Featured Courses

ENGL 1701-003: Creative Writing I

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Instructor: Sean Forbes

Prerequisite: ENGL 1010 or 1011 or 2011 or 3800

The Speaker: The Eye of the Poem and the Short Story

According to Frances Mayes, “the poet ‘finds’ the right speaker and the right listener, usually by trying out several approaches.” In this introduction to creative writing class we will examine the different approaches that a writer can take when trying to establish a speaker in a poem or short story. We will look at exemplary works of poetry and fiction from writers like Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, and Justin Torres. Students will produce a final portfolio of their original work. Class participation is an essential component to this largely workshop-based course along with weekly writing prompts such as writing in iambic pentameter and challenging prose sketches.

ENGL 3118W-001: Victorian British Literature

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Instructor: Albert Fairbanks

Prerequisite: ENGL 1010 or 1011 or 2011 or 3800

The Victorian Period (1832-1900) was one of enormous social change. The Industrial Revolution and restructuring of agricultural practices provoked a shift of many workers from the countryside to the cities that sprang up in areas favorable to mining and factories. The culture had to invent ways to cope with resulting labor abuses, zoning, pollution, and public health. The discoveries of geologists, paleontologists, and Charles Darwin brought about a crisis in religion, and the new wealth amassed by the growing middle class transformed traditional class structures and patterns of consumption. The political liberation achieved by the Reform Act of 1832 was only partial, and its failure to enfranchise women along with the stifling new conditions for middle-class women provoked intense discussion of their rightful familial and social role. A backlash against the sensibilities associated with the preceding Romantic period arguably exerted oppressive restraints on manners and especially sexual expression.

We will read literary responses to these issues by several novelists, poets, dramatists, and the public intellectuals that came to be known collectively as “the Victorian sage.” Novelists may include George Eliot, Dickens, and Oscar Wilde; poets Tennyson, Arnold, Robert Browning, and the Rossettis (Dante Gabriel and Christina); and social critics Carlyle and Arnold.

The class will be run as discussions, and the writing assignments will consist of a series of short papers (5-8 pp.) amounting to 15 or 20 pages in total. There will be a midterm and final exam.

PSYC 3250W-001: Laboratory in Animal Behavior and Learning

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Instructor: Etan Markus

Prerequisites: (1) ENGL 1010 or 1011 or 2011; (2) PSYC 1100; (3) PSYC 2100; and (4) PSYC 2200 or 2500 or 3201 or 3552

Remember how you got to class today? a bad experience? learning to ride a bike? What parts of the brain are involved in these different types of behaviors? How can one examine these questions in the laboratory rat? This hands-on laboratory will provide students with an opportunity to conduct experiments using modern behavioral techniques. The ability of rats to carry out different types of tasks will be related to different brain structures.

Note! This is a hard lab! Really!

  • This is a hands-on lab, most of the time we will only have a brief classroom session. Instead, on about half the weeks students will be training animals for about 1-2 hours/day for 3-4 days a week.
  • On occasion you will have to come in on the weekend to care for your animals.
  • This is also a “W” class with a large amount of writing & re-writing.

UNIV 3784-002: The Canon of American Legal Thought

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Instructor: Michael Fischl

Now open to any third-year (or higher) Honors student. Email susan.ruggiero@uconn.edu for a permission number.

This seminar will examine what are widely regarded as the “greatest hits” in American legal thought, essays and articles that have significantly influenced the development of law and legal theory in the U.S. since the early 20th Century. The essays exemplify the principal schools of modern legal thought – including legal realism, law and economics, the law and society movement, and various branches of critical legal theory – and they feature legal thinkers from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Karl Llewellyn to Duncan Kennedy and Catharine Mackinnon.

Class will meet on Wednesdays from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. in Gentry 140, and each week we will analyze and critique selected essays, most of which will be found in our textbook, The Canon of American Legal Thought (David Kennedy & William W. Fisher III, eds. 2006). A handful of additional readings will be available at a later date via email. Please be sure to purchase Kennedy & Fisher ASAP so you can  do the relatively short but very important reading assigned for our first class meeting on January 20.

Grades will be calculated in the following manner: 1/3 will be based on class participation; 1/3 will be based on your performance on a series of weekly quizzes; and 1/3 will be based on a final exam, which will be administered from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 27, our final day of class.

GERM 1169: Contemporary Germany in Europe (Conversion opportunity)

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Instructor: Shane Peterson

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

Taught in English!

Come find out why Germany is:

  • offering free university tuition to everyone
  • reacting differently to the refugee crisis
  • a leader in renewable energy
  • popular among young Israelis
  • mandating a 30% quota of women in business leadership
  • becoming patriotic about soccer
  • providing generous parental leave
  • reluctant about Google Street View & Facebook
  • much more diverse than you think

(CA 1, CA 4-Int)

GERM 1169: Contemporary Germany in Europe – flyer

EPSY 3830: Individual Differences in Creativity (Conversion opportunity)

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Instructor: James Kaufman

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

What makes people creative? What traits, abilities, or personal factors help make you creative (and creative in different ways from your friends)? This class will discuss how your personality, motivation, intelligence, emotional intelligence, and other parts of who you are work together to help you be creative. You’ll learn “best practices” to increase your own (or others’) creativity and you’ll gain insight into related topics such as discovering your personality profile, how IQ tests work, what motivates you, and similar questions.

For the Honors conversion, I will want you to use more original sources and delve deeper in them– so assignments about writing about an article on creativity will ask for higher level analysis, and the final project will ask for more professional articles cited and discussed.

Prof. Kaufman is also willing to waive the prerequisite of EPSY 2810; email him for a permission number.

COMM 1100-035: Principles of Public Speaking

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Instructor: Yerina Ranjit

Employers demand strong communication, presentation, and public speaking skills. As a future professional, you must be a confident speaker and have the ability to organize and prepare clear, concise, and interesting presentations. This course will prepare you for the future by helping you to develop specific methods for speaking and delivery as well as critical thinking and analytical skills that focus on how to organize a presentation, solve problems, build arguments, and be creative. As a honors section of this course, students will be expected to deliver clear and effective presentations and be able to write effective and well organized outlines. Students will be expected to demonstrate significant growth and development of skills as the course progresses. Students will also be expected to prepare for speeches by utilizing a variety of techniques, including but not limited to: peer to peer and online speech video recording. Finally, students will also be expected to improve their speech analysis skills by attending on-campus public speaking events.

MCB 2225: Cell Biology Laboratory

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[UConn Storrs]

Instructor: David Knecht

Prerequisite: BIOL 1107 or equivalent

Many Honors students in the life sciences have benefited from MCB 2225, Cell Biology Laboratory.  The laboratory is designed to help students decide if they are interested in research and to prepare them for working in a research laboratory. Students will become proficient with experimental design, quantitative data analysis, and data presentation in the context of learning to work with living cells.  Like a research laboratory, the course laboratory is accessible 24/7 because real science often does not fit into 3 hour time blocks.

Students do not need an extensive knowledge of cell biology in order to succeed in the class.  The background cell biology for each experiment will be discussed in class and a general protocol will be provided.  Students working in pairs will then design the details of the specific experimental question, develop a protocol including the necessary controls, carry out the experiment and then analyze the data.  Experiments are often repeated outside of class time as student researchers fine-tune their technique or protocol.  The results are then discussed in a “group meeting” so that each group can see how others approached related problems. There is great flexibility for students to branch out from the starting point provided to take the experiment in a direction that is of interest to the student.

Students will maintain their own wild type and mutant cell lines throughout the semester.  The laboratory is equipped with computer controlled video microscope workstations for acquiring data on cell behavior. The experiments will focus on the growth, motility, development and underlying cellular structure of the soil amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum.  Many of the experiments will ask questions about how cells move and respond to signals both in unicellular and multicellular environments.  Students will transfect cells DNA to express fluorescent probes (GFP and RFP) and investigate the role of the cytoskeleton in cell motility and signaling. Flow cytometry and confocal microscopy will also be used to analyze cells.  Open source image processing software (Fiji/ImageJ) will be used to analyze the data captured from the microscope.   One emphasis of the course will be on the quantitative analysis of image data.

In the last third of the course, students will work on independent projects of their choosing.  Often these projects involve investigation of mutant cell lines available from a National Stock Center or cells isolated from the local environment.

Unlike many courses that aim to teach science concepts, this course puts an emphasis on teaching students to think like a scientist. The class size is small and there is ample opportunity for individual attention from the instructor and TA. This course will provide students with specific skills and experience that will aid them in applying to any laboratory in MCB (and other departments) for Honors thesis research. There is also the possibility of continuing these projects as Honors thesis research in the instructor’s research laboratory as many of the experiments conducted in the class are an outgrowth of ongoing research projects.

POLS 1602-009: American Politics

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Instructor: Vin Moscardelli

Debates. Elections. Filibusters. Partisan Polarization. Police Brutality. Economic Inequality. Donald Trump! You know you want to know more about these things.

Well, this is your chance. This course is designed to serve two purposes. First, it will focus on the “nuts and bolts” issues of American government. We will deal with, among other topics, the legislative, executive, judicial, and electoral processes, both as they were designed, and as they work today in the real world.

Second, the course should enhance your understanding of the principles underlying the modern system of governance in the United States. You will be asked to step away from the details of contemporary political debates and controversies and come to grips with the more fundamental political questions they address—questions that have dominated American political discourse since the nation’s founding.

(CA 2)

POLS 1602H – Introduction to American Politics — Flyer