Honors Course Archive

The transition from the Republic to the Imperial period in Roman history brought stability and a reprieve from generations of civil wars, but it also signaled a loss of rights. The central question of this course will be what the Romans ultimately gave up for this authoritarian stability and why. Through primary and secondary sources as well as archaeological evidence, we will use this period as a lens to investigate the curtailing of rights such as freedom of speech and democracy. Specifically, we will investigate the following trends and the role they played in the breakdown of the Republican system: 1. Civil War

2. Inequality 

3. Cult of Personality

4. Imperialism

Time exists for us as both a felt experience in our lives and an abstraction. The clock ticks slowly for the bored students waiting for class to end at 12:20 pm. Yet, what does 12:20 even mean? We accept the notion of an objective time measured and built away from our felt experiences as a way of coordinating our lives. This class will explore various ways of abstracting time and understanding the different methods for it shaping our lives. In doing so, we’ll read a variety of theoretical and literary texts to think through how we depict time and how we might undo the assumptions we make about it. We’ll engage with ideas about time at both short and long time scales-with how we feel time in the moment compared to how we think about centuries passing. This class will also touch on how time becomes intertwined with identity; it is presented in ways that create “norms” around how to live one’s life that are resisted in various ways. Part of your task will be deciding how to represent your own experiences in time and to create a final project and presentation that engages with your own subjective sense of time while focusing on a cultural object of your choosing.

Evolution and genetics are the cornerstones of modern biology. DNA & Evolution will explore these fields in the context of contemporary issues that are important to individuals and societies. Although examples will be drawn from a variety of organisms, the primary emphasis will be on humans. Among the questions we will consider are these: Where did modern humans come from? Why are women and men different? Why do children resemble their parents? Do genes influence variation in personality, intelligence, and sexual orientation? What can genetic analyses reveal about evolutionary history and the relationships among species? Can genetic analyses allow us to predict the evolutionary future? Given what our society knows about evolution and genetics, should we take responsibility for guiding the evolutionary future of human populations? Throughout the course the goal will be to help students develop sufficient biological sophistication to understand new discoveries in genetics and evolution, talk to their doctors, and make rational personal and political choices about biological issues. Students will read secondary and primary literature, ask questions, design experiments, analyze and interpret data, and draw their own conclusions. Assignments will include essays, problem sets, and computer labs.

Students who have previously taken “DNA and Evolution” are not eligible to enroll in this course again. Additionally, students who have taken or are planning to take BIOL 354 with Professor Herron should not register for this course as there is significant overlap in material.

This will be a 5-credit seminar on public writing. Students will learn how to interrogate quantitative arguments and dubious uses of numerical data – in controversies regarding public health (COVID-19), race (redlining), education (value-added modeling), investment strategies (buying land), and other aspects of society. Each student will write five short pieces (such as a book review or op-ed), which will be edited by other students and further workshopped during class. Readings will consist of three books and several shorter pieces, including “Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil and a chapter of “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrell Huff.

The goal will be to learn to write clearly and persuasively for a general readership about quantitative aspects of socially important controversies. The course is open to mathematical science majors as well as to students in any major in the Honors Program.

It’s a given among many scientists that understanding how the natural world works (including mathematics) is an invaluable guide to understanding both the origins and evolution of human values. Yet these ideas rarely make it into humanities courses. Quantum mechanics offers insight into how  deep truths can appear to be mutually exclusive; special and general relativity demonstrate the power of constants that don’t change no matter what (symmetries), and how notions we accept as fundamental (like space and time) sometimes aren’t. The mathematics of game theory makes strong arguments that cooperative strategies are, in the long run, more successful than ruthlessly competitive ones, and that symmetry can inform fairness. Biology illuminates how symbiotic relations have been central to evolution, and how all life is connected. The “environment” is not something “out there,” separate from us. It IS us. Indeed, everything in the universe is connected, including matter and energy; a sense of community is built into nature. Neuroscience and psychology have given us an understanding of why we so easily fall into logical and destructive behaviors, why we fail to see the future consequences of our actions, why we find it nearly impossible to admit mistakes or “see” any “truths” we do not expect.

Students will read widely in physics, philosophy, mathematics, evolutionary biology. They will be responsible for written assignments based on those readings, independent study and presentations. Students will be encouraged to apply what they learn to their own fields of study and also to their personal lives.

Through a combination of thematic and genre-based inquiries, we will broadly define a field of AAPI women’s narratives via film, oral history, and cultural and theoretical texts. We will examine how contemporary representations speak to histories of AAPI racialization and gendering in relation to US empire, war, militarism and dispossession.

In this course, we will explore definitions, ideologies, values, processes, and geopolitics associated with “Western Civilization.” We will look at how feminism, Afrocentrism, and other critical frameworks have challenged assumptions about “Western Civilization.” We consider the impact of “Western Civilization” on the United States and other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The OECD is an international organization that works with governments, policy makers, and citizens to establish evidence-based international standards and find solutions to a range of social, economic, and environmental challenges. In this course, we will investigate the ways in which the OECD and its 38 member countries represent diverse experiences of “Western Civilization.” As I center the relationship between “Western Civilization” and the United States, students will choose an OECD country to investigate similarly. Course assignments will assess students’ independent and group work around this and other tasks. We will also examine how the United States compares to other OECD countries; specifically, regarding (1) social and welfare issues (social policy that protects individuals and their families), (2) education; (3) employment; (4) economy; (5) health; and (6) green growth and sustainable development. The OECD has a database that provides up-to-date statistics for making comparisons between countries and identifying trends over time. Finally, we will investigate gaps by race and ethnicity (including migrants), gender, and age across well–being outcomes, as well as the laws and public policies aimed to improve people’s well-being and reduce inequalities.

The course will offer students a fundamental understanding of the process of social innovation, and the role that social enterprises can play in addressing population health challenges. Through a combination of lectures, guest speakers, case studies and a team project, students will learn how organizations can advance work that has a positive societal impact while also remaining financially sustainable.

“How to read electronic literature” is a hands-on experiential, interdisciplinary course that guides students to profit from their exploration of digital media. We will acquaint ourselves with a selection of the most creative electronic works of the twenty-first century as we cross disciplinary boundaries, engaging recent literary history, technology, aesthetics, visual arts, sound design, and multimedia. With the rapid development of electronic and digital tools, e-literature competes with digital games for players’ interest. Engaging with the multimedia jargon of digital literature (remediation, digital poetics, cyberspace textuality, active creation of belief, and medial ideology) we will go through the non-trivial process of reading famous digital works by Michael Joyce, Talan Memmott, John Zuern, Shelley Jackson, Laura Okkema, and Serge Bouchardon, among others. Our journey through digital works will open the path to self-discovery as we will immerse ourselves into various forms of “reading” and “writing”.

Insofar as scientists use language and visual displays to communicate with others, they use rhetoric, selecting some aspects of reality to convey, and deflecting other aspects of reality from attention. Studying how scientists use rhetoric to communicate, and how nonscientists use rhetoric to argue about science and its effects in the public sphere, students in this class will discover the means of persuasion available to shape science, its products, and the relationship between both and the publics that surround them. Those who are considering a career in science will learn how to think critically about the internal and external discourse of science, improving their use of rhetorical tools in the process. Those who do not intend to become scientists will learn how to critically analyze the claims of science and respond thoughtfully and effectively to its potential influence on them in the modern world. Student Learning Goals: 1) Understand and critically evaluate scholarship on the rhetoric of science. 2) Identify, define and use rhetorical concepts in the analysis of communication about science. 3) Recognize and evaluate the means of persuasion that can be utilized by scientists in communicating with other scientists and/or the public. 4) Recognize and evaluate the means of persuasion that can be utilized by advocates critiquing or protesting against science and/or its consequences in the public sphere. 5) Write an original rhetorical criticism essay that contributes to the subfield known as “rhetoric of science.”

This course takes the dual phenomena of Indigenous American territorial dispossession and African enslavement in the Americas as its point of departure, and is guided by a growing body of scholarship that understands dispossession and enslavement as closely entwined tools of European colonizing across the hemispheric Americas beginning in the late 15th century. What otherwise obscured dimensions of Indigenous American and African American experience can this approach bring more clearly into view? What shared strategies of resistance and opportunities for coalition and a politics of mutual care are opened up by an understanding of shared Indigenous and African American experiences of settler colonialism? What do present-day (and in some instances local Seattle/PNW) examples of Afro-Indigenous coalition and solidarity teach us about the liberatory possibilities of anticolonial, antiracist, and anticapitalist movement building? To explore these questions, we will engage materials from a wide-ranging interdisciplinary archive, including historical and literary scholarship, fiction, audiovisual content, and music.

The key questions that are addressed in the Ways of Feeling class are: 

• Are there “emotional universals”, that is, feelings that all people share independent of language, culture, gender, and race?
• Are there “culture-specific” emotions?
• Are there “gender-specific” emotions? 

The class is suitable for all students who are interested in Language, languages, and meaning. Ways of Feeling is a comparative course, with enough Slavic content for it to be relevant for Slavic majors and graduate students, yet accessible to those interested in other languages. Students will be introduced to research methods in semantics, pragmatics and discourse, and will be required to produce a thorough examination of underlying conceptualizations and a semantic analysis of a linguistic expression of emotion in a language of their choice. They will gain an appreciation of the social and cultural underpinnings of their own language and other languages.

The requirements consist of 3 short papers, an image collection, and a final term paper.

BIOC 451 is the honors version of BIOC 441; it covers the same topics in metabolism and gene expression using the same textbook, but is taught as a group discussion of selected publications from the primary literature, with an emphasis on research strategy, experimental design, creative thinking, and scientific communication.

Continuation of CHEM 145. Includes laboratory. Together CHEM 145 and 155 cover material in CHEM 142, 152, and 162. No more than the number of credits indicated can be counted toward graduation from the following course groups: CHEM 152, 155 (5 credits); 145, 155, 162 (10 credits).

For chemistry majors and otherwise qualified students planning three or more quarters of organic chemistry. Structure, nomenclature, reactions, and synthesis of organic compounds. Theory and mechanism of organic reactions. Studies of biomolecules. No more than 4 credits can be counted toward graduation from the following course groups: CHEM 238, CHEM 336.

To accompany CHEM 336. No more than the number of credits indicated can be counted toward graduation from the following course group: CHEM 241, CHEM 346 (3 credits).

Computer programming for students with some previous programming experience. Emphasizes program design, style, and decomposition. Uses data structures (e.g., lists, dictionaries, sets) to solve computational problems motivated by modern societal and scientific needs. Introduces data abstraction and interface versus implementation. Recommended: CSE 121 or completion of Paul G. Allen School’s Guided Self-Placement.

Computer programming for students with significant previous programming experience. Emphasizes implementation and run-time analysis of data structures and algorithms using techniques including linked references, recursion, and object-oriented inheritance to solve computational problems motivated by modern societal and scientific needs. Recommended: CSE 122 or completion of Paul G. Allen School’s Guided Self-Placement.

English 182 focuses on teaching strategies and skills for effective writing and argument that are required of traditional academic genres, such as the research essay, while also expanding the skills for composing in multimodal genres that our increasingly digital and media saturated world demands.

Section K is an Honors discussion driven class with minimal lecturing and grounded in a disability studies analytic.  Students will reflect on their own growth as scholars and their learning process as an evolving product. Honors students will write longer reflective papers with emphasis on metacognitive critical takeaways.

Intermediate Multimodal Composition:Strategies for composing effective multimodal texts for print, digital physical delivery, with focus on affordances of various modes–words, images, sound, design, and gesture–and genres to address specific rhetorical situations both within and beyond the academy. Although the course has no prerequisites, instructors assume knowledge of academic writing.

Covers the material of MATH 124, 125, 126; 307, 308, 318. First year of a two-year accelerated sequence. May receive advanced placement (AP) credit for 125 after taking 135. For students with above average preparation, interest, and ability in mathematics.

Introduction to proofs and rigor; uniform convergence, Fourier series and partial differential equations, vector calculus, complex variables. Students who complete this sequence are not required to take MATH 300, MATH 309, MATH 324, MATH 327, MATH 328, and MATH 427. Second year of an accelerated two-year sequence; prepares students for senior-level mathematics courses. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.0 in MATH 334. Offered: W.

Addresses same material as PHYS 122 in more depth and with additional topics such as current research and cross-disciplinary applications. For students with strong calculus preparation. Maximum 5 credits allowed for any combination of PHYS 115, PHYS 118, PHYS 122, and PHYS 142. Prerequisite: a minimum grade of 2.5 in PHYS 141; and MATH 125 or MATH 134, either of which may be taken concurrently; recommended: high-school-level physics course. Offered: W.

This 2-credit peer-led course critically analyzes issues surrounding incarceration and the criminal legal system. Through student-led projects, we will collaboratively explore themes surrounding decarceration, abolition, and coalition-building that center the voices of incarcerated people and their work in prison organizing. The course will incorporate various forms of media including artwork, readings, speaker testimonies, legislative material, etc. Group projects, reflective essays, and other assignments will be organized based on students’ selected topic. Topics include (but are not limited to): art as liberation, legislation as a tool for community organizing, politics of reintegration.

This course is as a continuation of Honors 211a: “The Disenchantment of the West: From Shakespeare to the Coen Brothers” but can be taken without Honors 211a as a prerequisite. If the Diesenchantment course focused on the shift in the social imaginary of Western societies from premodern to modern, this course will focus on the shift in their imaginaries from modern to postmodern. The course content will primarily focus on the intellecutal history of North Atlantic societies in the 19th and 20th centuries to the present moment in the early 21st century. 

The course will give students the opportunity to engage with the work of a wide variety of thinkers and artists so that they might become acquainted with the dynamic cultural landscape that is profoundly changing our ideas of the human.

The instructor will provide background information and resources to acquaint students with the different perspectives they will encounter, but the main goal of the course will be to provide an opportunity for lively discussion around a topic that is of central concern for all thoughtful human beings: What do you think it means to be human?

This is a profoundly important question for students engaged in business, engineering, computer science, and the natural sciences to consider since the work they will be doing in their disciplines will have enormous consequences in shaping the answer to this question.

 

Weekly themes:

Week 1: Disenchantment and the Possibility of Renchantment

Week 2: To Inifinity & Beyond: Idealism & Romanticism

Week 3: The Capitalist Imaginary: Classical Liberalism and Neoliberalism

Week 4: The Breakdown of the Liberal Order 1: The Avant-Garde and the Revolutionary Left

Week 5: The Breakdown of the Liberal Order 2: Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

Week 6: Social Justice Warriors: Redefining the Left

Week 7: From Taoism to Neoplatonism: The Persistence of Post Axial Wisdom Traditions

Week 8: AGI, Biotechnology, Cognitive Science, & Possibilities for Human Self-Transcendence

Week 9: Utopian and Dystopian Futures: Imagining Human Self-transcendence

Week 10: Metaphysical Imaginaries for the Future