Author: Jaclyn Chancey

POLS 5505: Seminar in Public Law

Instructor: Kristin Kelly

With your advisor’s approval, graduate courses may be included in your Honors Final Plan of Study for graduation. They also count toward your Honors participation requirements.

This course focuses on the relationship between law and U.S. society.  In this seminar, law will be approached as both a political and a cultural institution that constitutes and is constituted by the society within which it operates.  The course is organized thematically and will include topics such as the definition of law, law’s violence, law and identity, feminist legal theory, law and social change, law and the “problem” of litigation, and law and social control.

The class will follow a seminar format and the majority of each class period will be devoted to discussing the assigned readings.  Participation in seminar discussions is therefore expected as a major component of your responsibilities in this class.

If you have questions about the course or if you would like to request a permission number to enroll please contact Professor Kristin Kelly (kkelly@uconn.edu).

ENGL 1616W-001: Major Works of English and American Literature

Topic: The Art of Storytelling

Instructor: Clare Costley King’oo

Prerequisite: ENGL 1010, 1011, or 2011

In this Honors course, designed primarily for non-English-majors, we will encounter several works judged to be literary masterpieces. Our aim will be to explore the art of imaginative story-telling over time, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century (i.e., from Chaucer to Achebe). We will consider questions of narration, representation, genre, literary authority, intertextuality, and canonicity. Our discoveries will be the focus of our own rigorous writing practices, as we work on improving our argumentative and stylistic skills through a range of reports and essays (with revisions). Lively participation in class discussions will be expected and warmly encouraged.

CA 1, W.

ENGL 3318-001: Literature & Culture of the Third World – CHINA

Topic: Chinese Literature and Culture

Instructor: Patrick Hogan

Prerequisite: ENGL 1010, 1011, or 2011
This course may be repeated for credit with a change in topic.

The literary and cultural traditions of China are vast. Clearly, one cannot cover anything even approximating their range in a single course. In this class, we will focus on a few elements of Chinese tradition, exploring them in greater detail. Specifically, the course will begin with a careful reading of Confucius with perhaps some reference to Laotze and/or Mencius. We will then work through some Chinese lyric poems, principally following Cai Zong-qi’s How to Read Chinese Poetry. Some of this poetry extends back to the ancient beginnings of Chinese literary tradition. Following this, we will treat a collection of Yuan drama (13th-14th centuries C.E.), focusing on the relation of the works to historical concerns (e.g., Mongol domination and Chinese national identity). After this, we will consider some prose work. Depending on what is available, this may be the first volume of Cao Xueqin’s Story of the Stone (a.k.a., Dream of the Red Chamber, 18th century) or perhaps some popular story, such as the often retold tale of “the butterfly lovers,” Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. The final section of the course will treat one or two works of recent Chinese cinema (e.g., Lu Chuan’s Nanjing! Nanjing!), considering both their thematic concerns and their formal techniques. Midterm, final, short written responses to some of the readings, class presentations.

CA 4-Int.

ENGL 2401-002: Poetry

Instructor: Yohei Igarashi

Prerequisite: ENGL 1010, 1011, or 2011

This course is a beginner’s guide to reading poetry, organized around the study of canonical or “classic” British poems. Along the way, the course introduces elements of poetic form, rhetorical and literary terms, poetic genres, and questions about the status of poetic discourse in society. Assignments include a shorter and a longer paper, in addition to a midterm and final.

CA 1

PSYC 3201-002: Animal Behavior

Instructor: David B. Miller

Prerequisites: BIOL 1102 or 1107; PSYC 1100

PSYC 3201 ANIMAL BEHAVIOR is an overview of the scientific study of animal behavior covering a broad range of topics, including evolution, adaptation, domestication, mating, communication, development, ethological concepts, and much more. The course is constructed around many examples from the scientific literature on a wide range of species. This is actually a “hybrid” course, in that 90% of the material is available day and night via streaming screencast videos. Around 8 in-class sessions allow for the presentation of additional content that is not contained in the screencasts, and around 6 in-class sessions are devoted to questions and answers. This is a combined class, with 185 seats open to all students (who register in Section 001) and 15 seats reserved for Honors students (who register in Section 002 for automatic Honors credit). Honors students meet once weekly for around an hour for a discussion session. The instructor is Professor David B. Miller, of the Department of Psychological Sciences, who has an extensive background in field and laboratory animal behavior research, primarily on birds.

MATH 3094: Undergraduate Seminar – Quiver Representations

Instructor: Prof. Ralf Schiffler

Students with an interest in Algebra and Combinatorics may be interested in this Honors seminar. Appropriate for any junior or senior with substantial mathematical background and interest, not just math majors.

A quiver is an oriented graph. A quiver representation is a collection of vector spaces and linear maps; one vector space V_i for each vertex i of the quiver and one linear map f_{ij} from V_i to V_j for each arrow i–>j of the quiver.

The complexity of different representations depends on the quiver. For some (few) quivers we can explicitly write down a finite number of representations such that any representation of the quiver can be constructed from our finite list by taking direct sums and using isomorphisms.  In these cases our finite list can be constructed combinatorially in the so-called Auslander-Reiten quiver.

We will study the properties of quiver representations, and see how to compute the Auslander-Reiten quiver in specific examples, using algebraic methods as well as combinatorial methods for example triangulations of polygons.

Contact Prof. Schiffler with any questions or to request a permission number.

Variable Topics: Legal Institutions and Social Change (Conversion opportunity)

Legal Institutions and Social Change: From Latin America to the United States by Way of Europe
POLS 2998-006; LLAS 3998-001; SOCI 3998-001

Instructor: Ángel Oquendo

While this is not an Honors course, Prof. Oquendo welcomes Honors students of any major and would be happy to offer Honors conversions for interested students.

The course deals, at a law-school level, with constitutional law, as well as with specific areas of private law, such as civil law, civil procedure, and business law, and considers how legal institutions further social change. It first introduces the civil law tradition, as well as legal history, comparing the Latin American experience with that of the United States and Europe. The discussion, which maintains this comparative aim throughout, then moves on to constitutional law: to the notion of constitutionalism, to basic principles, to the vindication of rights, and to second and third generation entitlements. Thereafter the focus shifts to civil law—i.e., civil codes, interpretation, combating codified sexism, and civil remedies—and to civil procedure—specifically to the attainment of legitimacy through procedure, to procedural guaranties, and to collective actions. The class closes with an exploration of corporate law. Students will become fully conversant with the principal legal concepts used by lawyers in the regions traversed.

Professor Oquendo is a George J. and Helen M. England Professor of Law at UConn School of Law. He has lectured and published extensively in five languages and is an authority worldwide on comparative law and international litigation. He graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

SPAN 1007-001: Major Works of Hispanic Literature in Translation

Instructor: Osvaldo Pardo

This course will introduce students to Latin American modern literature by exploring a wide variety of works by writers who expanded and renewed the possibilities of narrative forms and genres such as Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernández, Clarice Lispector, Álvaro Mutis, and Mario Bellatín. Some of the topics to be discussed include the modernization and internationalization of Latin American literature; critiques to realism; the place of literature in a global age, among others.

The course will be conducted as a seminar, which means that active participation in class discussions is essential. Honors students are expected to meet with instructor regularly to discuss the progress of the final research paper and familiarize themselves with basic research tools in the field of the humanities (bibliographies; databases; digital resources; etc).

A knowledge of Spanish is not required.

(CA 1, CA 4-Int)

UNIV 1995-001: Special Topics: Next Generation STEM Skills

One credit, Honors.
Instructors:
Jaclyn Chancey and Kaitlin Heenehan

Science is a human endeavor, conducted by people working in communities and being influenced by—and in turn influencing—society as a whole. This makes STEM practice complex and “messy.” Future professionals in STEM fields will need to think critically about problems that require interdisciplinary cooperation, and they must be able to communicate effectively with various audiences inside and outside of STEM.

Come explore this messiness across STEM disciplines in a small seminar format!

  • Participate in weekly presentations from faculty and other professionals
  • Interview two STEM professionals whose careers interest you
  • Connect class topics to current events
  • Personalize your learning and plan for future career development

This year’s presenters will include John Bau (Center for Career Development & Engineering); Dr. Lucy Gilson (Management); Dr. Amy Gorin (Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy & Psychological Sciences); Dr. Rowena Grainger (Office of National Scholarships & Fellowships); Dr. Heather Heenehan (NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center); Dean Kazem Kazerounian (Engineering); Dr. Thomas Long (Nursing); Dr. Caroline McGuire (Office of Undergraduate Research); Dr. John Redden (Physiology & Neurobiology); Dr. Margaret Rubega (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology); Dr. Leslie Shor (Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering); and Dr. Stephen Stifano (Communication).

Course structureThis class will meet for two hours each Friday. The first hour (2:30 – 3:20) will be devoted to the speaker series and will be open and advertised to all interested students. The second hour (3:35 – 4:25) will consist of additional discussions and small group activities limited to those enrolled in the course.

A permission number is required. Please email kaitlin.heenehan@uconn.edu and include your name and 7-digit Student Admin number.