Spring 2023 Honors Seminars: Welcome

HONR.3200 courses default as free electives. HONR.3200 may potentially satisfy an Arts & Humanities (AH) or Social Science (SS) requirement depending on the nature of the course, but students will need to file an extension.

Students interested in petitioning for an HONR.3200 course to count as either an AH or SS core requirement should contact Megan Hadley by emailing Megan_Hadley@uml.edu to initiate the petition process.

*May be petitioned to count as an Arts & Humanities

**May be petitioned as a World Ready: Spanish elective.

***Students must already be signed up and confirmed for the Honors Madrid Spring Break Study Abroad course to enroll. 

Course Descriptions - HONR.3200 (SP23)

Basque in the Glory of it All
Through literature, film, academic studies, and a jaw-dropping line-up of guest speakers, we will explore the history and culture of Europe's oldest and most mysterious people: the Basques! We will focus on their early roots as leaders of the Age of Exploration, their inadvertent hosting of the largest witch hunt in Europe, their participation in the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi Occupation of the French Basque Country during WWII, the birth and death of a domestic terrorist organization, along with Basque rural sports and cuisine (arguably one of the most-renowned in the world).

View full description in the course flyer for Basque in the Glory of it All

Public Speaking
The thought of standing up and making a presentation in public is nerve-wracking to many of us.  Yet, this skill is critical for our success as professionals, citizens and community members.  In fact, “ability to communicate well” is consistently ranked as the top priority for new hires by businesses, and that’s not surprising. You may have great knowledge you want to share, a commitment to social change, or a desire to be given responsibility for an exciting project.  You might want to motivate others to join you in a cause, or to fund your ideas.  To do any of those things well, you’ll need to communicate your ideas clearly and convincingly, usually in a public forum.

The good news is that great speakers are made, not born.  In this course, you’ll learn how to make interesting, informative, and even inspiring presentations.  You’ll learn how to make nervousness work to our advantage. You’ll study recent research about oral communication and persuasion as well as the great classical theories of rhetoric. You’ll listen to speeches from political, military and business leaders as well as activists for social causes.  Through a variety of readings, videos and discussions, you’ll learn how to present facts, when to and how to employ emotions, when to tell stories and use examples, and how and when to use visual aids.

You’ll have the opportunity to teach your classmates something, to persuade them to donate money to a charity, to explain a complex issue and to persuade your audience to action. You’ll develop your own speaking style in a supportive environment, with helpful feedback from the professor and your classmates, and you will most likely have some fun doing it.

HONR.3300 courses automatically satisfy an AH core curriculum requirement. 

** May be petitioned to count as a World Ready: Portuguese elective

*** May also be petitioned to count as a social science. Please note that the course can only count for one or the other, so if a student petitioned it for social science credit, they will only receive social science core curriculum credit and not AH credit. 

**** May be petitioned for a World Ready German, French, or Italian elective

Course Descriptions - HONR.3300 (SP23)

World Cinema
Approaches to the study of film are numerous, and seemingly limitless in their possible areas of focus and concern. This is of course understandable, as people have been thinking about the nature of film since the earliest days of the medium. One of the greatest contributing factors to this multiplicity of approaches has been this discipline's great inheritance from the other arts, and the accompanying insights, practices, and theories that these "others" have themselves generated for centuries. This fact has implications for our understanding of film's specific ontological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic nature, especially as these areas of concern would seem to unite many current approaches to the medium, however else these schools of thought may otherwise differ.

As such, a world cinema course such as this one calls for a great deal of discernment on our part, in both our film selection and our thematic approach. With this in mind, and as a group throughout, we shall follow a pedagogical approach which is twofold this semester. First, we shall explore select films from around the world in search of aesthetic, epistemological, ethical, and ontological points of both connection and concern. And second, in and through this exploratory approach, we shall advance several novel ways of reimagining our various conceptions of ‘perception’ and ‘world cinema.’

Women in Theatre
Study the rich history of women’s roles in theatre—as playwrights, actors, and subjects. From the great Italian actresses of the Renaissance to the key innovators of the modern and post-modern theatre, this course takes account of how artists have resisted and challenged social norms of gender identity, in both Western and non-Western theatre. Topics include plays written by women, the advent of female players, the evolution of female roles, and the portrayal of feminist perspectives on the stage. Attending to the cultural and political conditions surrounding the plays and the women we study will help us understand the many ways that women in theatre have worked to change them.

View course flyer for Women in Theatre

21st Century Feminisms
We will explore how 21st century feminism is similar to and different from previous feminist movements. In particular, we will use an intersectional and transdisciplinary framework, meaning that we will consider how race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, religion, and nationality are central to 21st century feminisms. Additionally, we will investigate how globalization and digital technologies impact feminist ideas. In this course, we will read, research, and write about people and events that participate in the “movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” in our current century. As a class, we will frame our discussions and writings around contemporary readings, podcasts, documentaries and representations, fictional texts, and academic texts.

View full description in the course flyer for 21st Century Feminisms

Art & the Nazis
This course will explore the artistic and cultural policies imposed by the Third Reich from 1933-1945. Topics included are: Degenerate Art in Germany and German-occupied Europe, Nazi art/visual media and cultural propaganda, Nazi-led art looting, and Allied retrieval and restitution of stolen art.

View course flyer for Art and the Nazis

Designing Your Life
This course uses design thinking to address the “wicked problem” of designing your life and career. This class offers a framework, tools, and most importantly a place and a community of peers and mentors where we’ll work on these issues through assigned readings, reflections, and in-class exercises. The course employs a design thinking approach to help students from any major develop a constructive and effective approach to finding and designing their lives and vocations after UML.
Topics include the integration of work and worldviews, ideation techniques, a portfolio approach to thriving, designing to increase balance and energy and how to prototype all aspects of your life. We also touch on the realities of engaging the workplace, and practices that support vocation formation throughout your life. This is an experiential class that includes seminar-style discussions, personal written reflections, and individual mentoring/coaching. The capstone assignment is the creation of an “Odyssey Plan” focusing on taking action in the 3-5 years following your graduation.

Game Gambit
Monopoly, Chess, Jenga, Catan, Scrabble, Sneaky-Snacky-Squirrel, Uno, D&D are 3D games requiring concentration, skill, and connection with others. Games engage our brains, hands, and hearts. Games encourage and support learning, growth, imagination, and healthy brain development. In this course, students will learn about the history of games, elements, and principles of what makes an engaging game as they learn to create their own games (both individually and in teams). The pandemic showed many the need for, and power of, games to both distract us from pain and engage us in connection with others. The games in this course will be real, 3D tangible tabletop games. (This course will not work with computer nor video games). 

Race & Rupture in 1920's American Literature
We’ll begin by learning about the dramatic demographic changes in the U.S. at the turn into the 20th century before looking at how they shaped the literary culture of the time. As we turn to that literature, mostly short stories and novels, we’ll consider the following questions, among others: How do people of non-Northern European descent navigate their positions within the dominant culture of the U.S.?  In what ways do they manipulate traditional and expected literary forms to express subversive or critical perspectives of that culture?  How do the expected and the revisionary come together to form new modes of representation?  How do writers from the dominant culture respond to the drastic changes taking place in the early 20thcentury and increasingly common encounters with the Other? In what ways do the drawing and erasing of borders inform the literature of the time? 

View full description in the course flyer for Race & Rupture in 1920's American Literature

Graphic Design Concepts
View course flyer for Graphic Design Concepts

Connected Histories: Portuguese Diasporas in a Comparative Perspective: 
This course addresses a variety of diasporic communities in the world, including the Portuguese communities in the Americas—New England, California, Ontario, Hawaii, Brazil, Guyana & Caribbean, and others—from the 19th century to the present. The comparative historical framework will cover the situations of post- abolition recruitment of laborers for sugar plantations, the recruitment of a massive labor force for New England’s industrial development, and the multiple flows of business- and labor-oriented migrations into the Americas. The approach will be complemented by the anthropological and sociological studies of the ethnically-identified communities thus formed, and by the study of literary and visual expressions of diasporic lives.
 

HONR.3400 courses automatically satisfy a Social Science core curriculum requirement. 

Course Descriptions - HONR.3300 (SP23)

Gender, Work, and Peace 
View a previous syllabus for Gender, Work, & Peace