Honors Program, WWU

Honors 350 CRN 40353

TR 1300-1420

Dr. Anne Marie Tietjen, Psychology

In this course we will explore the concepts of mental health and mental illness in the contxt of their historical and cultural circumstances and their relation to developments in psychology, anthropology, and medical science.  The course will focus on a number of key ideas including social construction, culture, and some of the major ongoing issues in psychology such as the relationship of body and mind, the influences of nature and nurture, and the contributions of theory and practice to understanding human behavior.  We will also consider approaches to healing in historical and cultural perspective.

Honors 351 CRN 40354

T 1700-1950

Dr. Nancy Pagh, English

Memoir is a form of life-writing that places the writer-and through imagination, the reader-in a specific social and historical context. Not just an interesting narrative about one person’s life, memoir is a gesture of meaning making, built from the urge to witness, to reflect, to confess, to understand, and to shape the world. In this class we will examine a handful of memoirs composed in different geographical and cultural landscapes of the late 20th Century (including Cuba, Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia, Canada, and the USA). These memoirists are all poets, all highly talented wordsmiths dedicated to the power and beauty of speaking their truth with precision, honesty and grace. Each of these authors treats the genre of memoir differently in style and tone, and each is concerned with personal themes within a larger cultural context. These themes include sexual identity, substance abuse and recovery, political persecution and war, coming of age and family, surviving loss and grief, the role of art in the world, and the life of an artist. Class meetings will focus on careful discussion of assigned texts and contexts, prompted by questions and by writing prompts to encourage both emulation and analytical engagement.

Honors 356 CRN 43831

MWF 1100-1150

Dr. Patrick Buckley, Environment Studies

Energy is the lifeblood of the modern industrial economy, hovering at around 8% of US GDP for the last half century, only labor is a larger non-capital input by valuation into our economic well being. As oil production inevitably peaks while developing economies cast avaricious eyes on the 24% of production currently being funneled into the US, major changes are in store as the world seeks sustainable, cost efficient, and an environmentally clean mix of sources.  This course looks at this issue from a geopolitical viewpoint.  It begins with an overview of current and projected supply of and demand for energy sources and peaking behavior not only in oil but eventually in other non-renewable sources.  Using this as the background we then explore not only the consequences for energy consumers but also the impact on exporting nations, politically, socially, and environmentally as well as economically.  Then turning to the future that is up until the midpoint of the century, we will investigate possible solutions that are currently on the drawing boards realizing that short of a miraculous break through, carbon based fuels will continue to do much of the heavy lifting during this time period.  This discussion involves both what is available and what seems most reasonable, especially with climate change potential.  Finally, we ask the quest of ingenuity, if change is inevitable, what must we expect from our global society?

Honors 352 CRN 10620

MWF 1300-1350

Dr. Cornelius Partsch, Modern and Classical Languages

The course takes its starting point from a seemingly undeniable fact:  crime, criminals, violence, victimization, detection, and various forms of punishment are ubiquitous in contemporary cultural production.  These representations of human suffering, criminal pathology, social disruption,, and moral conflict appear incessantly and spectacularly on cinema and television screens and in bookstores, both in their fictional and “true” imprints, and therefore significantly inform the cultural frame of reference of today’s students.  This course provides a framework in which students may engage in a dialogue between their own context and a number of seminal texts on the topic by presenting a genealogical overview tracing the multifaceted and ever-changing discourses that have shaped and modulated the categories of “crime” and punishment” from the late Middle Ages to the present.  The class will also examine how these categories have been imagined, symbolized, appropriated, controlled, and disseminated and how they continue to inform today’s debates as well as political strategy and policy.  The seminar, will, moreover, address and survey the “crime complex’ from a number of different angles and in different modes, exposing students to different ways of reading the texts, practices, signs, or events under investigation.

Honors 353 CRN 12264

TR 1100-1220

Dr. Jennifer Seltz, Environmental Studies

This seminar will examine the uses and meanings of energy-whether derived from fossil fuels, water, animals, or atoms—in American society and to American environments over the pas 400 years.  It will focus on the changing interactions among energy use, political economy, and culture, and on explaining some of the major causes and consequences of the shifts from preindustrial to industrial energy production.  The class will begin with the human-, animal-, and wood-powered world of early America; discuss the emergence of the concept of energy itself as a key idea in the nineteenth century; and then examine the successive and overlapping waves of technological, political, and economic change which made water, coal, and oil sources of power and which drew nearly all Americans and most American places into global networks of energy production and consumption.  By the end of the course, students should be able to construct a coherent history of energy and environmental change in the United States and understand the historical roots of contemporary political contests over energy and policy choices and contemporary narratives of energy abundance and scarcity.

Honors 357 CRN 13739

MWF 1100-1150

Dr. Nicholas Margaritis, English Department

This is an intensive study of the entirety of Dante's works: not just the tripartite Commedia, his great masterpiece, but his other writings, both poetry and prose.

Honors 354 CRN 22213

TR 1400-1520

Dr. James Hearne, Computer Science

This course is a rigorous treatment of techniques naturally brought to bear in evaluating non-deductive arguments to explanations, predictions and recommendations.  The point of view will be both theoretical and practical, i.e., the course will address both a theory of reasoning and will provide and occasion for energetic practice in its application.  The account of non-deductive reasoning will segue naturally into a treatment of quantitative methods and their applications.  It is important to note that the vocabulary used to describe the subject-matter of this seminar coincides with that of courses often found under the heading of “critical thinking” that are often included in general education curricula.  This seminar should not be confounded with such offerings.  It differs both in the philosophical literature it is organized around and its level of rigor.  It also differs in concerns that fall far outside traditional courses in reasoning.  For example, in order to develop a better understanding the whole enterprise of improving human reasoning and understanding, the class will include a treatment of seventeenth century attempts to improve human reasoning and communication through the development of artificial languages.

Honors 355 CRN 22214

TR 1500-1620

Dr. George Mariz, History &  Dr. Tom Moore, Liberal Studies

While Freud suggested the Romantic poets were the true discoverers of the unconscious, there is considerable evidence that traces the existence of this aspect of human nature back to St. Augustine and, before him, the Greek cult of Dionysius (The Bacchae). For our purposes, however, we will focus primarily on modernist expressions of this phenomenon, first looking at selected works of Dostoyevsky, Sorel, Freud and Arendt, and second, turning our attention to the contemporary world. Here we will examine manifestations of state-supported and free-lance terrorism as seen in films (State of Siege, The Dancer Upstairs) and in the Badder-Meinhoff phenomenon (Germany). Violence does seem to be a rather constant tenant of our psyche and we hope through this seminar to gain a better understanding of his habits and appetites.