Signature Seminars Archive

The Honors College offers Signature Seminars on cutting-edge topics taught by top professors, who are named Dean's Fellows in the Honors College. You must apply to participate, and if admitted, will be designated a Dean's Signature Scholar – a great plus for your resume. These seminars give you three hours of honors credit and in some cases, may also satisfy requirements specific to your degree.

Courses

In Totality: The History of Science Through the Study of Solar and Lunar Eclipses

• HNRS 401H3-001
• Fall 2025: Daniel Kennefick

Millions of observers across America, and Arkansas, knew in advance the precise time of totality of the eclipse of April 8, 2024. Yet most were still uncertain, with hours to go, whether they would be able to see the eclipse, due to doubts about the weather. Why can we predict one, and not the other? What does it tell us about the history of science that some natural phenomena are predictable and others are not. Thales of Miletus is often called the first scientist and some have called May 28th, 585 BC the birthday of science, because a total solar eclipse on that date was supposedly predicted in advance by Thales. We know now that Thales could not have predicted the path of totality though it is possible he might have predicted the right day. In this course we will follow the entire story of how astronomers perfected the science of eclipse prediction, even while other natural phenomena have stubbornly defied scientific prognostication. We will examine twelve historical solar eclipses (and four lunar eclipses) in detail, beginning with Thales’ eclipse and ending with the “Einstein eclipse” of 1919. Each eclipse will form a chapter in the development of astronomy specifically and the advance of science more generally. Eclipses have often been used to improve our understanding of other areas of science, including physics, chemistry, biology, geography, meteorology and computing. The story will bring in many famous names besides those of Thales and Einstein, including Ptolemy, Alexander the Great, Hipparchus, Columbus, Edmond Halley, Johannes Kepler, Benjamin Franklin, the Native American leader Tecumseh, the King of Siam (the one from the musical), Captain James Cook and many others. It will also illustrate the history of science from the Babylonians all the way to the present day and explain our modern understanding of eclipses and why they are so special and unique to our planet. Total solar eclipses will not be with us forever and we were indeed fortunate to be able to see one so recently. We also know that there will be another one passing through Arkansas in 2045, so plenty of time to plan ahead!

Food Matters

• HNRS 401H3-001
• Fall 2025: Jennie Popp, Margaret McCabe, Curt Rom
• Spring 2021: Jennie Popp, Margaret McCabe, Curt Rom

Food Matters—Shouldn’t It?

The U.S. Farm Bill governs agricultural and food policy, playing a central role in food security, public health, and agricultural sustainability. One critical area it addresses is the need for healthy, sustainable diets.

Traditionally, U.S. residents source protein from livestock and legumes. However, growing populations and expanding food deserts call for innovative solutions to meet nutritional demands. Two emerging alternatives are insects and cultured meat—protein produced by cultivating animal cells in controlled environments. Both options promise lower environmental footprints compared to conventional agriculture and could be scaled to improve local access to protein, particularly in urban food deserts.

Yet significant hurdles remain. Cultured meat costs far more than traditional protein, and insects face cultural resistance in the U.S., where they are often perceived as unappetizing or unclean. Globally, governments are still developing frameworks for regulating the safety, labeling, and sale of these products, which further slows their market growth.

The U.S. typically enacts a new Farm Bill every five years, but the most recent bill expired in September 2024. As America awaits its replacement, we are left with critical questions:

• Are insects and cultured meat viable protein sources?
• Should highly processed products even be labeled as "food"?
• Does it matter what we name our food?
• Is industry-sponsored research truly reliable?
• Is industrial food better than local?
• Is organic food safer and healthier?
• Can food be medicine, and should medicine be in our food?

This course explores the legal, economic, social, and environmental dimensions of the modern food system. Together, we’ll generate insights to guide regulators, industry leaders, and consumers in managing our evolving food landscape. It’s a conversation about why—and how—food matters.

Mexico

• HNRS 401H3-001
• Fall 2025: Rogelio Garcia Conteras

This honors course offers an in-depth account of Mexico's rich historical, cultural, political, and economic evolution, examining key events from pre-Columbian times to the present. The class is an exploration of Mexico's transformation from an ancient civilization to a modern nation, and analyzes the unique, at times difficult, at times friendly, relation between Mexico and the United States.

Animal Minds

• HNRS 401H3-001
• Spring 2025: Ed Minar
• Fall 2020: Ed Minar

Is there is a great divide between human beings and other animals, marked by mental or psychological characteristics that distinguish “us humans” from even our closest animal relatives? Such features might include rationality, language, tool use, culture, and self-awareness or sense of self. The idea of a wide gulf between humans and animals reinforced by perceived difficulties in obtaining knowledge of animal minds. After all, they cannot tell us what they think or feel. Some have regarded radical differences between humans and non-humans has as rationalizing the use of animals for human purposes. For example, if animals are thought not to be self-aware, their capacity to suffer, or at least the significance of their suffering, might be called into question.

Such (until recently, widespread) skepticism about animal minds contradicts the experience of animal trainers and others who work with animals on a daily basis. Moreover, their “folk knowledge” of the animals with whom we live, often criticized as anthropomorphic, is supported by recent advances in the scientific study of animal behavior. Researchers increasingly find – as Darwin and evolutionary theory would suggest – that the basics of rational thought, communication, culture, and self-consciousness are present in non-human species. In other words, the differences between “us” and “them” have in some ways been exaggerated. Does the breakdown of such a stark human/animal divide have consequences for how we human beings should treat our fellow creatures?

In this seminar, we shall explore some of these recent developments in our knowledge of animal minds. Questions will include: What is consciousness, what is it for, how did it evolve, how widespread is it in the animal kingdom? How much can we learn about what it is like to be a dog, a bat, an octopus? Can we experience the world from an animal’s point of view? What about self-consciousness or self-awareness in animals? And about knowledge of “other minds”? (Can your dog know what you are thinking or feeling?) What range of emotions do animals have? What do we know about animal communication, and how is it best studied? What is culture, where and how is it exhibited in animals? How should our approach to these and related questions affect our attitudes toward the moral status of animals?

Cancer and Chronic Disease in the American Healthcare Ecosystem

• HNRS 401H3-005
• Spring 2025: Tim Muldoon

In the United States in 2024, there will be over 2 million newly diagnosed cases of cancer, and over 600,000 will die from the disease. One out of three people will be diagnosed with some form of cancer during the course of their life. Despite an overall improving trend in cancer-related death rates over the recent decades, annual expenses for the medical care of these patients will total more than $125 billion, but even this staggering figure ignores the broader costs to society- financially as well as socially. Despite these daunting numbers, we are at the cusp of a revolution in the way we understand, diagnose, treat, and prevent cancer.

Cancer is not a single disease, but rather, a broad collection of various classifications and subtypes. Any cell type in the body may lead to its own unique form of cancer, and even two people with exactly the same type and stage of cancer, treated in exactly the same way, may not have the same outcome. Despite these challenges, we have never understood the basic biology of cancer better than we do now, and current research has lead to great strides in the way we treat- and often cure- many types of cancer.

There is significant progress to be made, scientifically as well as societally. How do we allocate resources to combat cancer? Can we better treat patients as a whole person, rather than just their disease? How can we better address healthcare disparities to improve overall outcomes? The enormous funding and attention that cancer has received also raises concerns about the “cancer / industrial complex:” are funding agencies prioritizing the right things when it comes to treating an aging population and other chronic diseases? This course will explore these broad and complex issues that cut across science, medicine, industry, and society.

Fashion, Identity and Power

• HNRS 401H3-003
• Fall 2024: Eric Darnell Pritchard

What we wear and where it comes from tells us much about who we are as individuals and a society. The history of fashion is inextricable from identity and power, as clothing, accessories, and body modification (e.g. tattoos, piercings, cosmetic surgery) illustrate a range of meaning-making and aesthetic decisions that inform how people see the world and, in turn, how they are experienced within it. This course will explore fashion as theory, art, practice, and industry, attentive to the myriad ways it has impact on and is affected by the social, political, and economic terrain in which clothing and accessories function with meaning and consequence. We will cover topics ranging from fashion's design, production, marketing, consumption, the ethical considerations regarding fashion and identity (including race, disability, class, gender, sexuality, age, and size), universal and adaptive design, environmental and climate concerns, sustainability, labor, and the teaching and passing on of culturally informed sewing, beading and other craft practices. We will engage writing and a variety of material objects - archives, visual and performance arts - and seminar discussions will posit the implications of past and current research on fashion and accessories for the present and next steps for fashion as an interdisciplinary field of study cutting across rhetorical studies, art history, apparel design, literary studies, American Studies, Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies, Disability Studies, Environmental Studies, and Legal Studies, etc. In closing, the course will support the development of each student finding or further developing their own fashion and style studies research, writing, and creative projects, with an eye toward exploring the broad implications of their interests for theory, methodology, and pedagogy of this field.

The Geography of Star Trek

• HNRS 401H3-002
• Fall 2024: Fiona Davidson

“Beam me up Scotty” “He’s dead, Jim”. Even if you’ve never seen an episode of Star Trek, the chances are that you’ve encountered one of its signature phrases. In the over fifty years since it first aired, through syndication and the constant creation of new content, the show has become a cultural touchstone not just in the US, but throughout much of the rest of the world. Since 1966, the franchise has gone boldly into the geography of an imaginary frontier, exploring new worlds, contacting new civilizations, and expanding the reach of the United Federation of Planets.

In this class we will examine Star Trek as a source of entertainment, but also as a reflection of our contemporary world, a world that was created by the Enlightenment, 19th century British imperialism and the expansion of the American Empire in the 20th century. The geography of the Federation is the geography of planets, solar systems, and fictional political entities; empires, hegemonies, coalitions, republics and alliances, each of which reflects the geopolitics and political units of a world in which the United States was, and continues to be, a dominant power.

Over the course of the semester, we will use excerpts from all the TV shows and films, with readings from academic work on the importance of Star Trek as a cultural and political text to examine the political and social geography of the messages that are embedded in the text and subtext of the show. Whether deliberately, or through their own unconscious, and conscious, biases, the creators, writers, showrunners, and performers have used Star Trek to both support and subvert the cultural and political norms of the late 20th century and early 21st century. In learning how to critically examine Star Trek, the class will not only gain a greater understanding of contemporary worlds society and politics, but also a greater understanding of how that world is influenced by the media that saturates our lives.

Gothic

• HNRS 401H3-001
• Fall 2024: Lynda Coon, Kim Sexton
• Spring 2020: Lynda Coon, Kim Sexton

This Signature Seminar takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Gothic art and architecture as a cultural phenomenon. Starting with Abbot Suger’s renovation of the royal abbey church of St.‐Denis in Paris (1140) and culminating in the architectural extravagance of America’s collegiate Gothic campuses, seminar participants will tackle medieval building and medievalism from a variety of topics, including Gothic and medicine, Gothic and gender, and Gothic and empire.

Technology Craft

• HNRS 401H3-004
• Summer 2024: Vincent Edwards

Technology is often associated with modernity and the cutting edges of human achievement. We instead consider it as something old, as the continuation of the ancient and universal human traditions of tool use and craft. A central question in that tradition is to start with a tool and ask simply “What can you do?”. In this course we will apply this question to some of the most modern tools, CNC routers, laser cutters and 3d printers. We will think about tools as physical objects, as computer models (which in some cases can control machines) and in the abstract, with the goal of balancing between theory and practice, seeing how each supports the other.

The Science, Politics and Culture of Dinosaurs

• HNRS 4013H-002
• Spring 2024: Celina Suarez

Dinosaurs are one of the most successful animals to ever live on Earth. Dinosaurs, which encompass both non-avian and avian dinosaurs (birds), span from 230 million years to today and have come to dominate all ecosystems on Earth. They inspire the imagination and are often a child’s first introduction to science. How do we know what we know about dinosaurs? What are the scientific and cultural influences dinosaurs have on society? How can they help us understand Earth’s past climate and give us clues to our future climate? Dinosaurs are also a means for science communication: How do scientists, artists and science writers work together to reconstruct these fascinating creatures and their environment. This seminar series will delve into both the scientific aspects of dinosaurs as well as topics related to dinosaur research, such as land-use policy, paleo-art, science communication and the business of fossil sales.

Engineering Antiquity

• HNRS 4013H-002
• Spring 2024: Kevin Hall
• Fall 2019: Kevin Hall

How did they do that?!? This is a very common reaction when touring what remains of the built environment of late antiquity and earlier. Monumental spaces and structures, clever mechanical and hydraulic works, and other artifacts capture our imagination, inspire awe, and marshal our respect for ancient engineers and craftsmen. However, in our awe and wonder, many times we miss a very important and central theme: the ancients were responding to demands in their societies that have not changed through the intervening centuries to present day. What can we learn from their solutions? What can we learn from the impacts – both positive and negative – their solutions had on their societies? In this course we will consider both how “they did that” and why “they did that” on the path of our ultimate quest: in terms of technological advancement, how do we balance “can we...”? against “should we...?”

Ozarks Culture

• HNRS 4013H-001
• Spring 2024: Virginia Siegel, Joshua Youngblood, Jared Phillips

The Ozarks is a place often described by outsiders as full of hillbillies, moonshiners, regressive, insular, etc. But how have Ozarkers thought about themselves over the years? What are these assumptive descriptions really saying? And how is this region being redefined in the age of Walmart and Netflix? By examining the history, literature, and cultures of the Ozarks through diverse perspectives, students will explore how Ozarkers have been engaged in meaning-making in this place and the nation during the American Century, impacting everything from country music to global commerce.

In particular, this course will push students to think beyond the traditional narrative of hillbillies to see how the Ozarks have evolved in the past fifty years to include a far more cosmopolitan community than generally understood. Highlighting the stories of immigrants, queer communities, and the region's longstanding communities of color will help to show students that the Ozarks are far more than Silver Dollar City would have us think.

Bad Medicine

• HNRC 4013H 011
• Fall 2023: Tricia Starks
• Fall 2020: Tricia Starks
• Fall 2018: Tricia Starks

Hippocrates (460-370 BC) divided the art of medicine into three factors — the disease, the patient and the physician. Patients, literally the ones who "suffer," gave themselves up to the physician’s knowledge, skill and craft. Yet in these early days, there was precious little that the physician could do besides follow the Hippocratic dictum to “first do no harm.” Even in that, they often failed. Bleedings, blisterings, cauterizations and poisonings came part and parcel with the knowledge and skill of the physicians. Healing was often accidental, if it occurred at all. Still, having the ability merely to name the dread disease from which a ruler or loved one suffered, physicians gained power.

Entering the modern era of nation states, liberal politics, enlightenment philosophies and capitalist economies, this power came not just from their guidance in the face of disease and death. Increasingly, European rulers saw the wealth of their nations as measured by having people to serve soberly, healthfully and quiescently in militaries and factories. Medical authorities became tools of the state in this quest for power, and helped bolster an entire bureaucratic structure that used medicine to control people who might threaten white patriarchal authority. Science was employed to define behaviors and peoples as unhealthy even when there was little medical evidence to justify these views. Then, through a web of state-backed and culturally-supported authorities, physicians pushed for these vectors of invented disease – be they hysterics and neurasthenics or imbeciles and morons – to be cured, quelled or eliminated.

Bad Medicine will demonstrate how those who disturbed order or menaced authority were medically defined as deficient, abnormal or aberrant and in need of a "cure." Students will explore how modern Western states used medicine to define and control their subjects, to incarcerate and harm those seen as deficient and to sterilize and kill those considered dangerous.

The class will show students how to be a patient is still to suffer.

Good Medicine

• HNRC 4013H 012
• Fall 2023: Jamie I. Baum, Erin K. Howie Hickey

“If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.” - Hippocrates

In Ancient Greek the word diet (δίαιτα – diaita) meant mode of life and it encompassed the various aspects of lifestyle: food and drink, physical exercises, baths and massage, sun-therapy, sleep and sexual practice, passions of the soul, habits and generally the whole way of leading one’s life. Today, diet (nutrition) and physical activity are two separate fields of study.

In this course, we will return to the Ancient Greek definition and explore the relationship between nutrition and physical activity and their role in whole health and well-being. To do this, we will focus on Hippocrates’ dedication to research and communication and the university’s land grant mission - research, education, and extension.

Throughout the course we will discuss the role of nutrition and physical activity in whole health and wellbeing, how to design research focused on changing nutrition and physical activity behaviors, and the importance of community engagement in achieving positive health outcomes. We will also address the challenges communities face and the barriers they need to overcome to implement dietary and physical activity changes in their daily lives.

The class will include guest speakers from across colleges on campus, community representatives, and interactions with leaders across the nation and globally.

Students will play an active role in integrating diet and physical activity within communities by:

• Understanding the scientific basics related to nutrition and physical activity
• Engaging with experts in research and community outreach
• Participating in an experiment/outreach project of their own design throughout the semester

Teeth

• HNRC 4013H
• Fall 2023: Peter Ungar
• Spring 2017: Peter Ungar

Most of us only think about teeth when something’s wrong with them—when they come in crooked, break or begin to rot. But take a minute to consider teeth as the extraordinary feat of engineering they are.

They concentrate and transmit the forces needed to break food, again and again, up to millions of times over a lifetime. And they do it without themselves being broken in the process—with the very same raw materials used to make the plants and animals being eaten. Chewing is like a perpetual death match in the mouth, with plants and animals developing tough or hard tissues for protection, and teeth evolving ways to sharpen or strengthen themselves to overcome those defenses. The variety of tooth types, especially across the mammals, is extraordinary.

It’s a testament to what evolution can accomplish given time, motive, and opportunity. Lots of animals have “teeth.” Sea urchins, spiders and slugs all have hardened tissues used for food acquisition and processing, but real teeth, like yours and mine, are special. They first appeared half a billion years ago, and Nature has spent the whole time since tinkering with ways to make them better. It’s a story written in stone—the fossil record.

TEETH: EVOLUTION’S BITE is broken into three parts. The first part introduces key terms and concepts: tooth form, structure, and development, food and feeding. The second part focuses on the evolution of teeth and, in a broader sense, the animals in whose mouths they evolve. We cover teeth before the mammals, the origins of chewing, and the mammalian fossil record. And the third part presents the teeth of mammals today in all their glory – an amazing example of Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” The course closes with a consideration of our teeth. Smile and look in a mirror. Millions of us suffer fillings, crowns, wisdom tooth extractions, and braces each year. Most other mammals don’t have widespread dental disease and orthodontic disorders. Why are we so different? The answer is rooted in evolutionary history; and this course offers the student the perspective needed to understand this and, in doing so, to better appreciate our place in Nature.

Death and Art

• HNRC 4013H-001
• Spring 2023: Lynne Jacobs

Although today art is associated with museums and galleries, in premodern Europe art was closely tied to one’s fate after death. At that time—when people had an average lifespan between 30 and 40 years and about half of all children died before the age of sixteen—death was a very visible part of life. Medieval Christians were terrified about what future awaited them they died. But art could help secure the proper spiritual future for their souls. Commissioning art constituted a “good work,” which could help achieve salvation after death. Prayers before indulgenced images offered reduced time in Purgatory, the place where souls who had committed minor sins were punished (for thousands of years or so) before being admitted to heaven. In addition, images, epitaphs, and tombs served as reminders to the living to pray for the deceased and thereby shorten their time in Purgatory.

This class will focus on the art of Northern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a time when the fascination with death and the macabre was particularly evident in art. We will examine different sites and artistic genres that functioned in relation to death, such as chapels, monasteries, altarpieces, tombs, epitaphs, and books, before examining artists who focus on themes of death, such as Baldung, Holbein, Bosch, and Bruegel. Students will give presentations on selected themes, such as Death and the Maiden, the Dance of Death, skulls, skeletons, suicide, war, capital punishment, the Fall, and the Death of Christ.

Soccer

• HNRC 4013H
• Spring 2023: Todd Cleveland
• Spring 2018: Todd Cleveland

It’s estimated that more than three billion people – casual observers and passionate fans alike – will watch the 2018 FIFA World Cup, either in person, on television, or via streaming media. Meanwhile, FIFA, soccer's international governing body, estimates that more than 265 million people worldwide actively play “the beautiful game.” These figures are stunning: the closest sporting competitor, cricket, counts an estimated one billion fewer fans.

Yet, for all the enjoyment that its myriad fans and practitioners derive from the game, soccer is much more than just a pastime. The passion that the game fosters has the ability not only to unite, generating communities of fans throughout the world and rallying populations around their national teams, but also to fracture communities. Soccer often deepens historic social divides and generates novel antagonisms. The sport continues to engender violence among fans and has repeatedly been a core component of aggressive nationalist agendas. At the same time the multi-billion dollar global soccer industry is awash in cash, raising the incomes of some of the world’s poorest while also enriching some of its most unsavory. Ultimately, the pervasiveness of soccer in global society – past and present – confirms its capacity to transcend the realm of sports, powerfully suggesting that it is truly much more than just a game.

Soccer is undeniably the world’s most popular sport. Yet few observers of the game pause to interrogate its unrivaled global popularity:

• How did soccer generate so many players and followers?
• From its innocuous beginnings as an endeavor enjoyed by the 19th-century British working class, how did the game spread throughout the world and come to dominate the global sporting landscape?
• Who were the agents of this diffusion?
• How was the game received, adopted, appropriated, altered, or even resisted by various populations worldwide?

This interdisciplinary seminar will prompt students to explore the answers to these questions and analyze how various geo-historical contexts shaped these processes, as well as the constituent individual experiences of these broader patterns. We will also examine the ways soccer has reflected the ongoing process of globalization. With players, ideas, tactics and wealth circulating throughout the globe, we will consider the future of the game based on contemporary trends that are shaping the ways that the game is played and consumed.

First Amendment

• HNRC 4013H-004
• Spring 2023: Mark Killenbeck

An intensive examination of the legal issues arising under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, with an emphasis on basic free speech doctrines and the dilemmas posed by interplay between the free exercise and establishment clauses. This is a Law School course with 5 seats reserved for Honors College students.

Climate Change: A Human History

• HNRC 4013H-001
• Fall 2022: Benjamin Vining

As anthropogenic climate change increasingly challenges the modern world. Past interactions between societies and changing climates offer lessons in adaptability, resilience, and vulnerability. This signature seminar takes an interdisciplinary approach to critically examining how societies over the past four millennia have experienced and responded to climate changes. Using modern paleoclimatic and anthropological approaches, the course will examine the behavioral choices that civilizations have made when confronted with violent storms, severe droughts, flooding, or other changes in regional climates in order to better understand how human action can either help us ‘weather’ these challenges or exacerbate our vulnerabilities.

Our examination will go beyond simple deterministic models that propose that climate shapes social adaptations and failures. We will look at how past civilizations have relied on economic, social, or ideological structures that have helped them create capacity to deal with climate change. The course will examine some of the great civilizations of the world that many are familiar with, but we will go much deeper into the diversity and pluralism of these societies to understand how human decision-making shifted vulnerabilities across different communities. The result will be a better understanding of how the decisions we make collectively might condition our future experiences with anthropogenic climate change.

Extractions

• HNRC 4013H-002
• Fall 2022: Toni Jensen

This Signature Seminar is designed to introduce students to the human costs of extractive industries. The course will consider our world’s demand for raw materials, energy, and human capital in the context of climate crisis. The practice and concepts of extraction will be studied broadly through political, environmental and socio-economic approaches.

Questions central to our inquiry include: How do we balance our material needs and wants with the environmental and societal impacts of these extractions? What are the human costs of these extractions, and how can studying these costs help lead us toward solutions? How are race, class and gender factors in who benefits or is harmed by extractive practices?

We’ll dive deeply into the lives of those affected by oil and gas extraction, mining, forestry, and commercial agriculture and food production. Those include the lives of workers and landowners, corporation executives and pipeline protestors, politicians and climate scientists alike. In Extractions, students will work toward layered knowledge both of these industries and of the people and places most affected by them.

Wrongful Convictions

• HNRC 4013H-003
• Fall 2022: Tiffany Murphy

Wrongful Convictions will encompass a study of the substantive causes of wrongful convictions and the procedural mechanisms allowing for the litigation of actual innocence claims. The focus of this class is the methodology used to investigate and develop claims of actual innocence. During the course of the semester, students will review actual cases of wrongful convictions and processes necessary for exoneration.

Economic Thought and Competition Law

• HNRC 4013H-027
• Spring 2022: Sharon Foster

Economic thought is the study of what economists thought happened, what did happen or what was about to happen within a particular economy. The study of economic thought from the ancient period and the Middle Ages provides a rich understanding of the origins of competition law, or as it is known in the United States, antitrust law.

The written evidence from the ancient period and the Middle Ages indicate economic thought in general, and in competition law specifically, focused on fair and unfair – virtue and vice. In fact, the term “justice” referenced in many ancient texts primarily meant economic justice. Economic justice, basic principles of fairness, permeates legal history in numerous areas of commercial law including contracts, usury, and debt relief. But competition law is, perhaps, where we most clearly see economic justice concepts. Admonitions against the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few by unethical means included cartels and monopolization, a particular concern during frequent times of famine and plague. Yet, despite a bountiful historical record relating to competition law, there is very little historical analysis of competition law from the ancient period or the Middle Ages.

In this Signature Seminar, students will analyze economic thought starting with the ancient city-states of Mesopotamia from around 2402 B.C.E. through the Middle Ages ending in 1400 C.E. The primary focus will be on economic thought regarding cartels and monopolization as expressed through ancient codes, biblical sources, canon law, philosophical writings and literature. Through these sources from the ancient period and the Middle Ages, this Signature Seminar will elucidate the connection between early economic thought and modern economic theory as it applies to competition law.

Euclid

• HNRC 4013H-026
• Spring 2022: Edmund Harriss, Joshua Youngblood

Euclid’s Elements weaves its way through the history of mathematics and the world. Studying the book provides an amazing insight into many topics, especially the history of the book in general and of course mathematics.

This Signature Seminar will guide students through the textual and intellectual history of Euclid. For more than 2,000 years, the mathematical concepts written up by the mathematician from Alexandria in Africa, have served as building blocks for students, theoreticians, designers, builders, and even poets and musicians. The collected books of Euclid were one of the most frequently taught texts in the world until the early 20th century and remain valuable sources of scholarly inquiry. In physics the 20th century began by finally showing how the universe quite literally bent the rules the Elements set down so long before.

Combining an interdisciplinary approach to mathematics, relying on history, intersectionality, and active creation, with analyses of the “book” as artifact and object, this course will allow Honors students to explore cultural and intellectual development over millennia though one of the most frequently cited and complex textual odysseys in the world. The mathematics of Euclid was adopted into the foundation of western civilization even though it was the work of the eastern Mediterranean. Students will seek to decolonise the historical assumptions about early mathematics and how they were understood or not understood, or willfully misunderstood.

Black Utopias

• HNRC 4013H
• Fall 2021: Caree Banton

Functioning as a gateway for humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew, the COVID-19 pandemic has produced utopian dreams of a virus-free world. But long before the pandemic, oppressed people in efforts to articulate agendas for self-determination had embraced utopian ideas.

The biblical story of the exile and exodus of the Jewish people and the subsequent creation of Israel, which many have referred to as a Zionist utopia, has long served as the chief ideological touchstone. Yet, since the modern era, the Black social and political imaginary has been largely structured and informed by utopian visions.

Black nationalist thinkers in the U.S., the Caribbean, and Africa at different points envisioned in great detail the ideals of a perfect Black society that would shield them from the perils of white supremacist and racist oppression. Through fugitivity, colonization, and emigration to Haiti, Canada, Liberia, Ghana, France and numerous other spaces, Black utopia came to represent the convergence of Black escapism with ethnic nationalist and political possibilities. Despite the differences in places, movements, leaders, and philosophies, Black people have had to confront the reality of utopia as elusive.

Still, in the 20th century, painters, musicians and fiction writers would continue to intervene upon the utopian traditions of Black culture, including anti-utopia, heterotopia and dystopia. Through artistic and philosophical renderings of Black life in outer space, Black utopia has more prominently become a site for Afro-futurist ideas.

In this course, we will engage the various ways in which Black people have sought to envision and create a better world. To examine how Black people have articulated utopian visions, we will read historical works alongside novels and short stories, view paintings, listen to music from the likes of Outkast, Fela Kuti and Lee “Scratch” Perry as well as view films that portray Black utopian societies and movements.

Consiracy Theory

• HNRC 4013H
• Fall 2021: Ryan Neville-Shepard

Conspiracy culture is not new in the United States. From the Revolutionary War to the era of McCarthyism, Americans were spinning populist counter-narratives about evil doers working through secret societies to undermine the interests of “common” people.

By the turn of the 21st century, however, a feeling emerged that conspiracy culture was becoming increasingly mainstream especially with the popularity of JFK assassination theories, the 9/11 Truthers, the Birther movement, and most recently the widespread misinformation surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.

Although such rhetoric was once limited to the fringes of society, it now permeates everyday life, impacting health decisions, political participation, public policy, and so much more.

Conspiracy Theory is a Signature Seminar that will begin with a basic understanding of conspiracy discourse.

Students will be challenged to define conspiracy theories and understand the formal characteristics of conspiracy narratives. Moreover, the course will trace the conditions in which conspiracy theories – in the United States and across the world – tend to flourish.

Particular attention will be given to the way mass media has shaped conspiracy culture, from contemporary film and television genres, to forms of social media that have made it far easier for people to create and share their own content online.

Not only will students gain an understanding of how such misinformation circulates in public and shapes beliefs and actions, but we will imagine the best ways that society might respond.

Sustainable Cities

• HNRC 4013H
• Fall 2021: Noah Billig, Ph.D., ASLA

More than 50% of the world’s population now lives in cities. Cities will continue to be the predominant living condition as people seek urban opportunities. Cities also have the potential to mitigate climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and other key sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

This course will investigate the many layers of the city—from the meaning of cities to cities as nested, but non-linear systems—including infrastructure, natural systems, and cities as narrative and people’s stories. Students will look at key challenges to sustainable cities in the 21st century, including:

• Urban sprawl
• Unequitable access to resources and environmental injustices
• Resilience in the face of climate change (e.g., flooding, sea rise)
• Threats to urban water quality and waterbodies/watersheds
• Loss of countryside, habitat, and farmland
• Lack of public space and walkable neighborhoods
• Single-use zoning
• Loss of sense of place
• Informal urbanism/squatter settlements

Students will then investigate many facets of the sustainable city, including landscape function and aesthetics; built urban fabric; government policies; transportation and transit; infrastructure liabilities and repurposing; conservation of resources such as water and energy; regional and urban ecology and habitat; and social structures and environmental justice.

They will also learn about adaptive solutions attempting to address these issues, including urban sprawl repair, tactical urbanism, the rise of small-scale developers, the emergence of grassroots community development organizations, and the adaptive reuse and densification of suburban residential neighborhoods.

Students will understand patterns, processes, and policies associated with these various adaptive urban solutions, both in the developing world and North America. Students will then apply their new knowledge to creative and strategic proposals for sustainable cities.

Conservatism

• HNRC 4013H-003
• Spring 2021: Jay P. Greene

Conservative political thought has a long and influential history, but it receives relatively little serious attention on college campuses. This neglect is a disservice to students inclined toward liberal and progressive views because they too often critique a caricature of conservatism, which undermines the strength and clarity of their own political thinking. But this neglect is also a disservice to students inclined toward conservative views, who, lacking an understanding of the traditions and diversity of conservative thought, often develop a shallow version of conservatism that is little more than being contrary to liberals. This course attempts to remedy these problems by reviewing the history and defining characteristics of conservatism, as well as how that political philosophy can be applied to current issues and political controversies. Our goal is not to adjudicate whether conservative views are right or wrong. Instead, we will attempt to understand how conservatives think.

Our readings will describe how conservatism arose in opposition to the universal claims of a series of political movements, culminating in the French Revolution. We will also review the role conservative thinking played in the American founding and then jump ahead to the various strains of conservative thought that emerged in the U.S. following the Second World War. We will apply those strains of conservative thought to contemporary issues, such as the scope of government authority, taxation, trade, sexual and moral regulation, welfare, healthcare, education, the environment and foreign policy.

Global Social Change

• HNRC 4013H-002
• Spring 2021: Laurence Hare, Rogelio Garcia Contreras, Jared Phillips

As the saying goes, “Think globally, act locally.” Indeed, many of today’s pressing global issues manifest themselves in the day-to-day challenges of communities, and it is within these communities that some of the most innovative and effective solutions emerge. Yet the ways in which challenges are understood and addressed vary across communities, cultures and nations. What can we learn from these different perspectives and experiences? In what ways can locales and regions in different parts of the world work together to achieve meaningful social change and solve common global challenges?

In this international honors signature seminar students will pursue a different kind of applied learning and community engagement. First, students will explore the ways in which global challenges manifest themselves in regional and local settings. They will gain experience with different pathways to social change, including social innovation and entrepreneurship, and discover how intercultural dialogue can facilitate solutions. Then, U of A honors students will work side-by-side with students, faculty, and community partners in Arkansas, Italy and Spain on a shared project to understand the impact of pandemic recovery on the international social change ecosystem and to apply their learning to proposing new ways forward in the wake of COVID-19.

This seminar connects students to the Arkansas Global Changemakers Initiative, which offers opportunities for student internships, research, service learning, and study abroad. It provides a terrific way to build intercultural skills, learn social innovation practices, and engage in meaningful partnerships between the University of Arkansas and communities at home and abroad.

Intimacies

• HNRC 4013H-004
• Fall 2020: Lisa M. Corrigan

When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover began authorizing wiretaps on civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1962, he had hoped to find ties to international communists. Instead of any communist ties, his entirely white FBI found themselves recording and commenting on black civil rights leaders’ intimate lives to manufacture political leverage against them.

This seminar charts moments like this one between Hoover and King to understand how intimacy shaped politics at mid-century. We see intimacy as a primarily political project where feelings create closeness and distance in deeply politicized ways that shape public understandings of iconic public figures. Those who relate through this sense of political intimacy have shared spaces, touches, interests, politics, fetishes, conflicts, promises, memories and affections.

This course examines the production and circulation of social and political intimacies from multiple perspectives. It offers a partial historiography of intimacy using several touch points in the mid-twentieth century as case studies to understand how intimacy has been framed, celebrated, repressed, weaponized and liberated. Equally important, we will probe how intimacy has shaped inequality, particularly as the state mobilizes race panic and sex panic in the service of regulating intimacy. Thus, will we study the ways that language and proximity shape public and private encounters of people who are or who become iconic public figures, in this case, activists, politicos and intellectuals.

We will begin with Brown v. Board and end with Donald Trump’s election in 2016 to understand how sexualized and racialized intimacies have been mobilized to build positive and negative political momentum. Students will discuss:

• Desegregation and Racial Intimacy
• Sexual liberation and Public Intimacies
• Surveillance, Technology, and Neoliberalism
• Intimacies and Alienation

Through each unit, students will explore how race and sex panic mobilize particular political regimes that simultaneously expand and contract possibilities for intimate collaboration.

Little Things that Changed the World

• HNRC 4013H-003
• Fall 2020: Chaim Goodman-Strauss

Consider a simple piece of string — hardly a technological marvel or a centerpiece of modern civilization! But string is old, and just try to make some. People of the paleolithic "String Revolution,'' beginning at least 44,000 years ago, worked out rope, thread, needle, cloth, clothes, nets, snares, lines, bags, straps, and handles, not to mention fancy hats, embroidery and beadwork, all refined over tens of thousands more years.

Or take the sugar cube — once a treasure in the global luxury goods trade, soon a driver of empire, genocide and an especially brutal form of slavery, later a standardized staple for a rising middle class, a symbol of 1960s psychedelic culture, and today a heavily subsidized agribusiness commodity.

The paperclip, the haircut, a leash, a fork, a needle, a flute, a button, the second, dice, beer, sauerkraut, ammonia, gears, chiles, wire, plastic bags ... any of these and many more banal little things will be our windows into our highly interconnected human experience.

It is amazing and humbling that within arms reach, at any time, we can touch the intellectual product of millions of minds across tens of millennia, building the technological world we live in today. Let's take a closer look.

Church and State

• HNRC 4013-001
• Spring 2020: Mark Killenbeck

In 1952 Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (in)famously declared that “we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” That statement was accurate at the time. It correctly expressed the worldview of a largely homogeneous American polity that assumed the existence of a single Christian deity and couched its conceptions of religious liberty in the light of that vision. But the assumptions that animated the nation in 1952, and shaped the Supreme Court’s approach to church-state relations for the next several decades, have become tenuous at best in an increasingly diverse nation whose composition more accurately reflects a multiplicity of views and beliefs. The goal of this Signature Seminar will be to shed light on what a contemporary understanding of the “separation of Church and State” should be in a nation that respects all creeds and is sincerely interested in protecting the “free exercise of religion.” The primary focus will be on the Religion Clause decisions of the Supreme Court, supplemented by readings tracing the history and development of the operative principles and rules since the Founding Era. Settled expectations will be challenged, and an irreverent approach to matters of religious reverence will be the rule, rather than the exception.

Violence

• HNRC 4013-003
• Spring 2020: Ram Natarajan

This seminar takes an anthropological look at violence and social suffering, focusing first on how societies institute and define injury and then on the consequences and afterlives of violence for those who inflict harm, those who suffer abuses and those whose existences are implicated with violence despite being neither victim nor perpetrator. Our main objectives are to study violence in a global context and to scrutinize how and why certain forms of violence get ignored and others get condemned and repaired: in other words, why and how societies accept or sanction certain forms of violence, but castigate, denounce or make invisible others. Topics to be covered include torture, trauma, colonial violence, animal violence, climate change, terror and non-violence. Our overall concern will be how violence encompasses more than bodily harm and becomes a long-term process that is part of everyday life.

Brain and Music

• HNRC 4013H
• August Intersession 2020: Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

This course intermingles science and the humanities to try to understand the pervasive and puzzling human behavior of music-making. Students will tackle challenging questions at the forefront of this highly intriguing subject, such as:

• How is it possible to design experiments that illuminate as complex a cultural phenomenon as music?
• What can neuroscience teach us about music, and what can music teach us about the brain?
• How can this research inspire new machines, tools, and interventions that affect health and society?

Students in this course will learn to think flexibly, navigating back and forth between science and the humanities as they engage with the most cutting-edge approaches and discoveries in the neuroscience of music.

Ghost Hunting

• HNRC 4013H-001
• August Intersession 2019: Misty Bastian

The United States is haunted by the ghosts of many dead Americans—or, perhaps, by intimations of a past that refuses to stay hidden even as the country tries to forget. These hauntings range from the modest appearance of “white ladies” who pace the parlors and staircases of houses where they once lived bourgeois lives, to the brusque touch of miners, angered that their places of work have long been shut down, to the sounds and smells of the great battles of the Civil War, playing endlessly in the night in closed national parks. Real estate agents in famously haunted areas like New Orleans advertise some properties as “haunted” on their signs, and ghost tourism has become a second, and welcome, evening revenue stream in cities all around the U. S. Out of this haunted landscape has arisen a new hobby or vocation (and, in a few instances, profession): paranormal research, also known as ghost hunting. While many older “ghost hunters” trace the origins of their interest in the paranormal back to the popular 1960s-70s author Hans Holzer, most contemporary “ghost groups” model themselves on the 21^st-century television phenomenon “Ghost Hunters” and other para-TV stars. These television programs opened up a space of ghostly interest for Americans—particularly white, working class Americans—and introduced their audiences to current technologies and rituals of paranormal research. Suddenly, anybody able to assemble a ghost hunting kit of digital recorder, camera and flashlight could begin their own paranormal explorations.

This Honors College Signature Seminar will explore the history and practice of ghost hunting in the United States, looking specifically at what the efflorescence of paranormal research in America can tell us about intersecting topics like gender, race, class and social memory during the 21^st century. Along the way, we will do some participant-observation with local ghost hunters and on ghost tourism in Northwest Arkansas. There are no guarantees that we will meet a real ghost in those hands-on explorations, of course, but we will keep open minds, just in case. We will address the following topics during our 11-day seminar:

• Ghost Hunting 101: An Introduction to the Practice
• Long, Black Veil: American Ghost Folklore and Storytelling
• Spiritualism and the Roots of Contemporary Ghost Hunting in the U. S.
• Ghosts of Gettysburg: Ghost Tourism and “Paranormal Playgrounds”
• Spectral Intersectionality: Working Class Whiteness and the Gender of Investigation

Fascists

• HNRC 4013H-003
• Fall 2019: Kelly Hammond

This Signature Seminar is designed to introduce students to the ideological underpinnings and historical contexts surrounding the rise and spread of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. We will also interrogate the ways that academics and politicians have written and talked about fascism from the 1950s through to the present.

The comparative study of fascism has undergone significant changes in the last decades, both opening up new research opportunities and posing novel challenges. One of these main research avenues has been fascist internationalism, which focuses on the interactions, entanglements and cooperation among fascism movements and regimes, at various formal or informal political levels. In this class, fascist internationalism will be our starting point, and a frame for conversations about broad themes such as race, gender, youth culture, art and architecture, animals, science, militarism, colonialism, socialism, the environment, religion and, of course, politics.

We will end the course by placing contemporary discussions about the rise of authoritarianism and the emergence of fascist-inspired movements into dialogue with what we have learned and read about fascism throughout the semester.

Shedunnit

• HNRC 4013H-001
• Fall 2019: Padma Viswanathan

Who do you picture when you hear the phrase “woman criminal?” Bonnie with Clyde and a smoking gun or Alice Paul jailed campaigning for women’s suffrage? A battered wife taking revenge or Alex from Orange is the New Black? Drawing on sociological and literary perspectives, this course will explore how women criminals are made and how they are perceived, what motivates them and how they see themselves. Using The Sociological Imagination (Mills 1959) as a means of entering unfamiliar spaces and writing creative works on women and crime, we will look for answers to why and how women are labeled “criminal,” and for what crimes.

Aging

• HNRC 4013H-002
• Spring 2019: Michelle Gray

Since 2005 the number of older adults has risen 30% and is expected to more than double by 2050, raising the average age of our nation. Older adults are more prone to chronic illnesses such as heart disease and arthritis; however, not all older adults experience these traditional age-related issues. While aging is typically defined in chronological terms, this definition assumes age and time are synonymous. In reality human aging is dictated by the intersection of psychological, biological and social characteristics or processes, ultimately resulting in loss of adaptability, functional impairment and eventual death. Understanding the process of aging and how it is accelerated is imperative to increasing the quality of life of this population.

This course will focus on the causes of aging, the importance of distinguishing between primary aging and accelerated aging processes due to illness/disease, and quality of life versus quantity of life. Students will walk away with knowledge of theories of aging and information related to improving quality of life throughout the lifespan.

B.S.

• HNRC 4013H-003
• Spring 2019: Jay P. Greene

We encounter B.S. all the time, but what exactly is it? How can we detect B.S. and avoid its harms? Why does so much B.S. exist? Does it have some beneficial qualities?

There is no shortage of B.S. in our society, from the loaded notion of "fake news" to much of advertising, corporate mission statements and strategic plans. Does a particular brand of toothpaste really whiten teeth better than any other? A particular company says they strive for excellence in customer service, but what does this really mean? And in a world where scholarly research is increasingly focused on shaping a better world rather than simply describing the truth, even academia is becoming more susceptible to B.S.

This course will explore these and other issues related to the topic of B.S. The main purpose of the course is to improve the ability of students to engage in critical thinking and skeptically assess claims; that is, to avoid B.S. We will consider examples of B.S. in a variety of fields, including education, psychology, business, medicine, politics and journalism. From these examples we will attempt to develop a general understanding of B.S. that could be applied to any field.

Place in Mind

• HNRC4013H
• August Intersession 2018: Edmund Harriss