Beginning in Fall 2020, ENGL 1007 will be the course number for all first-year writing courses at UConn Storrs.

Honors ENGL 1007 recognizes that Honors students are often expected to write more and differently than other UConn students. There are additional opportunities for connection to your own major(s) and greater emphasis on the roles of inquiry and discovery in the humanities. Finally, the Honors sections will culminate with a public celebration of student work.

For Fall 2020, there will be two themed sections of Honors ENGL 1007. They share a single studio section (instructor: Beth Reinwald).

ENGL 1007-015: Music and Identity

Instructor: Darby Lacey

Music is all around us and shapes our connections to places, films, experiences, and even ourselves. For example, music might help us connect to our cultures or explore our emotions or make friends by bonding over shared musical favorites. In this course, we will carefully consider our own various interactions with music and the impact those encounters have on how we perceive ourselves: how certain music makes us feel, how we interact with or use music, even how music might help us to construct our own personal identities.

As we consider our own reactions to music, we will also think about the convergences and divergences in rhetorical choices that are made both when artists compose music, and when we compose our own writing across different mediums. Just as composers, musicians, and djs make countless choices to make a song perfect for the moment, so too do writers when they create their own compositions. As we write together this semester, we will explore the key inquiry, “How does music specifically and writing in general compose our individual and collective identities?”

Our course will also embrace multimodality in music and our own writing. Music brings together sound, lyrics, and even images and video for maximum impact. We will similarly investigate the possibilities of different mediums and modes for our own composing as we explore our course inquiry. The contributions you make in this course will take the form of a personal reflective essay, an annotated playlist, an annotated bibliography, a critical introduction, and a visual album cover. We will explore a variety of composing technologies together, and no previous experience of writing across technology is required.

ENGL 1007-016: Documentary Film and the Composition of “Truth”

Instructor: Mollie Kervick

In a media landscape in which the line between fact and fiction is increasingly blurry, how does documentary media construct our perception of truth? This course asks you to consider the rhetorical moves that a variety of documentary texts make in order to craft an idea of “truth.” As we consume different kinds of documentary daily, it is vital to consider whether documentary media has more to do with “truth” or the ways we construct and consume stories about the “truth.” Furthermore, to what degree has the indecipherability of differences between fiction and non-fiction stories in our current media landscape exacerbated ideological divisions that cause us to interpret the same realities in dramatically different ways? In this class, we will use the art form of documentary film and other documentary media (podcasts/social media/news articles) to explore questions about the representation of truth and reality in art, media, and narrative form more generally. Studying a mix of classic and recent documentary texts, often in comparison with theoretical meditations on truth, we’ll celebrate the complexities of documentary media and delve deeply into the philosophical and aesthetic questions it inspires.

The course assignments include:
1) A Documentary Review (YouTube video)
2) Mini Discovery Documentary
3) Documentary Treatment
4) Collaborative Documentary Composition

Instructor: Leigh Fine

“Leadership” can be described as inherent traits, a set of behaviors, the leveraging of relationships, collaboration, or a socially-navigated performance – leaders may be someone with social influence, unique knowledge, a convincing enactment of “leadership”, or all of the above. UConn Honors believes leadership is a process that improves conditions in communities of practice. We believe leadership can be practiced by multiple subjects in many contexts, and that the need for leadership in all fields of study is as important now as it has ever been. Keeping such emerging social and leadership realities in mind, this course endeavors toward an integration of experiential, theoretical, and applied learning on the subject of leadership to the end of addressing a leadership challenge that exceeds the boundaries of traditional disciplines in the hopes of effecting change for the collective social good.

As a learning community, we will:

• Analyze leadership as a phenomenon that we can experience, practice, and study
• Evaluate current community and global problems through a leadership lens
• Create proposed solutions to current problems while applying leadership theories
• Embark on a shared leadership experience within our local communities

[UConn Stamford]

Instructor: Richard Watnick

Instructor consent required. To request a permission number, email Professor Watnick and include the name of a faculty member in your field who would recommend your participation.

This seminar has multiple faculty session leaders from different departments. There will be a guest session leader for approximately 10 of the weekly meetings, and the other meetings are for open discussion. The topic of the course will be finalized after considering the interests of the students who enroll; past topics include Ideas and Actions and Globalization, Culture, & Current Challenges. Professor Watnick organizes the course and attends all meetings. Each session leader assigns reading material ahead of time and then presents before opening up discussion.

Sample topics from Spring 2019 (Where are we? How did we get here? Where should we go from here?):

• Jerome Sehulster (Psychology): Self‐fulfillment and maturity
• Joel Blatt (History): Uncovering Rosselli’s ideas and actions and its relevance now
• Chris Bruhl (President and CEO of the Business Council of Fairfield County): Implications of Stamford’s location on policies and strategies
• Mark Boyer (Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Geography): Adapting to climate change: Managing threats in uncertain times
• Susan Nesari (Honors student): Respecting refugees: Evaluation of integration practices by Connecticut service providers
• Fred Roden (English): Harari’s 21 lessons for the 21st century
• Yonatan Morse (Political Science): Authoritarianism
• Charles Yarish (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology): Harvesting and maintaining the Sound
• Ricardo Salazar (History): The crisis of Argentine gradualism

50% of your grade is based on the open discussion in class and on HuskyCT as well as the additional discussion of the topic on your final exam. The other 50% of your grade consists of a term paper or project on a topic in your major under the supervision of a faculty member in your major. You and your faculty supervisor will decide upon the topic and nature of your project so that you can progress in your area of interest. Your faculty supervisor will determine this portion of your grade. Professor Watnick will help you connect with a faculty member if needed.

 

[UConn Stamford]

Instructor: Richard Watnick

Honors students are able to enroll without a permission number. Non-Honors students will need to request a permission number by emailing Professor Watnick with the name of a faculty member who would recommend your participation. 

This seminar has multiple faculty session leaders from different departments. There will be a guest session leader for approximately 10 of the weekly meetings, and the other meetings are for open discussion. The topic of the course for Fall 2021 will be Ideas and Actions. Professor Watnick organizes the course and attends all meetings. Each session leader, still to be identified for fall 2021, assigns reading material ahead of time and then presents before opening up discussion.

Fall 2020 Sample sessions (Topic: Resilience): 

• Jerome Sehulster, Professor of Psychology, The concept of Resilience in the field of psychology
• Susan Herbst, President Emeritus and Professor of Political Science, American Political Institutions:  How Resilient Are They in 2020?
• Shanelle Jones, Honors Student, University Scholar, Day of Pride Scholar, POLS & Human Rights, Untold Stories of the African Diaspora: The Lived Experiences of Black Caribbean Immigrants in the U.S
• Mark Boyer, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Geography, Adapting to Climate Change 
• Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, Resilience in litigation and negotiation
• Jeff Schlosser, National Supply Chain Lead Partner, Strategy and Transactions, Ernst & Young LLP and Kelly Stals, Senior Manager, Operating Model Effectiveness, in Ernst & Young’s International Tax and Transaction Services Group “Supply Chain Resilience – Responses to Disrupted Supply Chains in the COVID-19 Era”
• Joel Blatt, Professor of History, Fred Roden, Professor of English and special guest Roland Tec, On the work of Nechama Tec, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, The Resilience of Polish partisans during the Holocaust
• Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Professor of History, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity 
• Vicki Knoblauch, Professor of Economics, Analyzing responses to the pandemic through game theory
• Gregory Pierrot, Associate Professor of English, The Haitian Revolution: a global, artistic, and cultural legacy 
• Fred Roden, Professor of English, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning 

50% of your grade is based on the open discussion in class and on HuskyCT as well as the additional discussion of the topic on your final exam. The other 50% of your grade consists of a term paper or project on a topic in your major under the supervision of a faculty member in your major. You and your faculty supervisor will decide upon the topic and nature of your project so that you can progress in your area of interest. Your faculty supervisor will determine this portion of your grade. Professor Watnick and Kaitlin Heenehan will help you connect with a faculty member if needed.

 

[UConn Stamford]

Instructor: Richard Watnick

Honors students are able to enroll without a permission number. Non-Honors students will need to request a permission number by emailing Professor Watnick

This seminar has multiple faculty session leaders from different departments. There will be a guest session leader for approximately 10 of the weekly meetings, and the other meetings are for open discussion. The topic of the course for Fall 2021 was Ideas and Actions and for fall 2020 it was Resilience. Resilience (fall 2020 topic) may be repeated in fall 2022. Students can repeat this course with change of topic. See sample session guests and topics below. Professor Watnick organizes the course and attends all meetings. Each session leader, still to be identified for fall 2022, assigns reading material ahead of time and then presents before opening up discussion.

Fall 2020 Sample sessions (Topic: Resilience): 

• Jerome Sehulster, Professor of Psychology, The concept of Resilience in the field of psychology
• Susan Herbst, President Emeritus and Professor of Political Science, American Political Institutions:  How Resilient Are They in 2020?
• Shanelle Jones, Honors Student, University Scholar, Day of Pride Scholar, POLS & Human Rights, Untold Stories of the African Diaspora: The Lived Experiences of Black Caribbean Immigrants in the U.S
• Mark Boyer, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Geography, Adapting to Climate Change 
• Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, Resilience in litigation and negotiation
• Jeff Schlosser, National Supply Chain Lead Partner, Strategy and Transactions, Ernst & Young LLP and Kelly Stals, Senior Manager, Operating Model Effectiveness, in Ernst & Young’s International Tax and Transaction Services Group “Supply Chain Resilience – Responses to Disrupted Supply Chains in the COVID-19 Era”
• Joel Blatt, Professor of History, Fred Roden, Professor of English and special guest Roland Tec, On the work of Nechama Tec, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, The Resilience of Polish partisans during the Holocaust
• Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Professor of History, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity 
• Vicki Knoblauch, Professor of Economics, Analyzing responses to the pandemic through game theory
• Gregory Pierrot, Associate Professor of English, The Haitian Revolution: a global, artistic, and cultural legacy 
• Fred Roden, Professor of English, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning

Fall 2021 Sample Sessions (Topic: Ideas and Actions): 

• Jerome Sehulster, Professor of Psychology, Autobiographical memory 
• Spencer Ross, Assistant Professor of Marketing UMass-Lowell, Sustainable Marketing 
• Mark Strauss, UConn Digital Data Initiative, TIP Digital and from Wave Aerospace
• Joel Blatt, Associate Professor of History, Thoughts and Actions of Carlo and Nello Rosselli and the Relevance to Us 
• Mark Boyer, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, Executive Director, International Studies Association, The Climate Adaptation Imperative
• Charles Robins, Managing Director of Fairmont Partners, Start-ups/emerging technology, Building a unicorn: How to reverse the rainbow 
• Mark Rolfe, Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Transportation
• Fred Roden, Professor of English, Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss 
• Annamaria Csizmadia, Associate Professor of Human Development & Family Sciences, Racial Microaggressions 

50% of your grade is based on the open discussion in class and on HuskyCT. The other 50% of your grade consists of a term paper or project on a topic in your major or a topic covered in class.

 

[UConn Stamford]

Instructor: Lori Gresham, Ph.D. 

Honors students are able to enroll without a permission number. Non-Honors students who are interested should email kaitlin.heenehan@uconn.edu for more information. 

Mondays, 3:35-6:05pm, UConn Stamford, in-person

This course invites mid-career Honors students to explore their personal intellectual interests, to expand their knowledge of research approaches within various fields of study, and to examine topics with a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens. As an interdisciplinary seminar serving Honors students of many majors and led by scholars from a variety of disciplines, an important goal of the course is to cultivate comparative conversations across fields of specialization.  The successful student will present sophisticated and developed ideas in a manner sufficiently generalist to promote learning and innovation across subject areas. Students will also create a plan of action to expand their learning and build their skills and knowledge beyond this course. This plan will include individualized goals for completing the Honors thesis and learning goals for beyond graduation. This course will help support students within a community of scholars as they pursue Honors undergraduate research at UConn Stamford.  

Sample course schedule for fall 2023 (subject to change):

Week 1 – Welcome & Getting to Know You

Week 2 – Guest Speaker from the Library, Using the CRAAP method to assess sources, Brainstorming areas of interest with “Mind mapping”

Week 3 – Faculty Speaker Panel #1 (A panel of faculty members/experts will describe research in their field, including how DEI informs current research)

Week 4 – Faculty Speaker Panel #2

Week 5 – Guest Speaker from Enrichment Programs/Advising, Developing a Learning Plan

Week 6 – Guest Speaker from the Writing Center, Writing within your discipline

Week 7 – Honors Alums Guest Speakers Discussion of their Honors theses and careers

Week 8 – Guest Speakers on the Important of Life-Long Learning

Week 9 – Discussion on Research presentations from various disciplines

Week 10 – Who Has a Seat at the Table? The importance of representation in all fields

Week 11 – Minority Voices in Literature

Week 12 – Student TED Talks

Week 13 – Student TED Talks

Grading will be based on Participation/Engagement and Assignments. Assignments are likely to include: Attending a Getting Started in Undergraduate Research workshop, Identifying reliable sources assignment, creating a Quick Guide for writing within your own discipline, writing Reflections, presenting a “Ted-Talk” style presentation, and crafting a future Learning Plan.