Sustainability Courses

Starting roughly with the aftermath of WWI and culminating with the post-9/11 moment, this course examines the literary and artistic responses to technological modernity, historical trauma, and the rise of global capital. We will consider how artists and writers engage crucial forces that structure our world today through a variety of techniques, practices and media. Students will encounter: aesthetic fragmentation and Dadaist absurdity; the stream-of-consciousness novel and the Surrealist monta...

Read more about HONR-2130 : Representation and Culture

Significant shifts in political and economic systems invite resistance in various forms, and yet many who dare to speak truth to power or express subversive points of view are silenced and/or persecuted. This course will examine various literatures that were considered subversive, dangerous, or in violation of dominant doctrines of a particular time and place. We will explore the contexts that influenced writers to engage in literary acts of resistance, and we will consider why and how writers s...

Read more about HONR-2160 : Literatures of Resistance

This seminar develops the essential skills of effective argumentative writing on policy or other significant social issues within the social sphere. It provides a study of the rhetoric of public debate that emphasizes writing for diverse audiences, marshaling evidence for strong persuasion, constructing logical arguments, and appealing to an audience's sympathies and reason. Consideration also will be given to the genres of public discourse and the development of a flexible prose style that can ...

Read more about HONR-2180 : Rhetoric for Public Debate

This course will explore significant and selected developments in European culture and society from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution. The approach will be one that seeks to discern the interconnections and tensions between the social, cultural, economic, scientific, technological, and political spheres that marked the transformation of Europe from the fifteenth century through the seventeenth century.

Read more about HONR-2210 : Early Modern Culture

The first part of this course will compare the revolutions in England, France and the Atlantic World in the 17th and 18th centuries order to critique theories of revolution that have long dominated the discourse about these events. With this theoretical underpinning this course will then examine case studies of revolutionary responses to industrialization, political underrepresentation and colonialism in the 19th century. This course concludes with an examination of the extent to which the Russi...

Read more about HONR-2220 : History of Revolutions

Beginning with the theological, social and political unrest that resulted in the religious upheavals known as the Reformation this course will trace how these movements led to the political, cultural and intellectual revolutions of the 17th and 18th Century. In the first part of the course special attention will be given to the early history of the Jesuits and what this history tells us about the global impact of these religious upheavals. The second part of the course will compare revolutions i...

Read more about HONR-2240 : Revolution and Rebellion

This course will focus on one of the major problems afflicting the modern world - the widespread violation of human rights. The first part will examine the theoretical evolution and general history of the idea of human rights. We will consider the problem of human rights from historical, legal, philosophical, and theological perspectives and explore the nature of different types of human rights - including political rights, socioeconomic rights, women's rights, indigenous rights, workers' rights...

Read more about HONR-2250 : Human Rights in Modern World

This seminar examines the emergence of modern science in the 19th century and Big Science institutional global impact in the 20th century. It will include the study of animal electricity, natural history, and biological energetics leads to profound advances in understanding of life and the universe through the writings of Faraday, Darwin, Rutherford, and Einstein. Multidisciplinary, the seminar will feature a combination of biology, chemistry, physics, and earth science.

Read more about HONR-2310 : Electricity, Energy, Evolution

This course provides an introduction to the statistical methods that help inform decision makers and the public when considering public policy. The emphasis of this class is on application. Students will work with raw data related to the quarter's theme. Students will also be introduced to computer applications used to generate statistical results. Topics include: descriptive statistics, probability, random variables, estimation, hypothesis testing, and regression.

Read more about HONR-2360 : Statistics for Policy Analysis

This course investigates a 20th /21st -century response to the Enlightenment ideas of freedom and rational autonomy. This response focuses on the rise of a class of questions that relate to ideas of the self, identity and community within society and society's institutions. Particular attention is paid to the effects of modernization and globalization. Authors covered include such thinkers as Dewey, Du Bois, Freud, Levinas, Mead, Foucault, Nussbaum and Rawls.

Read more about HONR-2520 : Modern Self and Global Society