SPRING/SUMMER 2025 HON 42xx Seminar Descriptions

Spring Semester

Law, Virtue, & Society

HON 4200, CRN 33292

Sean Stidd

Tuesday/Thursday    11:30am - 2:00pm     CI, PL

Since Aristotle it has been believed that a healthy society both depends on and develops the virtue of its citizens. But legal and civic structures which encourage virtue seem to be in conflict with a free and liberal society in which the state doesn’t endorse any specific conception of the good in favor of allowing citizens to pursue their own diverse interests. Are these two ways of thinking about society really in conflict, or is it possible to support both virtue and freedom? This course will consider some major philosophical arguments on both sides of this issue. In what ways may the law be used to promote virtue without violating the freedom of citizens? Are there ‘value-neutral virtues’ which any liberal state can wholeheartedly support, and if so, what are they? Or is political value-neutrality actually undesirable, or an illusion? 

Spring Semester

“Decade of Protest”: Explaining the Turbulent Global 2010s

HON 4250, CRN 33247

Matt Lacouture

Online Synchronous Mon/Wed/Fri     12:30pm - 2:10pm    GL, HS

Time Magazine declared 2011 to be “the year of the protestor”—a year that began with mass protests toppling dictators in Tunisia and Egypt and that ended with the “Occupy Movement” in New York City; spreading quickly around the world. Things didn’t end there. Between 2011 and 2020, tens of millions of people rose up in protest across the world, from Brazil to Hong Kong, and dozens of countries in-between. The decade ended with the collision of a global pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sparking the largest mass movement in modern US history. That these events all fell within a relatively short period of time invites us to stop and ask some important questions: What drove millions of people into the streets? What connected these mass mobilizations? What was unique about the 2010s? What might happen next? We will address these questions (and more) through comparative case studies and independent research projects exploring the “decade of protest”.

Spring/Summer Semester

Surveillance Capitalism: How Much of You is for Sale?

HON 4280, CRN 33250

Ashley Woodson

Hybrid Mon/Wed/Fri     9:00am-10:00am

Surveillance capitalism is a business model based on collecting personal data. Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Uber use and sell personal data to create products, services, and social networks that influence our decisions and understanding of the world. This course explores all the ways we participate in surveillance capitalism – with and without our consent! We will work together to define surveillance, create presentations about our decisions as digital citizens and consumers, and develop a code of ethics for big ideas like privacy and permission.

FALL 2025 HON 42xx Seminar Descriptions

Law, Injustice, and Intersectionality (HON 4200, CRN 15856)

Anwar Uhuru

Wednesday    11:30am – 2:00pm      CI, PL

This course will examine what we think we know about social and political constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and ableism. Borrowing from Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice and Drucilla Cornell’s Imaginary Domain we will be tasked with critiquing how knowledge production or lack thereof contributes to harm. The texts in this course are primary philosophical and legal texts that mark moments in Anglophone political thought and culture.

American Medicine in the Twentieth Century (HON 4250, CRN 15452)

William Lynch

Hybrid - Friday    11:30pm - 2:00pm     GL, HS

This course examines major benchmarks in the making of the current American medical system. After surveying the basis of ancient medicine and considering the influences of humoral theory on medical practice up to the 19^th century, we then examine the rise of “scientific” medicine (based on germ theory and bacteriology) in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Medicine and health care are considered from different perspectives, including 1) how the understanding of medicine changed over time and why, and 2) how economics, ideology, race, gender, and ethnicity have influenced access to, and the quality of, medical care over the course of American history.

Varieties of Judaism (HON 4250, CRN 15841)

Howard Lupovitch

Monday/Wednesday     1:00pm - 2:15pm    GL, HS

This course will survey the development of Judaism as a religion and, more broadly, as a way of life over the past several millennia. The first part of the course will explore how Judaism was created out of the cultural and theological matrix of ancient Israel in response to the trauma of exile, the protracted encounter with Hellenistic culture, and the challenge of reconciling the centrality of the Land of Israel in with the realities of Jewish life in the diaspora. The second part of the course will examine, first, the essential features of Rabbinic Judaism once it emerged as the dominant form of Judaism worldwide, how it varied by region (e.g. Ashkenazic vs. Sephardic) and sired spiritual movements such as Hasidic Judaism; and second, the rise of denominations of Judaism in nineteenth Europe and America, notably Reform Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, and variations of each. The last part of the course will focus on the transformational impact of Zionism on the beliefs and practices of Judaism in the diaspora and compare the various forms of Judaism and Jewish identity in the State of Israel with those in post-war America and Europe.

Introduction to Chinese Literature (HON 4260, CRN 15688)

Yunshuang Zhang

Thursday     2:30-5:00       FC, GL

This course examines the nature and development of both poetic tradition and narrative tradition in China over a period of more than two and a half millennia from the Zhou dynasty through modern China. Historical contexts and critical terms for literary study will be introduced throughout the course. In reading representative works of poems, historical records, short stories, novels, and drama (as well as several video screenings), we will reflect on a series of critical issues such as the relationship between self and the society, the role of qing (desire, emotions, or love) in Chinese literature, the multiple identities of Chinese intellectuals, the transformation from elite literature to urban literature, and the enduring impact of premodern Chinese literature in modern and contemporary literature and culture.

Love Sickness in the Italian Literary Tradition (HON 4260, CRN 15768)

Raffaele De Benedictis

Monday/Wednesday      2:30pm – 3:45pm     FC, GL

This is a seminar with survey units on aegritudo amoris (love sickness). It traces the groundwork of love sickness into the studia humanitatis (humanistic texts from ancient Greece, Rome, Middle Ages, and the Italian Renaissance literary and philosophical tradition. It further examines the thematic convergence of literary and philosophical studies with the scientific, medical advances of earlier and later studies, particularly those that took place during the Age of scientific discoveries.

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (HON 4260, CRN 25839)

Collaborative Online International Learning course (COIL)

Silvia Giorgini

Hybrid - Thursday       11:30pm – 2:00pm        FC, GL

This course is a COIL course, a collaboration with an engineering course in Germany, which invites students to explore critical questions related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a cross-Atlantic comparative context. Students will study the history of the United Nations, examine the global political landscape in which the SDGs were developed, and then collaborate with German partners in a critical analysis of goals of their choosing.

Race and Ethnicity (HON 4280, CRN 13818)

Erfan Saidi Moqadam

Monday/Wednesday    10:00am – 11:15am    

This course explores how race and ethnicity signify heritage, cultural identity, social status, prestige, authority, phenotypic traits, and other social markers, while also shaping societal structures based on the cultural meanings ascribed to these attributes. Through the analysis of diverse trends and case studies written by anthropologists, sociologists, social theorists, historians, and black feminist scholars, students will be able to address questions such as how do we define “race”, “ethnicity”, “whiteness”, “blackness”, “racial categories”, and what does it mean to be a white, black, brown, multi-racial, or transnational individual living in the U.S. We will analyze how racial and ethnic distinctions have been socially constructed, how these societal meanings have changed over time, and how they intersect with gender, class, religion, language, and nationality.

Introduction to Linguistic Theory (HON 4280, CRN 15687)

Ljiljana Progovac

Tuesday           5:30pm – 8:00pm

This course is an introduction to the formal, scientific study of human language, which is concerned with three primary linguistic levels of structure: the level of sounds (phonetics and phonology), the level of words (morphology), and the level of phrases and sentences (syntax). Furthermore, we will examine how meaning is computed at these different levels (semantics), incorporating some basic notions of logic and philosophy. In addition, we will introduce the main approaches to language acquisition by children, incorporating some basic developmental milestones, intersecting with those studied in psychology. We will study a wide sample of languages, cutting across a variety of cultures.