Fall 2022 Course Descriptions

More classes are in the process of being added for Fall! Please check back in Week 7 to see newly added courses!

HC101H - Symmetry

Professor: Lindsay Hinkle

4.00 credits

CRN 11133: Monday & Wednesday, 8:30-9:50am @ CHA 301

CRN 11135: Monday & Wednesday, 10:00-11:20am @ CHA 201

The symmetry of a pattern provides visual interest. The symmetry of a molecule affects its function. But what does it really mean to be symmetric or to have symmetry? read more

HC101H - Philosophy of Food

Professor: Hannah Cutting-Jones

4.00 credits

CRN 11237: Monday & Wednesday, 2-3:20pm @ CON 330

In this class we will examine philosophical questions about what we eat and why we eat it, a fascinating and interdisciplinary exploration of humans’ complex relationship with food. The class will be wide-ranging in historical and geographic scope. read more

HC101H - The Garden and the Wall

Professor: Gantt Gurley

4.00 credits

CRN 11233: Monday & Wednesday, 8:30-9:50am @ CHA 201

CRN 11229: Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:20pm @ CON 330

I'd like to be
Under the sea
In an octopus' garden
In the shade
- Ringo Starr

Perhaps the most ubiquitous allegory in all of world literature is the garden, the locus amoenus, a concept that is often synonymous with paradise. read more

HC101H - Down the Rabbit Hole

Professor: Brian McWhorter & Lisa Munger

4.00 credits

CRN 11134: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:20pm @ CHA 201

In the opening chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Alice’s riverbank reverie is interrupted by a white rabbit, anxiously muttering and checking its pocket watch as it hurries past. “Burning with curiosity,” she pursues it down the rabbit hole and finds herself in an unfamiliar, fantastical world where she must develop new knowledge in order to get around and meet her goals—much like a new student in a liberal arts college. read more

HC101H - Artificial Intelligence: the Culture of Minds and Machines

Professor: Casey Shoop

4.00 credits

CRN 11235: Monday & Wednesday, 10:00-11:20am @ ESL 193

CRN 11228: Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:20pm @ CHA 201

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick’s titular question frames the concerns of this course on the relationship between minds and machines. Computers increasingly talk to us, make book recommendations, drive cars; they are even said to paint pictures and compose poetry. But what does it mean to think about an android’s dreams or desires or capacity for love? Is this a category mistake? What is the line between the human and the machine? read more

HC101H - The Art and Science of Human Flourishing

Professor: Kate Mondloch

4.00 credits

CRN 11234: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:20pm @ LIB 322

CRN 11223: Tuesday & Thursday, 8:30-9:50am @ LIB 322

For millennia, cultures have contemplated the question of human “flourishing:” an existence filled with deep satisfaction, well-being, resilience, and accomplishment. This course will explore perspectives from the humanities and the sciences about what it means to flourish and what the key components might be. read more

HC101H - Bondage & Freedom

Professor: Timothy Williams

4.00 credits

CRN 11136: Monday & Wednesday, 4:00-5:20pm @ CHA 201

This course takes its title from Frederick Douglass’s second autobiographical narrative, My Bondage, My Freedom (1855). Douglass’s title underscores the greatest contradiction of American life: The United States was founded on the ideals of freedom but nevertheless has supported and benefited from the bondage of others. read more

HC101H - The Cryptographic Imagination

Professor: Corinne Bayerl

4.00 credits

CRN 11137: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00-11:20am @ CHA 201

CRN 11225: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:20pm @ VIL 201

QEFP ZIXPP TFII YB CRK! Not sure what this means, but curious? Then join this class and find out how and why people across various cultures and centuries have invented ciphers and codes to communicate secret information. read more

HC101H - Malaria

Professor: Melissa Graboyes

4.00 credits

CRN 11230: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00-11:20am @ CON 301

CRN 11224: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:20pm @ ANS 193

This course examines the vector-borne disease, malaria, from an inter-disciplinary liberal arts perspective. We will consider malaria and its corresponding technologies in Africa from many different disciplines and perspectives, recognizing how these different approaches contribute to more complex and accurate understanding of a challenging disease. read more

HC101H - Misinformation

Professor: Nicole Dudukovic

4.00 credits

CRN 11227: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00-11:20am @ GSH 130

CRN 11226 Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:20pm @ GSH 131

This course examines misinformation from an interdisciplinary, liberal arts perspective. We will explore the nature of truth and knowledge and apply these concepts to our current struggle to separate facts from alternative facts and legitimate news from fake news. We will investigate the psychological processes that make us vulnerable to believing misinformation and why it can be challenging to correct these beliefs. read more

HC101H - Epic Influencers: Leadership, Poetry, and You

Professor: Barbara Mossberg

4.00 credits

CRN 11139: Monday & Wednesday, 2:00-3:20pm @ CHA 201

Epic rules! In this course, we are sleuths, investigating the case for and evidence of the questionable theory that poetry is an instrumental aspect of leadership. From Homer to Cervantes, Nelson Mandela to Amanda Gorman, Churchill to Richard Feynman to Harry Styles, Lincoln to Mao to Obama, Nikki Giovanni to George Lucas to Cameron Awkward-Rich, we cite chapter and verse, working independently and in teams, researching diverse leaders’ use of poetry across fields and disciplines and cultures. read more

HC101H - Psychology of Pilgrimage

Professor: Shoshana Kerewsky

4.00 credits

CRN 11231: Tuesday & Thursday, 2:00-3:20pm @ GER 303

CRN 11138: Tuesday & Thursday, 4:00-5:20pm @ CHA 201

What is a pilgrimage, and why are so many people drawn to explore its variations? For some, pilgrimage is a religious phenomenon, while for others, it is a meaningful secular experience. read more

HC221H - Shakespeare & Politics

Professor: Brent Dawson

4.00 credits

CRN 11219: Tuesday & Thursday, 5:00-6:20pm @ CON 330

This course focuses on Shakespeare’s second set of history plays, known as the Henriad. read more

HC221H - Gender in the Greco-Roman World

Professor: Lowell Bowditch

4.00 credits

CRN 11218: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:20pm @ GSH 130

This course will explore the construction of gender and norms of sexuality in Greco-Roman antiquity. We shall consider attitudes toward the body, homo-, bi-, and heterosexuality, the household, privacy, and religious ritual as it reflects issues of gender. read more

HC221H - Religion After Atheism

Professor: Jeff Schroeder

4.00 credits

CRN 11141: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00-11:20am @ MCK 121

It is said that we live in a secular age, an age of disenchantment. For some, this signifies the triumph of reason over faith and superstition, for others, loss and despair. Previous generations “beheld God and nature face to face,” but modern men and women are left groping for a new connection to the divine. And yet God is not dead, at least for the world’s billions of religious followers. read more

HC221H - The Limits of Utopia

Professor: Casey Shoop

4.00 credits

CRN 11217: Tuesday & Thursday, 4:00-5:20pm @ TYKE 240

How do we imagine a world otherwise, a community built to the specifications of our ethical and political dreaming? Such a question seems both urgently necessary and yet fraught with difficulty: utopia at once names a promissory desire for social perfection and the minatory danger of its fulfillment. read more

HC221H - Philosophy of Sport

Professor: Peg Weiser

4.00 credits

CRN 11140: Monday & Wednesday, 10:00-11:20am @ CHA 202

CRN 11215: Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:20pm @ ANS 193

We will study sport—professional, intercollegiate, and amateur/post-amateur—throughout history as well as current, controversial topics such as the nature of games, the ethics of athletic competition...read more

HC231H - Advocacy and Argumentation

Professor: Trond Jacobsen

4.00 credits

CRN 11213: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00-11:20am @ PLC 189

Rhetoric and argument have been the foundation of a liberal education for more than 2000 years. Students in this class will enhance their abilities in oral advocacy and critical thinking by participating in academic debates. Students will engage leading scholarship on a given topic in order to create and present sound arguments informed by that scholarship, in ways that honor a diversity of perspectives and that is intended for educated but non-specialized audiences. read more

HC231H - Fashion and Media

Professor: Donnalyn Pompper

4.00 credits

CRN 11143: Monday & Wednesday, 2:00-3:20pm @ CHA 202

This course invites students to develop and apply their critical thinking skills to consider fashion’s political, environmental, and economic effects – and ways media professionals and broader society may navigate and interrogate complex outcomes. read more

HC231H - The Lives of Languages

Professor: Allison Taylor-Adams

4.00 credits

CRN 11142: Tuesday & Thursday, 8:30-9:50am @ CHA 201

CRN 11144: Tuesday & Thursday, 2:00-3:20pm @ CHA 201

Language is part of everything we do, and each individual language has a metaphorical life of its own. read more

HC241H - Atoms: Mother Nature's Legos

Professor: Rebecca Altman

4.00 credits

CRN 11150: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:20pm @ CHA 202

By engaging with the three-dimensional nature of molecules, we will learn why their shapes are crucial to some of the most important parts of our lives, such as food, technology, and our DNA. read more

HC241H - Statistical Reasoning: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Professor: David Levin

4.00 credits

CRN 11147: Monday & Wednesday, 8:30-9:50pm @ CHA 202

Over the past twenty years, the explosion of computing power, coupled with the growth of networked communication and information systems, has allowed for the unprecedented collection of many types of information. read more

HC241H - Nature of Sound

Professor: Lisa Munger

4.00 credits

CRN 11148: Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:20pm @ CHA 202

Sound is an essential component of natural habitats, and it is critical to the survival of many organisms. In this course, we will take an interdisciplinary approach to explore the role of sound in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. read more

HC241H - Knowing and Saving our Relatives: Primate Ecology and Conservation

Professor: Larry Ulibarri

4.00 credits

CRN 11206: Monday & Wednesday, 2:00-3:20pm @ CHA 301

Primates are our closest relatives, and many are on the edge of extinction. Conserving primates and their habitats requires an understanding of their ecology. We will explore the diversity and complexity of primate ecology and behavior, including elements of social, feeding, and reproductive ecology, as well as features of primate life history and how primates interact with their environments. read more

HC241H - Neuroscience Perspectives on Drug Policy

Professor: Christina Karns

4.00 credits

CRN 11149: Tuesday & Thursday, 2:00-3:20pm @ CHA 202

Psychoactive drugs are a pervasive part of modern life. As the lines blur between recreational drugs and pharmacological treatments, a neuroscience perspective on these issues may clarify policy and public health implications of the changing times. read more

HC277H - Thesis Orientation - Munger

Professor: Lisa Munger

2.00 credits

CRN 11151: Friday, 10:00-11:50am @ PLC 361

CRN 11199: Monday, 4:00-5:50pm @ MCK 473

Thesis Orientation is two-credit class (graded pass/no pass) that introduces CHC students to the thesis process. The CHC thesis is the culmination of work in a major—a natural outgrowth from and expression of the ideas, problems, and approaches taught in that particular discipline or field of study. read more

HC277H - Thesis Orientation - Hinkle

Professor: Lindsay Hinkle

2.00 credits

CRN 11205: Thursday, 12:00-1:50pm @ GSH 132

HC277H - Thesis Orientation - Paty

Professor: Carol Paty

2.00 credits

CRN 11202: Thursday, 10:00-11:50am @ UNIV 205

HC277H - Thesis Orientation - Mossberg

Professor: Barbara Mossberg

2.00 credits

CRN 11204: Wednesday, 12:00-1:50pm @ CON 360

HC301H - Environmental, Climate, and Energy Justice in Latinx Communities

Professor: Catalina de Onís

4.00 credits

CRN 11198: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00-11:20am @ TYKE 202

CRN 11154: Tuesday & Thursday, 4:00-5:20pm @ CHA 202

Our world is profoundly shaped by precarity, intersectional injustices, and policies and practices that threaten life on Earth. With such high stakes for struggling for a more livable, just, and equitable present and future, in Environmental, Climate, and Energy Justice in Latinx Communities our primary goal is to research and respond to possibilities for co-existences that foreground the experiences of Latina/o/x people. read more

HC301H - Issues of the Nineties

Professor: Rebecca Schuman

4.00 credits

CRN 11153: Monday & Wednesday, 10:00-11:20am @ CHA 301

In this introduction to interdisciplinary research methods, students will explore multiple facets of the decade that has (re)captivated the imagination: the 1990s. read more

HC301H - Conspiratorial Thinking in American History

Professor: James Breen

4.00 credits

CRN 11196: Monday & Wednesday, 2:00-3:50pm @ PLC 361

CRN 11156: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:50pm @ MCK 121

From the colonial era to the twenty-first century, Americans have turned to conspiracy theories as a way to explain the unexplainable—from mysterious phenomena to large-scale social changes. read more

HC421H - Written on the Body: Exploring Embodiment through Creative Nonfiction

Professor: Brian Trapp

4.00 credits

CRN 11162: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:50pm @ CHA 301

In this seminar/creative nonfiction workshop, you’ll (1) explore how creative nonfiction authors write the body in contemporary literature and (2) write and workshop your own embodied creative nonfiction. You’ll explore how embodiment intersects with identity in its many forms: race, ability, gender, and sexuality. read more

HC421H - Lie to Me: Techniques in Prose Fiction

Professor: Ulrick Casimir

4.00 credits

CRN 11195: Tuesday & Thursday, 2:00-3:50pm @ PLC 248

The goals of this course are deceptively simple: to refine your understanding of the rudiments and mechanics of fiction writing, and to foster the development of habits vital to the future production of solid, expressive prose (which includes but is not limited to literary prose), beyond the confines of this course. read more

HC421H - Inside-Out Prison Exchange: Mercy and The Rule of Law

Professor: Kristen Bell

4.00 credits

CRN 11194: Thursday, 6:00-8:50pm @ KNL 42

The Week 1 class meeting will be in KNL 42, subsequent class meetings will be held at OSP or OSCI in Salem.

Philosophers and legal scholars generally define the rule of law as a state of affairs in which law, rather than the whim of individuals, is “in charge” in a society. The first part of the class will delve into what the rule of law is, whether/why it is valuable, and what conditions are needed to maintain the rule of law. read more

HC421H - Mark Twain's America

Professor: Harry Wonham

4.00 credits

CRN 11192: Monday & Wednesday, 10:00-11:50am @ CON 330

In Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s 1910 obituary, the San Francisco Examiner wrote that he was “curiously and intimately American . . . He was our very own.” Twenty years earlier, Mark Twain had gone even further in identifying himself with the nation, writing to himself in a personal notebook, “I am not an American. I am the American.” Students in this course will explore the works of Mark Twain with a special interest in the meaning of this seemingly simple, but ultimately inscrutable, assertion about his identity. read more

HC421H - The Labor of Care: Gender and Identity in "Domestic" Literature and Cinema

Professor: Dawn Marlan

4.00 credits

CRN 11193: Monday & Wednesday, 4:00-5:50pm @ CHA 301

How is the domestic both a refuge and a prison? How does home “work” blur the public/private distinction that undergirds the separation of spheres? read more

HC431H - Planning the City

Professor: Eleonora Radaelli

4.00 credits

CRN 11163: Tuesday & Thursday, 8:30-9:50am @ CHA 202

The course examines the praxis of planning the city focusing on plans as text. It is a seminar aiming to discover and produce scholarship on this topic. During the course we will analyze plans of American cities and read scholarly articles about planning. read more

HC431H - Out in the Archives: Preserving LGBTQ History

Professor: Judith Raiskin

4.00 credits

CRN 11164: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00-11:50am @ LIB 201

Much LGBTQ history has been suppressed by the imperatives of the closet and rendered invisible by library cataloging traditions embedded in systemic homophobia and heterosexism. read more

HC431H - Social Media and Democracy

Professor: Beck Banks

4.00 credits

CRN 11165: Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:50pm @ CHA 301

At the beginning of social media, the prospect of a real democracy emerged. Perhaps everyone’s voice could be heard? read more

HC434H/431H - Biography as History: Analyzing African Political Leadership since the 1950s

Professor: A.B. Assensoh

4.00 credits

CRN 11167: Thursday, 2:00-4:50pm @ CHA 301

In African political History, a nation on the second largest continent (Africa) was often considered both stable and progressive if there had not been a military intervention – i.e. coup d’etat -- in its national politics. read more

HC441H - Bitcoin: What Could Possi-blye Go Wrong?

Professor: Micah Warren

4.00 credits

CRN 11186: Monday & Wednesday, 10:00-11:50am @ PLC 361

Proponents of Bitcoin have hailed cryptocurrency as tool for resisting authoritarian governments, disrupting economic hegemony, defying censorship, banking the unbanked, disintermediating corrupt or self-dealing actors, and enabling powerful and useful technologies to bring third-world nations out of poverty and into prosperity. read more

HC441H - Cosmology

Professor: James Schombert

4.00 credits

CRN 11168: Tuesday & Thursday, 8:30-9:50am @ CHA 301

Cosmology, the study of the formation and evolution of the Universe, has progressed from its origins in early man’s ideas of Nature, to Chinese and Greek world views, to Dante’s vision of Heaven and Hell, to Newton’s Clockwork Universe. read more

HC441H - Physics of Sports

Professor: Ben McMorran

4.00 credits

CRN 11184: Monday & Wednesday, 12:00-1:50pm @ PSC B006

Sports do not require detailed knowledge of physics - athletes are able to make rapid judgements and accurate predictions about complex physical systems without the use of equations or computational analysis. read more

HC441H - The Art of Data Manipulation

Professor: Rebecca Altman

4.00 credits

CRN 11169: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:50pm @ PLC 248

Do you ever wonder what the numbers reported in the news actually mean, or where they come from? How do you know you can trust the story the numbers are telling... or the story the authors are saying the numbers are telling? In this course, we will take a deep dive into the world of data manipulation, both in our general society and in scientific reporting. read more

HC444H/431H - The Black Panthers in the Pacific Northwest

Professor: Marc Robinson

4.00 credits

CRN 11171: Wednesday, 2:00-4:50pm @ Synchronous Online

Take this class to learn about the Black Panther Party, a militant political organization of the Black Power Movement, and its activities in Portland and Seattle during the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, did you know that Seattle had the first Black Panther Party chapter outside of California? read more

HC444H/421H - Reading Experiments: Race, Power, and Identity in Literature

Professor: Mai-Lin Cheng

4.00 credits

CRN 11183: Tuesday & Thursday, 10:00-11:50am @ CHA 301

This course asks how literature represents and transforms our understandings of race, power, and identity. We will read a range of poetry and prose by writers whose experiments with language challenge conventional notions of reading, race, and power. read more

HC444H/421H - Black Feminist Literature

Professor: Courtney Thorsson

4.00 credits

CRN 11182: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50pm @ TYKE 340

In this course, we will study works from the vast body of Black feminist literature. Our texts will be by African American women writers, activists, teachers, and intellectuals and will span the late-nineteenth century to the present. Our readings will be diverse in form and genre, including poetry, fiction, anthologies, manifestos, and scholarly essays from a variety of disciplines. read more

HC477H - Thesis Prospectus - Gallagher

Professor: Daphne Gallagher

2.00 credits

CRN 11172: Monday, 12:00-1:50pm @ CHA 102

CRN 11179: Tuesday, 10:00-11:50am @ CHA 102

HC 477H Thesis Prospectus requires preauthorization before each term. To obtain preauthorization, you must complete an online Thesis Prospectus Application Form, which will route to your Primary Thesis Advisor for signature. You have the best chance of getting your first choice of H477H section if you submit this information by Friday of Week 6 of the term before you plan to take the course. You may submit the form and be preauthorized to register for HC 477H until the first week of the term in which you are taking 477 as long as there are seats available. More information on registering for HC 477H can be found on Canvas. Please contact Academic Thesis and Programs Manager Miriam Jordan (mjordan@uoregon.edu) with questions about registering for Thesis Prospectus. read more