Spring 2018 Honors Colloquia

AIST 4003H 001: EARLY CHINESE EMPIRES Professor: Rembrandt F. Wolpert Colloquium Type: Humanities

Taking the Silk Road as our main artery, we shall concentrate on the most colorful changes in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural medieval China from the period of the Southern and Northern Dynasties, and in particular from the rise and following unification of Northern China. Under the Northern Wei (386–534), to the subsequent unification of North and South under the Sui (589–618), through the resplendent Tang (618–907) and the most cultured of all Chinese dynasties, the Song (960–1279), the martial Jin (115–1234), to end with the culmination of power (at a price) in the largest empire emanating from Chinese soil, the Yuan (1271–1368).

AIST 4003H 002: READING JAPANESE NOH AS CULTURAL HISTORY Professor: Elizabeth Markham Colloquium Type: Humanities

We shall use original Noh chant books (utai-bon) alongside translations of librettos. Most plays will be viewed on film; the others listened to while reading. Our focus will be on the historical and the contextual: we shall work with the earlier poetry, songs, and dance-tunes, referred to as nostalgia in the plays, and also with early Buddhist, theatrical, and secular musical forms that have contributed to and borrowed from Noh. The course does not require specialized knowledge of music, nor of East Asian languages, and it is open to majors in any field. Students address their particular interests via individual projects, culminating in an extended research essay.

AIST 4003H 003: UNCOVERING HEIAN JAPAN (794--1192) Professor: Elizabeth J. Markham Colloquium Type: Social Science

The invention of an isolated, refined, purely aesthetic Heian Japan (794--1191) has been targeted in recent scholarship (Denecke, 2008, Heldt, 2008, Lamarre, 2000). An alternative placing of the early Heian court within the fold of Táng China (618--907), rather than in ethnolinguistic opposition to it, has been offered. This course traces the reasons for the former view but takes its cue from the alternative to focus on the early Heian court, temple, and shrine in terms of appropriation, assimilation, synthesis -- but also re-positioning and hybridization -- of “China'' in language, literature, religion, culture, and in terms of what these processes meant for the social and political order of the day.

ARHS 3923H 001: MEDIEVAL TRANSCRIPTS Professor: Lynn Jacobs Colloquium Type: Humanities

This colloquium will examine the wide variety of depictions of women in Dutch art of the seventeenth century, the golden age of Dutch painting. We will consider how women are represented as housewives, maids, prostitutes, potential wives, mothers, and saleswomen, and what meanings were associated with the scenes of women dancing, drinking, writing letters, making music, seeing doctors, and cleaning their homes -- all extremely popular themes in Dutch art of this time. Some of the artists whose works will be studied include Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, Jan Steen, and Ter Borch; special attention will be given to women artists in seventeenth- century Holland, particularly Judith Leyster. Students will have the opportunity to study a specific thematic strand within the imagery of women and to give a presentation of their findings. This course does not require specialized knowledge of East Asian languages. It is examined via essays on assigned topics and an extended research essay on a course- related topic chosen by the individual student.

BIOL 3923H-001, PLSC 3923H-002: MUSEUM MATTERS Professor: William F. McComas Colloquium Type: Social Science, Natural Science

Museums are among the most respected and visited cultural institutions, yet few have thought much about their history, purpose, and what happens behind the scenes. This class is an introduction to museology or the study of museums. We will consider the goals and rationales of museums, examine the distinct types, learn what links these together and what distinguishes them, talk about the distinction between collections, displays and exhibitions and consider the reasons for the occasional controversies that have occurred in the museum context. We will think employment opportunities, architecture, educational challenges, legal issues and other socio-cultural aspects of the wide world of museums. We will hear from local curators, visit several nearby museums in our region, spend some time in the UA museum storage facility and take a two-day field trip (March 30- 31) to Oklahoma City to see museums that we do not yet have here. This museum experience is highly interdisciplinary with students drawn from five departments. Class size is limited because most of the expenses for the overnight field trip are covered by the Honors College. Also, we will need leave campus earlier than our scheduled meeting time a few times for our local museum visits.

CLST 4003H-001: CLASSICAL BACKGROUND TO ENGLISH LITERATURE Professor: Joy Reeber Colloquium Type: Humanities

This course is an exploration of the many ways English poetry and prose has imitated, borrowed, and challenged literary themes and genres from classical antiquity, from Milton's epic to the satire of Swift, and from the Romantics' fascination with Greece to Auden's more prosaic take on Rome. The classical legacy, and knowledge of the Greco-Roman canon, has been put to many uses in the English-speaking world, and we will also spend a certain amount of time studying its reception more generally to help contextualize the literature we read. The course is open to majors or minors in any field, and no prior knowledge of Greek or Roman literature, nor of the languages, will be required (though students with experience in Latin or Greek will have the opportunity to work with texts in the original if they wish). In addition to frequent shorter assignments throughout the semester, students will have the opportunity to research and write about a specific topic, author, or poem and present their findings to their peers.

ENGL 3923H-001: MEDICAL HUMANITIES Professor: Casey Kayser Colloquium Type: Social Science

The kinds of issues we’ll focus on in this class will give you a different perspective on medicine than you’ll ever gain in your science classes, by attending to the social rather than technical aspects of medicine, focusing on such topics as the human condition; social responsibility; the history of medicine; and doctors’ and patients’ perspectives and how these are informed by larger cultural, economic, political, and social forces. Through readings, class discussion, writing activities, and first-hand observation, students will practice critical analysis and reflection to instill in them a commitment to compassionate, community-minded, and culturally competent medical care. This course requires a service-learning component that involves close interaction with a physician at a local clinic and service hours at a local agency in addition to the classroom time commitment. It is only open to premedical students who must meet with Dr. Jackson Jennings to enroll.

EUST: 4003H-002: SURVEY RUSSIAN LIT SINCE 1917 Professor: Nadja Berkovich Colloquium Type: Social Science or Humanities The course examines four great novels: Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What is To Be Done?, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons, Der Nister’s The Family Mashber (Di Mishpokhe Mashber), and Dovid Bergelson’s Judgement (Mides-hadin). The latter two are lesser- known works of Yiddish modernism. Dostoevsky’s and Der Nister’s novels, set in the same time period, both deal with psychological crisis and ultimate death, although within different cultural backgrounds and circumstances. Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky share a lot in common. They both advocated for political change, experienced a mock execution, and were exiled to forced labor prisons in Siberia. Der Nister and Bergelson were victims of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign. The former died in a GULAG in 1950 and the latter was shot in 1952. Bergelson’s novel centers around the Bolshevik, the embodiment of “judgment,” who enforces the new Soviet regime in a Jewish border town.

GEOS 4383H-001: HONORS HAZARD & DISASTER ASSESSMENT, MITIGATION, RISK & POLICY Professor: Thomas Paradise Colloquium Type: Natural Science or Social Science

The course addresses the broader perspectives of Hazards Studies that include comprehensive and inter-disciplinary approaches to various geologic, atmospheric, and environmental hazards including hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes, tsunami, and earthquakes. This course will also introduce students to aspects of law and policy- making, perception of risk and danger, mitigation of hazardous landscapes, and the diverse ways in which people, families, communities and nations deal with disaster, injury, destruction, and death.

HIST 4823-001: BLACK FREEDOM IN THE AGE OF EMANCIPATION Professor: Caree A. Banton Colloquia Type: Social Science or Humanities

This course is a comparative study of Black Atlantic World freedom movements and experiences of post-emancipation. Enslaved Africans in the US, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa sought emancipation in different ways and had high expectations of freedom. But as they would discover, slave emancipation as a crowning achievement of freedom was merely a myth. Though former slaves and their descendants hoped that emancipation would give them, amongst other things, the vote, land, equality, and control over their time and labor, various factors affected their ability to fulfill their hopes of freedom. They would confront the legal and extra-legal constraints placed on their lives, a social hierarchy in which color coincided with class, and economic decline. These and other obstacles, however, did not prevent the former slaves and their descendants from trying to realize their dreams. Through such means as petitions, the formation of political organizations, unions, migration, and rebellions, they vigorously contested the terms of their freedom. In this course, we will explore how blacks sought to eek out some semblance of freedom in the varied conditions they found themselves as well as how the search for liberty mutated, evolved, and expanded across the Black Atlantic World. It explores the histories, meanings, legacies of the various types of black emancipations in the Atlantic World and the different types of cultural, social, economic and political technologies that enabled them. It thus highlights the social, political, and economic conditions of freedom for former slaves and their descendants. By tracing the continuities and discontinuities among the different types, forms, and experiences of emancipation in different nodes of the Black Atlantic World (the US, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa), the course further explores the extent to which expectations of freedom were realized in the period between the slavery and independence movements in the post-world War II era. In bringing together the experiences of the emancipation of various groups of blacks in different spaces, we get to see the global dimensions and intersections of politics, economics, race, and freedom. By foregrounding the intersection of different disciplinary approaches to this topic, the ultimate goal of the course is to produce a perspective on black freedom across space and time, and locating them within a broader “Age of Emancipation.”

HIST 3923H-002 (cross listed HIST 7133) REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA Professor: Trish Starks Colloquium Type: Social Science or Humanities

In this course, students will read classic and new historical works that engage the Russian Revolutionary era (roughly 1905 -1932) from the perspectives of the many different constituencies of the imperial state across the divides of geography, class, gender, ethnicity, and creed. Students will be asked to engage vital questions of what conditions and groups precipitated change, how historians differ in their interpretation of these changes, and how perspectives, disciplinary approaches, and source materials can change the periodization and interpretation of Russia’s revolutionary era. In addition to weekly reading and writing assignments, students will create a final paper that follows the experience of one constituency through the tumultuous era to answer how revolution was interpreted across the empire.

HNRC 4013H 001: MANUSCRIPT Professor: Joshua Smith Colloquium Type: Humanities To register for this course, you must apply through the Honors College. Here is the link to apply Signature Seminar application form .

HNRC 4013H 002: INTERNET Professor: Stephanie Schulte Colloquium Type: Humanities or Social Science To register for this course, you must apply through the Honors College. Here is the link to apply Signature Seminar application form .

HNRC 4013H 003: SOCCER Professor: Todd Cleveland Colloquium Type: Humanities or Social Science To register for this course, you must apply through the Honors College. Here is the link to apply Signature Seminar application form .

HUMN 3923H 001: GAME DESIGN II

Professor: David Fredrick Colloquium Type: Humanities or Social Science

Please contact instructor ([email protected]) for more information.

HUMN 3923H-004: WRITING HISTORY & MAKING FILMS Professor: Sidney Burris and Craig Pasquinzo Colloquium Type: Humanities OR Social Science

This innovative course and film-lab will introduce students to the two fundamental skills that structure the most important media outlets that we consult on a daily basis: historical research and basic video editing skills. No prior knowledge of film- editing is required.

The course will focus on the Tibetan refugee situation and will work in conjunction with the extensive film archives of The TEXT Program (Tibetans in Exile Today), the University’s oral-history project that chronicles the lives of Tibetan refugees currently living in India.

For the documentary film, students will be given access to these archives and photographs that include not only interviews with Tibetans, but hours of footage from The TEXT Program’s travels throughout India—all of this material will be available to students in the class, as they plan their research paper and design their film.

HUMN 3923H 006: TIBET BUDDHIST PHIL/CULTURE Professor: Geshe Thupten Dorjee Colloquium Type: Humanities OR Social Science

Until the time of the Chinese invasion in the 1950’s, Tibet had maintained one of the richest cultural and religious traditions in the world. Now, with many of its citizens living in exile, Tibetans have been striving to maintain abroad the same traditions that were native to their homeland. This course will examine many of those traditions and offer the student a unique opportunity to participate in them under the guidance of an extraordinary teacher: a Tibetan Buddhist monk who has received the highest degree awarded by an Indian institution in Buddhist studies and who has passed examinations administered by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Students will not only learn about the major traditions of Tibetan Buddhism from an acknowledged authority, but they will also have an opportunity to participate in many of the activities that are central to the culture. Students, for example will construct a simple sand mandala as well as work side-by-side with Geshe Dorjee in preparing authentic Tibetan cuisine. Students will also study Tibetan chanting and construct simple religious objects, such as the prayer flag, while gaining an understanding of the place each of these objects occupies in the Tibetan cosmology.

MEST 4003H-003: HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF JERUSALEM FROM THE AMARNA TO OTTOMAN OCCUPATIONS Professor: Spencer Allen Colloquia Type: Humanities or Social Science

Located in the hills along the trade routes between Asia and Africa, Jerusalem has captured the attentions and desires of ambitious empire makers. Hundreds of years before David conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites and made it the capital of his Israelite kingdom (ca. 1000 BCE), the pharaohs of Egypt had already taken and lost control of the city. As a result of David’s conquest and his son Solomon’s building programs, over time, Jerusalem transformed from a strategic geographical center to the sacred city that it is today, holy to three billion Christians, Muslims, and Jews worldwide. This course will explore Jerusalem’s 4000-year history and its numerous conquests, settlements, and expansions through close examination of primary texts (ancient and modern, alike), archeological surveys, and historical circumstances.

MUSC 3923H-001: AMERICAN MUSIC: DUKE ELLINGTON

Professor: Kim Hannon Teal Colloquia Type: Social Science

As one of the most prominent creative voices in jazz, Duke Ellington had a significant and lasting impact on American music and culture. In this course, we will explore Ellington’s legacy as a composer, performer, band leader, and public figure, considering his career through a number of different lenses, including technical features of his music, the relationship between written scores and sounding performances, his business practices, and his public life in the context of twentieth- century American race relations. As a participant in this seminar, you will play an essential role in shaping the course by contributing to discussions of music and readings and by researching and presenting on topics of your own choosing related to themes of the course.

PLSC 3923H-001: POLITICAL VIOLENCE Professor: Jeffrey Ryan Colloquium Type: Humanities or Social Science

Please contact instructor ([email protected]) for more information.

PHYS 3923H-001: ECLIPSES AND THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY

Professor: Daniel Kennefick Colloquium Type: Natural Science

This class will discuss the role of eclipses of the Sun and Moon in the development of Astronomy over the ages. We will discuss ancient ideas on eclipses and the possibility that their existence helped give birth to the science of Astronomy. In the classical period the development of astronomy proceeded to the point where eclipses could be predicted in advance, which is part of a story which includes the invention of calendars. In the middle ages we have quite a few records of eclipses and a comparative study of different societies and their reactions to eclipses will be made. In the modern period eclipses figure repeatedly as exemplars of human power over the material and social worlds through scientific knowledge. Columbus is said to have overawed the natives of he Carribean through successfully predicting an eclipse. 19th century Astrophysics developed considerably through expeditions to study the Sun during eclipses. Finally the 1919 eclipse expedition to test Einstein's theory of General Relativity, which we will study in detail, brought eclipses to the forefront of world popular attention. The modern science of eclipses will be presented, but without any technical or mathematical prerequisites. The 2017 eclipse will be witnessed by enormous numbers of people, stimulating public interest in astronomy and science. In 2024 a total solar eclipse will pass through the state of Arkansas, providing a unique opportunity for Arkansans to witness one of the solar system's rarest events, since only Earth has a Moon which can provide such a remarkable show, just perfectly eclipsing the Sun's disk.

PSYC 3923H-001: BUILDING BRAINS: FROM IN VIVO TO IN SILICO Professor: Nate Parks Colloquia Type: Social Science

This seminar will be an interdisciplinary investigation of behavior, perception, and cognition from the perspectives of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.