麻豆区

HONR 200-1: Honor Scholar Reading Course (0.25 credits) with Prof. Pauline Ota

Thursday 7:00-8:30 PM

This reading course explores "exemplary objects" in premodern Japan (15th-19th centuries) and examines the role these objects played and continues to play in national identity, diplomacy, transnational trade, politics, art, tourism, marketing, and business.

HONR 200-2: Honor Scholar Reading Course (0.25 credits) with Prof. Victoria Peters

Wednesday 7:00-8:30 PM

Who owns academic knowledge, and who gets to participate in creating it? While the Open Access (OA) movement promised to democratize research, modern corporate publishing models have created new forms of exclusion—shifting costs from reading paywalls to high author publishing fees (APCs). Grounded in Stephen Pinfield’s text, Achieving Global Open Access, this reading course examines how scholarly communication intersects with power, economics, social justice, and technology. From corporate oligopolies and global publishing inequalities to the ethics of commercial AI models scraping open literature, this course equips Honor Scholars to critically evaluate the political economy of research as they prepare to become producers of knowledge themselves.

HONR 200-3: Honor Scholar Reading Course (0.25 credits) with Prof. Matt Maier

Thursday 7:00-8:30 PM

Sport is a powerful crucible in which culture is created and contested. Particularly in North America, sport provides metaphors for our public culture, carries and disseminates our cultural values, organizes our everyday lives, and shapes the very landscapes through which we move and in which we live. This course approaches sport as a way of better understanding culture by encouraging students to engage with sport as a contested space in culture the reinforces the power structures of society while creating opportunities for struggle and social change.

HONR 200-4: Honor Scholar Reading Course (0.25 credits) with Prof. Karin Wimbley

Monday 7:00-8:30 PM

This Honor Scholar reading course interrogates Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s 2016 visual album Lemonade through the lens of Kinitra D. Brooks and Kameelah L. Martin’s The Lemonade Reader. Structured around the visual album's narrative arc—from betrayal to reconciliation—the course treats Lemonade as an interdisciplinary text bridging cinema, music, literature, history, and social theory. Grounded in the scholarly essays of The Lemonade Reader, students will examine Black feminist epistemologies, Southern Gothic visual rhetoric, genre fluidity across blues and country, syncretic spiritualities, and the politics of historical memory. Through weekly 90-minute seminars, students synthesize methods from literary analysis, visual culture, ethnomusicology, and religious studies to evaluate how popular culture serves as a site of rigorous theoretical production.

HONR 200-5: Honor Scholar Reading Course (0.25 credits) with Prof. May Phang

Monday 7:00-8:30 PM

The transformative power of music has been widely acknowledged. It calms, soothes, yet can also energize and agitate. But how and why? The ancient Greeks had already acknowledged the influence art and music have on the human mind, soul and behaviour. Scientific research utilizing EEG, structural and functional MRI, has proven that musical experience does alter brain function and even structure, affecting a wide circuit including emotion, sensory-motoric, cognition, memory, language processing. Music therapy, while still not as accessible as physical and occupational therapy, has had positive track records on neurological rehabilitation, pain management, stress and anxiety management. Music, with its ability to literally change our brains, our biological control centers, therefore indeed does have a profound impact on our lives. Understanding more about that process can significantly benefit our health and well-being, perhaps even effecting positive change in society at large. Oliver Sacks Musicophilia will provide the starting point to our exploration into the fascinating connection between music and the brain.

HONR 200-6: Honor Scholar Reading Course (0.25 credits) with Prof. Jake Shaw

Tuesday 7:00-8:30 PM

Why did the United States develop such an expansive system of incarceration and punishment? Why has this system proven so difficult to change? Using Marie Gottschalk's Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, this course examines the historical development and political durability of the American carceral state. Students will explore the relationships among punishment, race, political institutions, inequality, citizenship, and democracy while considering how institutions created in one political era shape the possibilities of reform in another. Recent scholarship on decarceration, sentencing reform, political participation, and immigration enforcement will allow students to assess how the carceral state has changed since Gottschalk's book was published and to consider a broader question: once powerful political institutions have developed, how can they be transformed?

HONR 200-7: Honor Scholar Reading Course (0.25 credits) with Prof. Brian Wright

Tuesday 7:00-8:30 PM

This course will explore the structural realities of high-level performance in sport through the perspective of power structures, institutional ethics, and interpersonal interactions. Using Kara Goucher and Mary Pilon’s, The Longest Race as our text, students will examine a narrative through the dark intersections of sponsorship, abuse, and regulatory oversight on the journey from national collegiate success into the world of highly financed athletic development. Through weekly reflections and student-led discussions, the course will interrogate the ethics of sport governance, the courage of whistleblowers, and how female athletes are redefining labor rights and justice in athletics. Please note, the text we will use for this course does contain material describing physical and psychological abuse that may cause distress. The instructor would like all students to be aware of this prior to enrolling in the course.

HONR 300A-1: Arts & Humanities Seminar with Prof. Karin Wimbley

Mon/Wed 2:20-3:50 PM and Tues 7:00-9:00 PM (film screening)

This honors seminar examines horror, science fiction, and Afrofuturism across the Black Diaspora, positioning fear and the supernatural film not as escapism, but as vital tools for survival and critique. We will analyze how Black filmmakers globally use horror tropes—monsters, hauntings, body terror, and cosmic dread—to confront the real-world terrors of historical trauma, racial capitalism, gentrification, and colonial violence. By tracking how Black directors reinvent the mechanics of terror, we explore how cinematic fear maps "haunted landscapes"—physical and psychological spaces where history refuses to stay buried. Through close film analysis, students will examine how horror and speculative cinema interrogate the lived experiences of African and African-descended peoples, ponder existential questions of life, death, and spiritual persistence, and disrupt static notions of Black identity. Films include Jordan Peele’s Get Out (US, 2017), Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (US, 2021), Mati Diop’s Atlantics (Senegal, 2019), Mbithi Masya’s Kati Kati (Kenya/Germany, 2016), and Jean Luc Herbulot’s Saloum (Senegal, 2021).

HONR 300A-2: Arts & Humanities Area Seminar with Prof. Kevin Brophy

Tues/Thurs 2:20-3:50 PM

The historical underpinnings of Artificial Intelligence are rooted in the Humanities, with the first automatons attributed to philosophers and artists. In modernity, technologists celebrated the “AI Boom” and survived the “AI Winter,” while artists and designers implemented algorithmic AI in works that both aggrandized and critiqued the emerging technology. Over the past ten years, through deep learning facilitated by an ethically dubious influx of consumer data from social media corporations, generative AI has seen exponential growth. Today, digital artists and designers find themselves in an uncomfortable cohort of technologists who must reckon with the capabilities, biases, and limitations of AI.

This course focuses on the contemporary moment (2014-present) through readings on AI art criticism and posthumanism through the lens of both philosophy and computer science, putting these texts in relation to projects by cultural producers, including digital artists, speculative designers, and creative technologists. Students will gain an in-depth understanding of how AI is changing specific creative and scientific fields of study, while considering the (immediate and better) future of these fields in a way that is both pragmatic and necessarily critical. What might a future look like that no longer centers the human experience? Does it require collaboration between humans and AI? Or contradiction? Both? How might we subvert the worst possibilities? Through creative and scientific collaboration? Contradiction? Or, both? Students will engage with these ideas through both written and creative project responses throughout the semester.

HONR 300B-3: Science and Math Area Seminar with Prof. Nipun Chopra

Wednesday 12:30-3:20 PM

What can movies teach us about the brain—and what do they get wrong? This course uses popular and international films to explore how the brain shapes memory, emotion, perception, behavior, and identity. Through films such as Memento, Awakenings, Limitless, and After Life, students will examine topics including memory loss, neurological and psychiatric disorders, cognitive enhancement, and consciousness. No prior neuroscience coursework is required. Students will pair films with accessible readings, participate in discussion, and write short reflections connecting neuroscience to ethical, cultural, and societal questions. The course emphasizes curiosity and critical thinking.

HONR 300B-4: Science and Math Area Seminar with Prof. Allana Johnson

Mon/Wed/Fri 10:20-11:20 AM

This seminar offers a critique of modern digital life and requires no prior computer science background or technical experience. Designed for scholars across all majors, the course focuses on the ethical responsibilities of app designers and software developers, as well as the psychological impacts of everyday technology. The course centers on an evaluation of two primary lenses: Sherry Turkle’s seminal text Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other and the speculative media critiques of Black Mirror.

Together, we will analyze how application and platform rules, recommendation algorithms, and user interface designs directly trigger psychological reactions and shape human behavior. Honors scholars will interrogate "the Black Mirror effect," examining the thin line between contemporary app design and dystopian social reality. Through writing assignments, platform audits, and design interventions, students will critique the ethical implications of emerging technology and evaluate what it means to preserve genuine human connection in an automated world.

HONR 300C-1: Social Science Area Seminar (S-Competency) with Prof. Amy Sojot

Tues/Thur 12:40-2:10 PM

The term 'political economy' refers to the fusion of the interests of political and economic elites. The course establishes an economic context for the analysis of current reform initiatives and investigates claims in the literature and in policy about the performance of schools and the privileging of training over education. Examines the claim that economic imperatives have shaped and re-named the world, including the school, and have turned education into a production process.

HONR300C-2: Social Science Area Seminar with Professor Leigh-Anne Goins

Mon/Wed 12:20-3:50 PM

This course focuses on contemporary feminist thought. Throughout the semester, students emphasize the relationship between feminist theory and feminist practice and ways in which feminism changes our fundamental understanding of the world.

HONR 300CW-1: Social Science Area Seminar (W-Competency) with Prof. Amity Reading

Tues/Thurs 12:40-2:10 PM

We can study languages (like Spanish, German, or Chinese); we can study the theoretical framework of language as language (linguistics); and we can study the social science of applied linguistics, which examines how we actually use language in the world. As a field, applied linguistics is incredibly broad and encompasses everything from large language models and generative AI to courtroom lie detection to anti-racist linguistic activism. This course will begin with a brief introduction to the general field of linguistics (no prerequisite knowledge required), followed by a series of case studies that will introduce students to key areas of new and emerging applied linguistics, including sociolinguistics, forensic and legal linguistics, psycholinguistics, language learning and language pedagogy, discourse analysis, linguistic justice, corpus analysis, and language and technology.