(Also offered for HRTS majors or minors as HRTS 3445.) 

Instructor: Nishith Prakash

The course is set up around a series of major policy questions central to the gender equality agenda and girls and woman’s human rights, and linked to the post 2015 international development debates. For example, gender gaps in education, employment, political representation, and domestic violence are pressing global human rights concerns and matters of national social development. We will also explore to what extent behavioral and psychological factors explain these differences.

Instructor: Catherine Masud

This is a special opportunity to learn from an internationally award-winning filmmaker. The small Honors course is intended for those of you who are interested in creating documentary films as part of your scholarly and/or creative work. 

This course will be of special interest to students with a dual interest in human rights and film studies who would also like to have practical training in documentary film production. The course aims to open students’ eyes to the tremendous power and possibility of the documentary form as a vehicle of social discourse and change.

The first half of this course will examine the documentary from a historical, ethical, and aesthetic perspective to provide a theoretical grounding for students, with a particular focus on documentaries that address social and political themes. Some of the topics to be addressed include the evolution of the documentary genre, the modes and models of documentary, the rhetorical, narrative, and poetic documentary ‘voice’, and the question of ‘social impact’. Major milestones of the non-fiction genre will be studied along with lesser known short form documentaries that illustrate specific aspects of technique, style, and content. The second half of the course will provide students with a practical framework for discovering their own documentary voice. Students will be guided through the process of pre-production, shooting and editing as they create their own short form documentaries on a social issue of their choice.

Instructor: Maria Chrysochoou

While this is not an Honors course, Prof. Chrysochoou welcomes Honors students of all majors and would be happy to offer Honors conversions for interested students.

How do you get from an abandoned, potentially polluted property to a micro-brewery or modern apartment complex? 

Connecticut has a rich industrial history, which has resulted in thousands of abandoned sites throughout the state. The investigation, remediation and redevelopment of these sites requires skilled personnel in environmental law, financial and real estate analysis, land use and urban planning, public policy, environmental science and engineering and landscape architecture.

The course will bring students in contact with active professionals and CT municipalities, who will provide practical knowledge of the process, with real world examples.

• Learn the issues from professionals
• Work with CT communities on real projects
• No prerequisites
• All majors welcome

There will be an optional follow-up practicum to ENVE 3995 in the Spring.

Check out cbi.uconn.edu for more information about the Connecticut Brownfield Initiative. It was also featured in this UConn Today article.

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, 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 August Wilson’s Fences); and works concerning immigrant experiences: a collection of short stories by Anzia Yezierska, Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, some short stories by Junot Diaz, 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) 2 short (2-3 pp.) response papers and their revision; 3) an 8-10-page research paper and its revision.

CA 4, W.

Instructor: Sean Forbes

Prerequisite: ENGL 1010, 1011, or 2011.

This course is an introduction to poetry in English, designed to familiarize you with a range of poetic forms and modes from the 16th through the 21st centuries. We’ll read, discuss, and write about many different kinds of poems as ways of enjoying their wealth of rhythms, figures, and rhetorical effects. We’ll pay attention to the way poems sound, you’ll hear poems aloud in class, and at visiting writer events. You’ll also memorize and recite poems yourself, since memorization allows you inside a poem in a rather magical way. By the end of the course, you’ll have a good understanding of how content and sound work together in poetry, and you’ll know a selection of important poems and poetic forms.

CA 1.

Instructor: Clare King’oo

Prerequisite: ENGL 1010, 1011, or 2011.

In this Honors course, we will encounter several works from the British and North American traditions judged to be literary masterpieces. Our aim will be to explore the art of imaginative story-telling over time, with particular reference to the Renaissance (ca. 1485-1660) and the modern period (ca. 1850 to today). We will consider questions of narration, representation, genre, authority, intertextuality, and canonicity. Our discoveries will be the focus of our own rigorous writing practices, as we work on improving our argumentative and stylistic skills through a range of reports, essays (with revisions), and timed exams. Lively participation in class discussion will be expected and warmly encouraged. Please note that ENGL 1103W is designed primarily with non-English-majors in mind.

CA 1, W.

Instructor: Mark Boyer

While this is not an Honors course, Prof. Boyer welcomes Honors students of all levels and majors and encourages Honors conversions. If you do not have junior standing, contact Dr. Boyer for a permission number.

This course in human geography focuses on two primary sets of linkages:

1. Global-local linkages in an age of accelerating globalization
2. Human-environment interactions

Additionally, the course will explore the interaction between those two sets of linkages, their geographical context, policy implications and their ever-evolving status in today’s contemporary world. Fundamental to the course are considerations of scale as we move from the global to the regional to the local and seek to understand how each spatial realm impacts the others. Moreover, emphasizing systemic thinking throughout the course, the latter part of the course employs a future modeling simulation that will allow students to build scenarios about world and regional futures.

This is also a course that requires active participation by students in all aspects of the course. You will need to participate in class discussions, read assigned materials, work in groups to solve problems and use computers in a variety of ways in the course. Thus, students should be prepared for an active learning environment that is flexible and adaptable to a variety of approaches and learning styles. Students are encouraged to ask questions, to raise interesting topics and to explore the world of global environmental politics in new and creative ways. Only by doing this will the next generation of citizens and policy-makers be able to meet the environmental challenges facing the world system now and in the future.

Course Methods:

• The first half of the course will utilize case method teaching. Case method is a discussion-centric teaching model.
• The second will make use of the International Futures Simulation (IFS) – see http://pardee.du.edu/ for more information.