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Campuses:
2xxx-level courses are intended for freshmen and sophomores. 3xxx-level courses are typically taken by juniors and seniors. This list is subject to change.
(Satisfies two honors experiences each, one course and one non-course experience)
(Satisfies two honors experiences each, one course and one non-course experience)
HSem 2025H
Instructor: Paula Rabinowitz
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In the midst of the Great Recession, it is important to look back to the Great Depression and see how writers and artists--photographers, filmmakers, painters--responded to the devastating collapse of the economy during the 1930s. This course will survey an array of films from Hollywood and elsewhere, photographs from the Farm Services Administration, paintings by artists in the Works Progress (held in the Weisman Art Museum) and imaginative and theoretical writings by authors searching to document and critique the effects of widespread unemployment in the U.S and the rise of fascism abroad. This course is a seminar, which means you are responsible for coming to class, doing all the work and fully participating in all discussions and projects. The success of the course depends upon your deep engagement with the ideas generated by the materials we investigate in common and by whatever you can bring to the course as well.
Paula Rabinowitz's work focuses on the interconnections among politics, literature, and visual culture in 20th century America. She is currently working on two projects: American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street, a book-length study of post-war paperbacks, and Habits of Being, a four-volume collection of essays on clothing, fashion, and material culture.
HSem 2040H
Instructor: Susannah L. Smith
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In this seminar the best of the University’s research and creative work is brought to you. Every Thursday afternoon, the Institute for Advanced Study offers a presentation—a lecture, discussion, or performance—by leading scholars and artists from around the world and within the University. Seminar participants will attend the Thursdays at Four series and meet on Tuesdays to discuss the presentations, which will draw upon disciplines across the University. We will do supplemental readings related to the presentations and talk with presenters as their schedules allow. The spring presentation schedule will be available in mid-fall 2011 at www.ias.umn.edu/thursdays. This is the perfect seminar to introduce you to the rich variety of work done at the University.
Susannah L. Smith is a historian and the Managing Director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Her research is on Russian and Soviet music and national identity in the Stalin period; her position at the Institute allows her to exercise her curiosity about a wide set of subjects, from physics to art, animal behavior to human psychology, and archeology to foreign policy.
HSem 2053H
Instructor: Charles R. Fletcher
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Research has shown that most Americans hold one or more supernatural, paranormal or pseudoscientific beliefs. These include beliefs in mind reading, fortune telling, psychokinesis, remote viewing, therapeutic touch, out-of-body experiences, alien abduction, and cryptozoology (Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, etc.). This course has two goals: The first is to introduce students to critical thinking and behavioral research methods. The second is to critically evaluate the evidence for a variety of supernatural, paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Students will design and carry out their own experimental tests of these claims. The course will also include a guest lecture and demonstration by a local psychic.
Charles R> Fletcher holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He conducts research on the psychological processes involved in reading and language comprehension. He teaches the Psychology Department's Honors Research Practicum and a course on The Psychology of Language.
HSem 2101H
Instructor: Paul G. Siliciano
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Each time you pick up the newspaper, you are likely to find an article describing concerns about food or drug safety. Often, new studies are released that contradict the findings of previous studies. For example, hormone replacement therapy for post menopausal women has been through repeated cycles of recommendation and rejection over the past 30 years. How does the consumer know which study to believe? Consider the case of Vioxx, a non-prescription pain reliever and anti-inflammatory drug, which was widely prescribed and earned billions of dollars for Merck. Five years after its introduction, Vioxx was linked to heart disease and withdrawn, and Merck lost billions in lawsuits. How did Vioxx go from wonder drug to potential poison? Why did the safety testing not reveal this serious complication? This seminar will introduce students to the processes of food and drug testing, basic statistical analysis, and elementary biochemistry. Students will use the primary literature to research safety studies, and to learn how the body metabolizes foods and drugs. The course is designed for non-science majors, but a background in high school chemistry is required.
Paul G. Siliciano received his AB from Princeton University and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, he came to Minnesota and set up his lab studying RNA metabolism. He has taught everything from freshman biology to advanced graduate seminars, but his favorite courses to teach are those that introduce practical biochemistry to non-majors.
HSem 2413H
Instructors: Tobin Lawrence Nord and Harry Jack Sapienza
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This course is designed to introduce students to techniques for discovering everyday problems and fashioning potential solutions to those problems through the creation of new organizations. Because the course material deals with ideas and idea generation, it is designed to be helpful to many future careers and callings. During the semester we will explore the genesis of ideas and relationship between ideas, customer problems and innovation. Specific topics to be covered during the semester include the role of insights, ethnography and discovery techniques; individual and group creativity; and the use of structured ideation. This course seeks to provide students with the skills, tools, and mindsets to enable them to discover other people?s problems from which potential ventures might be built. These ventures include entrepreneurial start-ups, social ventures, and new businesses within large established organizations. The coursework will include readings, lectures, classroom activities, field activities, short reflection papers and journal, and presentations.
Tobin Lawrence Nord joined the University of Minnesota and the Carlson School of Management in 2006 after twenty years with local companies, the majority spent with Best Buy working in Strategic Marketing, Business Development, Strategy and Innovation. Some of this work is highlighted in the Harvard Business Case Best Buy: An Innovator' Journey. Toby is the Professional Director of the Carlson Ventures Enterprise and a Senior Lecturer at Carlson, teaching courses in Corporate Venturing, New Product Design & Business Development, Anthropology & Business, Design for Sustainable Development, and several Executive Education courses on innovation. Toby holds an MBA from the University of Minnesota and a BA from Hamline University.
Harry Jack Sapienza is the Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. Harry is co-founder of the Carlson Ventures Enterprise and its former Academic Director. Harry is currently the Doctoral Program Coordinator for the Strategic Management and Organization Department. His research interests include the internationalization and emergence of new ventures, innovation and strategic decision making in entrepreneurial firms. Harry has taught entrepreneurship and strategy classes at the undergraduate, masters, and PhD levels. Besides his love of teaching and literature, his passions include family, baseball, and rhythm and blues.
HSem 2513H
Instructor: Lee Penn
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This seminar will be devoted to NANO! Everyday, people encounter nanomaterials in products (e.g., in socks and cosmetics), technology (e.g., computer and phone components), medicine, and even in the environment (both natural and anthropogenic nanomaterials). Using the primary scientific literature, we will learn about nanotechnology, the fabrication of nanosized objects for specific applications, and how scientists characterize nano-sized objects (e.g., using electron microscopy). We will learn some of the basic science and consider the ethics of introducing new products with nano-ingredients or components. Class activities range from guest lectures to demonstrations of sub-nanometer resolution microscopes to reading popular fiction focusing on nano to synthesizing magnetic nanoparticles.
Lee Penn completed her BS in Chemistry at Beloit College and her PhD in m Materials Science at UW-Madison. She's been working with nanoparticles since the early 90s and has a passion for understanding their fundamental formation and growth mechanisms, how they are involved in chemical transformations in the environment, and elucidating the link between the physical and chemical properties of nanoparticles and how they participate in a wide range of chemical reactions. She has taught a range of courses, including honors general chemistry, My Other Car is a Bicycle (a freshmen seminar), Nanoparticle Science and Engineering, and Materials Characterization. She oversees a research group of eight graduate students and several undergraduates - all working on various topics involving nanoparticles.
HSem 2701H
Instructor: Jennifer Gunn
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This seminar examines the relationship of war to medicine and health, from the U.S. Civil War to the first Gulf War. It is organized around five key themes: psychological injury; human experimentation; military medicine and disease; destruction of the land and people; and the rise of beneficial technologies. We'll explore early neurologists' attempts to understand phantom pain in Civil War amputees, shell shock in World War I, the psychological effects on displaced children and populations in World War II, and PTSD. Nazi medical experiments are infamous; we?ll concentrate instead on the discovery of yellow fever in the Spanish-American war, Ancel Keys' WWII starvation experiments with conscientious objectors at the University of Minnesota, and biological warfare testing. Environmental destruction, through the use of defoliants like Agent Orange, land mines, atomic bombs, and biological warfare, targets soldiers and civilians alike with long-term health impacts. Yet war has also produced technologies that have shaped civilian medicine, from plastic surgery techniques to penicillin, blood storage, and trauma centers. Doing "hands on" history with primary documents and artifacts from local archives, museums, and special collections, students will create an integrated online learning unit on the medical and health history of World War I.
Jennifer Gunn is a historian of medicine who has researched the lessons of the 1918 global flu pandemic for contemporary emerging infectious diseases, taught about how the fields of nursing, psychology and psychiatry developed in wartime, mourned the broad social costs of wars in the past and the ones she's witnessed, and been fascinated by the beneficial technologies that emerge in war. As a Southerner, her idiosyncratic claim to fame is that she's been to the Alamo, but managed never to read a book about the Civil War until she went to grad school.
HSem 2801H
Instructor: Bobak Ha'Eri
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Law is the underpinning of modern society. No matter what career path you choose, it will affect it in some way. This seminar offers an introduction into legal thinking: Not merely what the laws are, but why we have them and, more importantly, how we come up with them. The ability to understand legal thinking is invaluable in any profession, from business to health to art. As a focus, we will ground ourselves in torts, a fundamental area of legal education that covers civil wrongs, other than contracts, for which the law provides a remedy. Students will have an opportunity to get a feeling for the law school experience as we use the case method, along with some Socratic method and ample discussion. We will focus on the basics of legal analysis, and learn how to apply that to critical thinking. Students successfully completing this seminar will be mentally armed and dangerous.
Bobak Ha'Eri is an attorney and graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School, where he is an instructor in the lawyering program. His work has covered FDA regulatory issues, torts, copyrights, trademarks and well as business start-ups. He strongly believes in helping students understand law, the legal process, and law school.
HSem 3008V
Instructor: David M. Lipset
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This course is divided into two parts, each of which has different but related purposes. The first part of the class has general and theoretical goals. First, differences between cultural anthropology and sociology with respect to the study of class difference will be introduced. Secondly, the major theories about hierarchy in pre-state society will be examined. Third, main theories and concepts in the study of class stratification in complex societies will be surveyed. The second part of the class will be comparative. It will focus on class ideology and social practices in France, USA, the UK and Latin America in particular. The focus will be on class in everyday life. in the domains of education, consumption, romance, sport and carnival. Throughout the course, in addition, we will make use of representations of class in Western popular culture, such as magazines and the movies.
David M. Lipset is a cultural anthropologist, the author of two books and many articles. He has done fieldwork in Papua New Guinea since 1981.
HSem 3039
Instructor: Patrick Nunnally
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Living with the Mississippi gathers students from diverse colleges across the University and engages them with the Mississippi River's challenges in a way that allows them to produce a body of work that is directly relevant to the work of planning, policy-making, research and design toward a sustainable Mississippi River. Working collectively, biological and physical scientists, planners, designers, advocates, and people involved in public interpretation and education must develop a 21st century approach to living with the urban Mississippi, one that uses the river as a community, environmental, and economic asset without diminishing the river's key ecological functions upon which we depend. Students in this course will combine knowledge from natural and social sciences with policy, planning, and design frameworks to develop realistic, potentially feasible solutions to river-related challenges posed by community partners.
Patrick Nunnally coordinates the River Life program, which connects U of M teaching, research and programs with the Mississippi River and its broader watershed. Nunnally has worked in planning, interpretation, and resource management along the Mississippi for 15 years; that experience, and his existing network of community partners form the core of this seminar.
HSem 3051H
Instructor: John L. Sullivan
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The first part of the seminar examines the power of conformity, denial and obedience in politics at the individual and collective levels. We will examine the underlying dynamics that can propel normal people into perpetrating malignant political aggression. An important theme will be the role played by threat perceptions and fear responses. To counterbalance the pessimism inherent in this topic, the second part of the seminar will examine political altruism and heroic political action. Considering work on political resistance, whistle-blowing and rescue activities, we will examine examples such as Le Chambon during World War II and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina during the Pinochet regime. From this baseline we will extract theories and concepts to apply during the third part of the seminar, which will focus on the U.S. use of torture since 9-11 and resistance to this policy.
John L. Sullivan has been at the University of Minnesota, where he is now a Regents Professor, since 1975. He teaches courses on political psychology, American politics and quantitative research methods. Professor Sullivan is a Fellow of American Academy of Arts & Sciences, winner of undergraduate and graduate teaching awards, and co-author or co-editor of Cooperation: The Political Psychology of Effective Human Interaction; The Political Psychology of Democratic Citizenship; With Malice Toward Some, Political Tolerance in Context; and Political Tolerance & American Democracy.
HCOL 3801H, Fall 2012
Instructors: Erika Lee and Katherine Fennelly
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In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will study the immigrant and refugee experience in America in the past and the present through readings, discussion, and service-learning with local immigrant and refugee serving organizations. We will address national and international issues related to immigrants and refugees in the US, while also focusing on communities, organizations, and topics specific to Minnesota. We will also consider why immigration has been considered a subject of "perennial debate" in the United States. Throughout the course we will explore four key areas: immigration and xenophobia, immigrant/refugee integration, immigrant rights, and immigration law and policy.
Why do immigrants come to the United States? What kind of "America" do they find once they're here? And why have Americans continuously debated the merits and demerits of immigration since the colonial era to the present? These are the questions that Erika Lee, Professor of History and Asian American Studies, explores in her research, writing, and teaching. Winner of a 2011 Arthur "Red" Motley Award for Excellence in Teaching in the College of Liberal Arts, Professor Lee is the author of two award-winning books and several articles on Asian American history and the history of immigration law in the United States.
Katherine Fennelly is Professor of Public Affairs at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Her research and outreach interests include the human rights of immigrants and refugees in the United States, and the preparedness of individuals, communities and public institutions to adapt to demographic changes. Fennelly is bilingual in Spanish and English and has worked and traveled extensively throughout Latin America.
HCOL 3803H, Spring 2013
Instructor: Jonathan Foley
In this challenge-based course, students will study the issue of global food security, seeking to answer the question "Can we feed the world without destroying it?" Students will learn the complexity of the problem and the issues and actors involved. While there isn't a "right" answer, progress can still be made through collaboration and innovation. Students will feel empowered to impact the global food system, from personal to career choices. Course format will include lectures, guest speakers, skills labs, and expert panels. Coursework will entail weekly individual assignments, group collaboration, and development of a solution to an aspect of global food security.
This course will be taught by Jonathan Foley, director of the U of M's Institute on the Environment (IonE), and professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. He also leads the IonE's Global Landscapes Initiative. Foley's work focuses on complex global environmental systems and their interactions with human societies. He and his students have contributed to our understanding of global-scale ecological processes, global patterns of land use, the behavior of the planet's climate and water cycles, and the sustainability of our biosphere. This work has led him to be a regular advisor to large corporations, NGOs and governments around the world.