[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.

Instructor: Johann Peter Gogarten

Recommended preparation: At least one 2000 level course in MCB.  

Instructor: Myron Minn-Thu-Aye

Prerequisites: MATH 2710 and instructor consent.

This course applies mathematics to shed light on problems in the realm of politics, both domestic and international. We begin with a study of voting systems, including both electoral and legislative processes. By formalizing notions of fairness, we will work towards theorems that will inform just how fair we expect elections to be. Our discussion of fair division will revolve around the problem of distributing seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the fifty states. We will explore various apportionment paradoxes (e.g. how could an increase in the total number of seats lead to a reduction in the number of seats assigned to a particular state?) through history anddetermine whether these are avoidable in the future. The development of methods to measure the political power of voting blocs and coalitions will inform our analysis of the apportionment problem and lead us to investigate political conflict via game theory.