Fall 2009 Events

Lecture Series

Victor DeMunck
Anthropology Department
Monday, October 5th 
A formal, cognitive and behavioral study of Macedonian kinship in contemporary Macedonia

Ken Moss
English Department
Tuesday, October 6th
How I Teach

Eve Tuck
Educational Studies Department
Thursday, October 22nd
Refusing Damage, Repatriating Desire: Ethical research on lived lives

Madeleine Arseneault
Philosophy Department
Monday, November 2nd
Playing With Words: Theories of Idiom

Gilbert Brenner
Geology Department
Tuesday, November 10th 
The Earth's Climate: Past-Present and Future

Seminars

HON 375 Alternative Epistemologies  

Instructor: Anne R. Roschelle (Sociology)

In this course we will examine the social and political implications of the lack of an integrated gender, race, and class analysis in the social sciences. Recent theoretical analyses examining the intersectionality of race, class, and gender have resulted in exciting new epistemological frameworks in the social sciences. However, feminist researchers have yet to articulate concrete strategies for capturing this intersectionality empirically. Using ethnographic research conducted in developing nations as well as in the United States, this course builds upon previous feminist and racial-ethic epistemological insights and allows students to develop theoretical and methodological strategies that can be used to capture the intersection of race, class, and gender in the context of cross cultural research. We will examine how some scholars have translated these theoretical insights into methodological guidelines that can guide research both inside the U.S., the site where much of this interacting hierarchies of gender, race, and class oppression shape the experienced of women, and how, we as agents of social change, can utilize this knowledge both theoretically and empirically.   

HON 305 Honors Seminar-Media and America 

Instructor: Robert G. Miraldi (Communication & Media)

The Media in America will explain and explore the pervasive role the news media play in American society, from history to politics to culture to everyday life. It will explore the relationship between American history and the various stages of the press’ development, as well as the relationship between government and the press in a self-governing society. The goal of the course is to get students familiar with and interested in the importance of media studies -- to both citizens and American culture.

HON 201 The Individual and Society

Instructors: Jeffrey L. Miller (Political Science & Honors Program) & Hamilton M. Stapell (History)

This course constitutes an introduction to core readings from within the humanistic tradition in Western Civilization. It focuses on the role of philosophy and literature in understanding and critically assessing the relationship between personal experience and social life. We will examine the links among literary texts, philosophical issues, as well as political and social commitments through the careful study of selected readings of significant import.

HON 323 Illuminating the Darkness

Instructor: Laura J. Dull (Secondary Education

African countries and their histories remain mostly understudied, mysterious, or viewed as irrelevant to citizens in the United States. To redress this, scholars of Africa have looked to oral histories, anthropological and archaeological analysis, interpretations of colonial documents, and other methods to bring history to Africa. Their work has expanded the meanings, methods, and forms of narrating history. In this course, we will read about the theories, history, and methods that inform contemporary historical study and then focus on five texts that provide different ways of presenting the history of Ghana: survey, an account aimed at a general audience, anthropological history, gender analysis, and social history. Students will also compare novels or films, one written in Europe or the United States and one created in Africa, in order to consider how different authors imagine the continent. We will draw from these texts as we grapple with the questions: What is history? What should it be?

HON 317 Modern Western Aesthetic Theory

Instructor: Jeffrey A. Crane (Art History)

What does it mean to say a work of art- any work of art- is ‘good?’ How do we know? Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder, or are there objective criteria? What do such terms as taste, beauty, the sublime, kitsch, camp, and avant-garde mean? This course will examine the cultural, socio-political. Phenomenological and psychological underpinnings of aesthetic judgment.

Seminars from previous semesters

The Individual and Society
A Matter of Taste: Modern Aesthetic Theory
Love and Humanity
The Graphic Text
The Art of Listening to Music
The Greek Idea of Unity
The Aesthetics of Witnessing
The Art of Listening
Education and Poverty
Studies in 20th Century Word & Image
Education and Indoctrination
Ideas of the Social Sciences

Descriptions of these courses can be found in the undergraduate catalog,

Lectures from previous semesters

Kate McCoy, Educational Studies Department
A second opinion on health care for people who use drugs: hitting the ethical limits of realist tales (Fall 2008)

Kerry Carso, Art History Department
Approaching the sublime: Sir Walter Scott, Medievalism and the Hudson River School of paintiing (Fall 2008)

Ron Knapp, Geography Department
Discovering China's 'forgotten' bridges (Fall 2008)

Alex Bartholemew, Geology Department
Recent fossil discoveries in the Hudson Valley and their bearing on faunal turnover in the Middle Devonian Appalachian Basin (Fall 2008)

Ligia Aldana, Foreign Language Department
Blackness, music and national belonging in the Colombian Caribbean (Fall 2008)

Anne Roschelle, Sociology Department
Welfare indignities: homeless women, domestic violence and welfare reform in San Francisco (Fall 2008)

Mary Holland, English Department

Reading beyond words: toward a twenty-first century literary hermeneutics (Fall 2008)