Honors Program Course Descriptions Fall Colloquia

Transcription

1 Honors Program Course Descriptions Fall 2018 Important notes to consider when registering for courses: Honors Colloquia = Only HNRS 300 level courses satisfies the colloquium/colloquia graduation requirement. HNRS 301 SECTIONS = HUMANITIES HNRS 301 SECTIONS = ART & CREATIVITY HNRS 302 SECTIONS = SOCIETY AND CULTURE HNRS 302 SECTIONS = SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY HNRS T480 courses do not satisfy the colloquium/colloquia graduation requirement but do count toward Honors credit. Colloquia HNRS Arthur Miller and the American Dream Instructor: Paula Marantz Cohen Wednesday 2:00-4:50 Description: Miller was America s most influential 20 th century playwright. His plays are still performed world-wide and still powerfully affect audiences and readers. We will discuss how Miller both reinforced and critiqued the myth of the American dream of success, exploring how this myth has been extrapolated in the 21 st century. HNRS Mars and Venus at the Movies: Men and Women Behind the Camera and in Front of the Screen Instructor: Carrie Rickey Friday 10:00-12:50 In the 1970s art historians looked hard at paintings and saw that male painters such as Goya frame women as sexual objects while female painters such as Mary Cassatt frame them as social subjects. In the 1990s sociolinguists listened hard to spouses and business colleagues in conversation. They heard men speak a language of status and independence and women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy. Before many of these efforts exploring whether

2 modes of communication and perception are perhaps gender-linked, film theorist Laura Mulvey proposed that classical Hollywood movies presumed that the spectator of the film was male and the spectacle female. She called this The Male Gaze. This course will test, and update, Mulvey s theory by comparing and contrasting similarlythemed films by male and female directors. Students will parse different elements of moviemaking from editing and average-shot duration to framing and point-of-view to explore whether the filmmaking is gender-linked. HNRS Defiance Instructor: Gregory Cooke Monday 10:00-12:50 The resistance against oppression, in any context, reveals the primal need of the human Spirit to be free. This course examines how film portrays individual and collective resistance in the context of character, structure, theme, and plot, and how these elements combine to create, in some cases, all-time classic movies. The films, individually and collectively, raise a variety of moral, social, and political issues. HNRS Photography and the City Instructor: Brent Luvaas Tuesday and Thursday 2:00-3:20 Paris. New York. Tokyo. Philadelphia. These are all modern metropolises that never looked at themselves the same way after the invention of the camera in the midnineteenth century. Photography and the industrialized city developed in tandem, the former supplying the visual and conceptual models through which the latter was planned and built. This course examines the role that photography has played in the way we imagine, move through, and construct the cities we live in. The first part of the course will be a history of urban photography. Students will survey the street, portrait, and urban landscape photographers who helped create the image of the modern city. They will also learn to analyze the work of these photographers through a critical, aesthetic, and social theoretical lens. The second part of the course will be a hands-on introduction to the photographic techniques of today s urban photographers, with a special emphasis on candid street photography and posed street style photography. Students will go out onto the streets of Philadelphia, camera in hand, and discover for themselves how photography transforms the way they see and experience their city.

3 HNRS Fashion as Material Culture Instructors: Joe Hancock and Jennifer Ayres Thursday 2:00-4:50 Location: Check Term Master Schedule Fashion reflects contemporary culture and is a key ingredient for forming our identities. Social scientists have become increasingly interested in theories of fashion, but have rarely directly addressed the material qualities of clothing. By contrast, traditional studies of dress have focused on textiles but often neglect the larger cultural context within which dress becomes consumed as clothing and is made meaningful. In this class students will address the gap by combining these two disciplines through an expressly material culture approach to clothing in order to understand the impact that clothing has on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, and other areas of social and cultural identity. HNRS First Steps to Citizen Advocacy Instructor: Ana Nye Tuesday and Thursday 5:00-6:20 Location: Check Term Master Schedule This course gives an introduction to volunteer-based grassroots advocacy work. In the first half of the term, students will engage with case studies to learn about three critical advocacy movements across areas of environmental sustainability, labor rights, and global public health and then analyze key congressional bills associated with these issues. The second half of the term will be dedicated to hands-on skill-building workshops. These lessons are based off of data collected by the Congressional Management Foundation, as well as the tried-and-true strategies utilized by effective citizen lobbying organizations like RESULTS and Indivisible. Students (working with an issue of their choice) complete advocacy actions such as: planning a face-to-face meeting with a member of Congress, writing a Letter-to-the-Editor for a local newspaper, and mapping coalitions with community partners. HNRS Eyewitnesses to World History Instructor: Thomas Ricks Tuesday 6:00-8:50 This course is an investigation into the historical authenticity of five eyewitness accounts of major world historical events, and the global impact of the account from 1896 Sudan, 1911 Persia, 1919 Palestine, China, and 1936 Spain. The course will examine the social, cultural and political events behind each event as

4 reported and not reported by British, Lebanese, and American investigatory journalists, historians, and diplomats. The course is interested in the ways the eyewitness saw the event, the ways in which the eyewitness reported the event, and the ways that the social and cultural events of the day contributed to the telling of these events as an historical record. HNRS Truth and Beauty: Math in Literature Instructor: Marion Cohen Monday 1:00-3:50 Throughout history math has been an inspiration to writers. Two examples are Lewis Carroll s Alice in Wonderland and Alex Kasman s fiction collection Reality Conditions. Math itself is a major expression of the mysteries, beauty, and truth of our universe; literature about math enhances this expression. Just as science has led to science fiction, so math has led to something analogous. This course will explore some mathematical writings through the ages and the math that inspired them, as well as the ways in which reading these writings might shed light on our own lives and experiences. Luminary Courses These courses are Honors colloquia designed specifically for students in the Luminary program. Honors students can apply to the Luminary program at any time. Luminary students are given priority to take these courses, and if seats remain, they are open to any Honors student. Since these are 300-level courses, they count toward the colloquium/colloquia requirement for graduation with Honors or Honors with Distinction. HNRS Luminary: Art and Creativity Theater, Film, and the Body Politic Instructor: William di Canzio Thursday 10:00-12:50 A survey of plays and movies that reveal stories of the nations through the lives of their characters, often exposing disease in the social order, sometimes suggesting a cure. Our texts will be both classical and contemporary, with a creative-writing option for the final project.

5 HNRS Luminary: Scientific Inquiry - Biography and Experimental Science Instructor: Lloyd Ackert Wednesday 6:00-8:50 Biography is a powerful and flexible method for exploring the history of science. In this course we will use a series of biographies to explore the creative process in science, with a special focus on experiment. Using the Lives of some of its most influential practitioners e.g. Galileo, Lavoisier Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein, and McClintock we will survey the scientific revolution. Drawing on a variety of biographical materials monographs, films, and historical databases and original scientific publications, we will examine the role of experiment in the development of scientific ideas. Crucial to this history is personality and how it defined the scientists approach to investigation and their relationship to their social, cultural, and political contexts. At the heart of this course are the contributions each scientist made to their respective scientific fields through their research notes and publications, and the materials, such as glassware, microscopes, and experimental organisms. Biographies are written for a broad range of purposes and come in a wide variety of styles, thus we will encounter psychological, hagiographic, scientific, and feminist treatments of major personalities in the history of modern science. Great Works HNRS T The Warmth of Other Suns Instructor: Tasha Gardner Monday 5:00-5:50 1 credit This course will examine The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. The epic story is about the Great Migration that took place from , a period where many blacks left the Jim Crow south for destinations in the northern and western parts of the United States. We will discuss the paths of the three individuals highlighted in the story, as well as, explore the impact the Great Migration had on America, then and now, through video, and observations about Philadelphia.