The following Spring 2019 Honors courses will fulfill the Honors Core requirement for Sophomore Honors (for entering class of Fall 2017) or University Honors Laureate (for entering class of Fall 2018). Always check to make sure you are registered for an Honors section.

* Distribution categories for the University Honors Laureate award, entering class of Fall 2018

AH 1030: Interdisciplinary Approach to Obesity Prevention

Obesity is considered a national epidemic and possibly a pandemic as it affects many developed countries around the world. This interdisciplinary course explores the biology of obesity, including genetic predispositions and behaviors that increase obesity risk (dietary, physical activity, social, and psychological); the obesigenic environment, including how communities are physically built as well as the economic relationship to obesity risk; and the policy and ethical implications for obesity prevention. Multi-level obesity prevention approaches that involve the individual, family, organization, community, and policy will be considered. The format will consist of common lectures, weekly discussions, hands-on activities, team projects, and synthesis of material presented.

Trouble registering? This class is open to freshmen and sophomores in the Honors Program. If you will be a first- or second-year Honors student with 54 or more credits in Spring 2019 and you want to register for this course, please email honors@uconn.edu and include (1) your name; (2) your 7-digit Student Admin number; (3) the class number (6496); (4) the course number and section (AH 1030-001); (5) the semester you entered UConn as a freshman (e.g., Fall 2017); (6) confirmation that there are seats available in the course; and (7) your pick day and time.

ANTH 2400: Honors Core: Analyzing Religion

This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to the academic study of religion. The goal of the course is to acquaint students with frameworks for understanding religion as an institution embedded in culture and social life. Students will learn conceptual tools for understanding religious phenomena and religious conflicts in their social, historical, and political contexts, and will consider rationalist and atheist critiques of ‘religion’ and religious belief. Analysis of the common components of religion–theology, cosmology, myth, ritual–will be illustrated with examples drawn from both indigenous non-Western and Western religious systems. Other topics include comparative models of the divine in the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), fundamentalism, mysticism, political uses of religion, and the “science versus religion” debate. Course activities will include student-led discussions of issues and texts, group exercises, and independent projects. Active engagement in the class is expected of all students.

ANTH 3095: (Special Topics) Applied Research in Archaeobotany

Archaeobotany, the study of plant use in antiquity, is an inherently interdisciplinary sub-field of archaeology that integrates botany, ecology, archaeology, and social theory to explore a wide range of topics including: 1) the nature, timing, and cause of plant domestication events around the world; 2) the social and environmental dynamics and causes of the transition from hunting-and-gathering to early agriculture; 3) the role that plant-based agriculture, viticulture, or irrigation played in the emergence and collapse of early social complexity, social hierarchies, and the development of the first cities; 4) the ways in which farmers modified plant-based agriculture to suit prevailing environmental conditions and social and economic needs; and 5) the choices that people made in the past to select and procure fuel in order to sustain everyday household activities and emerging craft specializations and industries.

This course integrates lectures on current and emerging trends in archaeobotanical research with hands-on instruction in the use of a range of lab equipment, microscopy, and digital imaging tools commonly found in many labs to address the topics listed above. These tools include: 1) botanical reference material; 2) analytical balances; 3) a muffle furnace; 4) student binocular microscopes; 5) an upright materials microscope with transmitted, incident, and polarized light; and 6) a confocal microscope with NIS Elements imaging software. Hands-on instruction is also provided in the use of a Jeol NeoScope JCM 6000Plus benchtop scanning electron microscope with Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy capabilities for elemental mapping. Throughout the course, students actively engage in the research process by using the tools learned in class to design and conduct an individualized research project (selected from a list provided in class).

For more details, see the syllabus.

Permission number A permission number is required. Please email honors@uconn.edu and include (1) your name; (2) your 7-digit Student Admin number; (3) the class number (17214); (4) the course number and section (ANTH 3095-001); (5) confirmation that there are seats available in the class; and (6) your pick day and time.

Note ANTH 3095 is a “variable credits” course. Please ensure that you register for 3 credits.

CLCS 1002: Reading Between the Arts – ONLINE CLASS

In everyday reading of news media, we are often exposed to a dynamic intermixing of media and arts as well as an intermixing of images and stories about events around the world. This intermixing is also prevalent in the arts and cultural expressions such as cinema, theater, visual art, text, music, and computer and video games. In this course, students will explore, analyze, and unravel some of this intermixing and transmedia. The course is an introduction to aesthetics, semiotics and structures of interart relations. Students will develop transferable multimedia reading skills in an effort to become interpreters of 21st century multi- and transmedia products. Much of the work will bridge natural sciences and the humanities.

Questions that will inform discussions and work include: Are there similarities connecting the diversity of expression in various arts and media? Can one characterize the arts as an area of research comparable and equal to scientific inquiries; and if so, how? Does art, as a diverse world of signs, help us recognize and understand reality? What can we learn about individual approaches to experiencing art and media when focusing on sensory perception?

DRAM 2134: Honors Core: Analyzing Sports as Performance – HYBRID IN PERSON / ONLINE CLASS

Through a rigorous critical investigation of lived human experience, this course uses the lenses of theatre studies, performance studies, and cultural studies to analyze and articulate the parallels between sports and performance. Consideration of gender, sexuality, nationalism, race, human rights, and ethics will be mediated through readings, attendance at live athletic events, film/media viewings, written assignments, multimodal research presentations, experiential activities, and student-led discussions of various sports. Students will be assigned innovative writing prompts and participate in lively discussions to identify and examine the interrelated aesthetic, performative, and humanistic values in the arts and athletics.

Permission number A permission number is required. Please email honors@uconn.edu and include (1) your name; (2) your 7-digit Student Admin number; (3) the class number (9983); (4) the course number and section (DRAM 2134-001); (5) confirmation that there are seats available in the class; and (6) your pick day and time.

ECON 1107: Honors Core: Economics, Nature, and the Environment

In this course students study the interactions between economies and their natural environment from a global and historical perspective. The course is multidisciplinary and synthesizes insights from various disciplines including economics and the social sciences, geography, archaeology, history, and ecology, while emphasizing a scientific approach. Among the many topics discussed are the effects of geography and climate on economic development and income inequality, the impact of humans on their environment, the causes and consequences of environmental problems, the environmental collapses of societies, the valuation of ecosystem services.

Beyond offering a solid understanding of the subject, this course aims to:

• Illustrate the application of a multidisciplinary approach
• Emphasize the scientific method as the basis for our understanding (and for possible actions)
• Foster students’ long-term interest in current research and recent findings in various fields

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

Introduction to game theory examines applications in the natural and social sciences and technology, which may include electric power auctions, evolutionary biology, and elections. The course is an opportunity for students to begin to think strategically about many types of problems found in science, social settings, and even university life.

In this course, students will learn: To recognize strategic behavior—and the potential for strategic behavior—in a variety of situations, for example, in social and political situations and even in the natural sciences. To solve games, use solutions to predict and explain behavior, and recognize and learn from the successes and failures of their analyses. How to work through a sequence of short directed projects to learn that choosing a topic for the Honors thesis is not quite as daunting as they may believe.

ECON 2495-001: (Special Topics) Honors Core: Rights and Harms

This course will expose students to a conceptual framework at the intersection of law, economics, and philosophy – what we can call the paradigm of rights and harms.  Working within this framework, you will analyze and debate a large set of controversial social issues.  The goal of the course is to encourage you to think critically and rigorously about such issues and to hone your skills in argument and persuasion.  Students from all majors and backgrounds welcome.

Consider a famous legal case analyzed by the Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase.  A physician sets up an examination room with a wall that is shared by a candy factory.  Noise from the candy machinery makes it impossible for the doctor to examine patients with a stethoscope.  If the candy factory has the right to make noise, the doctor is harmed; if the doctor has a right to quiet, the factory is harmed.  Economists and philosophers have developed ways of thinking about who should get the right – and thus who should bear the harm – in cases like these.  Most if not all controversial social issues take exactly this form: who has the right?  Who is harmed, and in what way?  As we will see, in many of these cases, the harms are immaterial: there is no tangible emission like noise.  I may harm you (make you angry or unhappy) by giving a speech in favor of Marxism or by selling my kidney to the highest bidder – even if you are nowhere in the vicinity and learn of my behavior only through a third party.  Should I have the right to engage in these behaviors?  Or should you have the right to stop me?

Details, with syllabus link.

GSCI 1055: Geoscience and the American Landscape

Not open to students who have passed GSCI 1050 or GSCI 1051. Equivalent to GSCI 1051 for the purposes of prerequisites.

This is the Honors version of introductory geology. The goal is for students to learn how the earth works, what its history has been, how life and planetary processes have co-evolved, and how the student can put this knowledge to use to solve practical environmental problems. Though geology is the main course, it will be heavily seasoned across time and space by American literature, environmental history, and our national parks.

The main pedagogy involves pre-class student preparation, followed by student-led discussions of each new topic, ranging from minerals as crystals to climates as outcomes. Field trips, seminars, a symposium and a final project round out the activities.

In this course, students will:

• Become geoscience literate
• Understand geology’s pervasive influence on human society
• Realize that geoscience is a respected scientific career with excellent job prospects, especially with respect to water and energy resources
• Realize that a geosciences major is a solid platform for graduate education in other non-scientific fields

General Education information GSCI 1055 alone is a CA 3 non-laboratory course. If you add the GSCI 1052 geology laboratory (either in the same semester or a future one), you may request the conversion of GSCI 1055 to fulfill your CA 3-Laboratory requirement.

HEJS 1103: Literature and Civilization of the Jewish People

The purpose of this course is to introduce the student to the history, religion, and culture of the Jewish people. Special attention will be given to Jewish civilization as it is portrayed in the literature of the Jews. No prior knowledge of Hebrew or Jewish culture is required.

This course fulfills General Education requirements in Content Areas I (Arts and Humanities) and IV (Diversity and Multiculturalism). One of the main goals is to enable students to develop a keen understanding of who the Jews are and an appreciation of the diverse cultures and traditions that comprise Jewish civilization. The emergence of Judaic ideas and their influence on Christianity and western civilization will be especially emphasized. The so-called “Judeo-Christian” tradition is broken down so that students understand the values and ideas that both Judaism and Christianity share as well as their distinctiveness. Students get a taste of how the earliest, ancient rabbis thought and how they succeeded in transforming a biblical religion into Judaism as we know it. Along the way, you will be challenged to think “talmudicly/midrashicly,” a critical form of analysis that may very well enable you to appreciate literary traditions belonging to other peoples and cultures in an entirely different light.

POLS 3023W: Politics and Literature

Requires ENGL 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 by Spring 2019, please email honors@uconn.edu and include (1) your name; (2) your 7-digit Student Admin number; (3) the class number (16289); (4) the course number and section (POLS 3023W-001); (5) confirmation that you do have credit for ENGL 1010, 1011, or 2011; (6) confirmation that there are seats available in the course; and (7) your pick day and time.

POLS/WGSS 3247: Gender and War

War is studied in this course as a range of experiences with armed political violence in the international system. Men, women, and children experience war directly or indirectly through media representations of war, gender combat practices, the militarization of masculinity, terror wars and women suicide bombers, rape in war, use of child soldiers, refugee camps, and through the application of international laws governing gender relations in war and post-war situations. To illustrate these and other points we consider recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Nigeria (Boko Haram) as well as the Mexican drug war, cyberwar and prospects for nuclear war using a variety of resources including fiction, autobiography, and academic studies. Throughout the course, students work in groups on these wars and periodically present their research and updates to the class.

Note POLS/WGSS 3247 is coded at the catalog level as “open to juniors or higher” but other Honors students may contact Prof. Sylvester for a permission number. In your email, confirm that you are a member of the Honors Program, provide your PeopleSoft number, and very briefly explain your interest in taking the course.

PSYC 3884-002: (Seminar in Psychology) Science of Learning and Art of Communication

One of the least-known areas of psychology is the science of learning. After decades of research, a great deal is known about the principles that govern the best (and worst) methods for effective study and instruction. Key principles have to do with communication — creating engaging presentations designed to maximize memory. The principles we will learn about will have immediate application for students; many of the most common study strategies are the least effective, while the most effective strategies are non-intuitive. These principles generalize beyond the college classroom, with implications for education and science communication at all levels, with implications for education, health, policy, journalism, and public understanding of complex challenges facing society.

Permission number A permission number is required. Please email honors@uconn.edu and include (1) your name; (2) your 7-digit Student Admin number; (3) the class number (16984); (4) the course number and section (PSYC 3884-002); (5) confirmation that there are seats available in the class; and (6) your pick day and time.

SLHS 3295: (Special Topics) Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Communication Disorders: From Brain to Behavior

WGSS 2105W: Gender and Science

Requires ENGL 1010, 1011, or 2011.

This class will critically examine how social constructions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability shape science, medicine, and technology. We will consider the complex relationships between constructions of nature, science, objectivity, and the body to highlight how culture influences the theory and practice of different sciences, medical research, and technologies.

Some of the questions we will explore include:
How does science and technology influence everyday life? How are gender, race, sexuality and nation woven through the historical development of Western sciences? How has feminist science studies intervened or critiqued the construction of science, medicine and technology? Is there such a thing as a neutral or gender-free science? Is there such a thing as a feminist science?

We will focus particularly on the culture of science and power of scientific discourse. We will look specifically at how science is used to make claims about social differences, as well as examine the some social implications of medical technologies for women, e.g. how current medical technologies create novel, and even moral, demands and dilemmas for women. No scientific background or experience is required; only a willingness to critically examine both science and ourselves.

Note WGSS 2105W is coded at the catalog level as “open to sophomores or higher,” but first-year Honors students without sophomore standing are invited to take this course. If you will have fewer than 24 earned credits by Spring 2019, please email honors@uconn.edu and include (1) your name; (2) your 7-digit Student Admin number; (3) the class number (15688); (4) the course number and section (WGSS 2105W-001); (5) confirmation that you do have credit for ENGL 1010, 1011, or 2011; (6) confirmation that there are seats available in the course; and (7) your pick day and time.