Fall 2025 Core Courses

ERTH 1055: Geoscience and the American Landscape

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[UConn Storrs]

Not open to students who have passed ERTH 1010, 1050, 1051, or 1070.

Welcome to the Honors Core version of introductory geoscience. The main goal is for students to learn how Earth works, what its history has been, and how this knowledge can be put to good use. More specifically, to reframe environmental thinking, mitigate natural hazards, and obtain the resources we need. Climate change, ecological collapse, human inequality, and planetary futures look very different when seen through an earthly lens.

The main pedagogy emphasizes hybrid learning via pre-class explorations, readings, and podcasts followed by in-class, student-led discussions. Four “cohort” days give students a chance to bond as a group and help guide the course direction. A final creative project is presented in a student symposium. There are zero tests or quizzes.

By the end of this course, students will:

  • Comprehend how the Earth works as a grand holistic system that includes ecosystems and human systems as components.
  • Realize that the world we know is a thin membrane created and controlled by whole-earth processes.
  • Understand the deep-time origins of landscapes to enhance their appreciation and management.
  • Learn that geoscience is a rigorous, environmental STEM career with excellent job prospects and one that provides a solid platform for graduate education in non-STEM fields.

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

AFRA/ARTH 2222: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Power of Looking

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[UConn Storrs]

We are often told that we live in a singularly visual age, where most information is communicated to us via some platform, frame, or program. Yet as we are increasingly dominated by the visual, we seem to be learning less and less about how to read, interpret, engage, or resist the visual culture that swirls around us. This class looks to intervene in that trend and will be a beginning investigation into the issues of what is visual culture and how we might define visual literacy. Thematically then, this class will focus on how we see, or do not see, race, gender, and sexuality.

With those parameters, the major questions the class seeks to engage with are: How do people “know” race visually? Who has been invested in seeing race and racial difference? How have artists and others attempted to intervene or disrupt these sight lines? What does gender look like? Can we remake how we see race and gender? What about how intimacy is viewed and the definitions of sexuality created; how have these categories been visually  constructed and how can they be re-imagined? How do different mediums (sculpture, print, film, or digital) affect how we see bodies?