Honors Seminars

Honors Seminars

Honors Seminars offered recently have included the following:

“Music and the Brain.”  This course focuses on the interplay of music, in various forms, with cognitive and emotional functions of the human brain. Not only does the course examine how music affects brain and behavioral functioning, but also the role of brain functioning in the creation and interpretation of music.

“Criminal Investigations and Society.”  A detailed analysis of several major criminal investigations and how societies’ opinions and expectations influenced the investigation and outcome of each case.  We discuss how these cases influenced citizens’ feelings about their country and the criminal justice system that either served or failed them during each of these historic events.  The course focuses on four cases: the Sacco-Vanzetti murder trial of 1921, the Boston Strangler case in the early 1960s, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and the Michael Peterson murder trial in 2003.

“Engineering and Society.” Relationships between engineering and society were investigated by focusing on environmental concerns.

“Contexts and Images: African-Americans in Literature and Film.” This course provided an opportunity to examine literature and film as integral elements of African-American experience, heritage, and culture from the Civil War to the present.

“Arabic and Christian Influences on Western Culture in the Middle Ages.” The Renaissance of the fourteenth century brought forth a new flowering of learning in Europe in science, art, music, politics and economics. This course investigates for forces outside of Europe, in particular the Arab world, had major influences on this rebirth of learning.

“Psycholinguistics and Science Fiction.” This course presents a psycholinguistics investigation of the impact of the influence of language on the perception of reality as exemplified in selected works of science fiction.

“Classical Experiments in Science.” In this course, classical science experiments are studied in their historic intellectual context and reproduced in the laboratory. This course is built around nine experiments, three in biology, three in chemistry, and three in physics. Students recreate the conditions that existed in the labs at the times of the experiments, conduct the experiments, and repot their findings in the context of the understanding of the day.

“The Ethics of Sport.” This course examines some controversial issues in contemporary sport within the context of several major ethical frameworks. This course draws heavily on both philosophy and sociology

“Cultural Entrepreneurialism.” In this course the relationsip between the cultural importance and interpretation of the artifacts of Connecticut and their potential as sites for tourism and economic development is explored. Historical, cultural, literary, and economic impact are assessed in relation to geography, population, education, cultural expectations and funding and long-range planning resources.