which are shielded from cosmic rays by hundreds or thousands of meters of rock. This seminar will describe these experiments on topics such as dark matter, neutrino mass, proton decay, double beta decay, nuclear astrophysics, gravity wave interferometers and low background counting; the science motivating them and the knowledge that has come from them. The seminar will include a Saturday visit (currently planned for Sept. 26, 2009) to the Underground Laboratory in Soudan MN, which houses the world's most sensitive dark matter and neutrino oscillation experiments.
Instructor: Marvin Marshak

Global Food.net.gov.org.edu: Sustainable Markets, Eating Dilemmas, and Food Safety
This Honors Seminar will allow students to explore and become articulate in the issues surrounding sustainable global production, delivery, and consumption of food. Using two lifetimes of knowledge about the food industry and agricultural production, the professors will take the students through the food supply chain from laboratories to farms to fork learning about how the parts of the food system are connected and interdependent. Efficiency models of production and delivery will be critiqued in light of new ideas about how food production could be compatible with preserving the environment, soil, water, and climate. Responsible consumption, a thesis of Michael Pollan (Omnivore’s Dilemma) and others, will be critiqued for its impact on global hunger, nutrition, food safety, and economic viability. The Seminar will include field trips to selected food processing and distribution companies and speakers who are experts in various aspects of science, economics, and industry.
Instructor: Jean Kinsey and Frank Busta

Language, Identity, and Globalization
We have documented more than 6,000 languages that are spoken in the world. More people are speakers of multiple languages than are monolingual. The social life of even a single language contains produces a challenging and sometimes even bewildering mix of social and individual identities. This course will explore the ways that a person’s language(s) and identity (ies) are inevitably entwined. The social life of language is an important aspect that contributes to the dynamics of local and global society in the 21st Century. Therefore, it is important to come to an awareness of the many ways in which a person or a group’s identity is tied to their language(s). Students will become intrigued as they uncover the powerful role that language plays in their individual life and in our global lives.
Instructor: Amy Sheldon

Objects of our (Dis)Affection: Pretty Girls, Distracted Boys, and Little Criminal Monsters
Looking beyond questions of representational truth, this seminar examines and theorizes the relationship between abstract ways of seeing childhood and the “real,” i.e., material world from which these visions emerge and diverge. Beginning with the fundamental question of what is a “child”—an inevitably political and ideological question shaped by notions of class, race, gender—we will study childhood as refracted through the prisms of these three contexts: [1] “The Legal Child”; [2] “The ‘Normal’ Child”; and [3] “The (Sexy?) Child-Adult.” Over the course of fifteen weeks we will:
[1] study historical and contemporary visual and textual representations and discourses of childhood;
[2] examine and theorize historical processes and materials, as well as ideological and economic
structures and systems that have gone into the (re)making of childhood and the “normal” and “abnormal” child circumscribed within it;
[3] explore philosophical and theoretical models that have shaped past and present thinking about class, gender, race, sexuality, and age in relation to childhood; [4] engage issues of ideology, politics, and power as they intersect with concepts and practices of contemporary childhood and its representation.
Instructor: Kysa Koerner Hubbard

Getting Lost with Kafka
This seminar will provide an in-depth reading of Kafka’s work that will situate Kafka at the crossroads of European modernity and within the debates about Jewish culture and identity in Prague. We will consider questions such as the relationship between Jewish subjectivity and Jewish text; Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of Kafka’s work as exemplary of a “minor” literature; the relationship between Jewish text and the Law; and the tropes of disorientation, travel, dislocation, displacement, and “getting lost” in Kafka’s work. Kafka’s work has generated an enormous body of critical reflection from various corners of critical and literary theory. We will explore these responses to Kafka, and also take into account the various “after-lives” Kafka has engendered in contemporary art, film, and literature, from Andy Warhol’s silk-screens of Kafka to the work of Haruki Murakami. In addition to works by Kafka, we will also read critical and theoretical works by Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre, Lukacs, Canetti, Blanchot, Gershom Sholem, Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari.
Instructor: Leslie Morris

Adoption in Literature: Real and Imagined
This course will look at issues related to adoption as described by those who became part of it willingly or unwillingly. The family will be examined as a flexible and changeable framework for exploration of identity, kinship, and love. While the students will read several texts from the social sciences, the instructor believes that literature might be a better venue for exploration of the personal details of this often-painful process. Ranging from descriptions of a search for closure or pursuits of biological ties to a bold reinvention of daily identity and family, the assigned texts offer a moving portrait of a complex process. A significant part of the course will be devoted to the issues of trans-national adoptions, which, in addition to reinventing families, often cross racial and continental divides. With texts chosen from two geographically and culturally different regions—the United States and Scandinavia—one of the goals of this seminar will be to establish how cultural practices influence attitudes toward adoption. The writers discussed will include A.M.Homes, Meredith Hall, and M. Myung-Ok Lee. The films for this course will include Secrets & Lies and The Italian.
Instructor: Monika Zagar

Music around Us: Political, Social, and Cultural Contexts for Listening
Listening is profoundly affected by context. Is music the background to a film, video game, shopping mall, and political rally, or is it foregrounded at a concert hall, rock concert, and through an I-pod? Often this distinction between background and foreground erodes, as in musicals and operas where music and drama are equally important. This course will explore the range of listening experiences in the history of Western music from Mozart to Eminem. Readings will draw on journalism, literary works, letters and diaries that illuminate how and why people listen to music. Music affects our emotions, but often more is at stake. Listening can be physical, and not just in dances and at parades. Some listeners report spiritual, even metaphysical experiences. How does musical style affect the listening experience, and what elements of music (melody, rhythm, the color of the sound) compel a physical reaction? Beyond emotional gratification, what social values are promoted through music? Moreover, since 1800, music also served political ends—as a symbol for national identity, a construction of racial purity, or a call to arms. We will examine case studies in which music affected historical developments—the growth of the middle class, totalitarianism, and social protest.
Instructor: Karen Painter

The Political Psychology of Conformity, Enmity, and Heroism
The first part of the seminar examines the power of conformity, denial, and obedience in politics at the individual and collective levels. Exploring concepts such as groupthink, the spiral of silence, the politics of denial, crimes of obedience and personal authoritarianism, an overarching theme will be an assessment of the role played by threat perceptions and fear responses. To counterbalance the pessimism inherent in such topics, the second part of the seminar will examine a more positive end of the spectrum—political altruism and heroic political action. Considering work on political resistance, whistle-blowing and rescue activities, we will examine examples such as Le Chambon during World War II and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina during the Pinochet regime. From this baseline we will extract theories and concepts to apply during the third part of the seminar, which will focus on the U.S. use of torture since 9-11 and resistance to this policy. Readings will include, among others, selections from the works of Janis, Noelle-Neumann, Kelman, Staub, Aronson, Stenner, the Oliners, and Thalhammer & O’Loughlin. During the third portion of the semester, when we focus on recent U.S. policy, we will examine selections from authors such as Greenberg, Kahn, Ratner, and Margulies.
Instructor: John Sullivan

Writing and Social Change in America
In the first half of the seminar, we will develop some of the key issues using examples from the late 18th through the 19th century. These will include Paine’s Common Sense, the “Declaration of Independence” and the Constitution and Federalist Papers, Cummins’ The Lamplighter (an early best-seller), Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Twain’s Tom Sawyer. In addition to reading the texts, students will track down contemporary reactions: book reviews, advertisements, letters and journals, etc. Doing this will help us figure out why and how these texts were targeted to and affected their contemporary audiences.
The second half of the seminar will involve students’ selecting and reporting on twentieth-century texts. I hope this will produce a wide range of examples, and that students will track down influential texts in their own areas of interest. For example, the student of politics might present Wilson’s 14 Points, King’s “I have a dream” or letter from Birmingham Jail. The biologist might discuss the Watson-Crick paper on DNA. Literary examples might contrast a respectable yet controversial novel like Catcher in the Rye with a sleazy companion like Peyton Place. We will also investigate the ways that media (TV, movies) interact to create and maintain best selling books.
Instructor: Donald Ross

Corporate Governance and Ethical Considerations
Corporate Governance and Ethical Considerations This class explores various topics relating to business organizations, including its internal and external governance and regulation, and its impact on society. We will begin by having an introduction to business organizations and different types of business entities. We will examine the duties and responsibilities of corporate officers and directors, especially in the wake of Enron and other corporate scandals. We will analyze how business decisions impact various stakeholders and whether the law is enough to promote ethical behavior. Students will also examine whether corporate social responsibility in our current world is a realistic or an altruistic thought. Last but not least, we will look at current events and apply the principles discussed in class.
Instructor: Gulzar Babaeva

Spring 2009

Understanding Diversity: A Universal Perspective
This course will analyze diverse forms and systems of existence—natural and designed by human beings, biological and socio-cultural. It will discuss diversity of races, cultures, languages, ideologies, and world-views. The goal of the course is to prepare students with an awareness and understanding of the interdependent workings of mind and body, human beings and nature, individual and society, diverse societies and diverse cultural systems and that these are not conflicting entities but rather complementary systems.
Instructor: Indira Junghare

Creativity and Critical Thinking: Understanding Ideas
Critical thinking is thinking that is oriented toward understanding ideas; it is the structured aspects of higher order thinking. It includes analysis, evaluation, synthesis, and creation more than the specific knowledge of a narrow topic or content. Critical thinking is a skill that can be learned. It does require extensive work by students and faculty, but the lessons will advance their capabilities and the quality of the University. To become a critical thinker is learning to use skills that enable one to start to take charge of the ideas that run one’s life; it is to think consciously and deliberately and skillfully in ways that transform oneself and to begin to remake one’s own mind. It is to run one’s inner workings for the first time and to understand the “system” one is running. It is to develop a mind that is analogous to the body of a person that is physically fit, like an excellent dancer who can perform any dance that can be choreographed. The class will focus on practice, not on lecture. It will emphasize your figuring out things using your own mind, not memorizing what is in a text book. On a typical class day you will be in small groups practicing “disciplined” thinking and will be regularly responsible for assessing your own work using criteria and standards discussed in class.
Instructor: Brad Hokanson

The Black Radical Imagination
This seminar introduces students to Black radical thought and practice in the African American experience. We will explore the meaning of Black radicalism and investigate its theory practice in Africa America. While a core theme running through our analysis is the historical underpinning of Black life and oppression in the United States, a global lens is also employed. We will explore why people of African descent have occupied an oppressed position in American society and how African Americans have resisted this oppression through radical thought and practice. We will explore changes over time by employing sociological, economic, cultural, and political tools for understanding the historical and contemporary positioning of African Americans. Most importantly, we will examine how African Americans have radically imagined freedom and fought for it.
Instructor: Dr. Rose M. Brewer

Mark Twain and American Values
Why did his contemporaries see Mark Twain as a humorist who represented mainstream American values? Why do many Americans today continue to see him this way? We will explore these questions because Twain’s writings seem to contradict these stereotypes. At the end of his life he predicted that an American President would use a powerful bomb to destroy the world. In his most famous novels—Huckleberry Finn, The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Puddin’ Head Wilson—the heroes fail to accomplish their goals. Why, then, have so many Americans identified Twain with the powerful national tradition that Americans, unlike other peoples, do not experience irony, failure, and tragedy? In addition to a discussion of Twain’s critique of the belief in American exceptionalism as a promised land, we will look at the at the ironic and tragic aspects of his personal life. We will use his life history, 1835 – 1910, and his major writings to explore some of the major complexities and contradictions in the dominant American middle-class culture of the second half of the nineteenth century.
Instructor: David W. Noble

Pyramids to Flowers: Sites of Commemoration
The purpose of this Honors Seminar is to investigate sites of commemoration, that is, the visual recollection of an event, an individual, or a place. The issue here is not so much a matter of nostalgia but rather of grief and longing expressed visually. It may be expressed by small tokens such as flowers offered in commemoration of the dead (an example would be the outpouring on the death of Princes Di) or by large commissioned artworks such as a grand tomb, for example the Taj Mahal or the Pyramids. Although I would make no claim for a universal aesthetic – in fact, quite the contrary – there are universal emotions, human loss being right up with hunger as a fundamental human condition that must be reconciled. Although many of the examples that the readings will cover are drawn from South Asia and the Islamic world, my areas of expertise, we will seek to understand the universality of visual responses to loss and the preservation of memory by looking at issues both globally and theoretically.
Instructor: Catherine Asher

No Word Left Behind: The Origins and Evolution of English Words
Participants in the seminar will get the broadest exposure to the history of English words from the most ancient period to our days. They will investigate the rise of such basic native words as /man/ and /woman/, loanwords from Latin, Scandinavian, French, and other languages (from /butter/, /window/, and /castle/ to /madrigal/),and multifarious slang (from /hocus pocus /to /lollygag/). A close look at the history of English vocabulary against the background of the history of England and the rest of the English- speaking world will illuminate not only such traditional questions of historical linguistics as the causes of language change, the principles of word formation, and the interaction of languages but also the interaction between language and society, language and material culture, language and psychology, and the origin of language, as well as the process of dictionary making. Lectures will alternate with discussion. The midterm and the final will check the students’ grasp of theory. Individual presentations and a paper will allow each participant to work on a topic of special interest.
Instructor: Anatoly Liberman

Democracy and Markets: Complementary or Not?
Are democracy and markets compatible? Do democratic processes and institutions undermine or enhance the workings of markets and vice versa? Competing theoretical perspectives from political economy are evaluated. And the experiences of countries with different political economic institutions are studied. Most of these countries are located in North America and Europe.
Instructor: John R. Freeman

Flexible Thinking: Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives
This seminar course will examine recent research findings from the cognitive, brain, and social sciences to arrive at a better understanding of the conditions that foster, or impede, flexible thinking. A recurrent theme will be that creatively adaptive thinking depends both on automatic (intuitive/perceptual) mental processes and more controlled or deliberate processes and most often emerges from a combination of these two modes of processing. Representative topics will include: the search for evidence and jumping to conclusions, including research on delusional thinking, and automatic thinking; the effects of reinforcing variable rather than habitual behavior; the role of goals, and adaptive changes in goals, in the creative development of ideas; the need for both highly specific and more abstract ways of accessing our knowledge and memory for experiences; the ways in which emotions may enhance or impair flexibility in thought; and the importance of mentally stimulating environments in adaptive cognition and behavior, and the brain changes that both accompany, and support, flexible thinking. We will read original research papers from several disciplines and multiple methodologies so as to arrive at a broad, integrated, and empirically informed view of flexible thinking.
Instructor: Dr. Wilma Koutstaal

Atrocities, Memories, and the Law
Current political struggles over the shape of trials against suspected terrorists are, inter alia, struggles over ways in which terrorist acts and the role of political actors will go down in history. Also, ongoing international trials of war crimes, genocide and human rights violations are likely to color collective memories. This seminar links ideas about atrocities, memories, and law. Section I addresses classical and contemporary literature on legal proceedings such as those against Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg (Landsman) and Jerusalem (Arendt); actors in the wars of the former Yugoslavia (Hagan); and cases in which American military personnel have been on trial. Section II addresses how legal proceedings color historical memories of atrocities, comparing criminal trials (Osiel) with Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (Wilson) and compensation programs (Mecklem). Finally, section III examines how such memories themselves have consequences as they may, or may not, break cycles of violence (Minow), lead to new legal institutions (Savelsberg/King), or to resistance against injustice through social movements (Harris).
Instructor: Joachim Savelsberg

The Science of Speech: Language and the Brain
This seminar is about language, a unique and fascinating product of the human mind/brain. We will examine human language in all aspects of its structure and use in comparison with animal communication systems. We are especially interested in how infants crack the speech code with so much ease and how early experience alters the brain, thereby affecting an individual’s future perceptions and actions. Both historical perspectives and current research will be introduced and discussed. Students are expected to learn not only the basics of speech acoustics, speech anatomy and physiology and properties of the auditory system but also the cutting-edge technology of computer speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, and modern brain imaging techniques. Dominant methods in speech and language research will be compared and contrasted, especially in tests of special populations involving infants, bilingual children, autistic children, dyslexics, and aphasics. A variety of delivery formats will be used, including video demonstrations, guest lectures, student presentations, debates, and software package tutorials. Hands-on experiments will be assigned as an integral component of the discussion, covering digital processing of speech and music, cross-language comparisons of speech acoustics and speech perception, brain anatomy tutor, neural activity simulator and neural network models of linguistic functions.
Instructor: Dr. Yang Zhang

Temporal and Spatial Design: The Art of Complexity
How we design systems, organizations, products, and environments matters in terms of the effectiveness, efficiency, success, and satisfaction of our lives, and yet most of us have little understanding of how design happens. Why do some designed systems, organizations, products, and environments work well and others do not? Why does the form of something matter a lot in some cases and not in others? Why does the timing of decisions in a design process matter and how can we make better decisions as a result? Why do certain “meta-patterns” reoccur in both natural and human-designed processes and what can we learn from those patterns to create a better future? How can you find the right moment to act so that you are neither too early nor too late? How can you anticipate various timing risks, for example, the risk that the world will change much more quickly – or slowly – than you anticipated?
Instructors: Thomas Fisher and Stuart Albert

Reading Faces: Investigating Autism
With minimal effort, most humans gather crucial social information from the faces of others. Such face expertise is central to successful social functioning. In the autism spectrum disorders (ASD), face-processing deficits are extensive. One account of these difficulties is that faces are processed in a piecemeal rather than global fashion. The class will explore how his account of ASD could be tested. For example, do children with ASD attend only to local features of a face? If this is true, do fail to perceive faces in a global fashion or do they process all objects in this way? A second goal of this class is to provide students with an opportunity to learn about new methods for training children to process faces in a holistic manner. Students will view videotapes of training sessions used by therapists exploring new methods and materials for treating children with this disorder. As a term paper project the class will create a manual for using a new method for training children to attend to faces and adapt a second training method that created for and used to help adults with face blindness for use with young children. The seminar-group-discussion approach is primary way graduate students receive formal instruction. This class will provide undergraduates in the honors program with a seminar experience but without the expectation that students have had previous training in the field.
Instructor: Al Yonas

Introduction to Randomized Clinical Trials
A clinical trial is an experiment carried out in human beings. Randomized clinical trials are the principal method used to test whether new drugs, surgical methods, or other treatments are effective in curing or preventing disease. Clinical trials require the cooperative efforts of researchers in medicine, epidemiology, pharmacology, biostatistics, data management, ethics, and behavioral sciences - plus, typically, lots of money and sometimes politics. They have enormous influence on the modern practice of medicine. This course will provide an introduction to clinical trials through a series of historical examples: clinical trials in polio prevention, breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, eye disease, acupuncture, and other areas. The emphasis here will be on:
• Statistical issues: design and data analysis; choice of endpoints, survival analysis, testing and estimation; intention-to-treat principle; metaanalyses.
• Ethical issues: potential harm to patients vs. advancement of medicine; costs and benefits and conflicts of interest; data falsification and its consequences
• Medical issues: how clinical trials affect the practice of medicine (or don’t)
• Regulatory issues: the role of the FDA and its track record
Instructor: John E. Connett

Fall 2008

(Un)Settling the U.S. West
In the six decades after 1776, over four million (white) Americans migrated from the East coast to the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys. There they found dozens of Native American nations that had been in place for centuries, and they used a combination of treaties and (rarely) military conflict to displace the Native Americans to the west of the Mississippi river. This seminar will combine travel accounts that preceded white settlement, statements of public policy, settlers' narratives and poetry, and the few texts by Native Americans to figure out what people on the frontier thought was happening.
Instructor: Donald Ross

Thursdays at Four
In this seminar the best of the University’s research and creative work is brought to you. Every Thursday afternoon, the Institute for Advanced Study offers a presentation—a lecture, film, performance—by leading scholars and artists from around the world and within the University. Seminar participants will attend the Thursdays at Four series and meet on Tuesdays to discuss the presentations, which will draw upon disciplines across the University. We will do supplemental readings related to the presentations and talk with presenters as their schedules allow. Check www.ias.umn.edu/thursdays.php for the up-to-date calendar. This is the perfect seminar to introduce you to the rich variety of work done at the University.
Instructor: Susannah L. Smith

“The Rules of the Game”: Exploring U.S. Campaigns and Elections
The 2008 elections promise to be exciting and historic for many reasons. In this course, students will monitor the presidential campaigns and some congressional campaigns to assess how theory and practice converge in 2008. First, we will explore how political scientists study and understand electoral politics. What theoretical generalizations can we make about candidates, voters, parties, and the media? In what ways do the electoral context and the “rules of the game” matter? Students will write a series of short papers analyzing specific elements of major campaigns. Students will be encouraged to volunteer for a campaign of their choice to write one of the short papers. Students will also write a research paper of at least ten pages that addresses one of the themes of the course and present their findings to the class at the end of the semester.
Instructor: Kathryn Pearson

Psychology of the Paranormal
Research has shown that most Americans hold one or more supernatural, paranormal or pseudoscientific beliefs. These include beliefs in mind reading, fortune telling, psychokenesis, remote viewing, therapeutic touch, out-of-body experiences, alien abduction, and cryptozoology. This course has two goals: The first is to introduce students to critical thinking and behavioral research methods. The second is to critically evaluate the evidence for a variety of supernatural, paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Students will design and carry out their own experimental tests of these claims. The course will also include a guest lecture and demonstration by a local psychic.
Instructor: Charles R. (Randy) Fletcher

Computer Programming from the Classical Era to the 21st Century
This course is intended for students who know at least one imperative programming language such as C, C++, or Java, and wish to improve their programming skills. Each session will start with a 15-minute lecture by a student describing the biography of a programming teacher (who range from Archimedes to 20th century pioneers). The course content includes: programming paradigms: functional, imperative, and rule based; elements of propositional calculus and validation of inputs; time complexity and trading time for space–use of arrays; errors in numerical computation, examples in computation of π and series evaluation; number theory and application to RCA encryption; introduction to backtracking.
Instructor:Krzysztof Frankowski

Evaluating Starvation: Revisiting Malthus in the Era of Biotechnology
This course explores the realities and relationships between food production and food consumption in a world with over 6.6 billion people. Discussions of the writings of Thomas Malthus (An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1826), Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, 1968), and Jared Diamond (Germs, Guns and Steel, 1997 and Collapse, 2005) will be evaluated in light of the Green Revolution and the promise of the biotechnology revolution. Students will be exposed to the workings of Norman Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner and advocate that biotechnology will be essential to meeting future food, feed, fiber and biofuel demand. This course provides students with an introduction to a multitude of issues surrounding food production, human nutrition, and starvation. Through consideration of fundamental principles in the areas of agricultural production and human nutritional needs, this course will evaluate agriculture and human development from a historical perspective as they relate to nutrition, famine, and the human diet. A variety of learning style techniques will be employed, including videos and lectures, guest speakers, small group discussions, reflection documents, and an experiential learning activity with a non-profit group ‘Feed My Starving Children’.
Instructor: Paul Porter

Global Health Challenges for Future Health Professionals
Obesity, heart disease, diabetes, drug-resistant bacteria, environmental contaminants, growing health disparities, and more. Students in this course will explore today’s emerging health issues and asks what challenges future health professionals can expect to face. This is done by hearing from faculty, clinicians, researchers, and other experts wrestling with the challenges to human health and how those challenges are tied to the changing expectations and responsibilities of health professionals. Students will hear about the evolving challenges and responsibilities of health professionals; the skills needed by health professionals to be ready for the future; and the role health professionals will play in shaping the future health status of the population, both locally and globally. The increasing, changing and expanding challenges to human health will require more broadly and highly trained health professionals in the future. This course will help students understand what they need to prepare for, and how to begin that preparation. This seminar is for high ability freshmen and sophomores who have an interest in learning more about emerging health issues, the data that describes these health trends, and the challenges and opportunities health professionals have as they work to address those health issues.
Instructor: Tricia Todd

Harlem Renaissance: African American Art & Culture in the Jazz Age
If the 1920s was the decade of flappers, cabarets, bathtub gin, and the writers of the Lost Generation, it was also the decade of the New Negro, the Jazz Age, Marcus Garvey's Black Legions, and an explosion of new urban black popular culture: blues and Broadway shows, painting and sculpture, the numbers rackets and religious cults. While focusing on writers and their relationships with artists working in visual and performing arts media, this course will review the Harlem Renaissance from a variety of perspectives—literary, historical, cultural, political—and will explore the complex patterns of interpenetration and interdependency between the worlds inside and outside of what W.E.B. DuBois called “the Veil of Color.” While prescribing no single theoretical or methodological approach to the Harlem Renaissance, the seminar will employ “Cultural Poetics,” or “the New Historicism,” as one major orienting conceptual framework toward which African Americanist cultural critics and theorists have gravitated in recent years—improvising and riffing along the way.
Instructor: John Wright

The Image on the Page
Before there were movies, television, and computer screens there were photographs, paintings, and pictures in books and magazines. The saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” reaches back before the commercial setting for which it was devised in 1927. This seminar will examine the production and uses of pictures in selected books and magazines that were published as early as 1493 and as late as 2007, many of them held by the Department of Special Collections and Rare Books, University of Minnesota Libraries. Readings will include historical, psychological, and philosophical accounts of depiction and the perception of pictures.
Instructor: Michael Hancher

Sex, Politics, & “Transnational” Comedy: The Films of Ernst Lubitsch & Billy Wilder--From Berlin to Hollywood
In this seminar we will study films by Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Lubitsch was born in Berlin in 1892; in 1923, already a very successful filmmaker in Germany, he came to work in Hollywood.. Wilder was born in the Austrian-controlled part of Galicia, Poland, in 1906; he became a screenwriter in Berlin but fled Germany for the U.S. in 1933. We will analyze the films with regard to the politics of gender, genre, migration, nationality, and ethnic identity, while situating them within the historical contexts of Imperial Germany and Weimar Germany and in Hollywood from the “Roaring Twenties” to the New Deal and World War II. Can these films made on both sides of the Atlantic be considered "transnational"? Also relevant to the work of these two German-speaking Jews is the issue of ethnic identity and migration. We will also look at the films in terms of their relation to the generic potential (and limitations) of comedy: how much is the use of comedy in them subversive as opposed to affirmative of the status quo?
Instructor: Rick McCormick

A Nation of Immigrants? Immigration and American Politics, 1900 to the Present
The United States is often described as a “nation of immigrants,” where peoples from all over the world have sought new lives, economic opportunity, and freedom from persecution. But as recent debates over illegal immigration, border enforcement, and terrorism make clear, the U.S. is also a “gatekeeping nation,” one which has established rigid policies to control immigration and exclude certain groups, often on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity. In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will study the immigrant and refugee experience in America. We will examine the great waves of European, Asian, and Mexican immigration during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the more recent migration from Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. We will also consider how immigration has shaped our national identity, politics, and race, class, gender, and ethnic relations. Readings will include immigrant autobiographies, primary historical documents, law and policies, and articles relating to immigrant activism, immigration law, xenophobia, and race relations. A key aspect of the course will focus on documenting history—we will use the internet, watch documentary and popular films, and visit the University’s Immigration History Research Center to explore how immigration is documented and interpreted.
Instructor: Erika Lee

Politics, Nationalism, and Music in the Balkans
Snatches of a half-remembered but somehow familiar melody echo in the soundscapes of contemporary Balkan pop. Whose song is this anyway? Is it Greek or Turkish? Macedonian, Serbian, Albanian, Bulgarian? Does it really matter? To whom and why? This course will explore the intersection between the nationalist politics, communist ideologies, and musical traditions in the Balkan Peninsula. It will address larger issues of (trans)nationalism, ethnic and religious identity, population exchange, inter-ethnic music relations, and (mis)construction of history as reflected in the musical practices of both rural and urban Balkan communities. Readings, films, and musical selections will offer students a socio-cultural lens through which to consider the recent troubled history of South-Eastern Europe, as well as the struggles and aspirations of its peoples reflected in the expressive cultural forms they have created.
Instructor: Gabriela Ilnitchi

The World of the Internet: the Challenge of Digital Literacies
Since the beginning of time, human communication has been influenced by technology, starting with the use of tools for cave paintings. In ancient Greece, Plato expressed concerns that the written word would influence how well people could memorize; later, the printing press shifted the power structures of who could own and disseminate information. More recently, tools from the telegraph to television and from to the computer to wireless devices have continued to change the communication landscape. In each case, particular technologies engender a particular literacy, or way of communicating and knowing the world. Digital technologies in particular have had a remarkably powerful effect, in a very short period of time, on how we relate to each other and how we create knowledge. Unlike the text-based world of printed books and newspapers, digital technologies are multi-modal (text, sound, visual) and tend to encourage short burst of ideas rather than long, sustained arguments. By way examining what we might call “digital literacies,” this class will introduce students to foundational research in the field of Internet studies but will quickly focus on digital technologies and the relationship of these technologies to reading and writing. The class will involve reading, discussion, some lecture, and a set of small observational research projects.
Instructor: Laura J. Gurak

Municipal Housekeeping: Women’s Role in Housing Policy
More than shelter, housing is essential for women’s well-being. Discover how women’s lives are influenced by housing and community design, limited by women’s incomes, and shaped by public policy. Explore housing concerns of women who are household heads- young, old, minority persons, immigrants or homeless. Expand your thinking about where we live in the city, across the country, and throughout the world. In this honors seminar students explore housing impacts for women and women’s involvement in developing housing policies. You will be expected to participate in class discussion and contribute reading materials for the class to share. A reading log and an individual report are required. There are no examinations.
Instructor: Ann Ziebarth

Business Organizations: Governance, Society, and the Law
This class explores various topics relating to business organizations, including its internal and external governance and regulation, and its impact on society. We will begin by having an introduction to business organizations and different types of business entities. We will examine the duties and responsibilities of corporate officers and directors, especially in the wake of Enron and other corporate scandals. We will analyze how business decisions impact various stakeholders and whether the law is enough to promote ethical behavior. Students will also examine whether corporate social responsibility in our current world is a realistic or an altruistic thought. Last but not least, we will look at current events and apply the principles discussed in class.
Instructor: Gulzar Babaeva

Spring 2008

Lying and Cheating in Public Life
People deceive or cheat one another, but they also deceive or cheat themselves. In this course, we identify the different forms of cheating and deception a person can engage in and the harm or damage each can do to private and public life. We will read a number of novels and plays that show how or why people engage in deception and how one character's dishonesty breeds suspicion and distrust in someone he depends on or who depends on him. We will also read some research on the history and philosophy of lying and cheating in private or public life. Students will work in small groups and be graded based on a number of individual or group writing assignments or presentations.
Instructor: Michael Root

Medieval Travel: East and West
This course examines travel in the Middle Ages through the topics of pilgrimage, crusade, exploration, and trade. The central theme will be cross-cultural exchange and conflict. Students will examine problems of ethnocentrism, alterity, and identity. European travel accounts, crusade chroniclers, Jewish travelers, and Arab geographers will provide the bulk of the primary source reading, along with ventures into the Indian Ocean with Cheng He and the North Atlantic with Leif Ericson. A particular focus of the course will be the ancient silk road leading across Asia, which was, in fact, various routes by which merchants traveled with their goods, especially silks and other valuable commodities East to West. Travel writing as a genre will be explored. Students will be introduced to historical interpretation. Marco Polo will serve as a specific case study because his book of Travels raises useful issues about travel and travel writing, and the survival of evidence. Students will keep a journal of their vicarious adventures. They will carry out map exercises, visit the James Ford Bell Library, review films, do a Web assignment comparing Polo and Ibn Battuta, and participate in debates. In lieu of a course exam, they will produce a paper of ten pages on the traveler of their choice.
Instructor: Kathryn Reyerson

Getting Lost With Kafka
This seminar will provide an in-depth reading of Kafka's work that will situate Kafka at the crossroads of European modernity and within the debates about Jewish culture and identity in Prague. We will consider questions such as the relationship between Jewish subjectivity and Jewish text; Deleuze and Guattari's formulation of Kafka's work as exemplary of a "minor" literature; the relationship between Jewish text and the Law; and the tropes of disorientation, travel, dislocation, displacement, and "getting lost" in Kafka's work. Kafka's work has generated an enormous body of critical reflection from various corners of critical and literary theory. We will explore these responses to Kafka, and also take into account the various "after-lives" Kafka has engendered in contemporary art, film, and literature, from Andy Warhol's silk-screens of Kafka to the work of Haruki Murakami. In addition to works by Kafka, we will also read critical and theoretical works by Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre, Lukacs, Canetti, Blanchot, Gershom Sholem, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari.
Instructor: Leslie Morris

Three Segregated Academic Worlds: Economics, Humanities, Ecology
In this course we will analyze the concepts of space and time used by current academic economists, humanists, and ecologists. Economists see a global marketplace characterized by a pattern of timeless natural laws. Within the perpetual equilibrium of this space, constant progress or linear time can take place. In contrast, many humanists who identify with post modernism see shifting patterns of timeful cultures as the only environment. In these timeful spaces the experience of linear time is impossible. For economists and humanists the theoretical choice seems to be either that of timeless nature or timeless culture. In contrast, ecologists see human culture as always participating within a nature that is timeful. This also is a space in which linear time and progress are impossible.
Instructor: David Noble

The Museum Machine
There is a museum for nearly every academic field, from museums of national or natural history to the zoo, the arboretum, or the observatory. Museums are also a growing, innovative sector of the entertainment economy that rivals the sports industry in terms of sheer visitor numbers. Why are museums such an important part of public culture, both in America and throughout the world? Where did the idea of the museum come from, and why did they take the form we recognize today? How do museums elect what aspects of the living world (indeed, the universe!) and its past to represent within their walls and what to exclude, which stories to tell and how? What are the issues facing those museums that have living people, divided communities, or contested histories as their "objects"?
Instructor: Margaret Werry

Wonder Women: Art & Technology 1968 -2008
This seminar will convene three generations of artists whose creative work is integrally engaged with technology. The impetus for this symposium is the timely need to bring together the vanguard generation of women who have had a profound and often understated influence in the creative realm of Art and Technology. The forty-year span from 1968 - 2008 highlights their work and their influence on the artistic inquiry of the two generations of women who follow.
Instructor: Diane Willow

Adoption in Literature: Imagined and Experienced
This course will look at issues related to adoption as described by those who became part of it willingly or unwillingly. The family will be examined as a flexible and changeable framework for exploration of identity, kinship, and love. While the students will read several texts from the social sciences, the instructor believes that literature might be a better venue for exploration of the personal details of this often-painful process. Ranging from descriptions of a search for closure or pursuits of biological ties to a bold reinvention of daily identity and family, the assigned texts offer a moving portrait of a complex process.
Instructor: Monica Zagar

Visual Perceptual Illusions
Humans constantly receive and process a vast amount of sensory input. Among the sensory abilities, vision provides arguably the richest information about our intermediate and distal environment. While visual processing is amazingly efficient and accurate, sometimes what we perceive is different from the physical reality. When this happens, we perceive visual illusions. The study of the conditions under which visual illusions arise and their mechanisms will help us understand how vision normally works. In this course, we will discuss many types of visual illusion and their implications. Students are encouraged to report their own observations and propose possible explanations with the goal of cultivating the habit of careful observations and critical thinking. We will also discuss potential individual and group (including cultural) differences in perceiving visual illusions. Students will be required to write a paper describing one of their own "illusory" observations, and to propose a plausible explanation for the illusion based on principles of visual processing and perception.
Instructor: Sheng He \

(Mis)Representing Africa
This seminar will start by analyzing some stereotypes of Africa and Africans in literature, in travel writing, in film, in photography, and in museum exhibits, tracing the relationships between power and representation. The bulk of the course, however, will be devoted to examination of postcolonial representations of Africa by Africans, including some West African novels, several African feature films, the recent Africa Remix art exhibit, and a selection of Afropop music and music videos. The seminar will investigate links between changes in the way Africa is represented and changes in political and economic power relations.
Instructor: Charlie Sugnet

Writing and Social Change in America
In the first half of the seminar, we will develop some of the key issues using examples from the late 18th through the 19th century. These will include Paine's Common Sense, the "Declaration of Independence" and the Constitution and Federalist Papers, Cummins' The Lamplighter (an early best-seller), Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Twain's Tom Sawyer. In addition to reading the texts, students will track down contemporary reactions: book reviews, advertisements, letters and journals, etc. Doing this will help us figure out why and how these texts were targeted to and affected their contemporary audiences.The second half of the seminar will involve students' selecting and reporting on twentieth-century texts. I hope this will produce a wide range of examples, and that students will track down influential texts in their own areas of interest. For example, the student of politics might present Wilson's 14 Points, King's "I have a dream" or letter from Birmingham Jail. The biologist might discuss the Watson-Crick paper on DNA. Literary examples might contrast a respectable yet controversial novels like Catcher in the Rye with a sleazy companion like Peyton Place. We will also investigate the ways that media (TV, movies) interact to create and maintain best selling books.
Instructor: Donald Ross

Fall 2007

The Psychology of Paranormal Phenomena
Research has shown that most Americans hold one or more supernatural, paranormal or pseudoscientific beliefs. These include beliefs in mind reading, fortune telling, psychokenesis, remote viewing, therapeutic touch, out-of-body experiences, alien abduction, and cryptozoology. This course has two goals: The first is to introduce students to critical thinking and behavioral research methods. The second is to critically evaluate the evidence for a variety of supernatural, paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Students will design and carry out their own experimental tests of these claims. The course will also include a guest lecture and demonstration by a local psychic.
Instructor: Randy Fletcher

HSem 2020H: American Culture and Politics
This course explores the relationship between public life, citizenship and nationality in the United States since l940 as mediated through popular art. We will focus on the changing definitions of "freedom," namely what it means to be a citizen and American, what is included and excluded in these definitions as a result of struggles over power and authority. The era since World War II provides an ideal time period for examining these issues, for it was over that time that the nation became an international power, while a new consumer culture and domestic ideal became linked to American identity and Cold War politics. The popular culture was one of the most important arenas where these challenges found expression. How a Cold War culture emerged, how it was challenged and how that disruption stimulated a popular backlash will be the focus of our attention. Artists and celebrities, film noir, rock and roll and country music will be explored to help answer questions that concern scholars who study both politics and the arts.
Instructor: Lary May

King Arthur in Romance and Film
The master narrative of King Arthur's exploits is among the oldest in the post-classical Western tradition, dating from historical developments in the 5th century CE. Arthur evolves from Celtic chieftain in post-Roman Britain to an early medieval Welsh king of miracles to the King Arthur of the courtly romances in the high Middle Ages. This seminar will explore the transformation of medieval history and Arthurian romance into modern novels and films. Readings will come from medieval romances (in English translation), medieval histories, Sir Thomas Malory, and T. H. White. The films will include classics by Bergman and Disney as well as more recent cinema by Glenville, Rohmer, Monty Python, and Boorman. Students will investigate the character of Arthurian narrative in its medieval context and assess the transformation of the master narrative for modern audiences. Students will also participate in the production of final projects, demonstrating through the description of a cinematic scene how they would accomplish the transformation of medieval Arthuriana for modern reception.
Instructor: Ray Wakefield

Working in the USA: Labor, Literature, Film, Photography and Painting from the 19th - 21st centuries
This seminar explores the literary, cinematic and musical representations of work and workers in America since the mid-19th century. As part of the growing field of working-class studies, it considers the variety of work-wage labor and slave labor-performed by the citizens, slaves, immigrants, aliens, and other residents during the period of U. S. emergence as an agricultural and industrial power through the current post-industrial age. As a course focused on how labor is represented, it considers cultural constructions of the actions and activities of work as essentially a project of creation-not only of goods and services-but of ideas, ideologies and practices that contribute to seeing what is meant to remain invisible: the efforts of humans to alter our world. We will be at once intensive and wide-ranging in our sources and methods as we try to determine "what work is," (Philip Levine) who workers are and how workers are constructed and define themselves. Because the forces of capital are global, the course will, of necessity, consider transnational migrations of workers and factories.
Instructor: Paula Rabinowtz

Exploring the Art and Cultural Landscape of the Twin Cities
The landscape of the performing and visual arts in the Twin Cities grows out of a multitude of disciplines and aesthetics, from the traditional to the contemporary, from the tribal to the experimental, from world renowned cultural institutions to independent galleries and store front theatres. Come explore this diverse and rich spectrum of art and culture that surrounds the University of Minnesota campus. The class will start at “home” exploring the University’s own Arts Quarter, the Weisman Art Museum, the Bell Museum and others. We will then take to the field, visiting nine distinct neighborhoods that are home to the Institutions, theatres, galleries, studios and diverse cultural centers. Take behind the scene tours, experience the creative processes of artists, attend alternative performances, and discover the pockets of culture that are in the University’s “backyard.”
Instructor: Michael Sommers

Masterworks of the 17th Century
This seminar will examine a small handful of “masterpieces” produced by European artists during the 17th century. In contrast to the way these works are traditionally taught (briefly in the context of a lecture), in this seminar each class meeting will be devoted to a single work of art, delving into the circumstances behind its creation, the way it was made, and the complex meanings it embodies. The seminar will engage, in other words, issues of patronage, production, style and connoisseurship, theory, and interpretation. Works by Gianlorenzo Bernini, Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Rembrandt van Rijn, Diego Velázquez, Artemisia Gentileschi, and others will be our focus. Several of the classes will be held at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, allowing for first-hand and close examination of the works.
Instructor: Steven F. Ostrow

Language Endangerment and Revitalization
Just as the rates of plant and animal extinction have accelerated in the last two centuries, so too languages are dying off today at a rate much faster than in the past. Some claim that only 600 of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world today will be spoken in 100 years if current trends are not reversed. In this course we will examine what it means for a language to be endangered, and what it means for a language to die. We will begin by evaluating the various answers to the question: why do we care? Then we will look at the causes of language endangerment and death. Next, we will look at the options and methods that a community can use to reverse language loss. Finally, we will examine the roles of researchers in language revitalization and the ethical issues involved.
Instructor: Marianne Milligan

Business Organizations: Governance, Society & Law
This class explores various topics relating to business organizations, including its internal and external governance and regulation, and its impact on society. We will first begin by having an introduction to business organizations and examining different types of business entities. Next, we will discuss whether government regulation of businesses are necessary, excessive, or detrimental to the fundamental concept of business. The class will also examine whether corporate social responsibility in our current world is a realistic or an altruistic thought. Similarly, we will explore the duties and responsibilities of corporate officers and directors to its shareholders and the society especially in the wake of Enron and similar cases.
Instructor: Gulzar Babeava

Sexuality and the Self
In the past, how has sexual desire defined how people understand the self? Did sexual desire determine people's identities? Did people have free will if they could not control their desires? This class will explore these themes through historical "confessions," or autobiographies, fiction, and case studies. We will begin with the ancient Greeks, who understood sex in a very different way than we do today. We will then study St. Augustine, who was tormented by involuntary arousal. We will then read the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, about his sexual adventures. Sigmund Freud will also be studied, because he claimed people were motivated by unconscious sexual desires. Walt Whitman will be another topic. We will also read novels such as Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray, Nella Larsen's Passing, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook.
Instructor: Anna Clark

Religion and the Founders: Contests over Belief in the Making of the United States
What religious beliefs did the "Founding Fathers" have and how and why should this matter to Americans today? This 3-credit Honors Seminar explores the religious beliefs of leading figures during the founding of the United States as well as some of the heated debates since then over what those beliefs were and what they should mean for the nation. We will examine the beliefs of prominent figures such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Paine, as well as the role of religion in the lives of less famous Americans. We will investigate some of the historical and contemporary contests over how to interpret the role of religion in the founding era. We will compare the claims of historians, think-tank pundits, and a Supreme Court justice with our own research findings, and we will analyze the relationship between religious beliefs, political convictions, and histories of religion.
Instructor: Kirsten Fischer

Media Aesthetics
Discussions of “the medium” are usually limited to technical and/or mass media: TV, newspapers, internet, etc. But there is another meaning of the term according to which a medium is “any raw material or mode of expression used in artistic activity” (OED): the stones of the architect or the paper of the writer; but also, more generally, image, sound, and writing. In this course, we will analyze a wide variety of texts, films, paintings, and photos, asking how meaning and content are shaped by the medium through which they are articulated. What constitutes a medium? What, for instance, is the difference between sound and words, images and language, the written and the spoken? What is the relation, in film, between the sound of voices and the sound of the soundtrack, or between title sequence and ‘actual’ film? How do media shape our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world? What is the effect of electronic and mass media on politics and public life? Texts by Plato, Barthes, Kafka, Goody, Melville, Derrida, B.Anderson, Spiegelman, S. Sontag, and others; films by Ford Coppola, Hitchcok, and Haneke; visual art by Velasquez, Sherman, Close, Warhol, and others.
Instructor: Andreas Gailus

Hard Times and Bad Behavior: Homelessness and Marginality in the United States
This class will examine several zones of "low life" through the first-person accounts of impoverished Americans themselves, as well as those of the reformers, academic experts, authors, and musicians who have interpreted, analyzed, or condemned them. As we read about contemporary Americans "on the skids" and "behind ghetto walls," we will trace some enduring themes within marginality in the United States. Particular emphasis will be paid to the rootlessness encouraged by the American economy, the love-hate relationship between elites and marginal populations in popular culture, and the complex mixture of freedom and deprivation experienced by people living on the edge. Interested students should be aware that the perspective presented in this class may differ considerably from what you might expect from the subject matter. This is neither a "social problems" nor a criminology class, but instead an examination of the cultural aspects of homelessness and related forms of marginality which draws on a very wide variety of materials from the 1880s onwards. There is a substantial emphasis on historical topics such as great tramp scare, the homeless orphans and street prostitutes of old New York, the "Wobblies" (the IWW), Charlie Chaplin, the Great Depression, and the romanticization of homelessness by the Beats and the counterculture.
Instructor: Teresa Gowan

Women in the United States Congress
Seventy-one women serve in the U.S. House of Representatives and 16 serve in the U.S. Senate. This seminar explores the ways in which congresswomen affect representation and policy making, along with the factors that enhance and constrain women's election to Congress and women's influence inside Congress. We focus on gender dynamics in congressional elections, representation, the legislative process, and the pursuit of power inside Congress. Although the number of congresswomen has increased during the last two decades-only 25 women served in the U.S. Congress twenty years ago-women remain underrepresented. We begin the course by studying gender differences in candidate emergence and congressional elections. Next, we ask whether congresswomen and congressmen advocate different policy agendas and issue positions. We consider the representational implications of the gender differences we uncover, including substantive policy differences and non-policy benefits that are conferred to citizens when women occupy positions of political power. We analyze the institutional features of Congress, asking how congressional rules and organization help and hinder women pursuing power and policy.
Instructor: Kathryn Pearson

The Politics of Eating: Food, Society, and Culture
This course explores many themes connected to food and agriculture, including how we produce food; the different cultural and social meanings people attach to food; food, culture, and body image; the globalization of agriculture; the obesity "epidemic," work in the food sector; the debate over GM food; and movements toward a more sustainable agriculture. The course is built on two key premises: first, that the production, distribution, and consumption of food involve relationships among different groups of people, and second, that one can gain great insights into these social relations and the societies in which they are embedded through a sociological analysis of food. The objective is to teach you to think analytically about something that is so "everyday" that most of us take it for granted: where our food comes from and why, why we eat the way we do, and the relationships involved in our encounters with food.
Instructor: Rachel Schurman

Interest Groups, Social Movements, and American Democracy
What role do interest groups social movements play in the United States? This course examines interest groups and social movements as agents of democratic representation and political change in American politics and policy-making. Course readings include both empirical work about particular movements and theoretical treatments of key issues. We will examine a wide array of organizations and movements, emphasizing in particular those that represent groups such as racial and ethnic minorities, women, religious conservatives, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, and low-income people. We will also address a range of fundamental questions about the emergence, evolution, and impact of interest groups and social movements; about the role of media in interest group and movement politics; about the implications for interest groups and social movement politics of developments such as globalization, the war on terror, and campaign finance reform; about the differences between interest groups and social movements; about the ways in which the agendas, identities, and participants associated with different movements intersect and overlap with one another; and about the relationships between movements and more conventional forms of politics.
Instructor: Dara Strolovitch

The Dawn of Prehistory: Homo Sapiens in Africa and Beyond
Recently, developments in two distinct academic fields (possibly three) have shed new light on the early history of our species. First, among evolutionary anthropologists, while there are still defenders of Multi-Regional Evolution - the idea that modern humans interbred with earlier species native to different continents - there is growing agreement that homo sapiens evolved only once, in Africa, between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago. Second, geneticists have used the human genome to read human history and human migrations backwards from the present. Samples of genetic material from living humans, classed according to the variations at specific nodes of the genome, confirm the theory of an African origin for our species, and have traced out-migrations from Africa beginning 50,000 or 70,000 years ago. Finally, although linguists are skeptical of the idea, some specialists have proposed different ways of tracing all languages past and present back to a common origin, probably in Africa.
Instructor: James Tracy