Seminars

Seminar Descriptions

• HON 111HA — Environmental Ethics
  • Dr. John McMahon
  • MW 2 – 3:15 p.m.
  • 3 Credits

  In a time where we face climate catastrophe, how should humans relate to nature (and while we’re at it, are humans even separate from “nature” in the first place?!)? What is political about the environment? How does our location in the North Country shape our ethical relationships with nature? How have our human views of nature changed over time? How do feminist, anticolonial, antiracist, and indigenous standpoints change our visions of the human-nature relationship? To examine these and related questions, this seminar engages the interdisciplinary fields of environmental ethics and environmental political thought. Along the way, we will explore issues of global climate change and climate ethics, environmental justice, environmental racism, intergenerational justice, the history of environmental political thought and philosophy, the Anthropocene, colonialism and the environment, and much more.  

  The work for this class will include reading, student-generated discussion questions, and reading responses. At the end of the course, all students will create an expressive final project (a podcast, a song, a film short, a digital project, artwork, short fiction, poetry, etc.), about some aspect of the politics and ethics of the environment, creating a public-facing archive of our collective environmental thinking.

  GE Category:  Humanities (Matriculation before Fall 2021)

  CC Category:  Individual Expression (Matriculation beginning Fall 2021)

• HON 119HA — Fear & Form: American Gothic
  • Dr. Tracie Guzzio
  • MW 3:30 – 4:45 p.m.
  • 3 credits

  This course examines significant works of American culture and literature that are considered “gothic.” However, it is not about style, genre, or even period. The idea of gothic transcends a historical era, representing our cultural anxieties about our character and society.  It reveals the horrors of our past, while it highlights our fears of the future. Therefore, the gothic can be found in the Puritan beginnings; in European first contact with the wilderness; in the haunted landscape of Southern slave plantations; in our environmental disasters; in our suburbs; in our current racial conflicts; and in our definitions of our own humanity. The American gothic is also an expression of the human psyche and a reflection of sin, guilt, and violence both as individuals and as Americans. As Leslie Fiedler points out, this is a “Literature of darkness and the grotesque in the land of light and affirmation.” In this seminar we will come to understand the historical roots of the gothic in American culture, and its continuing appearance and transformation in the contemporary world. We will trace this narrative from the Salem Witch trials to the film, Get Out.

  We will also focus on American literature and popular culture’s unique contribution to this narrative: the domestic gothic, female gothic, racial gothic, suburban gothic, and apocalyptic gothic. As a general rule, students are incredibly responsive to gothic tales and images. Our goal, as a class, will be to contextualize those responses within a historical framework and to articulate what both delights and disturbs us about the gothic.

  GE Category: Humanities (Matriculation before Fall 2021)

  CC Category:  Individual Expression (Matriculation beginning Fall 2021)

• HON 150HA — Voices in Song
  • Dr. William Pfaff/Ms. Holly Heller-Ross
  • MW 2 – 3:15 p.m.
  • 3 credits

  The seminar is designed to begin by providing students with an understanding of what a song is, how and why it is created, and major voices in the genre. Students will be encouraged to apply critical thinking constructs to a range of creators, emphasizing women and minorities. One of our goals as instructors is to broaden the net of the students’ understanding of recognized contributors across a number of contexts, setting students up to explore a wide-ranging world of dynamic creators far beyond standard contemporary popular culture.

  These concepts and independent research into a song selected by each student will also be the basis for learning fundamental information literacy/management concepts equivalent to the curriculum of the LIB190 general education course.

  GE Category:  The Arts (Matriculation before Fall 2021)

  CC Category:  Individual Expression (Matriculation beginning Fall 2021)

• HON 163HA — Culture & Philosophy of Yoga
  • Anthony D'Angelo
  • TR 2– 3:15 p.m.
  • 3 credits

  The popular conception of yoga may include people who manage to get their bodies into strange or unusual positions or postures, it may generate thoughts of exotic places, or, yet again, it may be associated with poorly understood practices of meditation. As with most popular conceptions there is some truth, but also much that is false in these ideas. This seminar provides students with an opportunity to explore and experience yoga under the guidance of a life-long practitioner of yoga.

  To understand yoga entails a familiarity with the cultural, religious and historical contexts in which it arose. Students will be introduced to major themes of Indian civilization, especially as these are manifested in the beliefs of Hinduism. The seminar will be based on the concept of the “Yoga of Synthesis” which is the integration of the four main paths of traditional yoga:

  Jnana Yoga — the path of knowledge, wisdom and discrimination
  Bhakti Yoga — the path of transforming emotions into devotion and love
  Karma Yoga — the path of selfless service to humanity
  Raja Yoga — the science of control of mind and body

  These paths will be the basis to inquire into the most fundamental questions of human existence: Who am I? Why am I here? How can I achieve health and peace of mind? 

  The philosophy of yoga introduces students to new perspectives on our perceptions of reality, values and the role of the ego or self in daily life. The practice of yoga provides concrete tools for bridging the discord between the mind and body. It strives for integration and new levels of physical mastery, body awareness and mental control. The objective of the seminar is to expose students to all levels of the yoga experience through readings, discussion, yoga exercise and meditation practice. Student evaluation will focus on written papers, class presentations and participation in seminar discussions.

  GE Category:  World Systems (Matriculation before Fall 2021)

  CC Category:  World Cultures (Matriculation beginning Fall 2021

• HON 174HA — Parenting & Human Evolution
  • Dr. Margarita Garcia-Notario
  • TR 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
  • 3 Credits

  In this class we will investigate the most traveled road since humans appeared on Earth: Life as children and life as parents. How does parenting impact the lives of children and how do children transform the lives of their parents? The sciences of evolution and psychology together with some traditional teachings will guide us to prepare for this incomparable task. 

  GE Category:  Natural Sciences and Tech (Matriculation before Fall 2021)

  CC Category:  Natural World (Matriculation beginning Fall 2021)

• HON 183HA — The Witch Craze in Early Modern Europe
  • Dr. Vincent Carey
  • TR 11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. 
  • 3 credits

  Somewhere between 80–100,000 — mostly women — were executed in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the supposed crime of witchcraft. It is important to understand that all of these women were innocent of the charges for which they died. They did not fly on brooms, attend witches' Sabbaths, steal Christian babies, and copulate with the devil among other ludicrous charges. Yet, European society by and large “bought” into this elite delusion. Our course will explore how and why a society undergoing change and feeling itself threatened came to believe in the existence of a plot by the devil and his “agents,” the supposed “witches." Fundamentally, it came to rest on fears for fertility and fear of the marginal. An historical experience that might give us pause to think about our own society today.

  It is very important to note that these women died because they were tortured; they were never demonic agents intent on undermining Christianity. The crimes for which they were accused were impossible. The evidence that brought them to their deaths was forced by a warped judicial process. One of the difficulties of the course for the student is the historian’s task to get into the heads of these men and of the women accusers, to understand their worldview.

  GE Category:  Western Civilization (Matriculation before Fall 2021)

  CC Category:  World Cultures (Matriculation beginning Fall 2021)

• HON 338HA — Transitional Justice in the 21st Century
  • Dr. Monica Ciobanu
  • TR 3:30 – 4:45 p.m.
  • 3 credits

  In the last three decades the question of a reckoning with the past has become intertwined with the main priorities and challenges faced by transitional governments. Addressing past abuses and human rights violations and ensuring that such acts will not occur in the future has direct implications for designing and consolidating democratic practices and institutions, establishing the rule of law, promoting a robust civil society and an engaged citizenry. Economies and infrastructures weakened by internal conflicts or corruption and mismanagement of previous oppressive regimes also need to be rebuilt.

  Transitional justice has become the catch-all term used by both academics and policy-makers to encompass both legal and non-legal mechanisms for addressing the past. The seminar will review several aspects of the vast domain of transitional justice represented by human rights and international justice concerns, including restitution (both material and non-material), amnesties, criminal trials (national, hybrid and international) truth commissions, memorializations, exclusion of former state officials from democratic politics (vetting and lustration). 

  A wide range of case studies from various regions of the world (Africa, Asia, Easter Europe, Latin America, and North America) will be discussed.  This comparative and transnational perspective will help students understand why some countries chose to prosecute and punish human rights abusers, while others have forgiven and forgotten similar crimes.  We will review several aspects of the vast domain of transitional justice represented by human rights and international justice concerns. Essentially, this topic will advance understanding of the following issues involving ways in which new democracies have come to terms with an authoritarian past:

  • The development and history of transitional justice.
  • International criminal justice and transitional justice.
  • Understand why some countries chose to prosecute and punish human rights abusers, while others have forgiven and forgotten similar crimes.
  • Familiarize students with specific mechanisms for dealing with the authoritarian past:  restitution, symbolic compensation, amnesties, truth commissions, exclusion of former state officials from democratic politics (lustration).
  • Familiarize students with transitional justice methods after periods or episodes of mass-violence and genocide such as peace-building operations.
  • Discuss local restorative justice mechanisms.
  • Discuss a wide range of case studies from several main regions of the world (Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America).

  At the end of the semester students will have to submit a term paper focused on a truth commission.

  GE Category:  Global Issues (Matriculation before Fall 2021)

  CC Category:  Human Communities (Matriculation beginning Fall 2021)

• HON364HA — History, Memory & Forgetting
  • Dr. Richard Schaefer
  • TR 9:30 – 10:45 a.m.
  • 3 credits

  This seminar is not a history class. It is not an overview of particular events or an analysis of why certain things happened in the past. Instead, it explores how history is used in very practical ways to make sense of the world and our place in it. It investigates how history structures our experience and infuses much of what we do in our everyday lives — how we think of ourselves and forge identity, how we encounter others, and how we project ourselves into the past and future. And, it examines how history is a dimension of human existence that plays an essential role in rendering cultural difference in time and space. The seminar will explore the dynamics between history and what is more diffusely called memory, and will raise questions about the nature of forgetting.

  GE Category:  Global Issues (Matriculation before Fall 2021)

  CC Category:  World Cultures (Matriculation beginning Fall 2021)

• HON399HA — Independent Study:  Peer Mentoring
  • Dr. Tracie Guzzio
  • 1–3 credits

  (Only sophomores and above may register for this course with permission of Dr. Guzzio, the honors program director.)

  Peer mentors will be tasked with helping incoming honors program students with transitioning into college, their majors, and their courses. Mentors will be required to attend a training session, complete a few readings, and meet regularly with their mentees. Credit amounts given will be based on the number of mentees each participating student agrees to mentor.

  Please contact Dr. Guzzio at [email protected] if you are interested in being a peer mentor. There is additional paperwork that will need to be filled out.