HON 42XX - Junior/Senior level seminar

The HON 42xx seminar is a required course for all Honors tracks: University Honors and every Departmental Honors track. These are Junior-Senior seminars intended for students who are at least into their third year of study, not only a Junior based on accumulated credits. These courses examine a specific topic through multiple disciplinary lenses, offering a broader and deeper understanding of the subject matter. The topics are chosen and taught by faculty from throughout WSU and change almost every semester. Some current HON 42xx seminars do have the ability to overlap with current WSU general education requirements, such as:

-HON 4200 - Cultural Inquiry (CI)

-HON 4250 - Global Learning (GL) using a historical perspective

-HON 4260 - Global Learning (GL) using a foreign culture perspective

All students wanting to take a HON 42xx seminar will need to request a block lift using this online form.

FALL 2024 HON 42xx Seminar Descriptions

Race & Gender in Early Greek Thought (HON 4200, CRN 17377)

Josh Wilburn

Wednesday 5:00pm – 7:30pm CI, PL

This course will examine early Greek constructions of gender, ethnicity, and racialized groups through examination of poetry, philosophy, speeches, medical texts, and other ancient sources.

History of Japanese Pop Culture (HON 4250, CRN 17014)

Elizabeth Lublin

Monday/Wednesday 2:30pm - 3:45pm GL, HS

This course explores the history of Japanese pop culture from its origins in the 17^th century to the present through an interdisciplinary lens. Focusing on film, literature, manga, anime, music, theater, and food, it examines the influences that have shaped these products and the ways in which they have been used to express social values, advance political agendas, uphold and challenge gender norms, raise environmental concerns, perpetuate national myths, and empower Japan in the global community.

Israeli Society and Politics (HON 4250, CRN 17277)

Howard Lupovitch

Tuesday/Thursday 1:00pm – 2:15pm GL, HS

The central aim of this course is to examine current debates and controversies regarding the State of Israel – including the current conflict between the State of Israel and Hamas and the broader conflict between Israel and the Palestinians – in a broad and balanced framework, to provide students with much-needed nuance, background, context, and perspective with which to absorb the prevalent, often one-dimensional understandings of these debates and controversies.

Nouns in Asian Languages (HON 4260, CRN 17508)

Haiyong Liu

Tuesday 2:30pm – 5:00pm FC, GL

This course will study the basic concepts, atomic structures, function mechanisms, shared universals, and their socio-political origins and impacts of nouns or nominal phrases, as represented by languages spoken in Asia. Students will also be trained to look for references and relevant literature, present, and write linguistic essays that include data introduction, analysis, and generalizations accurately.

Climate, Environment, and Media (HON 4280, CRN 17022)

Elena Past

Monday/Wednesday 4:00pm – 5:15pm

This course considers major environmental challenges, foremost among these climate change, through the interdisciplinary lenses of Environmental Media Studies and the Environmental Humanities. We will study an array of climate media from around the world, including feature films, documentary series, podcasts, and digital humanities projects, to analyze and critique genres and mediatic forms of climate protest, resistance, and activism.

Current Ethno-Racial Complexities (HON 4280, CRN 15678)

Erfan Saidi Moqadam

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

This course explores the ways that race and ethnicity may signify heritage, cultural identity, social status, prestige, authority, and other factors. Through the analysis of diverse trends and case studies written by anthropologists, sociologists, social theorists, historians, and black feminist scholars, students will be able address question such as how to 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.

Music Copyright: The Workplace and the Law (HON 4280, CRN 17108)

Eldonna May

Online Synchronous Tuesday/Thursday 11:30am - 12:45pm

This course explores a variety of legal issues relating to the creation, exploitation, and protection of music and other content. The seminar focuses on traditional legal regimes and business models and the ways in which new technologies (particularly the evolution of digital media and the Internet) have affected legal and business strategies involved in the making and distribution of content. The course’s primary emphases are music and the ways in which legal principles manifest themselves in practice in the music industry.

Introduction to Linguistic Theory (HON 4280, CRN 16093)

Walter Edwards

Wednesday 5:00pm – 7:30pm

This course is an introduction to linguistics, the scientific discipline that studies the nature and use of human language and languages. Linguistics investigates language acquisition, competence, and performance. Linguistics has at least 12 branches; but only the core areas of the subject will be covered in this course, e.g. phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistics, and language change.

Law, Injustice, and Intersectionality (HON 4200, CRN 17602)

Anwar Uhuru

Wednesday 11:30am – 2:00pm Hybrid 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.