Honors Colloquia - Fall 2024

Click on a course name to read a description.

All course materials can be purchased at Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers, located at 939 Lexington Avenue.

Course Descriptions

Thinking About Animals

Professor Richard Kaye (English)

HONS 2011Z
Mondays and Wednesdays; 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

The question of what it means to be human lies at the core of Western philosophical and scientific inquiry. As conceptualized in the Western tradition, preeminently in the writing of thinkers such as Aristotle and Descartes, "humanity" typically has been defined in opposition to the animal, which is said to lack the rationality, consciousness, and language that we adduce as the clearest evidence of our difference from beasts. However, recent scientific research has raised fundamental questions regarding the relationship between humans and animals. Drawing on ethical, legal, aesthetic, psychological, religious, and scientific perspectives, the class will consider the relations between animals and humans with special attention to British and American literary representation from the nineteenth century to the present. Students will take up current theoretical debates on animal rights, ecological ethics, and "post-humanist" philosophy.  We will begin with Aristotle's treatise "History of Animals" (a foundational work of the biological and zoological sciences) as well Descartes controversial conception of animals as unthinking machines. The class will then examine Jeremy Bentham's section of his 1789 "The Principles of Morals and Legislation" on the "rights of non-human animals" and then explore sections from Darwin's 1859 "The Origin of Species" and 1871 "The Descent of Man." The class will compare the different attitudes towards animals within the frameworks of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam as well as in the Western secular tradition. We will consider Rudyard Kipling's richly allegorical "The Jungle Book" (1894) and H.G. Wells' fantastical dystopian and anti-vivisectionist "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1896).  Throughout Britain, anti-vivisectionist critiques-many of them articulated by proto-feminist activists and anti-colonial writers--forged a connection between Englishness, egalitarian ideals, kindness to animals, and anti-colonialist politics. Among the twentieth- and twenty-first century writers we will consider are D. H. Lawrence (whose poetry often dealt with the relation between human and non-human animals), Virginia Woolf (who authored a biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog) Norman Mailer (who wrote on Chicago's brutal meat-packing industry), and J. M. Coetzee (who made an animal-rights intellectual and activist the heroine of one of his novels). Recent contemporary debates dealing with animal consciousness, the ethical treatment of animals, the justifiability of zoos, and the rights of non-human creatures will be considered through readings in behavioral science, psychology, religion, philosophy and the law through the writings of Peter Singer, Vickie Hearne, Barbara Hernstein Smith, Sandra Harding, Josephine Donovan, Temple Grandin, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Darnton, Richard Posner, Daniel Dennett, Steven Wise, and Donna Harraway. We will explore four films that meditate on the subject of the animal-human divide: Robert Bresson's 1966 "Au Hazard, Balthazar," Alfred Hitchcock's 1963, "The Birds," Werner Herzog's 2005 "Grizzly Man," and Louie Psihoyos's 2009 documentary "The Cove."

Requirements: a mid-term paper and a final paper.

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Captivity and Freedom

Professor Nicole Eitzen Delgado (English)

HONS 2012Q
Tuesdays and Fridays; 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

What can captivity teach us about the invention of race and ethnicity in the United States and how do captivity narratives offer new visions of freedom for our contemporary moment? Traditionally, scholars have limited the captivity narrative genre to racist and sexist accounts of US Anglo American women (like the famous Mary Rowlandson) needing rescue from so-called Indian savages. And yet, as some scholars have recently demonstrated, most Indian captives were of Indigenous and/or Mexican descent, not Anglo- Americans. This literary bias speaks to a larger trajectory of overrepresenting white captivity and underrepresenting non-white captivity. It also reflects how our modern imaginations continue to be captive to problematic ideas about race, such as who is and is not worthy of rescue, or which types of bodies should be met with fear and suspicion.

To flip the script on captivity narratives, this class investigates practices and representations of non-white captivity from the colonial to the modern eras in the United States. This will include factual and fictional depictions of the following captivities:

• Mexican American captivity by María Ruiz de Burton
• African American slavery by Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Jacobs
• Chinese Indentured labor by Betty G. Yee
• Native American conversion in boarding schools by Francis LaFlesh and Leslie Marmon Silko
• Japanese American internment by John Okada and Monica Sonei
• Muslim Arab American wrongful arrests post 9/11 by Moustafa Bayoumi
• Undocumented Latinix detention by Valeria Luiselli and Javier Zamora

By reading academic essays, historical, and literary materials, students will reflect on the race-making power of captivity. They will also learn about the history of racialized violence and resistance in America, blurring the boundaries between captivity and freedom. Further, by engaging with the demands for freedom within captivity narratives, students will be invited to ask: in a modern society that typically associates agency with mobility, what visions of freedom can we glean from captivity, when cross-racial encounters are bountiful, and movement is radically restricted?

Course requirements:

• 5, 1-page personal reflections
• 4-page midterm essay or creative project
• 10-page final essay or creative project, accompanied by a final presentation

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Ethical Dimensions of Medicine & Public Health

Professor Philip Alcabes (School of Urban Public Health)

HONS 20146
Tuesdays and Thursdays; 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

In this course, we will take up moral problems about the public's health-not the narrow medical-ethics questions around physician-assisted suicide or turning off life, but broad issues.

For example:

• Is it wrong to use CRISPR to treat hereditary illnesses like sickle-cell anemia, knowing that the sickle-cell gene confers some protection against malaria?
• Is it acceptable to use CRISPER-based gene drive to entirely eliminate animal species that threaten humans, like the malaria mosquito?
• May psychiatric units discharge unhoused mentally ill people to the streets, when those people can't pay for their care?
• As artificial reproductive technology allows you to choose the race, sex, height, and likely scholastic aptitude of your offspring, is it right that people should pay more for the ova or sperm of persons with desirable traits (tall, athletic, Ivy-League grads, for instance)?
• If trans-women are prohibited from competing in women's athletic events, is it right to allow cis-women with very high testosterone levels to compete in women's athletic events?

To find perspectives through which we can look at questions like these, we will take up concepts from political and social theorists of the past century, including Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Carol Gilligan, Martha Nussbaum, and others.

The course is a seminar. You will be expected to read, take notes, and share your thoughts in class. You will do some writing and revising. And you will undertake to study one topic deeply enough that you can lead the class for a quarter-hour or so in a discussion of your topic.

Reading:

1. JA Doudna and SH Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018 (paper) ISBN 978-1-328-91536-8.
2. You must be familiar and able to discuss the two seminal moral theories of justice in a liberal society: the one proposed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971) and the capabilities approach proposed by Martha C. Nussbaum in Creating Capabilities (Harvard, 2011). Read these books before the course begins! If you need help making sense of them, look at Section 4 of article on John Rawls and the article on the Capabilities approach in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (revised 2020).
3. Other readings to be assigned in class.

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Narrating Violence in Latin America

Professor Maria Luisa Fischer (Romance Languages, Spanish)
Professor Mary Roldan (History)

HONS 3011A
Wednesdays; 11:30-2:20 p.m.
412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

State-sponsored violence has taken place in several Latin American societies in the twentieth century.  This course examines the contexts and effects of political and social violence in Latin America during the '60s and '70s through the years of democratic transition in the '80s.  What is the legacy of violence and how has it shaped individual and collective notions of citizenship, justice, identity, politics, and history?  What are the causes of violence and how does it operate? How do individuals/nations remember violence and how do those memories shape imagination, a sense of self, interactions with others, and understandings of power? How do societies deal with the aftermath of violence and the need to achieve reconciliation or give voice to the impact of traumatic events of national scope? A central premise of the course is that how violence is narrated matters, constituting a powerful means of resisting oblivion, recuperating memory, or even, perpetuating violence (for instance, when certain acts, memories, or responsibilities are erased.) Narrating violence can be a way of establishing voice, asserting agency, and imbuing seemingly incomprehensible experiences with meaning.  We will explore these issues from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective (literature, history, art) focused on close readings of monographs, memoirs, official documents, novels, poetry, visual arts, and film in countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Colombia.

Course Requirements:
75 pp+ of reading per week. There will be 2-3 short paper assignments (2-3 pages each), one mid-term exam, an oral presentation, and a final paper. A final paper proposal is to be approved by the instructors by mid-April, and an 8-10 page final essay will be due during the examination period in mid-May. 

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The Art of Revolution: Global Perspectives

Professor Jonathan Shannon (Anthropolgy)

Guest Speakers

HONS 3011Y
Mondays and Thursdays; 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

Revolutions take many forms and shapes, from the technological and scientific to the social and political. Because the arts tend to develop in concert with social and political-economic developments, we typically understand the arts as responding to broader social movements. However, we might also ask, Can the arts promote and not only respond to revolutionary social and political change? How do the arts - from music and song to painting, poetry, cinema, and theater - help advance revolutionary social change, or even provoke a social or technological revolution? Another way to think about this is to ask, what are the interrelationships of art, politics, and society?

This seminar explores the role of the arts in revolutionary social movements from the French and Haitian Revolutions, to the 1848 European "bourgeois" revolutions, the Bolshevik and Cuban revolutions, and the recent Arab uprisings. Students will explore how artistic practices in mediums ranging from song and painting to theater and performance art not only reflect revolutionary social and political changes but also promote them. Drawing on a range of theoretical readings on aesthetics and social movements from disciplines including anthropology, art history, literature, musicology, and politics students will develop a critical understanding of the role of art in social change, an analytical grasp of theories of social mobilization, and deeper knowledge of transformative historical moments world history.

Coursework
In addition to weekly readings and in-class discussions, students will write short analytical essays, craft creative responses to readings and artwork, and write and present a final research paper on the arts and revolution in a particular context.

Assessment
     1.  Participation: 10%
     2.  Reading Journal: 20%
     3.  Creative Responses: 10%
     4.  3X Short response papers: 30%
     5.  Analytical Paper: 20%
     6.  Final Presentation: 10%

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Sociology and Memoir

Professor Jessie Daniels (Sociology)

Guest Speakers

HONS 3011Z
Mondays and Thursdays; 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Room: 412HW
3 hours, 3 credits

This course is meant to offer a space for a critical interrogation of our understanding about the ways that racism, gender, sexuality, and class shape our interior worlds through the lens of memoir. In this course, we will read a variety of memoirs by Black, Latinx and Asian American authors who have used memoir to narrate their individual lives in ways that help us better understand them as individual human beings and to grasp the world sociologically. The course covers a range of topics usually covered by sociologists, such as systematic racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and the resistance to these forms of oppression, but offers a more interdisciplinary and artistic approach to these topics.

From The Moth to StoryCorps to documentaries such as "Great Photo, Lovely Life," (2023) stories are ubiquitous in contemporary society and take many forms. Indeed, sociologists have argued that social life is itself "storied"-that we locate ourselves within familiar narrative structures, using them to "construct" identities and "tell" our lives. Stories, in this view, are not only the stuff of literature, but also the very fabric of social life: the foundation for individual and collective identities. This course grapples with the role of stories and storytelling in modern social life, with an intersectional feminist lens on race, gender, sexuality, and class. In the course, we will explore some of the ways that the text-based memoir has shaped these other mediated forms of storytelling, as well as how the written text competes for our attention, and how the written text offers interiority that others lack. Thus, the course is ideal for students who are interested in exploring different forms of storytelling.

SOME MEMOIRS WE WILL READ:

• Anna Qu, Made in China
• Kiese Laymon, Heavy
• Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
• Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
• Brian Broome, Punch Me Up to the Gods

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS:

Each week, students will be required to write a short reading reaction paper (one page). At the midterm, students will write a longer paper that critically analyzes the popularity of a memoir text they select, and placing it in sociological context, addressing the questions: why is this story popular now? and what does this tell us about society? (five pages)

Then, at the end of the term, students will expand and revise their midterm based on feedback. I have designed two class sessions near the end of the term (Week 14), to work with students in class on their revised papers. In the final paper, students will narrate their individual, personal story has been shaped by social, historical, and geopolitical factors. (eight to ten pages).

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Interdisciplinary Independent Study

HONS 30199
3 hours, 3 credits
Hours to be arranged

Students wishing to take this course will need two readers, from different disciplines, one of whom generally should be a member of the Council on Honors. In principle, the Council must approve the subject matter of such a paper before the student can register for the course. This course may be taken only once.

HONS 30199 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

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Advanced Interdisciplinary Study

HONS 49151
6 hours, 6 credits
Hours to be arranged

Upon completion of 90 credits, certified Honors Program students may be admitted by the Council on Honors to Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, with the opportunity of engaging in advanced independent study under the Council's supervision. A project for a thesis or other appropriate report of the results of the student's research is presented to the Council, which must approve it the semester previous to registration. Three sponsors, from at least two departments, one of whom must be a member of the Council on Honors, will supervise the work. The final product must be approved by all three sponsors and the Council.

HONS 49151 cannot replace any of the three required Honors Colloquia.

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