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.

Lower Division Seminars | Upper Division Seminars

Honors Departmental Courses (pdf)

 

Lower Division Honors Seminars

HSEM 2010H:  Lying and Cheating in Public Life
M,W Tu 1:25P.M. - 2:40 PM, classroom TBA, 3 credits

Instructor: Michael Root

Course Description: People deceive or cheat one another, but they also deceive or cheat themselves. In this course, we identify the different forms of cheating and deception a person can engage in and the harm or damage each can do to private and public life. We will read a number of novels and plays that show how or why people engage in deception and how one character's dishonesty breeds suspicion and distrust in someone he depends on or who depends on him. We will also read some research on the history and philosophy of lying and cheating in private or public life. Students will work in small groups and be graded based on a number of individual or group writing assignments or presentations.

 

HSEM 2020H: Medieval Travel: East and West
T 1:25-3:20 P.M.,Th 1:26-2:15, Classroom TBA, 3 credits

Instructor: Kathryn Reyerson earned her BA at Harvard University and her PhD at Yale University. She also holds a doctorat d’état from the University of Montpellier Law School. She is a specialist of social, economic, and legal history of medieval France and the Mediterranean world. She has written and edited a number of books, including The Art of the Deal: Intermediaries of Trade in Medieval Montpellier ( Leiden: Brill, 2002) and Jacques Coeur. Entrepreneur and King’s Bursar ( New York: Pearson Longman, 2004).

Course Description: This course examines travel in the Middle Ages through the topics of pilgrimage, crusade, exploration, and trade. The central theme will be cross-cultural exchange and conflict. Students will examine problems of ethnocentrism, alterity, and identity. European travel accounts, crusade chroniclers, Jewish travelers, and Arab geographers will provide the bulk of the primary source reading, along with ventures into the Indian Ocean with Cheng He and the North Atlantic with Leif Ericson. A particular focus of the course will be the ancient silk road leading across Asia, which was, in fact, various routes by which merchants traveled with their goods, especially silks and other valuable commodities East to West. Travel writing as a genre will be explored. Students will be introduced to historical interpretation. Marco Polo will serve as a specific case study because his book of Travels raises useful issues about travel and travel writing, and the survival of evidence. Students will keep a journal of their vicarious adventures. They will carry out map exercises, visit the James Ford Bell Library, review films, do a Web assignment comparing Polo and Ibn Battuta, and participate in debates. In lieu of a course exam, they will produce a paper of ten pages on the traveler of their choice.

 

Upper Division Honors Seminars

HSEM 3020H:  Getting Lost With Kafka
W, 5:00-7:20 P.M., 104 Folwell Hall, 3 credits

Instructor: Leslie Morris is a professor in the Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch. She earned her PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She also serves as the director of the Center for Jewish Studies.

Course Description: This seminar will provide an in-depth reading of Kafka's work that will situate Kafka at the crossroads of European modernity and within the debates about Jewish culture and identity in Prague. We will consider questions such as the relationship between Jewish subjectivity and Jewish text; Deleuze and Guattari's formulation of Kafka's work as exemplary of a "minor" literature; the relationship between Jewish text and the Law; and the tropes of disorientation, travel, dislocation, displacement, and "getting lost" in Kafka's work. Kafka's work has generated an enormous body of critical reflection from various corners of critical and literary theory. We will explore these responses to Kafka, and also take into account the various "after-lives" Kafka has engendered in contemporary art, film, and literature, from Andy Warhol's silk-screens of Kafka to the work of Haruki Murakami. In addition to works by Kafka, we will also read critical and theoretical works by Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre, Lukacs, Canetti, Blanchot, Gershom Sholem, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari.

 

HSEM 3030H:  3 Segregated Academic Worlds: Economics, Humanities, Ecology, MW 2:30 P.M.-3:45 P.M., 12 Nicholson, 3 credits

Instructor: David Noble is a professor in the Department of American Studies. His research and teaching interests are history, literature, philosophy and religion. His is the recipient of the CLA Distinguished Teaching Award and the Morse Alumni Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education.

Course Description: In this course we will analyze the concepts of space and time used by current academic economists, humanists, and ecologists. Economists see a global marketplace characterized by a pattern of timeless natural laws. Within the perpetual equilibrium of this space, constant progress or linear time can take place. In contrast, many humanists who identify with post modernism see shifting patterns of timeful cultures as the only environment. In these timeful spaces the experience of linear time is impossible. For economists and humanists the theoretical choice seems to be either that of timeless nature or timeless culture. In contrast, ecologists see human culture as always participating within a nature that is timeful. This also is a space in which linear time and progress are impossible.

 

HSEM 3040H:  The Museum Machine
TTh, 11:15 A.M-12:30 P.M., Classroom TBA, 3 credits

Instructor: Margaret Werry teaches in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance. Her research explores forms of entertainment and cultural performance that take place outside of the walls of theatre, in places such as museums, street festivals, heritage and tourist attractions. She is currently completing a book about tourism in New Zealand – from the late days of colonialism to the filming of the Lord of the Rings – that examines the relationship between tourist entertainment and political process.

Course Description: There is a museum for nearly every academic field, from museums of national or natural history to the zoo, the arboretum, or the observatory. Museums are also a growing, innovative sector of the entertainment economy that rivals the sports industry in terms of sheer visitor numbers. Why are museums such an important part of public culture, both in America and throughout the world? Where did the idea of the museum come from, and why did they take the form we recognize today? How do museums elect what aspects of the living world (indeed, the universe!) and its past to represent within their walls and what to exclude, which stories to tell and how? What are the issues facing those museums that have living people, divided communities, or contested histories as their "objects"?

 

HSEM 3050H: Wonder Women: Art & Technology 1968 -2008
T, 2:30-5:00 P.M., Room TBA, West Bank, 3 credits

Instructor: Diane Willow is an artist and an assistant professor in the new media area of Time and Interactivity within the Department of Art. Prior to her current position, she was appointed artist in residence at the MIT Media Lab. She joined the faculty at UMN to develop a teaching and research studio focused on experimental media within the Department of Art. She has a particular interest in interactive art and tangible media that link the virtual realm of programmable digital media, (including time-based media, such as sound art and video), with the physicality of embedded objects, environments and installations. Her interest in art as experience and the dynamics of nature, technology and community within contemporary culture guide her current research interests. Light Sensitive, a participatory installation for contemplation, focuses on the compelling light of bioluminescence within a series of interactive fountains, vessels and pools.

Course Description: Wonder Women : Art and Technology 1968 - 2008, will convene three generations of artists whose creative work is integrally engaged with technology. The impetus for this symposium is the timely need to bring together the vanguard generation of women who have had a profound and often understated influence in the creative realm of Art and Technology. The forty-year span from 1968 - 2008 highlights their work and their influence on the artistic inquiry of the two generations of women who follow.

HSEM 3060H: Adoption in Literature: Imagined and Experienced
TTh, 11:15-12:30P.M., 335 Nicholson Hall , 3 credits

Instructor: Monica Zagar earned her Ph.D in Scandinavian studies at the University of California- Berkeley, and was granted tenure at the University of Minnesota in 2001. She has taught a variety of courses on literature, culture, and women’s issues related to the Nordic countries.

Course Description: This course will look at issues related to adoption as described by those who became part of it willingly or unwillingly. The family will be examined as a flexible and changeable framework for exploration of identity, kinship, and love. While the students will read several texts from the social sciences, the instructor believes that literature might be a better venue for exploration of the personal details of this often-painful process. Ranging from descriptions of a search for closure or pursuits of biological ties to a bold reinvention of daily identity and family, the assigned texts offer a moving portrait of a complex process.

HSEM 3070H:  Visual Perceptual Illusions
TTh, 9:45-11:00A.M., 335 Nicholson Hall, 3 credits

Instructor: Sheng He is a professor in the Department of Psychology . His research interests are centered in the psychology department’s Vision and Attention lab, where Professor He and several graduate students are exploring the neural basis of human vision, visual attention, and visual awareness.

Course Description: Humans constantly receive and process a vast amount of sensory input. Among the sensory abilities, vision provides arguably the richest information about our intermediate and distal environment. While visual processing is amazingly efficient and accurate, sometimes what we perceive is different from the physical reality. When this happens, we perceive visual illusions. The study of the conditions under which visual illusions arise and their mechanisms will help us understand how vision normally works. In this course, we will discuss many types of visual illusion and their implications. Students are encouraged to report their own observations and propose possible explanations with the goal of cultivating the habit of careful observations and critical thinking. We will also discuss potential individual and group (including cultural) differences in perceiving visual illusions. Students will be required to write a paper describing one of their own "illusory" observations, and to propose a plausible explanation for the illusion based on principles of visual processing and perception. Coming soon.

HSEM 3080H: (Mis)Representing Africa
W, 4:00-6:30 P.M., 12 Nicholson Hall, 3 credits

Instructor: Charlie Sugnet is a professor in the Department of English. His research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature (especially fiction and film of the African diaspora), creative nonfiction writing, the contemporary novel, and multi-cultural instruction in the high schools.

Course Description: This seminar will start by analyzing some stereotypes of Africa and Africans in literature, in travel writing, in film, in photography, and in museum exhibits, tracing the relationships between power and representation. The bulk of the course, however, will be devoted to examination of postcolonial representations of Africa by Africans, including some West African novels, several African feature films, the recent Africa Remix art exhibit, and a selection of Afropop music and music videos. The seminar will investigate links between changes in the way Africa is represented and changes in political and economic power relations.

HSEM 3110V: Writing and Social Change in America
TTh, 12:45-2:30 P.M., Nicholson Hall 12, 3 credits  

Instructor: Donald Ross a professor of English whose main area of interest is American literature, especially of the nineteenth century. His publications include a co-authored book on Thoreau, articles and chapters on travel writing and the teaching of composition. He has been on the faculty since 1971.

Course Description: In the first half of the seminar, we will develop some of the key issues using examples from the late 18th through the 19th century. These will include Paine's Common Sense, the "Declaration of Independence" and the Constitution and Federalist Papers, Cummins' The Lamplighter (an early best-seller), Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Twain's Tom Sawyer. In addition to reading the texts, students will track down contemporary reactions: book reviews, advertisements, letters and journals, etc. Doing this will help us figure out why and how these texts were targeted to and affected their contemporary audiences.The second half of the seminar will involve students' selecting and reporting on twentieth-century texts. I hope this will produce a wide range of examples, and that students will track down influential texts in their own areas of interest. For example, the student of politics might present Wilson's 14 Points, King's "I have a dream" or letter from Birmingham Jail. The biologist might discuss the Watson-Crick paper on DNA. Literary examples might contrast a respectable yet controversial novels like Catcher in the Rye with a sleazy companion like Peyton Place. We will also investigate the ways that media (TV, movies) interact to create and maintain best selling books.