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Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: Fr or soph honors
Description: HSem 2005H Separate and Unequal? Race and Class in Postwar America to the Present With the historic election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, Americans are re-thinking issues of race, class, and opportunity in America. This seminar examines the issues of race and class in postwar (1945+) America, as intersecting systems of inequality and difference that have shaped American life and influenced global ideas of equality in the United States. We begin with a historical look at the different ways that race and class have been thought about and debated in American society?such as the classification of Irish immigrants as non-white, Scandinavian immigrants as Slavs, and the idea that the poor are biologically different from wealthy people. The course then examines the cold war and civil rights debates to see how these ideas were transformed, or reinforced. We then focus on the post 1960s debates around poverty, race, class and opportunity in American society and examine how these ideas have shaped current understandings of race, class, and politics in the United States. We conclude with a contemporary discussion of race and class issues seen through the lens of popular culture, such as Spike Lee?s films, and the racial and class politics of Eminem?s film 8 mile. David Karjanen is assistant professor of American Studies. He was a Fulbright Scholar and postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. His research focuses on globalization, migration, and racial and class issues in the US and abroad.
Instructor: Karjanen,David J
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: [Fr or soph], honors
Description: HSem 2039H Thursday at 4: Across the U and Beyond The course is built around the Institute for Advanced Study's Thursdays at Four series. In this series scholars and artists present their work -- a wide spectrum of topics is covered, and it varies every semester. Students in the seminar attend all the Thursday presentations, and then we meet in seminar on Tuesdays to talk about the presentations specifically, and more generally about how different sorts of research and creative activity are pursued at the University and how scholars in different disciplines communicate what they do. For many of the presentations we have background reading, and as schedules permit the presenters will attend the seminar following their presentation to talk in depth with the students. The objectives of the class are to familiarize you to the wide range of intellectual life at the University, engage you in the intellectual life of the University, and introduce you to different kinds of academic reading, writing, and modes of presentation. Class structure: Public lectures followed by seminar discussion Work Load: Three short papers (2-3 pp.), one in-class presentation, attendance at one event outside of class (student's choice, with instructor approval). Weekly readings vary from no assignment at all to 40 pp., with the average reading around 20 pp. No quizzes or exams. Grading: Writing (3 papers) 60%, Participation 30%; Attendance 10%. Susanna L. Smith is a historian and the Managing Director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Her research is on Russian and Soviet music and national identity in the Stalin period; her position at the Institute allows her to exercise her curiosity about a wide set of subjects, from physics to art, animal behavior to human psychology, and archeology to foreign policy.
Instructor:
Smith,Susannah L
(CLA-Work Group Outstdg Svc Awd)
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: [Fr or soph] honors student
Description: Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
Instructor:
Junghare,Indira Y
(CLA Distinguished Tchg Awd)
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: [Fr or soph] honors student
Description: HSem 2053H The Psychology of Paranormal Phenomena Research has shown that most Americans hold one or more supernatural, paranormal, or pseudoscientific beliefs. These include beliefs in mind reading, fortune telling, psychokinesis, remote viewing, therapeutic touch, out-of-body experiences, alien abduction, and cryptozoology. This course has two goals: The first is to introduce students to critical thinking and behavioral research methods. The second is to critically evaluate the evidence for a variety of supernatural, paranormal, and pseudoscientific claims. Students will design and carry out their own experimental tests of these claims. The course will also include a guest lecture and demonstration by a local psychic. Reading per week: 40 Pages. Three written papers (3-5 pages each), one group presentation, 4 quizzes. Charles R (Randy) Fletcher holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He conducts research on the psychological processes involved in reading and language comprehension. He teaches the Psychology Department?s Honors Research Practicum and a course on The Psychology of Language.
Instructor: Fletcher,Charles R
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: [Fr or soph], honors
Description: HSem 2101H Food and Drug Safety: Who Can You Trust? Each time you pick up the newspaper, you are likely to find an article describing concerns about food or drug safety. Often, new studies are released that contradict the findings of previous studies. For example, hormone replacement therapy for post menopausal women has been through repeated cycles of recommendation and rejection over the past 30 years. How does the consumer know which study to believe? Consider the case of Vioxx, a non-prescription pain reliever and anti-inflammatory drug, which was widely prescribed and earned billions of dollars for Merck. Five years after its introduction, Vioxx was linked to heart disease and withdrawn, and Merck lost billions in lawsuits. How did Vioxx go from wonder drug to potential poison? Why did the safety testing not reveal this serious complication? This seminar will introduce students to the processes of food and drug testing, basic statistical analysis, and elementary biochemistry. Students will use the primary literature to research safety studies, and to learn how the body metabolizes foods and drugs. The course is designed for non-science majors, but a background in high school chemistry is required. Paul Siliciano received his A.B. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, he came to Minnesota and set up his lab studying RNA metabolism. He has taught everything from freshman biology to advanced graduate seminars, but his favorite courses to teach are those that introduce practical biochemistry to non-majors.
Instructor:
Siliciano,Paul G
(Dagley Distinguished Tchg Awd)
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: Fr or soph honors
Description: HSem 2103H A Novel Environment: Environmental Topics Explored through Popular Literature This course will explore topics in ecology, evolution, and environmental science through reading two novels, Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver and The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols. A main focus of the course will be on science topics; human environmental behaviors, however, are only partially guided by science. Economics, socioeconomics, culture, local history, and interpersonal relations are arguably more influential than science in determining how humans use environmental resources and alter landscapes and ecology. This course uses popular fiction to generate interest in ecological topics, evolutionary biology, and environmental science within the context of a human story. Topics of exploration will include natural selection, sexual selection, kin selection, keystone predators, agricultural use of pesticides, water shortages and rights, environmental decision-making, and environmental justice. Students will research scientific and environmental topics, present their findings to the class, and lead discussions about these topics. Deena Wassenberg is an environmental toxicologist interested in the effects of environmental contaminants on organisms and ecosystems. She received her B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her Ph.D. from Duke University?s Nicholas School of the Environment. She is a teaching assistant professor in the Biology Program and teaches in the Foundations of Biology sequence.
Instructor: Wassenberg,Deena Marie
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: freshman or sophomore Honors student
Description: HSem 2205H Signs and Symbols in Chinese Culture This class will focus on studying the interpretation of Chinese signs and symbols, and particularly the relationship between pictographs and written characters in Chinese culture. Class content is based on theories of visual communication, and symbolism in visual icons and images. It will focus on examining the elements involved in the perceptual process of the interpreter. Additionally, this course will examine design elements such as the use of form, line, color, and shape in Chinese symbols relative to social and cultural influences. Sauman Chu is an Associate Professor teaching in graphic design. Her research focuses on cross-cultural design and the application of technology in design education. Research projects include cross-cultural comparisons of visual perception and understanding of symbols, design variables in multilingual printed and online materials, symbol design in computer games, and the exploration and creation of digital game-based learning.
Instructor:
Chu,Sauman
(Outstanding Achievement Award)
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: [Fr or soph], honors
Description: HSem 2535H The Deep Underground Sky During the past several decades, efforts to better understand the Universe have motivated multiple experiments in deep underground laboratories, which are shielded from cosmic rays by hundreds or thousands of meters of rock. This seminar will describe these experiments on topics such as dark matter, neutrino mass, proton decay, double beta decay, nuclear astrophysics, gravity wave interferometers and low background counting; the science motivating them and the knowledge that has come from them. The seminar will include a Saturday visit (currently planned for Sept. 26, 2009) to the Underground Laboratory in Soudan MN, which houses the world's most sensitive dark matter and neutrino oscillation experiments. Marvin Marshak is an experimental particle physicist, whose research focuses on the physics of neutrinos, the lightest currently known fundamental particles. He is currently involved in two experiments?MINOS and NOvA?that use a unique neutrino beam from Fermilab (near Chicago) to Soudan in northern Minnesota. He is also the Principal Investigator for a proposed 5,000 ton Liquid Argon Neutrino and Proton Decay Detector to be located in the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills in South Dakota.
Instructor:
Marshak,Marvin L
(Geo Taylor/IT Alumni Soc Award; Outstanding Service Award; Morse Alumni Award; John Tate Award Ugrad Adv)
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: Jr or sr honors
Description: HSem 3019H Language, Identity, and Globalization We have documented more than 6,000 languages that are spoken in the world. More people are speakers of multiple languages than are monolingual. The social life of even a single language contains produces a challenging and sometimes even bewildering mix of social and individual identities. This course will explore the ways that a person?s language(s) and identity (ies) are inevitably entwined. The social life of language is an important aspect that contributes to the dynamics of local and global society in the 21st Century. Therefore, it is important to come to an awareness of the many ways in which a person or a group?s identity is tied to their language(s). Students will become intrigued as they uncover the powerful role that language plays in their individual life and in our global lives. Amy Sheldon is a professor of Communication Studies and the Program in Linguistics. She grew up in New York City, in a multilingual community, in which some members were represented as speaking ?with an accent.? Her research has been in on a variety of issues, including first and second language acquisition, linguistic universals, language and gender, discourse analysis, narrative, language and media.
Instructor: Sheldon PhD,Amy
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: Jr or sr honors
Description: HSem 3021H Objects of our (Dis)Affection: Pretty Girls, Distracted Boys, and Little Criminal Monsters Looking beyond questions of representational truth, this seminar examines and theorizes the relationship between abstract ways of seeing childhood and the ?real,? i.e., material world from which these visions emerge and diverge. Beginning with the fundamental question of what is a ?child??an inevitably political and ideological question shaped by notions of class, race, gender?we will study childhood as refracted through the prisms of these three contexts: [1] ?The Legal Child?; [2] ?The `Normal? Child?; and [3] ?The (Sexy?) Child-Adult.? Over the course of fifteen weeks we will: [1] study historical and contemporary visual and textual representations and discourses of childhood; [2] examine and theorize historical processes and materials, as well as ideological and economic structures and systems that have gone into the (re)making of childhood and the ?normal? and ?abnormal? child circumscribed within it; [3] explore philosophical and theoretical models that have shaped past and present thinking about class, gender, race, sexuality, and age in relation to childhood; [4] engage issues of ideology, politics, and power as they intersect with concepts and practices of contemporary childhood and its representation Kysa Koerner Hubbard is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota under the supervision of Jack Zipes, an internationally known scholar in the field of children?s literature. Dr. Hubbard studies the contemporary construction of adult-child relations and the relationship of childhood to the collective psychic, social, political, and economic life of contemporary U.S. culture. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Civilizing Childhood: The Rational Alienation of Parents and Children.
Instructor:
Hubbard,Kysa Koerner
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Grading basis/credits:
Description: HSem 3033H Getting Lost with Kafka This seminar will provide an in-depth reading of Kafka?s work that will situate Kafka at the crossroads of European modernity and within the debates about Jewish culture and identity in Prague. We will consider questions such as the relationship between Jewish subjectivity and Jewish text; Deleuze and Guattari?s formulation of Kafka?s work as exemplary of a ?minor? literature; the relationship between Jewish text and the Law; and the tropes of disorientation, travel, dislocation, displacement, and ?getting lost? in Kafka?s work. Kafka?s work has generated an enormous body of critical reflection from various corners of critical and literary theory. We will explore these responses to Kafka, and also take into account the various ?after-lives? Kafka has engendered in contemporary art, film, and literature, from Andy Warhol?s silk-screens of Kafka to the work of Haruki Murakami. In addition to works by Kafka, we will also read critical and theoretical works by Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre, Lukacs, Canetti, Blanchot, Gershom Sholem, Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari, Leslie Morris is Associate Professor of German and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of a book on history and memory in Ingeborg Bachmann?s poetry, and co-editor, with Karen Remmler, of Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany. She has also co-edited, with Jack Zipes, Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis. She has written articles on the poetics of exile, diaspora, translation, sound and memory. She is currently completing a book entitled The Trans-Jewish: Translating Jewish Memory in Germany Today.
Instructor: Morris,Leslie C
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: [Jr or sr], honors
Description: HSem 3034H Adoption in Literature: Real and Imagined This course will look at issues related to adoption as described by those who became part of it willingly or unwillingly. The family will be examined as a flexible and changeable framework for exploration of identity, kinship, and love. While the students will read several texts from the social sciences, the instructor believes that literature might be a better venue for exploration of the personal details of this often-painful process. Ranging from descriptions of a search for closure or pursuits of biological ties to a bold reinvention of daily identity and family, the assigned texts offer a moving portrait of a complex process. A significant part of the course will be devoted to the issues of trans-national adoptions, which, in addition to reinventing families, often cross racial and continental divides. With texts chosen from two geographically and culturally different regions?the United States and Scandinavia?one of the goals of this seminar will be to establish how cultural practices influence attitudes toward adoption. The writers discussed will include A.M.Homes, Meredith Hall, and M. Myung-Ok Lee. The films for this course will include Secrets & Lies and The Italian. Monika Zagar received her Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies from UC Berkeley in 1994, and was tenured at University of Minnesota in 2001. She has taught a variety of courses on literature, culture, and women?s issues related to the Nordic countries. Zagar's book, Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance, will be published in the summer of 2009
Instructor: Zagar,Monika
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: [Jr or sr] honors student
Description: HSem 3047H Music around Us: Political, Social, and Cultural Contexts for Listening Listening is profoundly affected by context. Is music the background to a film, video game, shopping mall, and political rally, or is it foregrounded at a concert hall, rock concert, and through an I-pod? Often this distinction between background and foreground erodes, as in musicals and operas where music and drama are equally important. This course will explore the range of listening experiences in the history of Western music from Mozart to Eminem. Readings will draw on journalism, literary works, letters and diaries that illuminate how and why people listen to music. Music affects our emotions, but often more is at stake. Listening can be physical, and not just in dances and at parades. Some listeners report spiritual, even metaphysical experiences. How does musical style affect the listening experience, and what elements of music (melody, rhythm, the color of the sound) compel a physical reaction? Beyond emotional gratification, what social values are promoted through music? Moreover, since 1800, music also served political ends?as a symbol for national identity, a construction of racial purity, or a call to arms. We will examine case studies in which music affected historical developments?the growth of the middle class, totalitarianism, and social protest. Karen Painter, associate professor in the School of Music, writes on the history of musical listening, especially in the context of ideology and social history. The framework for her research has involved early bourgeois musical culture, fin-de-siecle cultural debates, World War I, Austro-German socialism, and Nazism.
Instructor: Painter PhD,Karen
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: [Jr or sr] honors student
Description: HSem 3051H The Political Psychology of Conformity, Enmity, and Heroism The first part of the seminar examines the power of conformity, denial, and obedience in politics at the individual and collective levels. Exploring concepts such as groupthink, the spiral of silence, the politics of denial, crimes of obedience and personal authoritarianism, an overarching theme will be an assessment of the role played by threat perceptions and fear responses. To counterbalance the pessimism inherent in such topics, the second part of the seminar will examine a more positive end of the spectrum?political altruism and heroic political action. Considering work on political resistance, whistle-blowing and rescue activities, we will examine examples such as Le Chambon during World War II and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina during the Pinochet regime. From this baseline we will extract theories and concepts to apply during the third part of the seminar, which will focus on the U.S. use of torture since 9-11 and resistance to this policy. Readings will include, among others, selections from the works of Janis, Noelle-Neumann, Kelman, Staub, Aronson, Stenner, the Oliners, and Thalhammer & O?Loughlin. During the third portion of the semester, when we focus on recent U.S. policy, we will examine selections from authors such as Greenberg, Kahn, Ratner, and Margulies. John Sullivan has been at the University of Minnesota, where he is now a Regents Professor, since 1975. He teaches courses on political psychology, American politics and quantitative research methods. Professor Sullivan is a Fellow of American Academy of Arts & Sciences, winner of undergraduate and graduate teaching awards, and co-author or co-editor of Cooperation: The Political Psychology of Effective Human Interaction; The Political Psychology of Democratic Citizenship; With Malice Toward Some, Political Tolerance in Context; and Political Tolerance & American Democracy.
Instructor:
Sullivan,John L
(Morse Alumni Award; Grad and Profl Teaching Award; Regents' Award)
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Description: HSem 3067H Writing and Social Change in America In the first half of the seminar, we will develop some of the key issues using examples from the late 18th through the 19th century. These will include Paine?s Common Sense, the ?Declaration of Independence? and the Constitution and Federalist Papers, Cummins? The Lamplighter (an early best-seller), Stowe?s Uncle Tom?s Cabin, and Twain?s Tom Sawyer. In addition to reading the texts, students will track down contemporary reactions: book reviews, advertisements, letters and journals, etc. Doing this will help us figure out why and how these texts were targeted to and affected their contemporary audiences. The second half of the seminar will involve students? selecting and reporting on twentieth-century texts. I hope this will produce a wide range of examples, and that students will track down influential texts in their own areas of interest. For example, the student of politics might present Wilson?s 14 Points, King?s ?I have a dream? or letter from Birmingham Jail. The biologist might discuss the Watson-Crick paper on DNA. Literary examples might contrast a respectable yet controversial novel like Catcher in the Rye with a sleazy companion like Peyton Place. We will also investigate the ways that media (TV, movies) interact to create and maintain best selling books. Donald Ross is a professor of Writing Studies and English whose main area of interest is American literature, especially in the nineteenth century. His publications include a co-authored book on Thoreau, articles and chapters on travel writing and the teaching of composition. He has been on the faculty since 1971. He taught honors seminars on this topic in 2000, 2001, and 2008.
Instructor:
Ross Jr,Donald
(UC Outstanding Teaching Award)
Grading basis/credits:
Prereq: [Jr or sr], honors
Description: Corporate Governance and Ethical Considerations This class explores various topics relating to business organizations, including its internal and external governance and regulation, and its impact on society. We will begin by having an introduction to business organizations and different types of business entities. We will examine the duties and responsibilities of corporate officers and directors, especially in the wake of Enron and other corporate scandals. We will analyze how business decisions impact various stakeholders and whether the law is enough to promote ethical behavior. Students will also examine whether corporate social responsibility in our current world is a realistic or an altruistic thought. Last but not least, we will look at current events and apply the principles discussed in class. Gulzar Babaeva is an alum of the CLA Honors Program and is an attorney at the law firm of Fredrikson & Byron. She advises emerging and established companies on a broad range of corporate matters, including corporate governance. For more information please visit: http://www.fredlaw.com/bios/attorneys/babaevagulzar/.
Instructor: Babaeva,Gulzar