Only freshmen and sophomores may enroll in 2xxx-level seminars, and only juniors and seniors may enroll in 3xxx-level seminars. Students may not enroll in more than one Honors seminar in the same semester. Students who have a late registration date or who find their chosen seminar closed should come to the Honors office and reserve a spot on the waiting list. Waitlisted students must attend the first day of class to have a chance of gaining admission to a closed seminar.

Fall 2007

Departmental Honors Courses

Lower Division Honors Seminars

Upper Division Honors Seminars

Lower Division Honors Seminars

HSem 2010H: The Psychology of Paranormal Phenomena
TTh, 9:45-11:00, Elliott Hall N227, 3 credits
Reserved for Courses in Common

Instructor: Randy Fletcher

Course Description: Research has shown that most Americans hold one or more supernatural, paranormal or pseudoscientific beliefs. These include beliefs in mind reading, fortune telling, psychokenesis, remote viewing, therapeutic touch, out-of-body experiences, alien abduction, and cryptozoology. This course has two goals: The first is to introduce students to critical thinking and behavioral research methods. The second is to critically evaluate the evidence for a variety of supernatural, paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Students will design and carry out their own experimental tests of these claims. The course will also include a guest lecture and demonstration by a local psychic. Reading per week: 40 Pages. Three written papers (3-5 pages each), one group presentation, 4 quizzes.

HSem 2020H: American Culture and Politics
MW 2:30-3:20, F 2:30-4:45, 12 Nicholson Hall, 3 credits
Reserved for Courses in Common

Instructor: Lary May

Course Description: This course explores the relationship between public life, citizenship and nationality in the United States since l940 as mediated through popular art. We will focus on the changing definitions of "freedom," namely what it means to be a citizen and American, what is included and excluded in these definitions as a result of struggles over power and authority. The era since World War II provides an ideal time period for examining these issues, for it was over that time that the nation became an international power, while a new consumer culture and domestic ideal became linked to American identity and Cold War politics. The popular culture was one of the most important arenas where these challenges found expression. How a Cold War culture emerged, how it was challenged and how that disruption stimulated a popular backlash will be the focus of our attention. Artists and celebrities, film noir, rock and roll and country music will be explored to help answer questions that concern scholars who study both politics and the arts.

HSem 2030H: King Arthur in Romance and Film
TTh, 11:15-12:30, 12 Nicholson Hall, 3 credits
Reserved for Courses in Common

Instructor: Ray Wakefield

Course Description: The master narrative of King Arthur's exploits is among the oldest in the post-classical Western tradition, dating from historical developments in the 5th century CE. Arthur evolves from Celtic chieftain in post-Roman Britain to an early medieval Welsh king of miracles to the King Arthur of the courtly romances in the high Middle Ages. This seminar will explore the transformation of medieval history and Arthurian romance into modern novels and films. Readings will come from medieval romances (in English translation), medieval histories, Sir Thomas Malory, and T. H. White. The films will include classics by Bergman and Disney as well as more recent cinema by Glenville, Rohmer, Monty Python, and Boorman. Students will investigate the character of Arthurian narrative in its medieval context and assess the transformation of the master narrative for modern audiences. Students will also participate in the production of final projects, demonstrating through the description of a cinematic scene how they would accomplish the transformation of medieval Arthuriana for modern reception.

HSem 2040H: Working in the USA: Labor, Literature, Film, Photography and Painting from the 19th - 21st centuries
MW, 9:05-10:20, 12 Nicholson Hall, 3 credits
Reserved for Courses in Common

Instructor: Paula Rabinowtz

Course Description: This seminar explores the literary, cinematic and musical representations of work and workers in America since the mid-19th century. As part of the growing field of working-class studies, it considers the variety of work-wage labor and slave labor-performed by the citizens, slaves, immigrants, aliens, and other residents during the period of U. S. emergence as an agricultural and industrial power through the current post-industrial age. As a course focused on how labor is represented, it considers cultural constructions of the actions and activities of work as essentially a project of creation-not only of goods and services-but of ideas, ideologies and practices that contribute to seeing what is meant to remain invisible: the efforts of humans to alter our world. We will be at once intensive and wide-ranging in our sources and methods as we try to determine "what work is," (Philip Levine) who workers are and how workers are constructed and define themselves. Because the forces of capital are global, the course will, of necessity, consider transnational migrations of workers and factories.

HSem 2060H: Exploring the Art and Cultural Landscape of the Twin Cities
Th, 6:30-9:30, Room TBD, 3 credits
Reserved for Courses in Common

Instructor: Michael Sommers has worked professionally as a designer, director, composer, performer and technician. Locally he has worked at the Guthrie Theater, Children’s Theatre, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, The Jungle, Frank Theatre, Minnesota Opera, 10,000 Things, among others. At the University of Minnesota he has directed Articulations, Look at Me Now, Old 4 Eyes, and, with colleague Luverne. Seifert, The Master and Margarita. He has taught as affiliate faculty for four years in the Theatre Department at the University of Minnesota and in 2006 he joined the Interdisciplinary Program in Collaborative Arts as an assistant professor. He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the Bush Fellowship for the Arts, McKnight Theatre Grant, and the Jerome Interdisciplinary Grant.

Course Description: The landscape of the performing and visual arts in the Twin Cities grows out of a multitude of disciplines and aesthetics, from the traditional to the contemporary, from the tribal to the experimental, from world renowned cultural institutions to independent galleries and store front theatres. Come explore this diverse and rich spectrum of art and culture that surrounds the University of Minnesota campus. The class will start at “home” exploring the University’s own Arts Quarter, the Weisman Art Museum, the Bell Museum and others. We will then take to the field, visiting nine distinct neighborhoods that are home to the Institutions, theatres, galleries, studios and diverse cultural centers. Take behind the scene tours, experience the creative processes of artists, attend alternative performances, and discover the pockets of culture that are in the University’s “backyard.”

HSem 2070H: Masterworks of the 17th Century
Th 1:30-2:40, F 7:00-9:00 PM, Evening sessions at the MIA, Afternoon at Blegen Hall 330, 3 credits

Instructor: Steven F. Ostrow, professor and chair of the Department of Art History, received his PhD from Princeton University. A specialist in early modern Italian art, he has received a number of fellowships and awards, including, most recently, the Rome Prize. Ostrow is the author (and editor) of a number of books and articles, which range in their subject matter from late 16th century sculpture and Italian Baroque art theory to the biographical construction of artists.

Course Description: This seminar will examine a small handful of “masterpieces” produced by European artists during the 17th century. In contrast to the way these works are traditionally taught (briefly in the context of a lecture), in this seminar each class meeting will be devoted to a single work of art, delving into the circumstances behind its creation, the way it was made, and the complex meanings it embodies. The seminar will engage, in other words, issues of patronage, production, style and connoisseurship, theory, and interpretation. Works by Gianlorenzo Bernini, Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Rembrandt van Rijn, Diego Velázquez, Artemisia Gentileschi, and others will be our focus. Several of the classes will be held at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, allowing for first-hand and close examination of the works.


HSem 2080H: Language Endangerment and Revitalization
TTh, 12:45-2:00, 12 Nicholson Hall, 3 credits

Instructor: Marianne Milligan is a visiting Assistant Professor in Linguistics. She earned her PhD in linguistics in the summer of 2005 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her primary subfield is phonology, the study of how sounds pattern in languages. She teaches courses in phonetics, phonology, morphology, field methods, language and culture, Language and Society, and Endangered Languages. She is currently working on a dictionary of Menominee with her advisor, Dr. Monica Macaulay.

Course Description: Just as the rates of plant and animal extinction have accelerated in the last two centuries, so too languages are dying off today at a rate much faster than in the past. Some claim that only 600 of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world today will be spoken in 100 years if current trends are not reversed. In this course we will examine what it means for a language to be endangered, and what it means for a language to die. We will begin by evaluating the various answers to the question: why do we care? Then we will look at the causes of language endangerment and death. Next, we will look at the options and methods that a community can use to reverse language loss. Finally, we will examine the roles of researchers in language revitalization and the ethical issues involved.

Upper Division Honors Seminars

HSem 3010H: Business Organizations: Governance, Society & Law T, 5:00-6:40 155 Blegen Hall, 2 credits

Instructor: Gulzar Babeava

This class explores various topics relating to business organizations, including its internal and external governance and regulation, and its impact on society. We will first begin by having an introduction to business organizations and examining different types of business entities. Next, we will discuss whether government regulation of businesses are necessary, excessive, or detrimental to the fundamental concept of business. The class will also examine whether corporate social responsibility in our current world is a realistic or an altruistic thought. Similarly, we will explore the duties and responsibilities of corporate officers and directors to its shareholders and the society especially in the wake of Enron and similar cases.

HSem 3020H: Sexuality and the Self
TTh, 2:30-3:45, Blegen Hall 255, 3 credits

Instructor: Anna Clark

Course Description: In the past, how has sexual desire defined how people understand the self? Did sexual desire determine people's identities? Did people have free will if they could not control their desires? This class will explore these themes through historical "confessions," or autobiographies, fiction, and case studies. We will begin with the ancient Greeks, who understood sex in a very different way than we do today. We will then study St. Augustine, who was tormented by involuntary arousal. We will then read the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, about his sexual adventures. Sigmund Freud will also be studied, because he claimed people were motivated by unconscious sexual desires. Walt Whitman will be another topic. We will also read novels such as Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray, Nella Larsen's Passing, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook.

HSem 3030H: Religion and the Founders: Contests over Belief in the Making of the United States
MW, 9:45-11:00, Blegen Hall 205, 3 credits

Instructor: Kirsten Fischer

Course Description: What religious beliefs did the "Founding Fathers" have and how and why should this matter to Americans today? This 3-credit Honors Seminar explores the religious beliefs of leading figures during the founding of the United States as well as some of the heated debates since then over what those beliefs were and what they should mean for the nation. We will examine the beliefs of prominent figures such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Paine, as well as the role of religion in the lives of less famous Americans. We will investigate some of the historical and contemporary contests over how to interpret the role of religion in the founding era. We will compare the claims of historians, think-tank pundits, and a Supreme Court justice with our own research findings, and we will analyze the relationship between religious beliefs, political convictions, and histories of religion.

HSem 3040H: Media Aesthetics
MW, 1:25-2:40, 345 Nicholson Hall, 3 credits

Instructor: Andreas Gailus

Course Description: Discussions of “the medium” are usually limited to technical and/or mass media: TV, newspapers, internet, etc. But there is another meaning of the term according to which a medium is “any raw material or mode of expression used in artistic activity” (OED): the stones of the architect or the paper of the writer; but also, more generally, image, sound, and writing. In this course, we will analyze a wide variety of texts, films, paintings, and photos, asking how meaning and content are shaped by the medium through which they are articulated. What constitutes a medium? What, for instance, is the difference between sound and words, images and language, the written and the spoken? What is the relation, in film, between the sound of voices and the sound of the soundtrack, or between title sequence and ‘actual’ film? How do media shape our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world? What is the effect of electronic and mass media on politics and public life? Texts by Plato, Barthes, Kafka, Goody, Melville, Derrida, B.Anderson, Spiegelman, S. Sontag, and others; films by Ford Coppola, Hitchcok, and Haneke; visual art by Velasquez, Sherman, Close, Warhol, and others.

HSem 3050H: Hard Times and Bad Behavior: Homelessness and Marginality in the United States
MW, 4:40-6:00, Blegen Hall 105, 3 credits

Instructor: Teresa Gowan

Course Description: This class will examine several zones of "low life" through the first-person accounts of impoverished Americans themselves, as well as those of the reformers, academic experts, authors, and musicians who have interpreted, analyzed, or condemned them. As we read about contemporary Americans "on the skids" and "behind ghetto walls," we will trace some enduring themes within marginality in the United States. Particular emphasis will be paid to the rootlessness encouraged by the American economy, the love-hate relationship between elites and marginal populations in popular culture, and the complex mixture of freedom and deprivation experienced by people living on the edge. Interested students should be aware that the perspective presented in this class may differ considerably from what you might expect from the subject matter. This is neither a "social problems" nor a criminology class, but instead an examination of the cultural aspects of homelessness and related forms of marginality which draws on a very wide variety of materials from the 1880s onwards. There is a substantial emphasis on historical topics such as great tramp scare, the homeless orphans and street prostitutes of old New York, the "Wobblies" (the IWW), Charlie Chaplin, the Great Depression, and the romanticization of homelessness by the Beats and the counterculture.

HSem 3060H Women in the United States Congress T, Th 9:45 A.M. - 11:00, Blegen Hall 335, 3 credits

Instructor: Kathryn Pearson

Course Description: Seventy-one women serve in the U.S. House of Representatives and 16 serve in the U.S. Senate. This seminar explores the ways in which congresswomen affect representation and policy making, along with the factors that enhance and constrain women's election to Congress and women's influence inside Congress. We focus on gender dynamics in congressional elections, representation, the legislative process, and the pursuit of power inside Congress. Although the number of congresswomen has increased during the last two decades-only 25 women served in the U.S. Congress twenty years ago-women remain underrepresented. We begin the course by studying gender differences in candidate emergence and congressional elections. Next, we ask whether congresswomen and congressmen advocate different policy agendas and issue positions. We consider the representational implications of the gender differences we uncover, including substantive policy differences and non-policy benefits that are conferred to citizens when women occupy positions of political power. We analyze the institutional features of Congress, asking how congressional rules and organization help and hinder women pursuing power and policy.

HSem 3070H: The Politics of Eating: Food, Society, and Culture
TTh, 12:45-2:00, Blegen Hall 220, 3 credits

Instructor: Rachel Schurman

Course Description: This course explores many themes connected to food and agriculture, including how we produce food; the different cultural and social meanings people attach to food; food, culture, and body image; the globalization of agriculture; the obesity "epidemic," work in the food sector; the debate over GM food; and movements toward a more sustainable agriculture. The course is built on two key premises: first, that the production, distribution, and consumption of food involve relationships among different groups of people, and second, that one can gain great insights into these social relations and the societies in which they are embedded through a sociological analysis of food. The objective is to teach you to think analytically about something that is so "everyday" that most of us take it for granted: where our food comes from and why, why we eat the way we do, and the relationships involved in our encounters with food.

HSem 3080H: Interest Groups, Social Movements, and American Democracy
TTh, 11:15- 12:30, Blegen Hall 335, 3 credits

Instructor: Dara Strolovitch

Course Description: What role do interest groups social movements play in the United States? This course examines interest groups and social movements as agents of democratic representation and political change in American politics and policy-making. Course readings include both empirical work about particular movements and theoretical treatments of key issues. We will examine a wide array of organizations and movements, emphasizing in particular those that represent groups such as racial and ethnic minorities, women, religious conservatives, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, and low-income people. We will also address a range of fundamental questions about the emergence, evolution, and impact of interest groups and social movements; about the role of media in interest group and movement politics; about the implications for interest groups and social movement politics of developments such as globalization, the war on terror, and campaign finance reform; about the differences between interest groups and social movements; about the ways in which the agendas, identities, and participants associated with different movements intersect and overlap with one another; and about the relationships between movements and more conventional forms of politics.

HSem 3090H: The Dawn of Prehistory: Homo Sapiens in Africa and Beyond
TTh, 2:30-3:45, Blegen Hall 255, 3 credits

Instructor: James Tracy

Course Description: Recently, developments in two distinct academic fields (possibly three) have shed new light on the early history of our species. First, among evolutionary anthropologists, while there are still defenders of Multi-Regional Evolution - the idea that modern humans interbred with earlier species native to different continents - there is growing agreement that homo sapiens evolved only once, in Africa, between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago. Second, geneticists have used the human genome to read human history and human migrations backwards from the present. Samples of genetic material from living humans, classed according to the variations at specific nodes of the genome, confirm the theory of an African origin for our species, and have traced out-migrations from Africa beginning 50,000 or 70,000 years ago. Finally, although linguists are skeptical of the idea, some specialists have proposed different ways of tracing all languages past and present back to a common origin, probably in Africa.