Instructors: Leslie Shor, Alexander Agrios

This course is intended for School of Engineering majors graduating in the current academic year or the next academic year. This course is not intended for sophomores who have “junior standing” by credit hours. Students who are in their sophomore year are encouraged to take the course next year.

This course provides students from across the School of Engineering with an opportunity to apply their individual, disciplinary technical skills to answer a peer-generated interdisciplinary design challenge.

Students in the course will work as both a “consultant” and as a “client” on an interdisciplinary design challenge posed by their classmates.  First, as “consultants,” student groups will summarize the technical skills typical of their own engineering discipline. Then, as “clients,” individual students will be mentored to formulate a specific technical challenge and scope of work.  The scope of work should make use of skills available in a different academic discipline, and must include a clear statement of expectations, constraints, and the deliverable schedule. Consultants and clients will be matched, and ultimately consultants will provide clients with the specified technical product(s). These products may include theoretical analyses, computer simulations, modeling, coding, primary research, or prototype fabrication. Finally, clients will integrate the consultant’s product into the broader context of their original challenge. Design challenges may be related to Capstone Design projects, undergraduate research projects, or technical-related extracurricular activities and outside interests such as Engineers Without Borders (EWB), 3D Printing Club, etc. Learning goals include: increase confidence and competence employing technical knowledge and skills; enhance interdisciplinary knowledge; improve project management skills; improve technical communication skills.

Interested students are encouraged to contact the instructor for more information: Leslie.Shor@uconn.edu

Instructor: Guillermo Irizarry

This honors course will study and discuss how Latin@ identity is represented and what historical events have marked its social and cultural articulation. These concerns will guide our course, as we review significant US Latin@s cultural products and practices. We will study the relationship of this community with Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States, and analyze how gender, race, sexuality, class, and other socio-historical factors affect the production of identities in literature, film, photography, and other cultural practices. Required texts include: Juan González. Harvest of Empire (Penguin Books. 2000), Marcelo Suárez Orozco’s Latinos: Remaking America (U of California P, 2008), and selected texts by Gloria Anzaldúa, Junot Díaz, Daniel Alarcón, Cristina García, an others. Evalutation will be based on three exams (30%); short reaction papers (30%); class participation (10%); final paper (30%).

(CA 1, CA 4)

Instructor: Vicki Knoblauch

Prerequisite: ECON 2201

Recommended preparation: Well developed mathematical reasoning skills, ability to work in small groups on an independent project. Prof. Knoblauch is willing to waive the ECON 2201 prerequisite for Honors students who possess the recommended mathematical and analytical reasoning skills.

One-semester introduction to mechanism design. Mechanisms are designed to induce people to act in such a way as to promote social welfare. Topics include public goods provision, 2-sided matching markets and peer evaluation of performance. The project in this course may serve as a good start for an Honors thesis or other piece of research.

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.

Instructor: Veronica Makowsky

Prerequisite: ENGL 1010 or 1011 or 2011 or 3800; open to juniors or higher, or others with permission of the instructor.

What is an American? How does ethnicity affect one’s sense of identity? How do class, race, sexuality, gender, generation, and location(s) interact with ethnicity to form or challenge identity or to suggest identities contingent upon context? In addition to these broad questions about ethnicity and identity, this course also considers how movement over time and space (within the US, to the US, from the US, and globally) may lead to unstable or fluid senses of identity. We will read a play, short stories, novels (including a graphic novel), and autobiographies. The texts encompass Native American works (Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories (excerpts) and Louise Erdrich’s The Round House); African American works (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun); and works concerning immigrant experiences: a collection of short stories by Anzia Yezierska, Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (a graphic novel), Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, and Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names. Grades will be based on: 1) active participation in daily discussion which usually includes in-class writing assignments based on the day’s assigned reading; 2) a series of short papers (totaling 15 pages) and their revision, some including research using the MLA International Bibliography.

(CA 4, W)

Instructor: Katharine Capshaw

Prerequisite: ENGL 1010 or 1011 or 2011

This survey of the short story will analyze its central features (plot, point of view, characterization, setting, theme, and symbol). The second half of the course will include attention to Edwidge Danticat, a contemporary major writer. Our goal is to understand our own engagement with stories. Why do we like what we like? Why do some stories make us cringe? Why do others transport us emotionally or intellectually? How do stories build whole worlds in such limited space? In analyzing the approaches that generate our responses, we’ll examine diction, structure, tone, imagery, patterns, beginnings, and conclusions. Our readings are structured through particular ideas that writers pursue – ideas about love, war, childhood, loss, and the strange and surprising human condition.

(CA 1)

Instructor: Jonathan Hufstader

Prerequisite: ENGL 1010 or 1011 or 2011

An overview of British literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the literary movements known as Romanticism, the Victorians (there is no such thing as Victorianism), followed in the twentieth century by the Modernists and then, for want of a better term, the Post-Modernists. We will read, in an Anthology, major works of poetry, prose (essays and short stories), and drama. The class will be conducted as a discussion. Two essays, a mid-term and final.

(CA 1)