College Scholars Honors Seminars – Spring 2008
HONS 181 33 “Cult Books & the Popular Imagination” TR 2:35-3:50 WH 113
Professor Meike Werner Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages
In this seminar we will examine classics from the canon of Western Civilization which achieved in their time the unique status of “cultbook.” We will read texts from Rousseau, Goethe, Lermontov, Nietzsche, Hesse, Buber, Camus, Kerouac and Christa Wolf, and we will address the question of how and why these texts came to assume nearly religious qualities for certain epochs, generations or ethnic groups. What crises or ruptures did these texts express? How did they constitute meaning? In addition, we will also consider different cultureal artifacts like paintings and film.
CPLE: Humanities AXLE: Humanities and Creative Arts
HONS 181 40 “The Idea of the University” TR 11:00-12:15 SC 1313
Professor Barbara Hahn Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages
What went wrong with modern universities? Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University, recently complained about “Our Underachieving Colleges.” Harry Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, entitled his latest book: “Excellence without a Soul. How a Great University Forgot Education.” Contemporary novels show a strange world: Political correctness, harassment, crazy professors, students only interested in sex and drugs. In this seminar, we will explore the history of institutions of higher learning from Greek antiquity to our times, with special emphasis on modern institutions such as the French Ecole normale, the German research university, and English and American colleges. We will study the architecture of the university and read theoretical reflections as well as novels.
Readings include: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust I; John Henry Newman, The Idea of the University; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Future of Our Educational Institutions; John Dewey, Democracy and Education; Max Weber, Science as a Vocation; Bill Reading, The University in Ruins; Dominique La Capra, The University in Ruins?; and excerpts of novels by Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, Mary McCarthy, Theodore Morrison, Philip Roth, Richard Russo, Jane Smiley, and Donna Tartt.
CPLE: Humanities AXLE: Humanities and Creative Arts
HONS 182 18 “Physics and Art” TR 2:35-3:50 SC 1210
Professor James Dickerson Department of Physics and Astronomy
Two apparently unrelated topics share many philosophical as well as practical relations. We will explore the intimate connection between physical phenomena that pervade aspects of art and the practice of art and between the visual representation of beauty, innate to certain aspects physics, and physical phenomena. Is there evidence of artistic beauty in science and scientific phenomena? On the contrary, do there exist scientific or technical components in either the practice or the appreciation of works of art? Perhaps, on a more tangible level, what aspects of scientific phenomena, represented in art and artistic movements or in various innovations, rooted in the physical sciences, have affected or have been incorporated into the fine arts? What physical phenomena and devices are integral parts of either the practice of art or the study of art?
We will investigate such diverse elements as: radiocarbon dating of artistic works; the surrealist movement of the early 20th century; pattern formations in condensed matter and in granular media; the concept of perspective and light in Western and non-Western art; the beauty found in astronomy (images of the universe); the development of photography in the 19th century; infrared spectroscopy for non-destructive surface and interface studies of art.
CPLE: Science and Society AXLE: Perspectives
HONS 182 19 “Leonardo da Vinci” MW 3:10-4:25 FM 217
Professor Michael Bess Department of History
In this seminar we will explore the life, ideas, and works of one of humanity’s most remarkable figures, the Florentine genius Leonardo da Vinci. We will contemplate the full breadth and depth of Leonardo’s achievements, which ranged famously across painting, sculpture, architecture, engineering, botany, anatomy, philosophy, theater, psychology, cartography, mechanics, music, and military technology – to name just the most obvious areas. My goal is for us to come closer to understanding how Leonardo’s mind worked, what made him “tick”, and perhaps most importantly, what we can learn from him that applies to living our own lives as thinking persons today. Is the ideal of the Renaissance Man, of the Universal Mind, hopelessly outdated in our age of hyper-specialized research and scholarship? Or, to the contrary, is that ideal all the more relevant precisely because we live in a world of specialized fields of inquiry? What is living, and what is dead, in the example of Leonardo da Vinci today?
CPLE: Science and Society AXLE: Perspectives
HONS 185 01 “What is Life?” TR 11:00-12:15 SC 6837
Professor John Wikswo Department of Physics & Astronomy
Physicists have been productively considering the nature of life throughout the twentieth century. Developments in theoretical and experimental physics have enabled us to examine in detail the nature and molecular basis of life. This course will look at biology and medicine from the perspective of physics and engineering, and vise versa, and will provide an understanding of the fundamental physical and biological principles that govern the structure and function of selected biological systems, the instrumentation developed to measure the properties and behavior of biological systems, our limited ability to mimic biological systems, and the ability of biology to fabricate complex machines that as yet defy copying. We will begin with an exploration of the role of physics in the origins and principles of modern biology, guided by a critical reading of Schrodinger's "What is Life," Watson's "The Double Helix," and Dyson's "Origins of Life". The course will then shift to a student-led web search, literature review, and presentations on biomimetics, bioelectronic hybrid devices, biomicroelectromechanical systems (BioMEMS), the origins of life, and artificial life. From this, students should gain skills in critical, quantitative analysis and an appreciation of the relationship between biology, physics, and engineering.
CPLE: Basic Science AXLE: Mathematics & Natural Science
HONS 185 06 “Mad Cow Disease, Alzheimer’s & Other Amyloidoses” TR 9:35-10:50
U-6202 (6th floor MRB III)
Professor Gerald Stubbs Department of Biological Sciences
This seminar will examine the biochemistry and cell biology of the amyloidoses, which include the infectious prion diseases such as mad cow disease, and also Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and many others. Although the focus will be on the molecular basis of the diseases, clinical and epidemiological aspects will also be touched upon. Topics will include: how do proteins fold and mis-fold? What cellular processes are affected by the formation of the amyloid structures characteristic of these diseases? Why are some amyloidoses infectious, and others not? Why is cannibalism a bad idea?
Students are assumed to have completed Biological Sciences 110a (Introduction to Biological Sciences) before taking this seminar.
CPLE: Basic Science AXLE: Mathematics & Natural Science
HONS 186 02 “Empire, Race and Visual Culture” MW 1:10-2:25 CL 204
Professor Catherine Molineux Department of History
What function do visual representations play in the construction and maintenance of imperial power? From the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, artists in Portugal, Spain, England, France, the Netherlands, and colonial America generated numerous visual representations of the New World and West Africa. Because most early modern Europeans never traveled to the Americas, this imagery offered one of the only sources of information about the peoples, places, and goods that existed across the Atlantic. This course asks students to think about the consequences of these imagined encounters not only for the development of European cultural identities, but also for the economic and political development of their respective empires. The goals of this course are several: to gain an overview of the major conceptual frameworks for the study of the early modern Atlantic world; to think critically about the role of visual culture in the process of imperialism; to research and write in depth on a topic of the student’s interest, developed in consultation with me; and to further develop the student’s synthetic, analytic and evaluative skills in both written and spoken form.
CPLE: Integrated AXLE: International Culture
