Previously Offered Honors Seminars
2006 - 2007
Imagining Egypt in Antiquity
Instructor: Eric Casey MW 2:30 – 3:45
This class will take a twofold approach to ancient Egypt mixing history and myth. We will begin by learning about the history, literature, and culture of Egypt with a focus on the last several hundred years before the Roman conquest. We will then use literary and historical sources to investigate how the Greeks and Romans envisioned Egypt. Sources will include Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, and Apuleius. Topics will include Alexander the Great, the Ptolemy dynasty, the great library at Alexandria, and the famous Cleopatra. We will conclude with the place of Egypt in the cultural imagination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
More than Meets the Eye
Instructor: Rebecca Massie Lane TTh 2:45 – 4:00
Using works of art from the Sweet Briar College Anne Gary Pannell Art Gallery permanent collection, students will research and write about original works of art using the forms of descriptive, interpretive, and critical writing. Students will read from documentary, scholarly, and critical sources, and will seek out and view comparable works of art from other museum collections.
Eating, Sex, Pleasure in Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Film
Instructor: Alice McLean MW 2:30 – 3:45
Because psychological, physical, and social appetites are mutually constructed, what we desire and how we go about satisfying our hunger not only speaks volumes about ourselves but also about the social and political environment within which we operate. By exploring how embodied pleasures nourish subjectivity and social identity, this course will encourage students to reflect on their own appetites and on what these appetites express about themselves as individuals and their place in society. This course will examine the relationship between the pleasures of eating and sex. A few of the questions we will consider: How does food stimulate erotic desire? How does lust determine how and what we eat? What transforms desire into disgust, pleasure into pain? To answer these questions, we will explore fiction, nonfiction, and film.
On Monsters
Instructor: Cathy Gutierrez MW 2:30 - 3:45
This course will trace the history of the monster in the West, from Greek chimera to contemporary genetic mutations in laboratories. We will contemplate the monster as cultural products of other societies or peoples, as threats to our well-being, as the products of discovery of new species, and finally as a subset of people in the carnival freak show. We will examine a variety of genres from Classical mythology to contemporary television to ponder the function of monsters for a given society and how the idea of the monstrous encourages the acquisition of new knowledge.
European Women Film Directors
Instructor: Marie-Therese Killiam MW 1:30 - 3:20
This course will examine European Women Film directors in regards to their specific contribution to the cinematographic genre. We will look at various women’s political, social and emotional agendas, and how their films differ from contemporary male film directors. We will discuss French, British, German, Spanish and Italian film makers as well as some female emigrants’ recent works. Students will learn to view the films in a professionally critical manner and will study if and how women show a different creative expression of their own apprehension of reality. Students will analyze the specificities of women’s approaches to all kinds of issues, from class distinctions to class discriminations, and from family desire to family restrictions.
Eating Bodies, Consuming Cultures
Instructor: Alice McLean MW 2:30 - 3:45
From communion to cannibalism, from excess to asceticism, how we eat and what we eat speak volumes about cultural ideals as well as anxieties. This course will examine a range of eating practices to illuminate how modes of consumption determine individual and social bodies. It will also examine how identities (individual and cultural) are affirmed, denied, and reconfigured through the act of consumption—both literal and metaphoric. We will work to define the following terms: the civilizing appetite, culinary colonialism, cannibalism, communion, culinary tourism, fast food, Slow Food, and vegetarianism. In addition to a fiction, non-fiction, and film, we will read essays culled from a range of academic fields: anthropology, ethnic studies, folklore, gender studies, history, literary studies, and psychology. Using food as the grounding metaphor, this interdisciplinary course will enable students to investigate modes of consumption that differ dramatically from their own.
2005 - 2006
HNRS 229 - Sovereignty, Globalization, and the Coming Politics
Instructor: Matthew Calarco
in an era of globalization with respect to space and time. In particular, students will examine the eclipse of old forms of sovereignty and the rise of new forms of global power and resistance in an era of increased globalization. This course may be counted toward the major in philosophy. V7
HNRS 231- History of the Interior
Instructor: Christian Carr
This course presents the history of the domestic interior from classical antiquity through the Renaissance and into the modern era, covering styles such as Rococo, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Reform and Aestheticism, Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and Modernism. The focus will be an exploration of the ways in which furniture, decorative arts, and interior architecture function as a domestic expression of historical developments. Students will be required to pay a $100 fee toward expenses for a field trip to New York tentatively scheduled for October. V6a
HNRS 232 - Epic Novel in Contemporary World Literature
Instructor: John Gregory Brown
This course will examine the evocation of time and place in a number of epic 20th-century novels from around the world: Bernardo Atxaga's "Obabakoak," Maryse Conde's "Segu," Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Kazuo Isiguro's "The Unconsoled," and Ben Okri's "The Famished Road." We will consider the literary devices these writers employ in such lengthy narratives as well as the historical, political, and cultural issues that inform these works and the differences, if any, between the real and imaginary settings of these novels. This course may be counted as a 200-level course toward the majors in English and English and creative writing.
HNRS 233 - Animal Minds
Instructor: Roberta Sadler
A seminar exploring current research in the field of cognitive ethology, looking at perceptual, memory, thought, and emotional processes of animals in their ecological context and entertaining questions about animal consciousness and intentionality. Discussion of selected readings from animal cognition, behavioral ecology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of science.
HNRS 234 - Reading and Writing about the Natural World
Instructor: Marcia Robertson
"Nature Writing" combines both the subjective and objective; it often combines the systematic observation and patterns of explanation associated with the natural sciences and the attention to voice and form associated with literary writing. This course will focus on combining these practices and will introduce students to significant works about the natural world. This course may be counted as a 200-level creative writing course toward the majors in English and English and creative writing. V6b
HNRS 235 - Eating Language
Instructor: Alice McLean
Reading novels ranging from Upton Sinclair's "Jungle" to Monique Truong's "Book of Salt" alongside cookbooks and culinary memoirs, we will explore a few of the ways that food nourished the twentieth-century imagination. Topics of exploration include the gendering of food and appetite, the capacity of language to nourish psychological and physical hungers, and the aesthetics of sensual pleasure. V2
HNRS 303 - Advanced Spectroscopy
Instructor: John Beck
This course will provide students with increased knowledge in the area of spectroscopic analyses of organic molecules using 1D and 2D Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectra, fragmentation patterns of mass spectra, and infrared (IR) spectroscopy. Students will also be introduced to the theory of NMR data acquisition and how it pertains to germane experiments.
HNRS 399 (3) - Summer Honors Research
Projects are undertaken and completed over eight weeks in the early summer. The student and her faculty sponsor together determine what the student will produce as the culmination of her research project. At the end of the program each student must turn in to the Honors Program and to her faculty sponsor the final product of her research project. The research papers will be published in a special issue of the Honors Journal. This course is graded on a P/CR/NC grading option only.
2004 - 2005
HNRS 213 - Mathematics of Chaos
Dr. Steve Wassell
HNRS 221 - Subverting the Francoist Order: Spanish Literature in Translation: 1960-1975
Dr. Pamela DeWeese
HNRS 223 - Building Order in a Chaotic World: Medieval Pilgrimage Architecture and Ritual
Dr. Tracy Hamilton
HNRS 225 - Jazz Studies
Dr. Rebecca McNutt
HNRS 227 - Diplomatics: American Cultural Negotiations
Dr.
Martha Elena Rojas
HNRS 230 - Self-Improvement, Self- Control: Narratives of Reform in U.S. Literature
Dr. Martha Elena Rojas
HNRS 224 - From Joan of Arc to Napoleon: France’s Heroes in Art and Literature
Dr. Marie-Therese Killiam
HNRS 226 - Time in Western Civilization
Dr. Lee Piepho
2003 - 2004
HNRS 215- Contemporary International Writers
Prof. John Gregory Brown
HNRS 216 - The Art Market
Prof. Christian Carr
HNRS 121 - Women, Sport and Film: Images and Values
Prof. Jennifer Crispen
HNRS 217 - The Medieval City
Prof. Tracy Chapman Hamilton
HNRS 219 - Faking It: Impostors & Counterfeits in U.S. Literature
Prof. Martha Elena Rojas
HNRS 218 - From Montgomery to Watergate: The Long 60s in America
Prof. Michael Richards
HNRS 222 - At Sea: Ocean Voyages and the Literary Imagination
Prof. Martha Elena Rojas
HNRS 220 – Science and Pseudoscience
Prof. Ellen Rosenshein
HNRS 302 - Women, Law and "Family Values": A Comparative Perspective
Profs. Judith Evans-Grubbs and Lynn Laufenberg
2002 - 2003
HNRS 185 - History of Photography
Prof. Paige Critcher
HNRS 005 - Isn't Love Strange?: Examining Love in Different Cultures
Prof. Deborah Durham
Section I - MW 1:30 - 2:45 (open to 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students)
Section II - TR 9:00 - 10:15 (this section reserved for first year students)
HNRS 183 - Opera as a Reflection of History and Culture
Prof. Allen Huszti
HNRS 169 - The Ebony Column: Classics and the African American Literary Tradition
Prof. Ashley Hairston
HNRS 187 - Visual Memory in the Medieval World
Prof. Tracy Hamilton, Department of Art History
HNRS 214 - Constructing Our Lives: Psychological Accounts of Memory
Prof. Susan Beers
HNRS 186 - Landscape and Memory
Prof. Deborah Durham
HNRS 212 - The Artist's Book
Profs. Laura Pharis and John Morgan
HNRS 188 - Science and Nature Writers
Profs. Jennifer Brice and Linda Fink
HNRS 184 - Rings, Wands and Wonders: Children's and Fantasy Literature in American Popular Culture
Prof. Ashley Hairston
