Converse College Undergraduate Academic Programs

NISBET COURSE OFFERINGS

The Honors Program offers six different kinds of honors courses:

Freshman Honors Seminars, a course for first-year students, is typically offered in the fall of their freshman year. Students invited into the program directly from high school begin their honors courses with a freshman honors seminar. These courses count toward students’ General Education Program course requirements.

Honors Sections of Ideas and Culture, a year-long humanities sequence (IDC 150 and 151). Students may opt for one or both courses.

Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars involves two professors from different fields team-teaching courses. Examples of Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars include “The Sixties in Music and Historical Memory,” “Philosophy of Religion,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and “Science Theatre: The Case of the Heywood Brothers.” These dual field courses give each student the opportunity to satisfy her honors requirements and sometimes a major requirement.

Junior Honors Seminar is a course designed to help students prepare for life after Converse. Students can learn about graduate school scholarships, draft a personal statement for grad school applications, find out about undergraduate research opportunities, revise resumes, discuss family and career challenges, and explore the meaning of the liberal arts before and after graduation.

Honors Directed Independent Studies are one-term independent research or creative project courses that one or two students, in conjunction with a faculty mentor, design and take. Frequently, students taking such courses seek to present their work at conferences or in publications.

Upper-level Honors Courses allow a student to explore less common topics to fulfill major requirements or to explore an area that interests her. Typical courses include “From Colonial Goodwives to Martha Stewart: Domestic Advice and Experience in America,” “Intelligence and the Brain,” and “Women in Africa and Asia.”

Senior Honors Thesis is an intensive research project, or creative project, or musical performance beginning during a student’s junior year, and culminating in a public presentation to the college and Upstate community late in her senior year. In consultation with a faculty mentor, the student designs the project, helps select an advisory committee of faculty, and researches and creates the final work. Research and creative projects often approach a question from an interdisciplinary angle. Highly qualified and motivated students are permitted to do an honors thesis.

Courses

Fall 2009 Honors Program Courses

Freshman Seminars
(GEP) = General Education Program

PSY 199H: What is Yoga?
Professor: Dr. Jan LeFrancois

Description: The ancient, Indian discipline of yoga is gaining widespread popularity in the Western world. As with anything that rises rapidly to mass appeal, there can be a loss of a deeper understanding of the subject, for example, the tendency to see yoga as only another form of physical exercise. Whereas yoga does have excellent benefits for the body, it is defined classically as a discipline that “stills the fluctuations of the mind” in order to increase awareness of oneself in physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual ways. The purpose of this class is to acquaint you with yoga, its history, philosophy and practice, and to then critically examine a sampling of popular books on yoga in order to see how these popular texts are consistent with the classical philosophy and where they veer from this philosophy. Since yoga is a subject of great scope and depth, our study will be basic.

Credit: GEP, elective credit in psychology; non-Western, non-Anglophone

HST 199H: Gender, Indian Wars, and Witchcraft in Colonial New England
Professor: Dr. John Theilmann

Description: This course places the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 in the larger context of developments in colonial New England and tries to address why the trials took place and why certain people were accused as witches. Through reading secondary and primary source materials (including trial proceedings) you will become aware of the complexity surrounding witchcraft prosecutions. You will develop and express your ideas via papers, discussion, and courtroom simulations. The course is designed to foster curiosity as you confront conflicting evidence and interpretations.

Credit: GEP and elective or major credit in history

PHI 199H: Cultural Collisions
Professor: Dr. Kevin DeLapp

Description: This course will require you to grapple with the perennial question of how cultures respond to forced and sudden collision and confrontation. You will explore some of the most fascinating primary sources the history of the humanities and arts has to offer. Specifically, we will address the following five collisions by attention to primary sources: the collision between Hellenic and Persian culture in the ancient world; the encounter between Christians and Muslims in the First Crusade; the mutual explorations of Western Europe and the Far East during the Renaissance and Enlightenment; and the clash between Europe and the native inhabitants of the Americas following Columbus. We will also devote significant attention to modern media relevant to these collisions, and to theoretical frameworks of cross-cultural philosophy.

Credit: GEP, elective and minor credit in philosophy; non-Western, non-Anglophone credit

Interdisciplinary Honors Courses

ECN / HST 299H: Great Depression
Professors: Drs. Woodrow Hughes and Melissa Walker

Description: This course explores the Great Depression in the United States through the eyes of economists and historians. The course will explore the causes of the Great Depression, its impact on ordinary Americans, and the various ways the federal government attempted to address the hardships created by the economic catastrophe. The course will also examine the legacy of the New Deal in today's America.

Credit: GEP credit in economics or history. Also counts for major, minor, and elective credit in economics or history.

Upper Level Honors Courses

ECN 291H: Movies and Money
Professor: Dr. Madelyn Young

Description: This course is designed to teach students basic microeconomic and macroeconomic principles and theories using examples from film. Topics for discussion include scarcity, entrepreneurship, economic systems, market structures, financial markets, government regulations, poverty, unemployment, monetary/fiscal policy, market failures, labor unions and discrimination. This course will use films, in addition to real world examples and applications to illustrate the basic concepts of the world of economics. At the end of this course, the student will know the basic rules of economic thinking and how they are used to build theories of economic behavior; understand the basic issues of microeconomic and macroeconomics, as illustrated by key economic facts and examples from film; apply these principles of economics, to critically analyze situations encountered in the real world; and appreciate how good economic thinking can help one as a local and global citizen contribute to the making of responsible public policy.

Credit: GEP and elective, major, or minor credit for economics

HST 399H: Junior Honors Seminar
Professor: Dr. Laura Feitzinger Brown

Description: This one-credit course helps students to plan ahead for life after Converse. We discuss topics such as the liberal arts, undergraduate research, career planning, writing strong graduate school applications, evaluating job offers, balancing family and career, and finding Plans B and C when life throws us a “curve ball.”

Credit: This seminar is required to complete the Honors Program.

January 2010 Honors Program Courses

Interdisciplinary Honors Course

ENG/BIO 299H: Human Sexuality and the Literature of Love, Marriage, and Birth
Professor: Drs. Edna Steele and Laura Feitzinger Brown

Description: The interdisciplinary combination of Biology 299H and English 299H should allow students to examine sexuality from a number of perspectives. Students will study the anatomy of the human reproductive system in relation to its sexual functions. By reading literature of love, marriage, and birth, students should also leave the course with a fuller understanding of sexuality's social, religious, and psychological aspects and be better able to make wise decisions about how she enjoys and uses the gift of her body.

Credit: GEP in literature or in natural sciences. Also counts for major, minor, and elective credit in English.

Spring 2010 Honors Program Courses

Interdisciplinary Honors Courses

POL/PSY 299H: Political Psychology
Professors: Drs. Rich Keen and John Theilmann

Description: This course is designed to blend work in psychology, political science, and behavioral economics. This interdisciplinary approach will examine developments in psychology as they are applied in political science and economics. In doing so we will critique the rational choice approach, the defining paradigm in political science and economics. We will also question what psychology may learn from political science and economics in formulating theories of decision-making. Students will be expected to develop an interdisciplinary perspective in examining various questions concerning political behavior. They will also be expected to develop the perspective to assimilate qualitative and quantitative approaches as they evaluate the reading. Students will be expected to be able to address questions of interest in written and verbal form and to think independently.

Credit: GEP in social science. Also counts for major, minor, and elective credit in politics or psychology.

Upper Level Honors Courses

HST/POL 402H: Women in Africa and Asia
Professor: Dr. Joe Dunn

Description: This course has two major objectives which may or may not harmonize. On one hand, we are examining some important historical and contemporary events through the vehicle of one or more women’s lives. On another plane, we are addressing cultural issues particularly as they relate to women. In several cases this issue revolves around traditional cultural practices coming into conflict with Western modernity. Women in non-Western traditional cultures experience lives quite different from modern Western women. This has both negative and positive aspects. In either of its two purposes, this course is neither an exercise in oppression studies nor a glorification of other cultures. It provides brief glimpses into some selected non-Western cultures at various times and places in history, and it affords an opportunity to understand the dynamics of change taking place all over the globe. Although our concentration will be on women’s lives we will introduce some aspects of non-Western culture that transcend women’s lives exclusively.

Credit: GEP in history or in politics. Also counts for major, minor, and elective credit in history or politics.

ENG 380H: Women in the English Renaissance
Professor: Dr. Laura Feitzinger Brown

Description: In this course you will learn more about the culture in which early modern English poetry developed and about the poetry itself. Our focus will be on women in Renaissance poetry, not only in terms of the ways that the era’s poetry depicts women but also in terms of poetry written by women. We will cover well-known authors (such as John Milton, William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, and John Donne) and also recently discovered or less well-known authors (such as Aemilia Lanyer and Isabella Whitney). We will discuss the varying shapes that English women’s lives took in this time, including expectations about singleness, marriage, childbirth, education, economic contributions, religious observances, political power, and death.

Credit: GEP and major, minor, or elective credit in English.

HST 399H: Junior Honors Seminar
Professor: Dr. John Theilmann

Credit: This seminar is required to complete the Honors Program.

Other Honors Courses Offered

IDC 151H: Honors section of Ideas and Culture
Professor: TBA

Description: Honors sections of the one-year sequence on the great ideas that have shaped different cultures; one section offered in fall and spring.

Credit: GEP.

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