Curriculum Updates

PNB 5700: Sensory Physiology

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Graduate courses act as Honors credit, as long as you earn a grade of B- or higher.

Instructor: Karen Menuz

Recommended preparation: This graduate course is an advanced version of PNB 3700. As such, it is appropriate for senior Honors students with credit for PNB 2274 or 3251.

This course is designed to provide students with an in-depth understanding of sensory physiology. Special attention is paid to the receptors, receptor cells, and tissue physiology in peripheral sensory organs. The course covers senses that are familiar to humans, such as olfaction, taste, vision, touch, and hearing, and those that we lack such as magnetoreception, electroreception, and infrared detection. A comparative approach will be taken, highlighting the common principles and key differences in select sensory systems in vertebrates, invertebrates, and other organisms.

ENGL Honors classes Spring 2021

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All three of these courses carry the pre-requisite of first-year writing (ENGL 1007, 1010, 1011, or 2011).

ENGL 1701-003: Creative Writing I

Instructor: Ellen Litman

This introductory class will concentrate on poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction. Students will learn by writing original work, reading and discussing the work of published authors, responding to their classmates’ stories, poems, and essays, and trying to help one another. We’ll begin by doing a series of exercises, eventually working our way toward producing three to four poems, one finished piece of creative nonfiction, and one short story, all of which we will workshop in class. Students should be prepared to read and write a lot and actively participate in class and online discussions.

ENGL 2409-001: The Modern Novel

Instructor: Margaret Breen

This is an exciting reading-intensive course. We will be reading a selection of significant novels of the last 125 years from a range of cultural contexts—novels important for both the stories they tell (stories regarding alienation, resilience, resistance, violence, memory, and forgetting) and the ways in which those stories are told (ways regarding narrative technique, point of view, plot construction, metaphor, and so on). In short, this is a course on the modern novel, where “modern” refers to both the new kinds of stories these texts recount and the innovative formal means that facilitate and create that recounting.

Likely texts: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (2017 [2015]), Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018), and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

Likely assignments: a short, 75-minute essay exam; a 5-6 essay or creative project; a final 6-8 page essay or creative project.

CA 1. 

ENGL 3122-001:Irish Literature in English since 1939

Instructor: Mary Burke

Open to juniors or higher.

This Honors course will situate contemporary Irish drama, prose, and poetry in its evolving historical, social, linguistic, and political contexts. No previous knowledge of Irish writing or culture is assumed. Authors to be discussed include Elizabeth Bowen, Seamus Heaney, Martin McDonagh, Glenn Patterson, and Claire Kilroy. Some contemporary Irish films or films on a contemporary Irish theme (e.g. McDonagh’s 2005 Oscar-winning short) will be considered alongside the literary texts. Group discussion will be at the center of class. Writing: a practice essay, a midterm paper, a presentation, film reports, and a final exam.

CA 4-Int.

ECON 1108: Game Theory with Applications to the Natural and Social Sciences

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[UConn Storrs]

This course offers an introduction to game theory. Game theory develops analytical tools to study strategic interactions between individuals, to better understand and predict behavior, conflicts and cooperation. Game theory is widely used in many disciplines (e.g., economics, political science, law, computer science, biology). The course introduces basic concepts and tools for solving games (e.g., simultaneous games and a Nash equilibrium, sequential games, repeated games, asymmetric information models) as well as a variety of applications (e.g., auctions, evolutionary biology and voting).  Through simple examples, students can develop their ability to think strategically.

POLS 3023W: Politics and Literature

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Requires ENGL 1007, 1010, 1011, or 2011.

There has long been a close relationship between politics in the United States and popular literature. Some books, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle, have shaped public policy; others, like All the King’s Men and The Last Hurrah, have used fiction to describe the political game; still others, like Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Henry Adams’ Democracy, have examined the relationship between the individual and the political community.

This course explores American politics through the lens of political fiction. Generally reading one novel per week, we will discuss the historical, economic and social context within which the work was written, define its audience, examine its impact, and discuss parallels between the time the work appeared and our own era. Students will write several short papers dealing with these themes, but the primary emphasis in class will be on discussion and dialogue on the topics at hand.

Note POLS 3023W is coded at the catalog level as “open to juniors or higher,” but first- and second-year Honors students without junior standing are invited to take this course. If you will have fewer than 54 earned credits when this course is offered, you may register by emailing honors@uconn.edu and including (1) your name; (2) your 7-digit Student Admin number; (3) your registration “pick time”; (4) the course number and section; (5) the class number from Student Admin; (6) confirmation that there are seats available in the course; and (7) confirmation that you do have credit for ENGL 1007, 1010, 1011, or 2011.

ERTH 1000E: The Human Epoch: Living in the Anthropocene

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[UConn Storrs]

The planetary potency of humankind requires the naming of a new epoch on Earth’s calendar, the Anthropocene. This tipping point is forcing a paradigm shift in our environmental consciousness, one that embraces the Earth system more holistically and which refutes the false binary separating humans from nature. Ironically, this brave new world is one without wilderness, yet with more wildness than ever before.

Learning how the earth works and what its history has been will reframe the way you think about critical environmental issues: climate change, ecosystem collapse, pollution, natural resources, urban infrastructure, and much more. Earth is not fragile. That designation is reserved for species and communities like ours. The fate of humanity has always been in the hands of geothermal, meteorological, cosmic, and evolutionary processes.

Limited to 19 students, this experiential, interdisciplinary, investigative, and collaborative course provides an opportunity for you to engage with the Honors core goals of exploration, creativity, and leadership.

ERTH 1000E also meets the general education requirement for a CA 3 (science) non-lab course.

GSCI 1000E: The Human Epoch: Living in the Anthropocene

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[UConn Storrs]

Climate change. Ecosystem collapse. Urbanization. Acidic, anoxic oceans. Altered landscapes. Novel chemicals. Resource shortfalls. What’s the “thing” that holds all these? In physical space, it’s the whole of planet Earth, an oblate spheroid of interacting solid, liquid, and gaseous components. In chronologic time, it’s the Anthropocene Epoch, the newest page on the geological calendar, named for our seemingly limitless power. Comprehending this epoch is causing a paradigm shift in our environmental consciousness, forcing us to re-think our implicit biases about nature and wildness, and offering an optimistic prospect for the human world as part of a very rugged planet.

Limited to 19 students, this discussion-based, seminar-style course will be facilitated by student leaders under the guidance of the instructor.  As a result of this course, students will:

  • Become more effective planetary citizens by putting so-called environmental issues in their proper planetary context. Earth is not fragile. That’s reserved for species, including ours.
  • Discover how intelligence, leading to science, leading to technology, gave humans the power to transform the surface of of a polychrome Earth for good and bad. Green is not the main color of the environment.
  • Understand that the likely launching pad for human intelligence was environmental stress and rapid climate change in Africa’s rift valley. This intelligence will allow us to adapt to an uncertain future.
  • Realize that the future of humanity is being driven by geothermal, climatic, cosmic, and evolutionary processes.

MATH 2141Q: Advanced Calculus I

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Instructors: Katie Hall (section 001) and Myron Minn-Thu-Aye (section 002)

Prerequisite: A year of calculus, which may include calculus taken in high school. Instructor consent required; email the faculty member for the section in question.

This is the first course in a four-course sequence (2141Q, 2142Q, 2143Q, 2144Q) that approaches calculus in a fundamentally different way: focusing on proofs and theoretical understanding more than on drilling skills. While other math courses you’ve taken might emphasize tricks and recipes, this sequence will focus on seeing patterns and helps to provide a solid conceptual understanding of how math works instead of just gaining computation skills.

Completing the two-year sequence fulfills the requirements of a mathematics minor and satisfies the prerequisites for upper-level mathematics courses (those that require linear algebra, differential equations, and/or transitions to advanced mathematics).

More information.

JUDS 5397/CLCS 5301: The Talmud, the Rabbis, and History

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Graduate courses act as Honors credit, as long as you earn a grade of B- or higher

Instructor: Professor Stuart S. Miller

Open to advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor.

This course is a unique introduction to Talmudic narrative and related writings of the ancient rabbis of Roman Palestine and Sassanian Babylonia.

The aim is to gain both an appreciation for the ways Talmudic writings inform history and why they continue to fascinate not only scholars of Judaism and rabbinic law, but also philosophers, theologians, legal and literary theorists.

Some discussion will be devoted to the unique discourse of the ancient rabbis and especially to “midrashic thinking.” Of late Talmudic literature has been of great interest to scholars of American juridical thinking, for example, the Yale legal scholar, Robert Cover, the author of the influential Narrative, Violence, and the Law. We will examine how his work has had an impact on legal thinking. We will also take a detour into the work of Emmanuel Levinas to understand better why Talmudic writings have generated much interest among philosophers and theologians.

Usually thought of as works of religious law, the two Talmuds, that of Babylonia and the lesser known “Talmud of the Land of Israel,” are a treasure trove of information about the rabbis’ times, their neighbors, and, of course, their outlook on life. Seminar meetings will be devoted to discussion of diverse Talmudic and “midrashic” passages. Students will gain knowledge of the overall rabbinic corpus, the modes of rabbinic discourse, and the challenges they pose for scholarly inquiry.

Although the rabbis were primarily interested in articulating their program for sanctifying daily life, they reveal much about their lives and times (first through fifth centuries C.E.) and especially about their perspectives towards other Jews and non-Jews among whom they lived. Special attention, therefore, will be devoted to the rabbis’ perception of history, and especially their relations, interactions, and attitudes towards others, including women, apostates, heretics, Samaritans, Romans/pagans, Zoroastrians, and Christians.

For more information, contact Stuart Miller at stuart.miller@uconn.edu.

ENGL 1007: Honors First-Year Writing

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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

Healthcare Innovation graduate courses

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[UConn Storrs]

Graduate courses act as Honors credit, as long as you earn a grade of B- or higher

Honors students are invited to take one or more courses in Healthcare Innovation on a space-available basis. Courses must be taken in sequence:

  • NURS 5111: Healthcare Innovation Theory and Application (Spring)
  • NURS 5112: Healthcare Opportunities for System Level Solutions (Fall)
  • NURS 5113: Developing & Leading a Sustainable Culture of Healthcare Innovation (Spring)
  • NURS 5114: Healthcare Innovation Development (Fall)

Contact Dr. Tiffany Kelley to discuss your interest in and fitness for these courses. The sequence is not recommended for first-year students.