Honors Intro to Humanities I & II

Honors student Edgar Gordyn presenting on The Odyssey, The Aeneid of Virgil, and The Inferno of Dante.

Fall 2011 Course Information

Freedom vs. the Social Order: Introduction to Humanities I, Fall 2011

Using great works from ancient times to the Renaissance, students will raise questions about free speech, pornography, drama, philosophy, freedom, and the social order. For fall 2011, students will read and discuss great plays such as Sophocles' Antigone, and great writers such as Milton, Plato, Hobbes, and Shakespeare . Students will also explore the writings of legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon to consider perspectives on pornography. Team-taught by Professor Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler from the Department of English, and Professor Ken Ward from the Department of Political Science, this Honors Introduction to Humanities I promises to complement the 2011-12 Common Experience theme of Freedoms: The First Amendment.

Designed to be as flexible as possible, these courses allow different instructors to choose their own themes and emphases within the general parameters of engaging with significant "great books" or humanities texts. The courses are organized chronologically, from Classical to early modern and from Enlightenment to the present. They are also based on graduate Humanities courses.

Substitution(s): POSI 2320, Advanced Upper-Level Group I Political Theory, Sophomore Literature, or Advanced English.

General Course Information

For Humanities I and II, students will be exposed to two professors from two different disciplines, focusing on a theme that explores great works. The team-taught format, which we consider vital to the program, pairs a faculty member from Political Science, Philosophy, or History with a faculty member from either English or Modern Languages.

Several instructors who formerly taught in the graduate Humanities program have been teaching the Honors courses. Instructors who have taught the Honors Humanities offerings include Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler (English) with Ken Ward (Political Science), Lucy Harney (Spanish) with Cecilia Castillo (Political Science), Elizabeth Makowski (History) with Susan Morrison (English), Kenneth Grasso (Political Science) with Carole Martin (French), Robert Tally (English) with Rebecca Raphael (Philosophy), and Ken Ward (Political Science) with Blake Locklin (Spanish).

Students do not need to take a course in sequential order, and can take one course alone without taking the second course.

HON 3394N Introduction to Humanities I

Fall 2011

Instructor: Skerpan-Wheeler, E. and Ward, K.

Days/time: MW 2:00-3:20 PM

Location: LAMP 501

HON 3394P Introduction to Humanities II

Spring 2012

Instructors: DeHart, P. and Jaffe, C.

Days/time: TH 9:30-10:50 AM

Location: LAMP 501

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Honors Intro to Humanities I & II

HON 3394N Introduction to Humanities I

HON 3394P Introduction to Humanities II