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Home > Curriculum > Course Descriptions > Spring 2009 Course Descriptions
Spring 2009 Course Descriptions
Spring 2009 Course Descriptions | Literature | History | Science | Colloquia SPRING 2009 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS back to topLITERATURE back to top
"Literature and Testimony in Twentieth Century" This course explores the ways in which a cultural oblivion or a cultural canonization have failed to account both for the scale of the violence that has been perpetrated in our century and for the value of individual testimonies. The course is based on the reading of primary sources, mostly autobiographical accounts of personal and historical traumas and discusses the problem of representing these events in writing. Is it personal testimony a way of representing historical events from an subjective point of view? Or does testimony put itself beyond the limits of representation and of subjectivity? Is this possible? What is the truth of testimony? Is it the truth of writing or is it something not accessible through writing? The first part of this course studies the formation of a philosophical and religious idea of testimony by focusing on selected readings from Plato, the Dao de jin, Dante, Augustine and Emanuel Levinas. The second part will study the emergence of the literary notion of testimony. Readings include Siegfried Sassoon's Poems, Antonio Gramsci's Letters from Prison, Italo Calvino's Autobiographical Essays (selections), Primo Levi, If this is a Man and a selection of his Poems, Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life. The Diaries of Etty Hillesum (1941-43), Albert Camus' The Plague, and The Fall, and Vincenzo Consolo, The Smile of the Unknown Mariner.
“Man-Machine: Fictions of Artificial Life” The fascination with automata is as old as Plato, but it picks up considerable steam (so to speak) with the emergence of a mechanistic world-view during the time of the Scientific Revolution. Starting here, we will investigate theoretical/philosophical texts, literary texts and files that explore the implications of the idea of artificial life for philosophical, scientific, political, and religious questions. Beginning with the classical incarnations of this motif, the course will go on to investigate the automata of Romanticism, the role of artificial creation in silent film, and the cyborgs and humanoid robots of the present and future. Throughout, we will be concerned with the precarious position of artificial life between hopeful utopias on the one hand, and the specter of routinely disastrous consequences on the other. What exactly does the drive to create these highly ambiguous doppelgangers tell us about ourselves?
“Figures in the Crowd: Race, Power, and Identity in Modern Literature” This course explores literature of the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. We will be focusing on representations of the city, the crowd, and the detective in short stories, novels, poems, and films. Our readings will lead us to questions of race, power, and identity. Readings will include works by Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Charles Baudelaire, Nella Larsen, Alfred Hitchcock. Requirements include: formal and informal writing and research assignments; oral presentations; attentive participation in class discussion. HISTORY back to top
“Global Ideology, Trade, and Conflict: 1750-Present” This course will give particular attention to political-economic-social ideologies that achieved international prominence, and the competition between these ideologies. We will explore the rise of, and struggles between, republicanism, classical liberalism, democracy, capitalism, racism, colonialism, nationalism, communism, fascism, and neo-liberalism. We will use these ideologies as our primary lens of examination as we consider the rise and fall of Europe’s global domination, the tension between industrialization and traditional cultures, why some ideologies (e.g., democratic capitalism) appeal to some peoples and not to others, the advent of World Wars and Cold War, and the struggles of underdeveloped countries against developed countries. This investigation will consider events in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, East Asia, the US, the USSR, the Middle East, and elsewhere. We will approach these questions through examining philosophy, literature, political treatises, art, and technology. Through using these sources we will explore the distinct creative forces within various cultures, develop skills of critical thinking and interpretation, learn to ask analytical questions of our sources, and recognize the broad patterns that mark global history.
“The Modern World: Historical Thinking from the Enlightenment to the Present” This third segment of the year-long world history sequence has two primary goals: The first is to trace major political, ideological, economic, intellectual, social, and cultural themes in world history from the Enlightenment to the present. We will examine new ideas and essential conflicts that arose in Europe and America during the modern era, and we will analyze the impact of the West on the rest of the world. The second goal is to prepare historical research papers that center on the modern era. Significant time will be devoted to honing the mechanics and craft of historical writing.
Texts will include Marx and Engel's The Communist Manifesto, Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz plus a wide range of primary documents relating to the American and French Revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, slavery, evolution, nationalism, imperialism in Africa and Asia, the world wars, modern political ideologies, Russian revolutions, Chinese revolutions, the Cold War, and decolonization. We’ll also watch excerpts from films (such as Triumph of the Will and All Quiet on the Western Front) and view newsreels, TV coverage, and hundreds of images of the people and events we study.
“Creating the ‘Modern’ World: Readings in Global History from the Enlightenment to the 20th Century” This third segment of the year-long world history sequence will be conducted as a reading and writing seminar. We will explore major themes in global history from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century through a series of reading assignments designed to familiarize students with the central questions raised by scholars of this period. We will cover the Enlightenment, imperialism, industrialization, nationalism, facism, and communism as well as their decline. And we will explore decolonization, rights movements, and various facets of globalization as well. The reading assignments will be primarily journal articles and book excerpts. Students will also write a term paper (ten to fifteen pages in length) based on primary sources so substantial class time will be devoted to the research and writing process.
“From Empire to Globalization: The Making of the Modern World” The empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries set many of the boundaries of the contemporary world, and globalization is currently creating the patterns and relationships that will outline the future. In this course, we will use these two ideas to analyze the development of the last two centuries.
Rather than a survey, this course will be taught seminar-style, giving our concentration to five books in turn. We will begin with the synthesis Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Stephen Howe) which illuminates the varieties of empire—formal and informal, cultural, economic, and ecological. We will examine how capitalism and the industrial revolution underpinned European empires with Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Daniel Headrick). We will look at the rise of postcolonial nationalism by studying the creation of India and Pakistan, still troubled today by an uneasy border, with the novel Cracking India (Bapsi Sidhwa). Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions (Timothy Cheek) will introduce us to communism and China’s internal consolidation from empire into nation. We will end with a second synthesis in Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Manfred Steger), bringing us into the twenty-first century. (These books have all been ordered at the bookstore—they are the bulk of the syllabus but short readings may be added.)
All sections of HC233 require that students complete a research paper based on primary sources, of about 10-15 pages. We’ll move through the process of writing a historical research paper step-by-step, with several preliminary assignments, and some class meetings will be devoted to paper workshops. For your paper, you may choose any topic that interests you, from any period of history, but I will encourage you to pick a topic related to empire or globalization, in order to take advantages of the questions and concepts raised in class. The early reading Empire: A Very Short Introduction may offer a range of topic possibilities.
Other assignments may include a short essay in the first half of the term and occasional response writing on the reading throughout the quarter. There is no midterm or final exam, but you will be asked to write a concluding short essay at the end of the course. SCIENCE back to top
"21st Century Science" The 21st century will be a golden age for scientific knowledge and technological progress. During this last century, our view of Nature shifted from a Cartesian-Newtonian view of a clockwork Universe to an expanding Universe ruled by chaos, complexity and quantum uncertainty. This course will explore scientific topics concerning the macroscopic world, microscopic world and cosmology (dynamics, elementary particles, galaxies, Big Bang) in the context of the philosophy of science that we use to apply meaning to reality (reductionism, emergence, holism and creation). The website for this class is http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/. COLLOQUIA back to top
Prerequisite: HC 221-223 or 231-233
Graduation Requirement: This class will fulfill both of the following requirements: a Social Science Colloquium and an IC Multicultural class. If the student has already taken a Social Science Colloquium, this class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and an IC Multicultural class.
Course Substitution Petition: It is NOT necessary to submit a course substitution petition for this course to count toward the above graduation requirement.
HC INTERNATIONAL CULTURES COLLOQUIUM [HC SOCIAL SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM] Conflict in Divided Societies: Northern Ireland This course will use Northern Ireland as a primary case to focus on social conflict, territorial disputes, and options for moving toward political accommodations. It will operate in a mixed lecture/seminar format, and touch upon a range of issues that reflect the broad impact of zero sum conflicts, including sectarian dynamics in the work place, the family, the educational system, government, popular culture, and "the street." It will explore structural elements that are part of the Catholic-Protestant/Republican-Nationalist-Unionist-Loyalist struggle, as well as the narratives that stem from and contribute to the encompassing dispute. In lecture and discussion we will move among several different scales as we incorporate the experience of the individual, the community, and the nation(s) and attempt to identify strategies that help mitigate or transform the zero sum situation that has characterized much of Northern Ireland for generations. In the final phase of the course we will conduct a negotiation simulation in an attempt to better understand the peace process and the search for enduring solutions.
"Inventing the Middle Ages" This course has been cancelled.
INSTRUCTOR INTERVIEW AND DEPARTMENTAL APPROVAL REQUIRED
This course is part of the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program and meets at the Oregon State Penitentiary.
HC ARTS & LETTERS COLLOQUIUM "Don Quixote and Dostoevsky's The Idiot" Don Quixote, written by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), is recognized as the first truly modern novel in the Western tradition. Cervantes, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, lived an eventful life. He was wounded in the famous naval battle fought at Lepanto (1571) in the Gulf of Patras in Western Greece, in which Christian forces defeated the (Muslim) Ottoman Empire. As a consequence, at the age of twenty-four Cervantes lost the use of his left hand. He was captured by pirates in 1575 and spent five years as a slave in northern Africa. After an unsuccessful career as a dramatist, in 1597 he was imprisoned for alleged malfeasance for his work as a tax collector. He was imprisoned again in 1605, where some believe he began writing his masterpiece, El Engenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha).
Cervantes' protagonist Don Quixote is so enthralled by the heroic exploits of the knights he reads about in his beloved tales of chivalry that he loses possession of his rational faculties and devotes himself to saving those around him from what he imagines are mortal dangers.
What does Cervantes' novel say about ethics? Don Quixote is an idealist, someone who is absolutely devoted to doing good in the world, but he is also apparently mad. Is Don Quixote a Christian saint or is he a deluded fool who harms rather than helps others? Or is he both a saint and a fool? Is Cervantes suggesting that it is crazy to be good?
What is Cervantes telling us about the relation of ethics to the reading of literature? Is Cervantes saying that getting lost in a powerfully imaginative work of fiction is a form of madness that diverts us from our responsibilities to others? Or does Cervantes believe that reading can inspire us to be good?
In order to help us address these questions, we will ponder some lectures on ethics by perhaps the greatest philosopher of ethics of the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), including his lecture on Don Quixote ("Don Quixote: Bewitchment and Hunger").
Cervantes' novel was enormously popular and very influential. After portraying a guilty man (Raskolnikov) in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky wanted to pose for himself the challenge of creating a protagonist who was truly good. He based the hero of his novel The Idiot on Don Quixote. In the second half of the course, after reading Part I (1605) of Don Quixote, we will read Dostoevsky's moving portrayal of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (1868/1869). We will focus on the interplay between the two novels and will ask ourselves what Dostoevsky's novel has to say about ethics, which Levinas understands to be my inescapable responsibility for a unique and irreplaceable other.
"Literature of War" This term, we will be exploring the many faces of war over time. The intention of the course is to allow students, reading works in different genres, to see the impact of war on qualities like bravery (and how this is defined), duty, loyalty, disloyalty, fear, and survival instincts, as well as war’s effect on the psychology of soldiers through training, slogans, the death of friends, victory, or defeat.
Minor focus will be on the bonds between fellow soldiers and between soldiers and their commanders. While we will study works in roughly chronological order there will be historical gaps due to built-in term limitations. Outside reading should help fill in the gaps.
Some of the texts will deal with specific famous battles; others will focus on wars in Greece, Rome, China, the United States, and in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, especially in poetry.
The class will require moderate to occasionally heavy reading, a long 8-10 page paper, an optional oral report of 10-12 minutes (with research and bibliography) on extra works not included in the syllabus, an in-class midterm and a take-home final. The oral report is not mandatory, and can substitute for the final exam. The course will be lecture/discussion.
Texts (in full or in packets)
· Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield (historical novel)
· Anabasis by Xenophon (memoir)
· Selected chapters from The Romance of Three Kingdoms (Chinese historical novel)
· Books 7-12 from The Aeneid by Virgil (epic)
· The Man Without a Country by Edward Everett Hale (novella)
· The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (novella)
· Fragile Fox by Norman Brooks (play)
· Assorted war poems by medieval lyricists, Tennyson, Kipling, Yeats, Owen, and Jarrell
· Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell (memoir)
Outside of class I hope to show several films as well.
NEW COURSE JUST ADDED FEBRUARY 17, 2009! HC ARTS & LETTERS COLLOQUIUM "The Pound Era" Arguably one of the most influential and controversial poets of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound left an imprint on literary history that continues to challenge poets and scholars today. Pound was a poet, translator, editor, and, according to Lawrence Rainey, “the cultural impresario and entrepreneur who . . . occupied a critical position at the heart of modernism.” He was also a supporter of Mussolini, arrested during WWII and imprisoned in an outdoor cage in Italy, and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital while he awaited trial for treason. During the term, we will examine his manifestos, his translations, and a wide range of his poetry including selections from his Cantos. We will consider the ways in which his work reflects the modernist goal to “make it new,” and we will debate the relationship between his poetics and his politics. Finally, we will explore his impact both on his contemporaries and on future generations of poets.
Prerequisite: HC 221-223 or 231-233
Graduation Requirement: This class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Arts & Letters Colloquium and an IP Multicultural class. If the student has already taken an Arts & Letters Colloquium, this class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and an IP Multicultural class.
HC IDENTITIES COLLOQUIUM [HC ART & LETTERS COLLOQUIUM] "Why Disability Studies Change Everything" This colloquium explores the growth over the past 15 years of a new academic discipline: disability studies (DS). This new school of thought uses a social model of disability rather than a medical model. Disability appears not as a pathology to be treated but as a form of cultural identity and a source of community. Interdisciplinary to the core, disability studies reevaluates existing fields of knowledge from the perspective of disabled people. DS “change everything” by reassessing mainstream truths from the supposed margins. This course welcomes Honors College students to participate in this process of re-imagination. No previous knowledge of disability is required. Students will talk and write about provocative readings and will engage in their own research. The course is based in literary study, but branches out from it into several other disciplines. Each week we will reassess a different field of knowledge from a disability studies perspective.
Prerequisite: HC 221-223 or 231-233
Graduation Requirement: This class will fulfill both of the following requirements: a Social Science Colloquium and an IP Multicultural course. If the student has already taken a Social Science Colloquium, this class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and an IP Multicultural course.
HC IDENTITIES COLLOQUIUM [HC SOCIAL SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM] “Disparities in U.S. Health and Health Care” There is a large empirical literature documenting socio-demographic inequalities in health outcomes in the United States. People of color and those with low incomes have consistently been found to have worse health outcomes compared with whites and those with higher incomes. This class will examine the sources of racial/ethnic and income-based disparities in healthcare and it will explore ways to reduce the disparities. In the first half of the course we will examine the sources of disparities, which include inequality in health care access, differentials in health care quality, race and class-based segregation, bias and discrimination, cultural differences, and individual preferences. In the second half of the course, we will study the current policy and clinical approaches to addressing disparities (e.g. culturally appropriate care, quality improvement, data collection and monitoring).
Prerequisite: HC 221-223 or 231-233
Graduation Requirement: This class will fulfill both of the following requirements: a Social Science Colloquium and an IC Multicultural course. If the student has already taken a Social Science Colloquium, this class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and an IC Multicultural course.
Note: Class limited to 12 CHC students and 3 Environment Studies graduate students.
HC INTERNATIONAL CULTURES COLLOQUIUM [HC SOCIAL SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM] "Language, Sustainable Communities, & Global Warming" The chief focus of the course will be on cultural issues generally overlooked in current discussions about how to slow the rate of global warming and other forms of environmental degradation. These include the widely held misconceptions about the nature of the languaging processes that reproduce the misconceptions of earlier thinkers who were unaware of environmental limits, as well as the cultural practices taking place in local communities that are less dependent upon participating in the consumer-dependent money economy that has an ecologically unsustainable footprint. The latter can be referred to as the “cultural commons” that exist in every community—and that are under constant threat of being monetized and thus integrated into the industrial system of production and consumption. Addressing the language issues will bring into focus Albert Einstein’s warning about the double bind of relying upon the same mind-set that created the problem to correct it. The following language issues will be considered: the myth of a conduit view of language, the ways in which analogs adopted in the past continue to frame the meaning of today’s vocabulary, how to introduce analogs that are culturally and ecologically informed, the root metaphors that provided conceptual direction and moral legitimacy to the industrial culture, how the differences between orality and literacy influence awareness of local contexts and the ability of cultures to develop ecological intelligence. Issues related to understanding the ecological importance of the cultural commons include: how modernizing ideologies and the high status forms of knowledge promoted in the educational systems marginalize awareness of the non-monetized, intergenerational knowledge, skills and relationships within local communities that have a smaller ecological footpcolrint, the sustainability characteristics of the local as well as the world’s diversity of cultural commons, and the ways in which the cultural commons are being “enclosed”, and how the forces of enclosure increase dependence upon a money economy that is undergoing radical changes.
As both the language and cultural commons issues require giving close attention to the taken for granted patterns that are part of everyday experience, students will be expected to participate in the class discussions by using the readings as a way of making explicit their own culturally embodied experiences in the cultural commons, monetized relationships, and in reproducing the double bind characteristics of language that reinforce the cultural patterns that are overshooting environmental limits. That is, one of the expectations of the class is for students to develop communicative competence in discussing issues and relationships that most of the larger society either ignore or simply repeat the orthodoxies learned from others. Two short papers as well as a final project will also be required.
Prerequisite: HC 221-223 or 231-233
Graduation Requirement: This class will fulfill both of the following requirements: a Social Science Colloquium and an IC Multicultural course. If the student has already taken a Social Science Colloquium, this class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and an IC Multicultural course.
HC INTERNATIONAL CULTURES COLLOQUIUM [HC SOCIAL SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM] “Enlightenment and Revolution: Latin American Independence, 1750-1850” Virtually all of Spain’s empire in the Americas became independent in the 1820s, after a decade of costly warfare. The leaders of the newly independent republics embarked upon an extremely ambitious path. Inspired by Enlightenment thought and models from the North Atlantic (France, Britain, and the US), they set out to transform their former colonies into sovereign republics with such modern features as equality, civil rights, elected government, and capitalistic economies. Abandoning custom, they wanted to transform a political culture in which legitimacy flowed from tradition, the king, and the Church, to one in which legitimacy resided in public opinion, representative government, and a free-market economy. Though these plans appeared rational at the time, violence, repression, and poverty continued to plague these republics decades after independence. Why didn’t these glorious ideas work?
Though Latin America’s attempt at modern “development” (attempting to adopt these distant, foreign ideas to overhaul a traditional society) saw questionable success, this phenomenon is still prevalent throughout the world today. Across the century that brackets independence, this course will investigate not only political, economic, and social structures, but also the less tangible cultural features that undergird a society and affect its attempts to “develop.” Through exploring the perspectives of numerous peoples (men and women, rich and poor, diverse ethnic and racial groups) we will attempt to understand why freedom, equality, and democracy can be such complicated, dangerous ideas.
Prerequisite: HC 221-223 or 231-233
Graduation Requirement: This class will fulfill both of the following requirements: a Science Colloquium and an IC Multicultural class. If the student has already taken a Science Colloquium, this class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and an IC Multicultural class.
HC INTERNATIONAL CULTURES COLLOQUIUM [HC SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM] “The Physics and Politics of Global Climate Change” The potential for significant Global Climate Change is likely the most severe and economically costly problem of this century. Effective solutions to mitigate its effects will require an unusually high level in international cooperation and thus this topic necessarily brings with it different cultural perspectives. For instance, China keeps posing the fairly logical argument that until they reach the same level of per capita energy consumption as the US, they are not going to cooperate much on reducing their carbon footprint. Unfortunately, the climate system can not withstand this potential perturbation by China. As awareness of this issue increases, so does the amount of miss-information, myth propagation and political agenda. It thus becomes important to focus on this issue in an objective, scientific manner so that the ambiguities are clearly revealed.
I believe that a basic understanding of the Greenhouse effect is something that every college graduate should be able to articulate and therefore a proper class should be constructed to facilitate such articulation. Moreover, global climate change is an excellent example of a situation where you can build a very scientifically plausible and compelling case, but you can not yet scientifically prove that such climate change is human induced. As a result, this topic lends itself to an in depth exploration of the science/policy interface where decisions and future policy implementation necessarily will be made on incomplete data. Therefore, I think a comprehensive course on this topic will serve the HC students quite well in their overall academic preparation and will also immerse them in the noisy data that the science of Global Climate Change must necessarily deal with as well as the international nested conundrums that make the formulation of sensible policy difficult. Indeed, since 2003 the rate of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities has essentially doubled relative to the 1950-2000 baseline –we are therefore, losing ground on this issue at an increasingly rapid rate.
A particular case study for this course will be the various forms of “The Carbon Tax” which have been proposed and whether or not there is really any accountability or verification or “fair trade” in these proposed systems.
The first 2/3 of this course will focus on the data and science of Global Climate Change – its potential drivers and impacts as well as the various kinds of measurements which can be made to verify (or possibly refute) this phenomena. We will begin with simple models of our atmosphere to show how the burning of fossil fuels at a rapid pace naturally leads to the enhanced greenhouse effect. This beginning serves as the basic tie in to the Energy Footprints course. The latter 1/3 of the course will focus on the politics of Global Climate Change in terms of protocol implementation and resistance, the interactions between ambiguous scientific data and public policy, and the needs for new energy sources as one way to mitigate this problem.
In this latter 1/3 of the course, we will also introduce the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) dynamic to show how the energy footprint of BRIC is the major driver in this century of our potential climate path and how this all potentially relates to international carbon trading, carbon caps and carbon taxation.
This course has three principal objectives:
Prerequisite: HC 221-223 or 231-233
Graduation Requirement: This class will fulfill both of the following requirements: a Science Colloquium and an IC Multicultural class. If the student has already taken a Science Colloquium, this class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and an IC Multicultural class.
HC INTERNATIONAL CULTURES COLLOQUIUM [HC SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM] “The Challenge of HIV/AIDS in Africa” HIV/AIDS has a devastating impact on the people of Africa and kills millions each year. In this age of remarkable medical advances in the developed world, why is HIV/AIDS such a difficult problem in sub-Saharan Africa? Why are HIV infection rates not falling in much of Africa, in contrast to many other underdeveloped regions of the world? And why have so many international aid efforts failed? We will focus on two broad topics. First, we will investigate biological and medical aspects of HIV/AIDS and current 'best practices' in its prevention and treatment. Second, we will investigate economic, cultural and political barriers to the successful management of HIV/AIDS in Africa. A background in science is not required; this multifaceted topic accommodates students from all disciplines and each student will develop a topic of their choice for a term project, in consultation with the instructor. Class materials will include books, web-based material, films and primary literature. Course assignments include written responses to assigned readings, oral reports and discussion, and a final research paper. SPECIAL COURSE OFFERINGS back to top
Prerequisite: GEOL 103 or 203
Graduation Requirement: This class will not fulfill a CHC graduation requirement, but features a CHC professor.
VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY This course will cover the paleontological evidence for the evolution of vertebrate life over the last 540 million years. We will begin with the origins of vertebrates from early chordate ancestors and trace vertebrate life through fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and, mammals. We will trace the evolutionary relationships among these animals, as well as discussing major patterns in the evolution of morphology and ecology. Particular emphasis will be placed on key innovations in the evolution of vertebrates, as well as the role of interactions with the physical and biological environment in driving change in vertebrate faunas.
Lectures will focus on tracing evolutionary history of groups, while weekly labs will offer students the opportunity to learn to recognize the elements of the vertebrate skeleton and to use them in identification and description of fossil vertebrates. We will examine material of both living and fossil vertebrates. There will also be at least two weekend field trips to give students an opportunity to learn field methods in vertebrate paleontology and to recognize fossils in their native habitat.
Grading will be based on lecture and lab exams, lab quizzes, field trip exercises and a term paper.THESIS ORIENTATION back to top
This course is P/N only. Attendance is mandatory because it only meets one day: Saturday, April 18.
THESIS ORIENTATION This short workshop class introduces Clark Honors College students to the thesis project required of all our students. The workshop will meet for one day, plus one additional conference with the instructor. We will discuss what makes a successful thesis, what the student can hope to get out of the project, how to identify possible areas of interest, how to find appropriate faculty sponsors, how to identify courses which will provide necessary background, and how to plan the project so that it is manageable and rewarding, rather than burdensome. Other subjects include the difference between research-oriented and creative theses and how to incorporate plans for study abroad into their thesis plans. This workshop is NOT a substitute for HC 477H Thesis Prospectus. This workshop aims to assist students in the earlier and preliminary work of how to approach the thesis. Consider taking this course when you begin seriously exploring your research possibilities, but no later than the term before you take HC 477H Thesis Prospectus. Thesis Orientation is not required for graduation, but CHC students who have taken it found it to be extremely helpful and it relieved their anxiety about the thesis process. THESIS PROSPECTUS back to top
This course is P/N only.
THESIS PROSPECTUS Students will spend the majority of their time in this class polishing their prospectuses and then participating in mock oral examinations. Course requirements include submitting a Thesis Prospectus and completing the Graduation Audit. Seniors should also have a graduation audit done in their major department(s).
Enrollment is based on a first-come, first-served basis. Space is limited! Students who do not file applications in a timely manner will be asked to take Thesis Prospectus the following term. Before enrolling in this class, a student should
1. select a primary thesis advisor from their major department or school,
2. complete and print a Thesis Prospectus Application,
3. have the Thesis Prospectus Application signed by the primary thesis advisor,
4. submit it to CHC Academic Coordinator Kris Kirkeby one to two weeks before registration for the next term begins, and
5. register for the class.
Students who are studying abroad and need to register for Thesis Prospectus should contact Kris Kirkeby for a way to do this from afar! INDIVIDUALIZED STUDY back to top
FALL 2009 PROPOSED COURSES back to topCourses are subject to change.
HISTORYHC 231H Honors College HistoryLITERATUREHC 221H Honors College LiteratureTHESISHC 410H Thesis OrientationHC 477H Thesis Prospectus COLLOQUIA
Arts & Letters
Social Science
Science
Identities and Pluralism (IP)
International Cultures (IC) |
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