Honors Seminars Spring 2023

ENGL 402/HON 436/HON 446: African-American Writing and the Sea with Dr. David Anderson

For two-and-a-half centuries, African Americans have written about life on or near the world’s oceans. They describe a double navigation through modern society and the natural world--first around the Atlantic Ocean, and later around globe. The African-American literary tradition begins with the sea: its first six autobiographical texts were written by mariners or former mariners. Eventually, these writings tell many tales: not only about the slave trade, but work at sea, travel, exploration, emigration to other lands, natural appreciation, and even recreation. Oceans in this literature are contested sites of national prestige, citizenship, and economic opportunity, and its writers reflect upon the histories of the Atlantic World, the nation, and the African diaspora. This course will cover a large range of history from the eighteenth century to the present, and possible writers include Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Matthew Henson, Paule Marshall, Langston Hughes, Harry Foster Dean, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, Charles Johnson, and Colson Whitehead.  

HON 436/HON 446: Thinking like Shakespeare with Dr. Joe Turner

This course is interested in how Shakespeare thinks and why that is important to us in the 21st century. Although we will examine Shakespeare’s plays as artistic achievements, our primary focus is what those works can teach us about thinking: what it looks like, how it works, what goes wrong when we do too little or the wrong kind. We will use the works of Shakespeare as well as a range of 20th and 21st century thinkers from education, cognitive science, and psychology to understand better what we mean by “thinking” and how we can become better at it. How - for example - can we use Shakespeare’s plays as a route to understanding earlier educational systems, which prized different habits of mind than we value now? Can we use Shakespeare to become more flexible, responsive, and empathic in our thinking? To think more and differently about others? Possible readings include Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet; the poetry of Ovid, Anne Carson, and Kiki Petrosino; as well as theorists such as Quintilian, Grawmeyer Award Winner James McGaugh, and Etienne Wenger. You need no previous knowledge of Shakespeare to succeed in this course.