Past Honors Courses

Fall 2020

Sophomore Seminar – Place and Placemaking. Drs. Sandy Marshall and Danielle Lake. (Civ)

How often do you take the time to stop, observe, and think about the spaces and places that you walk by, study in, and inhabit on a daily basis? All too often, we see place as the static stage upon which we play out our lives. Though we take place for granted, designers, developers, architects and other planners inscribe their values, identities, and assumptions upon particular places and, consequently, shape our experiences and ideas. This course will examine how the social design of place shapes individuals and communities. In this course, students will learn to look at and think about place in a new way, examining how place design shapes individuals and communities. Using a variety of methods, including ethnographic interviewing, the collection of oral histories and digital story-telling, together we will analyze everyday places and how they came to be. We will use participatory design practices to work with communities to imagine how places could be in the future. Throughout the semester, students will conduct community-based research with the aim of uncovering the hidden histories of forgotten places and reimagining how places in the community might look instead.

Sophomore Seminar – Making the Grade: Teaching and Learning from Antiquity until Today. Dr. Kristina Meinking. (Civ)

What does learning look like? How do we know that we’ve learned? How do politics, economics, psychology, and other factors influence our understanding of learning? Why and how might these matter? And what do grades have to do with learning? Drawing on the diverse experience and expertise of students, this course seeks to explore these and other questions by examining the history of education, deconstructing the relationship between grades and learning, and inviting students to create meaningful alternative models for articulating and demonstrating their learning.

Sophomore Seminar – The Science of Death. Dr. Jessica Merricks. (Sci)

What is death, exactly? What is the precise moment that gives way to its terminal state? How have modern medical advances helped or hindered the transition between life and death, and challenged our definition of personhood? This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to address questions about death and dying. Beginning with a discussion of the physiological requirements for sustaining life, we will examine the mechanisms that underlie the dying process, discuss the environmental and economic factors related to methods of preservation of life, and the various issues surrounding deposition of the body. We will also search the globe for a glimpse into the diverse attitudes and beliefs towards the dead and dying. Ultimately, this class will challenge our understanding of death and provide students with the opportunity to revise their own perspectives on what it means when life is “lost”.

Other Past Courses

First Year Seminar – Vision & Difference: Art, History, & Identity. Dr. Kirstin Ringelberg. Civilization

This course will explore the intersections of art objects and makers, their historical contexts, and categories of personal and group identity, particularly gender and race. Artists both work within and challenge, through subtle subversions or direct attacks, the normative identity constructs of their historical contexts. We will look at several case studies across a variety of contexts and analyze the strategies taken by both these artists and the historians who wrote about them. How can we think differently about our own contexts and identities by studying the ways that identity has been constructed, performed, and deconstructed in visual objects? Or in texts that attempt to frame and define those objects, their makers, and their periods? What relationships do seeing and being seen have to our identities, our histories, and the way we understand and learn? Much is being made of our own current context as one of heightened individual visibility in a landscape itself increasingly visually oriented; what is at stake in this supposed change, and how can art history’s focus on these very issues be deployed to understand it?

First Year Seminar – Cosmopolitanism. Dr. Ketevan Kupatadze. Civilization

At Elon we capitalize on our desire to educate what we call “global citizens,” yet we have not considered using the phrase “cosmopolitans.” Why? Taking this question as a point of departure, this course invites students to explore the intellectual history of cosmopolitanism and the similarities and differences between being ‘global’ as opposed to ‘cosmopolitan.’ The term comes from Diogenes, the Greek philosopher, who when asked where he came from, replied: “I am a citizen of the world” [kosmopolitês]. The response was intended to mean that he was not bound to the laws of the metropolis to which he had arrived. The course, therefore, will focus on one of the most basic questions with which cosmopolitan discourse has always challenged us: why do we attach ourselves to local and/or national identities? And, based on this attachment, claim or strip away one’s rights, privileges and authority? In this context, the history and the tradition of cosmopolitanism in Latin America will prove to be illuminating, as it is a compilation of cultures highly influenced by Western socio-political, philosophical and literary discourses, but at the same time one that has always had to negotiate its peripheral place vis-à-vis the European center while searching for its own coherent identity.

Second Year Seminar – Burning at the Stake: Superstition in the Western World. Dr. Mina Garcia. Civilization

This course asks how belief in supernatural causes shapes societies, relates to religion and idolatry and changes depending on the context. Studying what constitutes superstition from Apuleius to the Virgin of Guadalupe, from Inquisitorial Spain to the Salem Witch Trials, can expose the complexities of a particular society and how racial, gender, class and territorial conflicts can be disguised as manifestation of a spell. Students will develop a critical understanding of the malleability of the concept, focusing in its role in Early Modern Spain the newly discovered Americas and the contemporary world. Course assignments, focused reaction papers, a poster session and a semester-long project are designed to prepare students to meet the complex questions of the term in the most engaging way.