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IUB Honors Courses Indiana University Bloomington

ENG-L 204 – Introduction to Fiction: Big Books

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Sections offered FALL 2021:

#21019

JESSE MOLESWORTH

MW 1:10-2:25pm

BH 314

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; COLL Intensive Writing section

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

This course offers a slow, unhurried reading of two very long novels: Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72). We will take each novel part by part, book by book, and even page by page, examining form, content, and overall theme. Our central question is: what is gained from excessive length? What can be accomplished within the span of a long novel that cannot be accomplished in the form of a shorter novel?

Since this course is intended to offer an introduction to the study of fiction, we will spend much time discussing the fundamental formal features of fiction, including point of view, plot, characterization, description, setting, and style. Since we will be reading novels drawn from different centuries, we will also spend much time discussing the historical development of the novel, from its origins to the present. Topics will include the novel’s relationship with the epic tradition, narrative techniques like omniscience and the free indirect style, the rise of realism, the ethics of the novel, and the relationship between form and meaning.

Assignments will include 3 medium-length essays (one of which will be revised), short in-class writing assignments, and regular class attendance and participation.

SPH-F 150 – Introduction to Life Span Development

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Sections offered FALL 2021:

#40304

DEBORAH GETZ

TR 9:25-10:40am

PH C100

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

This course provides an introduction to human development across the lifespan. Supports development of fundamental knowledge of interpersonal, physical, cognitive, emotional, and psychological development from conception through death. We will examine the way people develop through the lifespan and the ways that established theories and research support the understanding of humans.

This course will require that you engage with the instructor, peers, and community members as you reflect, document, and examine development. A variety of aspects of development will be addressed by the end of the semester you will be able to tie your knowledge to your personal life as well as your employment goal and explain how your knowledge gained can be applied in their future efforts. Each student will identify a health-related topic that is interesting to them, and then they will develop, deliver, and evaluate a 10 minute tool to share information about that topic with a specific audience.

Hutton Honors College students will further develop their presentation into a more comprehensive report, working directly with Dr. Deb to capture and present more details based upon their interest, the audience selected, and the evaluation tool created.

CMLT-C 262: Cross-cultural Encounters: A Foreigner Among Us

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Sections offered FALL 2021:

#45916

EYAL PERETZ

MW 7:00-8:15pm

BH 143

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

Who is the foreigner? This seems to be a question at the heart of every culture. Is the foreigner an exciting and promising arrival, bringing unheard of novelties, opening one to the wider world beyond one’s habitation? or is the foreigner a danger announcing a culture’s possible destitution, the threat of being taken away, or deprived, from one’s familiar and customary home? But what at all is at the source of this double quality of the foreigner which each culture, – in its desire, on the one hand, to open beyond itself, to the world, and, on the other hand, in its anxious closing in upon itself – seems to waver around? What precisely is the nature of the foreigner’s exciting promise, and why at all would the foreigner be seen as posing such a dangerous threat? The thesis of this class is that the most fruitful place from which to answer these questions are works of literature and art which can be defined as the places in culture where the foreigner, and the foreign, that which is beyond each culture, truly come to speak. And when it speaks, what does the foreign say? in order to be able to answer this question we will be looking at many works of art – in literature, film, theater, painting, music, etc – from numerous cultures, from Europe to Japan, from India to America.

COLL-C 103 – Researching White Supremacism and Antisemitism on Social Media (Honors Discussion)

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Sections offered FALL 2021:

#24636

GUNTHER JIKELI

W 4:15-5:05pm

HU 217

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

For permission to enroll in above class, email rsteele@indiana.edu and include university ID number.

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

Online hate speech, including white supremacism and antisemitism, is a growing problem for communication on social media. This course covers online conversations in English from across the globe to ask what are prominent forms of such online hate? Who are frequent disseminators and how does hate speech travel across the globe? What are current discussions of dealing with hate speech between censorship, free speech, and counter-speech? What are the historical roots of white supremacism and antisemitism?

We will examine the most significant myths in their historical and social contexts, including conspiracy theories. We will see how some older myths from the European Middle Ages are still relevant today and how they are reformulated and disseminated on social media. In order to do so, we will need to learn about the history of antisemitism, white nationalism, and race theory.

A strong emphasis will be put on your own original research on social media. You will work individually and in teams to answer some aspects of the above questions. Some of the material you will be reviewing will be deeply offensive in texts and images. We will use a large database of live tweets and analytical tools that we have developed in an ongoing international research project on this topic.

HON-H 303 – The Secret of Comedy

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Sections offered FALL 2021:

#45677

EYAL PERETZ

MW 1:10-2:25pm

BH 340

CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; meets with CMLT-C 492

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

A burst of laughter – that is, a laughter that overtakes us by surprise, as if in spite of ourselves, causing us to lose ourselves, lose who we are and who we are determined to be – and a happy ending, thus an ending where our desire is fulfilled. Establishing the link between these two seems to be the central achievement of the comic work of art. In distinction from other artistic genres, such as tragedy or melodrama, where self loss – a loss of home, or social position, or property – seems to set one on a trajectory of unhappiness and frustrated desire – in comedy it is self loss in which the secret to happiness seems to reside. How can this be? How is it that self loss can be the road to happiness? What is the secret to happiness which comedy holds? These will be the questions that will occupy this class as we investigate the question of the comic work of art. We will be reading some of the most celebrated comic works from Shakespeare and Moliere to our times, as well as some of the most influential theoretical texts about the comic, and we will be watching some of the greatest screen comedies from Charlie Chaplin, the Marx brothers, Ernst Lubitsch, and Preston Sturges, and some tv comic series from Seinfeld to Schitt’s Creek.

COLL-C 105 – Quantum Mysteries for Everyone (Honors Discussion)

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Sections offered FALL 2021:

#40579 (Lecture)
#42411 (Discussion)

AMIT HAGAR

MW 8:45-9:35am
F 10:00-10:50am

WH 101
HU 108

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd N&M credit – Natural Science; COLL (CASE) N&M Breadth of Inquiry credit; COLL (CASE) Critical Approaches

Above class taught in a Hybrid manner which includes In Person and Online Instruction. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

 

Quantum theory is the best theory we have of microscopic things, but it is also extremely hard to understand what exactly the theory is saying. We will begin this course by describing a few simple quantum experiments to see just why the theory is so strange, and then we will begin to look more closely at the formalism of the theory and at the philosophical puzzles raised by its interpretations. After suggesting several solutions, we shall adopt a more instrumental view, on which these puzzles may be considered an important resource that, if harnessed, may have some surprising implications on the way we manipulate information and perform computations. Along the way, we will learn how to think critically and carefully about science and scientific theories, and how to approach a given problem from several different philosophical angles. The course will have both lecture and discussion. There will be weekly writing assignments of 1 page each (30%), three small quizzes (30%), a group project (20%) and a final multiple-choice exam (20%). The final exam is a necessary requirement for the final grade. It will be waived for the 2 students with the best group presentation!

Please note that this fall the course will have a somewhat unusual layout. The first 8 weeks have the lectures completely asynchronous online, while the discussion session for the general population will meet in person, and the honors will meet online. Full in person will resume on Oct 14th for both lectures and discussion.

BIOL-L 112 – Foundations of Biology: Biological Mechanisms (Honors Discussion)

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Sections offered FALL 2021:

#19069

AMY BERNDTSON

W 6:45-7:35pm

JH 065

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd N&M credit – Natural Science; COLL (CASE) N&M Breadth of Inquiry credit

Contact Rebecca Steele rsteele@indiana.edu or biougrad@indiana.edu for permission to enroll

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

 

Dr. Amy Berndtson is offering an honors discussion section for her BIOL-L 112 – Foundations of Biological Mechanisms course during Spring 2019. Grades in the course will be based on a student’s performance in the regular lecture component of the course.

However, during the honors discussion section, students will review course materials from the lecture, then tackle readings from The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist and professor at Columbia University. Dr. Mukherjee is an award-winning science writer that recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his critically acclaimed book, Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.

Students will be assigned weekly readings from The Gene: An Intimate History that include discussion questions to enhance class participation. In addition, students will work in small groups to explore one specific topic from the readings in greater detail, and present their research through an oral presentation. Honors credit will be assigned to students that precipitate in class discussions and fulfill the goals of the course.

Feel free to contact Dr. Berndtson if you have any questions about the honor section of her BIOL-L 112 course. To receive permission to register for the course, please email the Biology Advising Office.

SLAV-T 230 – Topics in Slavic Literature and Culture: Vampires

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Sections offered FALL 2021:

#19002

JEFFREY HOLDEMAN

TR 4:55-6:10pm

GA 0007

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd World Culture credit; IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; COLL (CASE) Global Civ & Culture credit

Above class counts as a 3-credit HON-H course in the Hutton
Honors College

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

The vampire is one of the most popular and enduring images in the world, giving rise to hundreds of monster movies around the globe every year, not to mention novels, short stories, plays, TV shows, and commercial merchandise. Yet the Western vampire image that we know from the film, television, and literature of today is very different from its eastern European progenitor. Nina Auerbach has said that “every age creates the vampire that it needs.”

In this course we will explore the eastern European origins of the vampire, similar entities in other cultures that predate them, and how the vampire in its look, nature, vulnerabilities, and threat has changed over the centuries. This approach will provide us with the means to learn about the geography, village and urban cultures, traditional social structure, and religions of eastern Europe; the nature and manifestations of Evil and the concept of Limited Good; physical, temporal, and societal boundaries and ritual passage that accompany them; and major historical and intellectual periods (the settlement of Europe, the Age of Reason, Romanticism, Neo-classicism, the Enlightenment, the Victorian era, up to today). We will examine how the vampire first manifested itself in European literature and how it “shape-shifted” its way into the entertainment (and commercial) media of today, through numerous and various readings of fictional, ethnographic, and scholarly works, the analysis of folklore materials, as well as the viewing of movies, television shows, and Internet sites, not only from the U.S. and Europe but from around the world. By the end of the course, students will be able to discuss the origins, classifications, functions, natures, and evolution of the vampire and what that can tell us about historical periods and our own contemporary cultures.

ARTH-A 102 – Renaissance Through Modern Art

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Sections offered FALL 2021:

#17983

MICHELLE FACOS

W 1:45-2:35pm

SY 200

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd World Culture credit; IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; COLL (CASE) Global Civ & Culture credit

Above class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

For permission to enroll in above section, please email
rsteele@indiana.edu and include university ID number

Learn how to identify art movements (Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism) and works by major artists (Michelangelo, Monet, Picasso) and the ways in which these help us to understand Western history from the 15th to the 20th century.

GNDR-G 101 – Gender, Culture, and Society

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Sections offered FALL 2021:

#10953

STEPHANIE SANDERS

MW 11:15am-12:05pm

LH 130

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

Above class taught in a Hybrid manner which includes In Person and Online Instruction. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

 

This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of gender—the social creation and cultural representation of femininity and masculinity and other forms of gender expression—by examining relevant beliefs, practices, debates and political struggles. Lectures, readings, and class discussions consider how people of different races, ethnicities, classes, and nationalities in various historical periods and different societies have assumed and expressed gendered identities. Topics may include: the scientific study of sexual differences; sexuality; romantic love and marriage; parenthood; reproduction; birth control and new reproductive technologies; interpersonal violence; fitness, health, body image, and popular culture; the sexual division of labor and economic development; and feminist movements.

This course deals with aspects of human sexuality and gender in a straight-forward and explicit manner. If this is a problem for you, please do not take this course.

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