Our new seminar was created especially for freshmen and designed to introduce you to the many ways that an academic community goes about making knowledge through inquiry-, creativity-, and discovery-based learning.

This seminar is a study of theatre arts that treats the theme of inquiry and discovery--its risks, its creativeness, its ambiguities and complexities, and its moral dilemmas--through selected works from several media-theatre, music, visual arts, and film. You will analyze works in terms of their historical context and internal structure as well as their treatment of the nature of inquiry and discovery.

GER Credit for Honors Seminars Spring 2004

Occasionally, departments have specific requirements for GER courses that will need to be addressed on a student-by-student basis. See the Director of the Honors Program for details.

Time: 3:40 to 4:55

Days: Monday, Wednesday

Location: HA 146

Instructor: D. Greene

Description:

This seminar is a study of theatre arts that treats the theme of inquiry and discovery--its risks, its creativeness, its ambiguities and complexities, and its moral dilemmas--through selected works from several media-theatre, music, visual arts, and film. Students will analyze works in terms of their historical context and internal structure as well as their treatment of the nature of inquiry and discovery. This year the seminar will focus on the play Copenhagen, which recreates the 1941 visit of Werner Heisenberg, who was then in charge of the Nazi nuclear power program, to Niels Bohr, his mentor, and collaborator in creating quantum mechanics, complementarity, and the uncertainty principle, in German-occupied Denmark.

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Time: 1:05 to 2:20

Days: Tuesday, Thursday

Location: BOS 2704

Instructor: J. Vandenbergh

Description:
In this seminar, students will examine the evidence that chemical substances, both natural and artificial, can mimic or block the action of hormones in the body. The seminar consists of three portions. The first will be a review of the endocrine system that is affected by endocrine disruptive chemicals (EDCs) in a lecture format. Many of the known effects relate to environmental estrogens but other hormones may be involved. In the second portion, the students will review the scientific literature for specific effects. This will require library and web-based research and reports to the class in a discussion format. In the third portion, we will attempt to bring together the scientific information with current and future policies and laws related to the control exposure to endocrine disruptors.

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Credit: 3 hours, Literature GER

Time: 09:50 to 11:05

Days: Tuesday, Thursday

Location: Clark 205

Instructor: J. Wall

Description:
I will begin with Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s “star-crossed lovers,” whose tragic story has been performed or recalled on stage or in movies countless times. It has also been retold by other writers in opera and on stage (in such works as West Side Story), and has been alluded to in popular culture, from rock songs to rap songs to love ballads. We will look at the cultural background of Shakespeare’s play—the narratives of courtly love and the Elizabethan fad for love sonnets—to see what expectations Shakespeare had for the behavior of his lovers and how we have interpreted and reinterpreted those expectations in subsequent generations.

We will also look at other narratives of love in our culture, considering other plays by Shakespeare as well as novels from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries that trace the relationship between love and marriage, as well as the discontents with conventional moral and ethical ideas about human relationships. We will examine cultural stereotypes about ideals of beauty, desirability, and feeling; try to locate where they come from; and assess whether they help or hinder us from finding what we seek in our relationships.

Credit: 3 hours, Social Sciences GER

Time: 11:20 to 12:35

Days: Tuesday, Thursday

Location: Clark 205

Instructor: R. Stephen

Description:
Political, economic, and technological changes now offer global opportunities for American business. These opportunities also threaten to deepen inequalities at home and fragment our common identity. How we adapt to a more open world economy will determine the future of our nation and our communities. Students taking this seminar will attend the annual Emerging Issues Forum in February, which addresses these issues. They will go on to pursue independent research projects sparked by the ideas and issues they encounter, with a view to having their findings circulated to a wide audience by the Institute for Emerging Issues.

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Credit: 3 hours, Social Sciences GER

Time: 01:05 to 02:20

Days: Tuesday, Thursday

Location: Clark 205

Instructor: N. Miller

Description:
In this course, students will look at how U.S. environmental laws have been shaped by politics over the past half century. Specifically, we will examine and evaluate the roles and influence on major environmental policies of the interest groups and stakeholders involved in the lawmaking process: environmental activists, the business sector, the media, the scientific community, state and local governments, the EPA and other administrative agencies, and even global economic conditions and circumstances. It will conclude with an exploration of the emerging impact of the Internet on environmental policymaking.

While studying environmental policymaking from an academic perspective, students will produce environmental journalism themselves in the form of press releases, op-ed pieces, and reportage of various kinds on environmental issues of their choice. This will provide students with an opportunity to see how the policymaking process actually operates in the context of a current environmental controversy.

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Credit: 3 hours, Sociology GER

Time: 02:35 to 03:25

Days: Tuesday, Thursday

Location: HA 143

Instructor: N. Kriesberg

Description:
In this seminar students will examine the scientific method and look at questions such as "Is science inherently ethical?" "How do we make informed choices when faced with emerging technologies?" and "How do we make moral decisions about dilemmas involving scientific research?" A major portion of the seminar will focus on the conflict over animal subjects in research as an example of this sort of dilemma. We will look at themes via case studies, historical descriptions, journalism, short stories, videos and science fiction. This reading and writing seminar will demand a lot of thinking. If you like to read and write or want to improve your reading and writing skills this will be a good seminar for you. If you care a lot about animals or plan on working with them professionally some day, this will be good seminar for you as well.

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Credit: 3 hours

Time: 04:30 to 05:45

Days: Tuesday, Thursday

Location: GA 1418

Instructor: R. Bruck

Description:
The topic of contemporary environmental science and technology is one of the most important educational challenges facing students of the 21st century Indeed, it is essential for educated members of society to be knowledgeable of the seemingly intractable problems of air, water and soil pollution, as well as population dynamics, hunger and environmental justice. This course is meant for UHP students willing to engage in critical thinking regarding the integration of scientific knowledge with the social, political, economic and ethical tenets of contemporary environmental decision making. Guest speakers and field trips will challenge the students’ value systems and prepare them to meet local to global challenges. Students will consider becoming part of the solution rather than remaining part of the problem.

Credit: 3 hours, Arts GER

Time: 09:50 to 11:05

Days: Tuesday, Thursday

Location: PMC 120

Instructor: J. Kramer

Description:
At NCSU and in the Triangle people are actively engaged in music making, dancing, devotional practices, and a multitude of other kinds of artful performance. In this class students will think about the relationship between music and other aspects of social life by doing their own field research bearing questions such as these in mind: How do we make sense of our lives in playing and consuming music? Where do we draw our creativity from? How do we listen? Why do we perform? What is virtuosity? What makes up a scene? What does it mean to be a fan, a regular, a dancer, a CD collector? How is worship through the body different to worship through the word? Why might we celebrate live music and devalue mediation—or do we? Who is the 'we' of a music tradition? How do music and dance shape social life, values, and ideas about difference?

A second component to the class considers modes of research about music. Students will learn techniques for doing ethnographic research, bearing questions such as these in mind: What can we learn about music making (and other forms of aesthetic practice) by means of a particular research method? What assumptions do different methods or analytic approaches make about their subject? What do they privilege about their subject? How do they represent sounds, aesthetic values, and knowledge? How does the researcher's point of departure and her/his relationship with those she/he is learning from shape what she/he comes to know? What are the ethics of field research? And, how does one do it?

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Time: 11:20 to 12:35

Days: Tuesday,Thursday

Location: WN 122

Instructor: J. Carroll

	Attention: Students who took this seminar under its previous listing as "HON 294B or HON 294K" may not register for this seminar

Description:
This is a course in contemporary metaphysics addressing the philosophical paradoxes of time travel. David Lewis, perhaps the foremost contemporary metaphysician, argues that time travel is possible. His argument is based on ingenious positions about three central topics of metaphysics: personal-identity, causation, and free will. We will consider each of these topics in some detail, always with an eye to their implications about time-travel. One usual feature of the course will be regular use of science fiction stories and movies.

Students completing this course will approach many familiar questions with unfamiliar depth and rigor, learning to reconstruct arguments and theories in a charitable fashion; develop their reasoning skills, becoming better able to assess the validity of arguments and to assess the plausibility of theories; become familiar with leading philosophical theories on the possibility of time-travel, personal-identity, causation, and free will; engage in some elementary philosophical research; and start to become better informed of the true nature of reality.

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Time: 11:20 to 12:10

Days: Monday, Wednesday, Friday

Location: WN 122

Instructor: MK Cunningham

	Attention: Students who took this seminar under its previous listing as "HON 294A" may not register for this seminar.

Description:
In this seminar students will examine major issues in contemporary Jewish and Christian religious thought, with particular attention to how theologians have reshaped traditional theological concepts in response to the challenges posed by the 20th-21st centuries. After considering what is involved in the academic study of religion and addressing the methodological issues of the nature of religious language and the task of theology, students will examine the impact of recent historical and cultural developments on the formulation of theological proposals as well as the role that religion has played in shaping societal attitudes and mores. Specific issues to be treated in the course are the Nazi Holocaust, the threat of nuclear warfare, ecological crisis, social injustice (based on gender, class, or racial hierarchies), and conflicts between religions. Religious responses to be studied include representatives of Holocaust, ecological, feminist, Latin American liberation, and black theologies.

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