Fall 2025 Colloquia Courses

HONS 226-01 – The Premodern Foundations of “Western” Identities
Instructor: Bryan Ganaway
MWF 8:00 – 8:50 a.m.

This course asks how lived historical experience shaped Western identities in the ancient, medieval, and early modern world by employing methodologies from history and literary studies.  It seeks to help students understand who they are today by looking closely at the ideas, experiences, and environments that shaped the past.  The course will have a traditional lecture component, but most of the learning will take place in twice-weekly discussion sections where students engage directly with the core sources, all of which will be primary materials.  All written assessments will be essay-based (papers and exams).

Our guiding theme is: what are the ideas that shaped Western identity in the pre-modern world?  This course-wide theme also envelopes a history-specific one.  The vital reason that a knowledge of history is key to all educated voters in a democracy is that people utilize the past:  they use it to describe themselves and people like them as good and individuals different from them as bad.  The class will provide specific examples of this process.

This course counts towards the College's history general education requirement for the Honors College advising classes of 2026 and 2027.

HONS 230-01 – Art, Power, and Patronage: The Evolution of Collecting in the American Art Market
Instructor: Kelley McWhirter
TR 9:25 – 10:40 a.m.

This course explores the history of collecting art in the United States.  It will examine the influential roles played by art dealers such as Joseph Duveen and Peggy Guggenheim who shaped the American art market and the dealers redefining the market today.  Students will study the origins of prominent American art museums such as the MET, MOMA, and the Frick Collection as well as newer institutions such as Crystal Bridges. We will discuss the intersections between private collections, corporate patronage, and how they can create controversial philanthropy, discussing examples such as the Sackler family and the Lehman Brothers post-collapse corporate collection sell-off.

The class will use a variety of source materials to analyze the complex relationships between commerce, culture, status, and public access to art including historical biographies, documentary films and guest speakers.

HONS 230-02 – Sex and Scandal in Dance
Instructor: Gretchen McLaine
MWF 11:00 – 11:50 p.m.

This course explores the seedy underbelly of an art form that often associates itself with the sacred and virtuous. Topics will include the rampant prostitution in 1800s European ballet, illicit relationships on and off the stage, engendered power imbalances inherent in organizational structures, empowerment vs. exploitation, copyright infringement, controversial dances, arts censorship, and subterfuge. 

Dance expresses life in society: how and what people feel and believe, and how they live is seen through dance. Students will encounter concepts relevant to various time periods and will develop an increased awareness of other people’s values and forms of expression.

HONS 230-04 – Narrative Makeovers: The Afterlives of the Literary Canon
Instructor: Maryann Piel
MW 3:25 – 4:40 p.m.

In this course students will learn about classics of German literature and their continued influence via graphic novel, graphic diary, and film adaptations. These canonical works refract and reflect upon the social and political contexts of the time during which they were written, while each adaptation re-contextualizes these narratives within a new era. What becomes legible when we study adaptations are the ways in which these works, legitimized through their elevated position within the canon, can be co-opted or creatively recontextualized to reflect the contemporary political, moral, and social values in the time and place in which they are produced. We will also explore how these adaptations at once reproduce the established literary canon and democratize access to its narratives by appealing to a broader audience of readers and viewers. In class sessions, students will actively participate in course discussions and collaborate with classmates in small groups in order to gain a deeper understanding of the sometimes surprising ways in which an engagement with the literary canon can reveal unexpected connections between the present and the past.

HONS 240-01 North Africa Travelogue
Instructors: Rana Mikati and Garrett Davidson
TR 9:25 – 10:40 a.m.

This course examines how Americans, Europeans, and Middle Easterners encountered each other’s cultures and religions through travel between empires. We will engage in close readings of famous Muslim, European, and American travelogues with a focus on shifting perceptions of the Other.  The readings include the famous accounts of Ibn Battuta, Ibn Fadlan, Marco Polo, Mark Twain, and others. We will examine their perceptions as they moved from the center of their empires to its peripheries and beyond. Our chronological scope is broad, covering the medieval, early modern, and modern periods. In terms of geography, we will read the accounts of a Moroccan in India, an American in Cairo, and an Egyptian in Paris.

HONS 250-01 – Ecotopias, Ecovillages, and Applied Sustainability: Living With Hope in the Anthropocene
Instructor: Todd LeVasseur
TR 1:40-2:55 p.m.

In what ways has the human animal, past and present, procured calories, and thus carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, in order to survive and flourish?  Are there ways of doing so that are more sustainable than others, based on social, environmental, and economic metrics?  If so, what metrics would be used to answer this evaluative question, leading to what specific food and agricultural policies and practices?  Taken together, this course will explore these and similar questions, tracing the origins of settled agriculture through the industrial agriculture regimes of today, investigating this history from a holistic and normative perspective of regenerative and sustainable agriculture.  To engage with this history of food an interdisciplinary approach will be used, investigating issues related to animal agriculture, colonialism, corporate control of food, the mechanization of agriculture, genetic engineering, environmental agrarianism, organic and other regenerative agriculture regimes, food apartheid, and other food sustainability issues.  These approaches will assist in the effort to figure out the most sustainable way to procure calories for the human animal, especially in an era of rapid global heating and ongoing human population growth.

HONS 260-01 – From Witch-Burning to Stargazing: Science, Humanities, and Magic
Instructor: Sharonah Frederick
TR 4:00 – 5:15 p.m.

Poetry, science, the arts, alchemy, and medicine, have all been intertwined-in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa-for millenniums. And yet, science and the humanities appear to be on a collision course that shows no sign of slowing down…. does it have to be this way? What do the great philosophers of the natural sciences-from Galileo in 17th century Italy to the authors of the Rig Vedas in Ancient India to Hypatia, female scientist, historian, and astronomer-have to tell us about how science and the humanities can work together? How did the medicine of Mayan Indians alter the course of the study of infectious disease in the Americas? Why are Evolution and the Bible at loggerheads when Darwin himself lived and died a believing Anglican Christian? And was “magic” always defined as something that undercut science…or would Sir Isaac Newton have seen that one a bit differently? These and other questions from the past will help us map out a future where science and the Humanities go hand in hand, as in fact they did for many centuries.

HONS 264-01 – Good Neighbors? Imagining Latin America in the United States
Instructor: José Chavarry
MW 2:00 – 3:15 p.m.

Latin America and the United States are closely tied: dreams of hemispheric cooperation, wartime alliances and military interventionism define their relationship for the past 200 years. In this course, we will explore how this complex and continuing history helps explain the representation of Latin America and its cultures in the US today, across media, political and even academic discourse. We will analyze productions from across diverse disciplines and sources (fiction, essays, music, films, art, scholarly articles and invited speakers) to examine how culture has played a crucial role in the ways Latin America has been imagined as simultaneously alluring and undesirable, exotic and violent, a place to escape to and from. We will pay close attention to the intersectional categories at play in these imaginaries and especially consider how colonialism is central to this history.

This course counts towards the College's MUGC requirement.

HONS 265-01 – Storytelling in the Age of AI
Instructor: Lancie Affonso
TR 10:50 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.

How do we tell compelling stories with our data? For thousands of years, storytelling has been an integral part of our humanity. The human drive for understanding the universe underlies the knowledge-generating, transformational process that is constantly at work in our everyday lives. Even in our “big data” digital age, stories continue to appeal to us just as much as they did to our ancient ancestors. Data visualization and storytelling with data changes the way we interact with data, transforming it from a dry collection of statistics to something that can be entertaining, engaging, thought-provoking, and even inspirational. In this interdisciplinary course, students will be introduced to the theory and practice of designing effective visualizations of data from multiple sources. A broad overview to the data visualization field will be provided, covering principles, methods, and techniques that are foundational to both information and scientific visualization. Students will learn how to detect and articulate the stories behind data sets and communicate data findings in visual, oral, and written contexts for various audiences.

This course counts towards the College's MUGC requirement.

Permission of Instructor required. Please contact Professor Affonso at affonsol@cofc.edu if interested.

HONS 265-02 – Ancestries of Enslavement
Instructor: Kameelah Martin
TR 12:15 – 1:30 p.m.

Ancestries of Enslavement critically interrogates genealogy as an unreconciled legacy of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. We will engage with primary sources, genealogical research methods, life-writing, and documentaries to explore the "afterlives of slavery" of descendants of enslaved Africans as well as the descendants of enslaver families.

We question what impact personal ties to slavery have on how they remember and participate in narratives about their heritage. Using theoretical frameworks around cultural memory, bio-historiography, and Toni Morrison's concept of 'rememories,' the course will consider what impact chattel slavery has had on our most intimate social connections–family. We will grapple with the complicated ancestry of global African-descendant communities as an issue of racial justice, debating such topics as reparations, historical memory, and collective trauma. Through intentional and careful interrogation, the course confronts the enduring cultural trauma at the intersection of racism and US citizenry by analyzing the social politics and language employed in recalling an ancestry that descends from inhumane bondage.

This course counts towards the College's MUGC requirement.