Honors Program, WWU

Honors 350 CRN 40180

TR 1400-1520

Dr. Wayne Landis

This course examines the influence of culture and human experience on scientific discovery and the corresponding effect of discovery upon culture using the vehicle of the work of Charles Darwin. The initial portion of the class will look closely at Darwin's life prior to 1859 and the publication of The Origin of the Species, focusing particularly on the relationship among Darwin, A. R. Wallace, T. H. Huxley, and Joseph Hooker, three scientists with whom he was in close communication during the time he was researching and writing the Origin. The second portion of the class will explore the social impact of the Origin and its companion The Descent of Man (1871). Students will prepare papers on a variety of topics and present them in class for discussion.

Honors 352 CRN 43827

MW 1500-1620

Dr. Sean Murphy

In this seminar, we approach the cultural history of Eros through the analysis and interpretation of a series of sources from the first century BCE to the fourteenth century CE. Eros in the cultural history of ancient and medieval Europe is, like the god described by Augustine in his Confessions (c. 397 CE), "never new and never old." It is the embodiment of an inter-personal and fundamentally sexual desire, a desire of both body and mind, one that can find its object in this world or another. A constant of human experience, erotic desire is subject to near endless variation in its scientific, philosophical, rhetorical, legal, and, above all, literary and artistic treatments. Where erotic desire is conceptualized, it serves a larger effort to understand self, society, nature, and divinity; and where erotic desire is represented, it also serves the pleasures of sense and beauty. Four thematic areas—Reproduction, Regulation, Rhetoric, and Representation—provide the seminar's structure. In "Reproduction," we consider scientific theories of sexual desire and sexual function; in "Regulation," legal codes developed for the control of sexual practice; in "Rhetoric," theoretical descriptions of erotic desire and accompanying arguments for its expression or repression; in "Representation," depictions of erotic desire in literature (epic, novel, romance, fabliau, and lyric poetry), hagiography, mysticism, and visual art.

Honors 356 CRN 13471

TR 1500-1620

Dr. Sheila Webb

This course is designed for students who are interested in exploring how science and technology have been covered in the American media. For most Americans, the reality of science is what they read in the press. In concert with the belief that science and technology are central to progress, the media have long glorified science and technology, portrayed scientists and entrepreneurs as exemplary Americans, and presented technology as an expression of American ingenuity. This seminar explores the social, historical, and cultural role coverage of science and technology has played; the class examines coverage since the Colonial Period to today; describes the narratives used to frame America's prowess; and it addresses the current challenges to America's role as a leader in science and technology. The class draws from history, cultural studies, science and technology, sociology, and mass media, all explored through the lens of American media – in particular, in magazines.

Honors 357 CRN 12729

TR 1400-1520

Dr. Mart Stewart

This course will proceed out of the observation by investigators in several disciplines that one of the best windows into the values of a society is an examination of the food the people in it eat – where it comes from and how it is produced, how it is processed and marketed, how it is prepared and consumed, how it is politicized or becomes a matrix for cultural controversy, and the history of all of this. We will examine food as both the subject and the object of historical analysis, and explore the history of food in America as a way to explain larger historical forces in the American past.

Honors 351 CRN 22851

TR 1500-1620

Dr. George Mariz

This seminar deals with the "generation" that came of age in Europe before the First World War, i.e., the one that matured in the period between 1905 and 1914, and looks at the intellectual, social, and economic forces that operated on them. This is the generation whose men marched off to war in 1914 and whose women and children, mothers and fathers, stayed behind and supported, mourned, and suffered in their own ways. Using novels, philosophy, scientific literature, and art, the class will explore the experience of these various groups. The class will look as well at the "generation" whose intellectual legacy shaped and weighed on them, the generation of the 1890s.

Honors 353 CRN 23182

MWF 1500-1550

Dr. Nicholas Margaritis

This is a study of the transposition of one form of art into another, and of the decisions and process involved in such artistic transmutation: principles and methods of selection, omission, rearrangement, invention. The course treats films based not on original screenplays devised for the purpose of filming, but films that have been inspired by literary works created independently, without any anticipation of their possible conversion into cinema – in fact, most of them written centuries earlier.

Honors 354 CRN 21753

MW 1500-1620 & T 1600-1750

Dr. Kaveh Askari

This course on the modern Middle East will introduce students to recent critical theory and the study of moving-image arts in equal measure. We will first familiarize ourselves with key philosophical debates about conceptions of the nation, cosmopolitanism, empire, and the turn to ethics in recent political theory. Then, we will discuss how we can integrate critical theory relevant to the Middle East and North Africa with photographic, cinematic, and web-based works of art. The course gives special attention to cinema, but topics will range from photography in early-twentieth-century colonies and royal courts, to video installation in galleries, to contemporary social media. We will learn how to analyze images, and how to situate them within a historical context that pays particular attention to intersections of art and politics.