Spring 2025 Honors Courses

TR, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm. Instructor(s): Maria Servedio. Enrollment = 24.
This course teaches students how scientists use mathematics to approach questions in evolutionary biology and ecology. Students learn both biological and mathematical concepts, taught using an array of pedagogical approaches. There are two group projects over the course of the semester, one involving the development of an original mathematical model.

PREREQUISITES: BIOL 101 & MATH 231. PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR REQUIRED FOR STUDENTS LACKING THE PREREQUISITES.

Dr. Servedio’s research centers on determining the evolutionary mechanisms that produce and maintain biodiversity. She is currently concentrating on the evolution of species-specific mate choice in animals, on the evolutionary effects of learning, and on the evolution of male mate choice. Dr. Servedio addresses these questions through the development of mathematical models of evolution.

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am. Instructor(s): Kerry Bloom. Enrollment = 24.
To provide you with the core principles of genetics and molecular biology.
The lecture/discussion sessions and the book will provide the basic content. We will take an historical approach at times to discuss seminal experiments and how they were done. We will examine the basic “rules” of genetics and molecular biology. After this class you will be prepared to do research in a lab on campus and to build upon this content with upper-level genetics courses and/or molecular biology courses.
Skills —
· Build hypotheses to answer a specific scientific question, design an experiment
using an appropriate technique/assay to answer the question, predict and analyze the results of the experiment
· Give examples of how advances in genetics and molecular biology, from the discovery of DNA’s structure to the sequencing of individual genomes, have changed the world (e.g. recombinant insulin, personalized medicine, transgenic crops)
· Prepare and deliver a short presentation based on reading and research

Concepts —
· Explain the term “allele” for a single gene at a population, organismal, cellular and molecular level; explain how dominance and recessiveness are expressed at these levels
· Explain where genetic variation comes from in a population (e.g. meiosis, mutation and epigenetic changes)
· Predict genotypic and phenotypic ratios of offspring in defined genetic crosses and work these problems in reverse (i.e. when given data about offspring determine the genotypes and phenotypes of parents)
· Deduce modes of inheritance (e.g. autosomal dominance, X-linked recessive) from genetic pedigrees and explain how incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity complicate these analyses
· Distinguish single gene traits from polygenic traits and the influence of environment on traits
· Explain how DNA is replicated normally and abnormally, and how these concepts are utilized in polymerase chain reaction (PCR)
· Understand the mechanism of recombination and its impact on genetic variability
· Compare and contrast the consequences of germline errors during meiosis (such as non-disjunction and translocations) and somatic errors during abnormal mitosis (such as non-disjunction and cancer)
· Explain the flow of genetic information based on the central dogma from DNA to proteins and how mutations are carried through this flow of information
· Describe the nature of the genetic code
· Describe the general organization of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes, including the identification and significance of the different parts of a gene (i.e. regulatory/nonregulatory, exons/introns, transcription start site, translation start site, UTRs)
· Explain how a gene can be regulated transcriptionally and post-transcriptionally and how this leads to limited expression under different conditions (e.g. different environments, during the course of development or under disease conditions)
· Predict the outcome of experimental manipulations in genes
· Describe the basic steps in gene cloning
· Design a transgenic animal/bacteria where a protein of interest is specifically produced
· Explain the significance of research in genetic model organisms to understand fundamental biological phenomena

 

Kerry Bloom is recognized for his work studying dynamic aspects of the cytoskeleton and chromosomes in live cells. He is known for work on the chromatin structure of active genes and most recently biophysical studies demonstrating the physical basis for how centromeric chromatin is built into a molecular spring that resists microtubule-based extensional forces in mitosis. Dr. Bloom was born in Washington D.C. He graduated from Tulane University (B.S. 1975) and received his Ph.D. in 1980 from Purdue University. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. John Carbon at UC Santa Barbara and took his first and only job at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1982. Bloom was an Instructor in the Physiology course at the MBL in Woods Hole MA for 10 years in the 80’s and 90’s, and an Instructor in the Science Writers course for 5 years in the early 2000’s. Bloom has a record of service in the American Society of Cell Biology where he is currently Secretary of the Society. He is a Lifetime Fellow of the ASCB, as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
Research Interests
Dr. Bloom has a long-standing interest in chromatin structure. He used nucleases to probe chromatin organization and studied the structure of active genes and centromeres. Dr. Bloom was an early developer of live cell microscopy and analysis of fluorescent protein fusions in budding yeast. He discovered a nuclear migration defect in dynein mutants that opened up the field for studying the mitotic exit checkpoint and genetic requirements for nuclear migration and spindle orientation in yeast and multicellular organisms. Turning back to the centromere, the visualization of centromere DNA dynamics challenged prevailing models of how cohesion holds sister centromeres together. Using bead-spring polymer models of chromosomes he discovered that the centromere is organized into a bottlebrush, in which the bulk of DNA is in radial loops, displaced from the primary axial core. The axial core is where tension is focused, and lies between kinetochore microtubules. They are currently using high spatiotemporal imaging of chromatin in vivo together with mathematical modeling to elucidate physical properties that underlie the formation and fluctuations of chromosomal territories, including the centromere and nucleolus. Introduction of tethers, cross-linkers and loop extrusion functionalities into the models sequester sub-domains and account for experimental observations

TR, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm . Instructor(s): Bob Goldstein / Amy Maddox. Enrollment = 24.
This course will take you to the next level of understanding how cells work. You will learn how cell components function, and how cells accomplish dynamic processes including cell division, migration, and communication. These topics are important for development, homeostasis, and avoiding a wide range of human diseases. We consider cell biology interesting because it involves active materials, signal integration, and the struggle to create and maintain order in an increasingly entropic world. The course will also help build your understanding of how scientific knowledge is amassed through creative design of scientific experiments. You will learn to think critically about how discoveries are made, and you will imagine and propose how future discoveries might be made.

Bob Goldstein is a Distinguished Professor of Biology and Adjunct Professor of Art. He runs a research lab at UNC that focuses on discovering fundamental mechanisms in cell and developmental biology. The lab asks questions about how cells work during development, questions that are relevant both to basic biology and to human health: How do cells divide in the right orientation? How do certain components of cells become localized to just one side of a cell? How do cells change shape? How do cells move from the surface of an embryo to its interior? The lab also studies tardigrades, which are microscopic animals that can somehow survive just about anything. He enjoys helping students learn using students’ own curiosity as a starting point.

For an organism to develop from a fertilized egg, or for tissues to replenish to compensate for wear and tear, cells must divide. During the final step of animal cell division, cells assemble a transient machine that pinches it in two, creating two topologically distinct daughter cells. Proper execution of this event is essential not only for development and homeostasis but also to avoid disease states including cancer. Amy Maddox’s lab is working to understand the molecular and physical mechanisms of animal cell shape maintenance and change, such as that which occur during cell division. We combine light microscopy, genetics, biochemistry, and mathematical modeling to study cytokinesis and other cell shape changes. Prof. Maddox’s research and teaching emphasize quantitative approaches, interdisciplinarity, and public outreach including scientific communication.

M, 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm. Instructor(s): Sabrina Burmeister. Enrollment = 24.

The purpose of BIOL 395H is to provide honors students with independent research experience, while working in a research lab on a question of current biological interest. Under the supervision of a faculty member, and with contribution of research postdoctoral fellows, students will learn more than just basic research techniques. They will learn how to start to think as scientists, raising hypotheses and finding ways to test them in an empirical manner.  In addition to the research performed in the lab, honors students will meet with each other on a weekly basis, discuss their research and develop their scientific thinking through reading and discussing primary scientific literature.

FOR BIOLOGY MAJORS ONLY. PREVIOUS ENROLLMENT IN BIOL 201 OR 202 REQUIRED (FOR  THE NEW BIOLOGY CURRICULUM, THE PREREQUIISTE IS ONE OF THE 200-LEVEL COE CLASSES). DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY PERMISSION REQUIRED; APPLICATION THROUGH THE BIOLOGY WEBSITE.

BIOL 395H may be taken for no more than six graded academic credits.  Three to five credit hours of research may be counted as one lecture course toward fulfillment of major requirements; six credit hours may be counted as one lecture course with laboratory toward fulfillment of major requirements.  Additional hours of research course credit will be counted as elective hours toward graduation.

 

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am . Instructor(s): Jason Reed. Enrollment = 35.
Recent advances in plant molecular biology, genetics, development, and biotechnology, and their potential relevance to agriculture. The course will include lectures, reading and discussions of papers from the primary literature, and student presentations.
Prerequisites, BIOL 202; or BIOL 271; or BIOL 103, BIOL 104, and BIOL 220; or permission of the instructor for students lacking the prerequisites.

The course will focus on several themes that will illustrate methodological approaches and intellectual questions in plant biology. These themes may differ in different years. Each theme will be covered over several class periods (2-3 weeks). We will intersperse lectures and more focused class discussions centered on papers from the primary scientific literature reporting research findings. Students will:
i) learn about current methodologies and questions of scientific interest in plant molecular biology;
ii) practice reading and evaluating papers from the scientific literature;
iii) consider how discoveries in these areas may be useful to develop new crop varieties.

In our lab we study how plants control their growth through signaling by endogenous hormones and environmental cues, transcriptional response pathways, and cell biological mechanisms.  We have an interest in translating our discoveries in these areas to potentially useful traits, such as allocating growth to desired organs, or changing the kinetics of stomatal opening to improve drought tolerance.

 

TR, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm. Instructor(s): Charles Mitchell. Enrollment = .
This course is about ecological interactions between hosts and pathogens, at scales from a host individual to the globe. The primary focus is on processes determining transmission of infectious diseases in host populations. To understand transmission of many diseases, we must understand evolution. Much of the course is on zoonotic diseases, those transmitted between humans and non-human animals. The course seeks to elucidate general principles that can apply across hosts from humans to plants and pathogens from viruses to fungi. The course is centered on student-led discussions.

Dr. Charles Mitchell has conducted research on the ecology of infectious diseases for over twenty-five years. His research group aims to understand how epidemics of infectious diseases are influenced by interactions among multiple species, using fungi and other microbes infecting grass leaves as a model system. He has taught Disease Ecology and Evolution at Carolina since 2006.

TR, . Instructor(s): Elena Simintzi. Enrollment = 35.
This course provides essential tools that anybody interested in business should know. We will analyze theory and practice of the major financial decisions made by corporations. The goal of the class is to teach you 1) how to value firms and project opportunities using methods drawn from the theory of corporate finance 2) to develop an appreciation of how financing decisions impact project and firm value and 3) how to develop effective ways to visualize and communicate spreadsheet analyses. By definition, the course is designed to be “hands-on”.

Prerequisite: BUSI 408 with minimum grade of C

TR, 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm. Instructor(s): Scott Maitland. Enrollment = 50.
The goals of this course are to give the students a broad understanding of the field of entrepreneurship and to introduce the important tools and skills necessary to create and grow a successful new venture. The course is designed to simulate the real life activities of entrepreneurs in the start-up stage of a new venture. Students, in teams, will develop a new venture concept and determine if a demand exists for their product or service. Importantly, the course facilitates networking with entrepreneurs and other students who are considering becoming entrepreneurs.

 

TT, 3:30 pm – 6:15 pm. Instructor(s): Ted Zoller. Enrollment = 30.
This course explores the key issues associated with the entrepreneurial career and the lessons of success and failure with a goal to reinforce a high-performance entrepreneurial mindset. The course is designed for students who are committed and currently engaged actively in pursuing an entrepreneurial career path, either during their program, immediately after graduation, or over the course of their early career. This is a required course for Adams Apprentices.

APPLICATION REQUIRED.

F, 9:00 am – 10:30 am
. Instructor(s): Karin Cochran. Enrollment = 30.
This course is a live management consulting project that leverages and integrates other UNC Kenan-Flagler course curricula. Teams of 5-7 MBA and undergraduate students and 1 faculty member work with major corporations or not-for-profit entities over the course of the semester to solve complex business challenges. Teams create four major deliverables (kick off deck, preliminary findings report, storyline document and the final recommendations deck), and participate in corporate partner meetings and presentations. All teams are guided by both a faculty advisor with significant business consulting/corporate experience and a company executive. The program utilizes the TEAM FOCUS framework and emphasizes skill development in teamwork, analysis and presentations. Teams meet twice weekly for 1-2 hours during times scheduled by the team. Team members also work individually for approximately 5-10 hours per week. This course counts for 4.5 credit hours.

STAR projects and teams are selected through a competitive application process. You will be asked in your application to describe the type of experience, interest, and expertise you possess that qualifies you for a particular type of project and to provide information that permits the STAR Selection Committee to configure teams well matched to the client and their needs. The undergraduate business program staff will enroll accepted students in the course. For more information and the online application, visit www.star.unc.edu.

ENROLLMENT REQUIRES APPLICATION AND PERMISSION OF KFBS.
PRE OR CO-REQUISITE: BUSI 554.

TR, 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm. Instructor(s): Sandeep Rath. Enrollment = 40.
This course will examine both the strategic and tactical problems of managing operations within a service environment. Emphasis will be placed on the special characteristics and challenges of organizations that provide a service in contrast to manufacturing a product. The course consists of six modules which integrate both strategic, design and analytic issues within services.

Prerequisite: BUSI 403 with minimum grade of C

R, 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm. Instructor(s): Karin Cochran. Enrollment = 30.
**Application and Permission Required for This Course (See Below)*

Consulting Skills and Frameworks is an intensive skill-based course dedicated to teaching key business and consulting skills of teamwork, analysis and presentations.  While designed particularly for students interested in consulting, any students are welcome.  Students who are interested in applying will need to submit an application at https://kenan-flagler.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_87CMlGhYOPikJV4 by April 1st.  The application requires you to upload your resume (including current GPA) and a brief cover letter (with interest, capabilities, relevant coursework, and seciton preference for 2pm or 5pm on Thursdays, if any).
Note that there are limited seats in the course. *Note: This course is NOT restricted to Honors students, but Honors students may use the course towards their program requirements.
This course is designed to complement the technical and diagnostic skills learned in the other courses at KFBS. A basic premise is that the manager needs analytic skills as well as interpersonal skills to effectively manage groups. The course will allow students the opportunity to develop these skills experientially and to understand team behavior in useful analytical frameworks.
This course is designed to complement the technical and diagnostic skills learned in the other courses at KFBS. A basic premise is that the manager needs analytic skills as well as interpersonal skills to effectively manage groups. The course will allow students the opportunity to develop these skills experientially and to understand team behavior in useful analytical frameworks.

 

R, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm. Instructor(s): Karin Cochran. Enrollment = 30.
**Application and Permission Required for This Course (See Below)*

Consulting Skills and Frameworks is an intensive skill-based course dedicated to teaching key business and consulting skills of teamwork, analysis and presentations.  While designed particularly for students interested in consulting, any students are welcome.  Students who are interested in applying will need to submit an application at https://kenan-flagler.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_87CMlGhYOPikJV4 by April 1st.  The application requires you to upload your resume (including current GPA) and a brief cover letter (with interest, capabilities, relevant coursework, and seciton preference for 2pm or 5pm on Thursdays, if any).
Note that there are limited seats in the course. *Note: This course is NOT restricted to Honors students, but Honors students may use the course towards their program requirements.
This course is designed to complement the technical and diagnostic skills learned in the other courses at KFBS. A basic premise is that the manager needs analytic skills as well as interpersonal skills to effectively manage groups. The course will allow students the opportunity to develop these skills experientially and to understand team behavior in useful analytical frameworks.
This course is designed to complement the technical and diagnostic skills learned in the other courses at KFBS. A basic premise is that the manager needs analytic skills as well as interpersonal skills to effectively manage groups. The course will allow students the opportunity to develop these skills experientially and to understand team behavior in useful analytical frameworks.

 

TR, 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm . Instructor(s): Leslie Hicks. Enrollment = 24.
Analytical separations, chromatographic methods, acid-base equilibria and titrations, spectrophotometry, mass spectrometry

To gain an understanding of the fundamental principles and modern techniques of chemical analyses including spectrochemical, volumetric and chromatographic methods. Additionally, explore modern chemical instrumentation and evaluate different methods for data interpretation.

If you would like to be considered for a seat in 241H, please fill out this survey here. You will need to include your major, overall GPA, and grades in Chemistry courses at UNC.

PREREQUITE: CHEM 102 OR 102H.
DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY CONSENT REQURIED.

 

 

Dr. Hicks received her B.S. in Chemistry at Marshall University (summa cum laude) and Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she was the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at UNC. Research in the Hicks lab focuses on development and implementation of mass spectrometric approaches for protein characterization including post-translational modifications, as well as the identification of bioactive peptides/proteins from plants.

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am. Instructor(s): Marcey Waters. Enrollment = 24.
Molecular structure of organic compounds, and the correlation between structure and reactivity including the theoretical basis for these relationships; classification of “reaction types” exhibited by organic molecules using as examples molecules of biological importance.  This course will be similar to CHEM 261 with a greater emphasis on class discussion, problem-solving, and the investigation of organic chemistry research at UNC.

PREREQUISITES: CHEM 102 OR CHEM 102H. GPA OF 3.600 OR HIGHER.
PERMISSION OF INSTRUCTOR REQUIRED. EMAIL chemus@unc.edu.

 

Professor Waters’ research interests are at the interface of organic chemistry and biochemistry. The overarching goal of her research is to design molecules to control biomolecular recognition for biomedical applications.

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am . Instructor(s): Sidney Malik Wilkerson-Hill. Enrollment = 24.

Sidney is currently an assistant professor in the Chemistry Department at UNC Chapel Hill where his research focuses on methods to obtain orphaned cyclopropanes. Sidney Hill was born in Kinston, North Carolina and began his undergraduate studies at North Carolina State University in 2006. He obtained a B.S. in Polymer and Color Chemistry through the College of Textiles, a B.S. in Chemistry through the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 2010. In 2015, Sidney received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Richmond Sarpong from the University of California, Berkeley where his researched focused on using transition metal-catalyzed cycloisomerization reactions to access natural product scaffolds. Then, he was a UNCF-Merck postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Huw Davies at Emory University in Atlanta, GA where his research focused on developing novel reactions using N-sulfonyltriazoles and rhodium tetracarboxylate catalysts for C–H functionalization reactions. During his graduate studies, Sidney was also involved in diversity initiatives such as the Berkeley Science Network, and California Alliance programs to address disparities facing minorities pursuing careers in the physical sciences. Since starting at UNC, he has received the ACS Herman Frasch Foundation grant, NSF CAREER Award, Alfred P. Sloan Award, Eli Lilly ACC Grantee Award, FMC Young Investigator Award, the ACS Organic Letters Lectureship, and the Thieme Journal Award.

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am. Instructor(s): Elizabeth Brunk. Enrollment = 30.
Dynamic examination of the principles of biochemistry, from macromolecules through enzyme function and catalysis, and into the primary metabolic pathways that create cellular energy.  This course will be an interactive combination of lecture-type materials along with presentations from students and deeper dives into topics of mutual interest to course participants.  The goal of the course is to provide a detailed foundation in biochemistry and to teach critical thinking skills focused on understanding and challenging primary biochemical data.  Students who enroll in this course are typically heading to graduate or professional school in this area of study, or will use the principles employed to enhance their problem-solving abilities.
Chemistry 430H is designed for chemistry majors and is not cross-listed with biol 430.  Hence, Chemistry majors in the honors program will have priority.  Seats will open as follows: Chemistry majors in honors with senior status,
Chemistry majors in honors with junior status, Chemistry majors BS-Biochem, Chemistry majors BA.  Any additional seats (and there usually are very limited at this point) will be open to other majors.  For non-majors, you will be enrolled last based on open seats and affiliation with the Honors Carolina.
DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY CONSENT REQUIRED. CONTACT THE DEPARTMENT VIA EMAIL AT chemus@unc.edu. PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR NAME, EMAIL, AND REQUEST FOR CHEM 430H ENROLLMENT IN THE MESSAGE.

 

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am . Instructor(s): Joshua Beaver. Enrollment = 30.
Concurrent to CHEM 460 with increased emphasis on primary literature.

PREREQUISITE: CHEM 262 OR 262H.
TO REGISTER FOR CHEM 460H, YOU MUST BE REGISTERED FOR CHEM 460 FIRST. ONCE YOU ARE REGISTERED FOR CHEM 460, PLEASE EMAIL chemus@unc.edu REGARDING YOUR INTEREST IN REGISTERING FOR CHEM 460H.

Joshua Beaver, Ph.D., is a Teaching Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches organic and general chemistries. His graduate training was in the fields of organic chemistry and molecular recognition. His postdoctoral training was in the development of targeted anticancer drug delivery agents using DNA-based nanoparticles under the direction of Ashutosh Chilkoti in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University.
As a teaching professor he adapts interdisciplinary problem-solving approaches to active, evidence-based teaching to help students take an active role in their learning, and develop translatable problem-solving and critical thinking skills that benefit them beyond the classroom.
His current research focuses on improving student outcomes in organic chemistry courses. One branch of this research involves creating data-driven analytical tools to identify students who benefit from additional support at early stages of the semester in order to improve their trajectory, and ultimately their learning in large-enrollment chemistry courses. Other projects include deepening our understanding of modes of instruction and how they influence student learning, establishing effective teaching methodologies across multi-instructor courses, and developing novel scaffolded learning resources, such as the Organic Chemistry Workbook used in Organic Chemistry, CHEM 261, and the Course Pack for Organic Chemistry II, CHEM 262, for learning organic chemistry.

TR, 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm. Instructor(s): . Enrollment = 24.
This course serves as a gateway to the SCiLL minor. This interdisciplinary course provides a foundation for understanding the origins of and the big questions surrounding civic life and leadership. Part I of the course uses classic texts in politics, philosophy, and literature to examine the role of the state in society and the tensions that exist between individual freedom and the power of the state to keep order. Part II focuses on the founding of the United States of America, including primary documents, in order to understand the unique elements of the United States experiment in democracy. Part III applies the lessons of Parts I and II to a set of controversies and tensions in modern civic life such as reproductive rights, free speech, religious freedom, and crime and punishment.  The assignments in this course include weekly responses to the readings in advance of classroom meetings, scheduled in-class debates, and a variety of writing assignments. Participation in class discussion and debates, including the ability to provide evidence for opinions that students both agree and disagree with, are all crucial to this course, as indeed they are crucial to civic life in a democracy. Students are encouraged to visit and analyze community, campus, and city government meetings in order to see how questions that influenced the  founding still are relevant in today’s society. This course qualifies for FC-PAST and FC-VALUES in the Ideas in Action Curriculum.

 

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MWF, 12:20 pm – 1:10 pm; Recitation: W, 11:15 am – 12:05 pm. Instructor(s): Alexander Duncan. Enrollment = .

Al Duncan holds a B.A. in English and Classical Languages & Literature from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in Classics and the Humanities from Stanford University.  Having previously taught in Classics and Comparative Literature at the University at Utah, he joined the Carolina faculty in 2015, where he teaches a variety of courses on ancient Greek language and literature and ancient Mediterranean culture.
Professor Duncan’s research focuses on performance, aesthetics, cognition, and embodiment. His first book, Ugly Productions: An Aesthetics of Greek Drama, comes out this year, and he is working on projects concerned with spectatorship, creativity, and interactions between humans and materials in the ancient Mediterranean world.

 

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am . Instructor(s): Jack Snoeyink. Enrollment = 24.
Underlying the many applications of computers in our daily life are discrete structures like Boolean logics, relations, finite state machines, graphs, and networks that have mathematical specifications. You can tell your parents that the primary purpose of this class is to introduce these discrete structures and the formal proof techniques that support the production, verification, and maintenance of correct software. In fact, many of these are familiar from puzzles and games: already in 1990 Super Mario World expects kids to immediately understand a finite state machine diagram…
This is a language class: you will learn vocabulary and idioms of a language that is more precise and less ambiguous than the languages that we usually speak or write. With any new language, you may at first struggle to make yourself understood, but by frequent immersion and fearless practice you can become comfortable thinking and expressing yourself creatively in the language. Students pick up languages at different rates, so work to teach each other. All can gain fluency with effort and a willingness to make mistakes. And fluency will help all your computer science endeavors – precise and unambiguous language helps you catch mistakes early, when they are cheaper to fix.
Math381, Discrete Mathematics, shares many of our goals of teaching formal reasoning and mathematical rigor, but they do so by delving deeply into number theory. We will find our examples more broadly, so that we can also provide students with a toolbox of mathematical techniques and concepts that are fundamental in most areas of computer science.
The honors section is for students who want mastery of this language. In addition to participating in the regular lectures, honors students will be asked to use this language develop proofs of more advanced material using the Moore method. For graph theory in particular, the textbook has a series of definitions and questions for which students are asked to provide answers; similar material is being developed for game theory.

PREREQUISITES: MATH 231 or MATH 241; a grade of C or better is required

Prof. Jack Snoeyink (Ph.D. Stanford, 1990) works on computational geometry, which is a branch of the theory of computer science that designs and analyzes algorithms and data structures for problems best stated in geometry form. His main application areas are in terrain modeling in geographic information systems, molecular structure validation and improvement in biochemistry, as well as computational topology, computer graphics, and information visualization. He participated as a PI in GEO*, the first program Darpa organized with NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, formerly NIMA, DMA.)

TR, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm. Instructor(s): Tessa Joseph-Nicholas. Enrollment = 24.
COMP 380 explores social, historical, and ethical issues arising from individuals’, groups’, and societies’ design and use of computers, the Internet, and information technologies.

 

Tessa Joseph-Nicholas, MFA/PhD, is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Her teaching and research explore the intersection of computing technologies and human culture with a blend of approaches and methods from the computational to the creative. Specific interests include Internet histories, cultures, and communities; digital literatures, arts, and poetics; inclusive, accessible web design and development; net neutrality and open cultures; and technology ethics.

TR, 3:30 pm – 4:45 pm. Instructor(s): Adam Price. Enrollment = 15.
Writing intensive. Early short assignments emphasize elements of dramatic scene with subsequent written practice in point-of-view, dialogue, characterization, and refinement of style. Assigned short stories with in-depth analysis of technique, craft, and literary merit. Students will write and revise two stories which will be workshopped by instructor and class. Revision in lieu of final exam. The course is informal but stringent; students may be asked to write each class meeting. Vigorous class participation in workshop is expected. This course (or ENGL 130) serves as a prerequisite for other courses in the fiction sequence of the creative writing program (ENGL 206, 406, 693H). Textbook:  TBD.

 

FIRST YEAR HONORS CAROLINA STUDENTS ONLY

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am . Instructor(s): Joseph Fletcher. Enrollment = 15.
This course will explore the many pleasures and challenges of writing good poetry. Our focus will be the regular writing and revising of your original poems, and the in-class workshopping of some of these poems, but we will also spend much time reading and discussing exemplary poems from the past and present, learning poetic terms and forms and techniques, listening to poems read aloud, and doing whatever else might help you become a better poet. Among the course requirements: several textbooks, to be read and discussed thoroughly; a midterm exam and a final “term poem”; other written exercises; a memorization and recitation assignment; and (most important of all) your writing of up to ten original poems, and your ongoing revisions of those poems. This is a fun and informative class that will help you think and write more clearly, more vividly, and more imaginatively.

INTENDED FOR FIRST-YEAR HONORS CAROLINA STUDENTS, BUT OPEN TO OTHERS, BY PERMISSION OF THE INSTRUCTOR.

 

Joe Fletcher is the author of the poetry collection The Hatch (Brooklyn Arts Press), the novella Jenny Haniver (Bored Wolves, forthcoming), the scholarly monograph William Blake as Natural Philosopher (Anthem), as well as five chapbooks, including Kola Superdeep Borehole (Bateau) and Sleigh Ride(Factory Hollow Press). He has been teaching composition, literature, and creative writing at UNC since 2007. He currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and as Assistant Editor of the William Blake Archive.

TR, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm. Instructor(s): Stephanie Griest. Enrollment = 15.
HONORS INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE NONFICTION:
Put on your boots. In this class, we’ll be roaming. We’ll start with an exploration of our own world: our childhoods and our families; our fans and our enemies; our lovers and our friends. Our quirks, our fears, our desires. Next, we’ll investigate other worlds. Like roller derbies, bingo halls, and bail bond agencies. Then we’ll create new worlds by reinterpreting the ordinary as extraordinary—through graphics, lyricism, mosaics, and objects lost and found. Along the way, we’ll read scintillating works that take risks both in content and in form, and then we’ll strive, strive, strive to do the same. We’ll write testimonios. Memoirs. Travelogues. Portraits. Lyric essays galore. We’ll be artists. Seekers of truth. Arbiters of the dynamic Fourth Genre. We’ll write words that matter.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from the Texas/Mexico borderlands whose five books include Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; and All the Agents and Saints. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, VQR, The Believer, BBC, and Oxford American. A Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has performed on five continents in capacities ranging from a Moth storyteller to a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department. Visit her website at www.StephanieElizondoGriest.com.

MW, 12:20 pm – 1:35 pm; Recitation: F, 12:20 pm – 1:10 pm. Instructor(s): Tugba Somuncu. Enrollment = 24.
The primary focus of the course is on the function of markets and how markets work to allocate resources and distribute income. Topics included in the course are  consumer behavior including economic uncertainty, theory of the firm, market structure (perfect competition, monopoly, and oligopoly), and basic game theory and information economics. One of the purposes of the course is to help students learn how to apply microeconomic principles to economic questions. For this reason, problem sets are assigned and considered to be an important part of the course. The honors section is offered in order to provide students with the opportunity to gain a somewhat greater breadth and depth of knowledge than in other sections. Calculus will be used.

PREREQUISITES: ECON 101. MATH 231 OR STOR 113.

 

I earned my PhD in Economics from Iowa State University in 2024. My primary research interests lie in environmental economics and labor economics. In my PhD dissertation, I focused on the green transition, particularly examining its impact on workers’ earnings, with an emphasis on female workers, as well as the role of water pollution in determining economic opportunities. I am excited to teach honors courses and introduce students to economic tools and their applications.

MW, 2:30 pm – 3:45 pm; Recitation: F, 1:25 pm – 2:15 pm. Instructor(s): Tugba Somuncu. Enrollment = 24.
The primary focus of the course is on the function of markets and how markets work to allocate resources and distribute income. Topics included in the course are  consumer behavior including economic uncertainty, theory of the firm, market structure (perfect competition, monopoly, and oligopoly), and basic game theory and information economics. One of the purposes of the course is to help students learn how to apply microeconomic principles to economic questions. For this reason, problem sets are assigned and considered to be an important part of the course. The honors section is offered in order to provide students with the opportunity to gain a somewhat greater breadth and depth of knowledge than in other sections. Calculus will be used.

PREREQUISITES: ECON 101. MATH 231 OR STOR 113.

 

I earned my PhD in Economics from Iowa State University in 2024. My primary research interests lie in environmental economics and labor economics. In my PhD dissertation, I focused on the green transition, particularly examining its impact on workers’ earnings, with an emphasis on female workers, as well as the role of water pollution in determining economic opportunities. I am excited to teach honors courses and introduce students to economic tools and their applications.

TR, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm. Instructor(s): Christopher Roark. Enrollment = 24.
The course serves as an intermediate treatment of modern micro-founded macroeconomic models. There is particular attention on describing macroeconomic phenomenon and the impact or effects of monetary and fiscal policy. Students should also expect to analyze current trends and data in the macroeconomy using the toolsets developed in the course.
By the end of this course students should be able to:
1.) Construct and solve a model that matches several stylized facts about the macroeconomy
2.) Apply General Equilibrium analysis to a working model of the macroeconomy
3.) Evaluate data and media statements regarding shifts and changes to the working model
4.) Discuss monetary policy in the modern ample reserves environment
5.) Assess the impacts of fiscal and monetary policy decisions on the macroeconomy and its primary measures

 

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am . Instructor(s): Inger Brodey. Enrollment = 24.
This course will focus on the fiction of Jane Austen, who wrote her letters and novels in the English countryside at the turn of the nineteenth century. Until the last few decades, Austen’s deep interaction with the literature, philosophy, and world events of her time were not fully appreciated. This course explores her relation to the age of war and revolution in which she lived—including the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the War of 1812. In honor of the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth in 2025, and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, this course will look at Austen’s writing as exemplifying revolutionary thought and in relation to the establishment of civil society.

In addition to reading Austen’s novels, we will read other texts related to Austen and her historical context as well as to her adaptations. Students will have the opportunity to engage in original research via a new digital project for the public, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities: “Jane Austen’s Desk,” forthcoming at www.janeaustensdesk.org.

Students will have the opportunity to write a screenplay, enter a national essay contest, and attempt to publish original research on Jane Austen. Students will also have the option of presenting a paper at the June 2025 or June 2026 Jane Austen Summer Program.

NOTE THIS COURSE ALSO COUNTS AS AN ELECTIVE TOWARDS THE NEW MINOR IN CIVIC LIFE AND LEADERSHIP

Dr. Brodey was born of Danish parents in Japan, immigrated to the US, and studied in Germany and Japan, before receiving her Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her primary interests are in the comparative history of the novel and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the novel in Europe and Japan. Her UNC awards include a Spray-Randleigh Faculty Fellowship, a Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, a Johnston Family Teaching Award, and a Faculty Mentoring award, among others. She currently serves as Director of the Office of Distinguished Scholarships and is very active in the public humanities. Check out the Jane Austen Summer Program (www.janeaustensummer.org), Jane Austen and Co.(janeaustenandco.org), and The Virtual Feast (virtualfeast.org) for examples of her public humanities outreach.

 

MWF, 1:25 pm – 2:15 pm. Instructor(s): María DeGuzmán. Enrollment = 24.

This course examines major U.S. novels and their night optics. These novels of the night perform a deep questioning of the “American Dream” and the novelistic task of giving form to chaos and refiguring the social order. This course examines the intertwining legacies of the dark side of the Enlightenment, Gothicism, Romanticism, Naturalism, noir, existentialism, Gnosticism, and socio-political and aesthetic dissent. Required reading: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934); Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936); William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness (1951), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), John Rechy’s City of Night (1963), Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), Paul Auster’s Oracle Night (2003), and Manuel Muñoz’s What You See in the Dark (2011) in combination with ongoing reading of sections of Dr. DeGuzmán’s Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night and Understanding John Rechy.

Dr. María DeGuzmán is Eugene H. Falk Distinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature and the Founding Director of the UNC Latina/o Studies Program at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has published three scholarly books: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minnesota Press, 2005); Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana University Press, 2012); and Understanding John Rechy (University of South Carolina Press, 2019) as well as articles and essays on Latina/o/x lived experiences and cultural production. She is also a conceptual photographer, creative writer, and music composer / sound designer. She has published photography in The Grief Diaries, Coffin Bell, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Map Literary, Two Hawks Quarterly, Harbor Review, The Halcyone, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Ponder Review, Alluvian, and streetcake: a magazine of experimental writing; two creative nonfiction photo-text pieces, one in Oyster River Pages and the other in La Piccioletta Barca; a photo-text flash fiction in Bombay Gin (forthcoming); photo prose poetry in Landlocked Magazine; poetry in Empty Mirror; and short stories in Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Sinister Wisdom, and Obelus Journal. Her SoundCloud website may be found at: https://soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman.

MWF, 11:15 am – 12:05 pm. Instructor(s): Rebecka Rutledge Fisher. Enrollment = 24.
This course takes as its primary objects of analysis novels, poetry, and visual and filmic texts; historical and government documents; and personal memoir, music, journalism, and interviews, in order to examine how race and ethnicity, or maybe our perceptions of race and ethnicity, shape our current world. This, in turn, should enable us to imagine other ways of seeing and being. We will consider how race and ethnicity, among many other identity signifiers, are structured by institutions and social relations and informed by cultural beliefs. Once we understand how we participate in and interact with these structures, how we are defined by them, how we create them, we are positioned to critique and change them.

The sub-title (how does it feel to be a problem?) comes from W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 foundational text The Souls of Black Folk where, among other important insights, critiques, and analyses, he predicted that the “color line” would be the issue of the twentieth century. Perhaps it is the question for the twenty-first century as well? If we consider what it means to be a problem, we must ask: Who decides who is and who is not a problem? What are the criteria for becoming a problem? Do we need some people to be considered problems? In order to examine these issues and formulate responses, we must also explore the changing structures of power.

 

MWF, 10:10 am – 11:00 am; Recitation: M, 11:15 am – 12:05 pm OR M, 2:30 pm – 3:20 pm. Instructor(s): Greg Gangi. Enrollment = 24.
This course will explore changing human-environmental relations from a variety of social, geographical, and historical settings. While some lectures do include material from the natural sciences this is a social science class. The class cuts across many disciplines in a manner that is integrative rather than segregating lessons from different academic disciplines into separate lectures. The focus of this course is in the first half of the class to give students familiarity with how humans and human organizations deal with issues of sustainability. The second half of the semester will explore some critical issues like population, food security, climate change, urban planning and transitioning to a low carbon economy. This part of the course will not only give student information important background information about the problems but also highlight possible solutions.

The most important reason to take this class is that it will be closely linked to the UNC Cleantech Summit. Clean energy, sustainable mobility, circularity and bioeconomy/green chemistry are the consistent themes of the Summit.  This past March we had over 250 speakers and a lot of high-level keynotes that included government leaders, CEOs of large and small companies and the CEO of a large bank. Speakers come from all over the world and representatives of foreign governments often contribute as speakers. It is an amazing networking opportunity and students have connected with internships and job at the Summit.

In addition, to weekly class lectures, students will attend a one-hour recitation session to enjoy small-group discussion and to explore related topics of personal interest.  Your class involvement will be enhanced by a class listserv, that is set up to facilitate the exchange of references and other course related information.  Major Objectives:  1)  To introduce the social context of environmental issues.  2)  To provide an exposure to diverse aspects of human-environmental relationships so that students who are pursuing a major or minor in environmental studies can better design their future plan of studies.  3)  To allow all students to better understand the link between environmental problems, cultural behaviors, public policies, corporate decision-making, and citizen and consumer behavior.

Course requirements: Students are required to attend class, to compete reading assignment, to participate in class discussion and recitation exercises, to complete a group project, and to perform successfully on written examinations.  There will be a midterm (10% of the grade), a Cleantech Summit assignment (10% of grade) and a final examination (35% of the grade).  Another 20 percent of the grade will be based upon a group project and written paper assignment on one case study related to one of the topics covered at the UNC Cleantech Summit.  The recitation grade will account for the remaining 25 percent of the grade.

Greg Gangi has broad interests in sustainable development. He is interested in nurturing experiential learning opportunities for students and has developed a number of innovative field based program in different parts of the world.

MWF, 11:15 am – 12:05 pm. Instructor(s): Amy Cooke. Enrollment = 24.
Water supply is a critical component of food and energy production, good health and sanitation.  Yet globally, access to clean water is still not assured, even within developed nations like the United States.  Following the leadership of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, an increasing number of countries are adopting the position that access to water is a human right.  What barriers to nations and individuals have to guaranteeing water access?  Given the critical nature of water to good health and nearly all of human economic activity, what constraints do people have to negotiate globally to maintain sufficient stocks of this crucial resource for the earth’s population?

This course examines these questions.  To do this we will use a variety of mediums: film, books, scientific research, lectures and discussions.  We will endeavor to not only outline the constraints to and conflict over this increasingly limited resource, but also suggest some paths towards sustainable water use in the future.  Each of you will also have the opportunity to investigate solutions to a particular water conflict of your choice.

Dr. Amy Cooke has been teaching and working on African and environmental issues for over 2 decades. These interests began as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1990s and are currently focused on the ecology of food production and the health of water systems. She received her doctorate in ecology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2007, after completing research on land use change in Tanzanian savannas. Since 2009 she has been teaching and advising students in the Curriculum for the Environment and Ecology at UNC, and is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Curriculum.

MW, 3:35 pm – 4:50 pm. Instructor(s): Douglas MacLean. Enrollment = 5.
The central focus of this course will be on how we understand the relationship between human beings and nature.  Do we, as rational beings, stand apart from the rest of the natural world?  Or should we see ourselves, because we are animals, as part of that world?  Does nature (or the environment) have value beyond being a means for us to use?  If so, how do we explain and justify that value? And what are its ethical implications?  As we investigate these general issues, we will examine more specific related questions: What is the moral status of (nonhuman) animals?  What is the moral status of other living things, of species, and ecosystems?  What is the relationship between wilderness and civilization?  We will ask whether nature or the environment makes ethical demands on humans, and this question will force us also to ask, more practically, about the ethical issues involved in climate change.

 

Douglas MacLean’s current research focuses on practical ethics and issues in moral and political theory that are particularly relevant to practical concerns. Most of his recent writing examines how values do and ought to influence decisions, both personal decisions and government policies.

TR, 5:00 pm – 6:15 pm. Instructor(s): Gary Marks. Enrollment = 2.
This course engages the European Union and the political causes and consequences of Brexit, nationalism, political polarization, and Trumpism. What kind of polity is emerging at the European level? How is European integration contested? Is European integration the beginning of the end of the national state in western Europe, or will states harness the process within their current institutional structures? In this class, students will have an opportunity to analyze the character and dynamics of European integration and the current economic crisis by reading speeches of contemporaries, evaluating alternative theories of European integration, and by using additional resources.
This course has a double purpose: to think critically about one of the world’s most important experiments in governance–the European Union and to probe the future shape of politics in the West and the wider world.
The course will critically assess the emergence of the Europe Union, Brexit, the future of the EU, the rise of nationalism, political polarization, and the response to Trumpism. Is the West breaking up into regional blocks? Is the EU an consensual empire? What are the political pressures that shape it? How does the European Union compare with other international organizations such as the United Nations, NAFTA, the African Union, or the World Trade Organization?

Gary Marks is Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. He was educated in England and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. In 2010 he was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize for his contributions to political science. He co-founded the UNC Center for European Studies and EU Center of Excellence in 1994 and 1998, respectively, and served as Director until 2006. Marks has had fellowships and visiting professorships at Oxford University, the Free University of Amsterdam, the Free University of Berlin, the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg, Pompeu Fabra, the Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna, Sciences Po, Konstanz University, McMaster University, the University of Twente, and was National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His publications have received more than thirty thousand citations. His teaching and research are chiefly in comparative politics and multilevel governance. His books include Multi-Level Governance and European Integration (2001); It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (2001); European Integration and Political Conflict (2004); The Rise of Regional Authority (2010); Measuring Regional Authority (2016) and Community, Scale, and Regional Governance (2016).

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am. Instructor(s): Johna Mihalik. Enrollment = .
This course provides an introduction to neuromuscular control and motor learning through a general understanding of neuroanatomy/neurophysiology, sensory contributions to human movement, initiation and regulation of voluntary movement, and the acquisition of motor skills.  Course topics will include central and peripheral nervous system functions in the production and regulation of human movement, neural pathways and control mechanisms, and enhancement of motor learning in the rehabilitation and training settings.   The course will include interactive discussions, class group work, unit content activities, research article reviews, exams, and a culminating case study project.

 

Dr. Johna Register-Mihalik is the Associate Chair for Curricula and Faculty Affairs and an Associate Professor in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science. She is also a core faculty member in the Matthew Gfeller Center and serves as the Co-Director of the STAR Heel Performance Laboratory and Traumatic Division Director for the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research.

, . Instructor(s): Michal Osterweil. Enrollment = 24.

Michal Osterweil is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Curriculum in Global Studies at UNC Chapel Hill.  Her PhD is in Cultural Anthropology with a Certificate in Cultural Studies.  Her courses and research focus on new paradigms of social change, in particular those emerging from various social movements as well as other sources of relational or non-dualist thought and action ranging from anti-capitalist social movements like the Zapatistas, and various indigenous movements,  to complexity and systems theory in science, as well as spiritual philosophies and practices including Buddhism and various forms of religious and mystical thought. In her writing, research and teaching she has focused on what she understands as a “new political imaginary” or a new paradigm of social change being simultaneously discovered and created in a variety of spaces and movements. She is co-convenor with Arturo Escobar of UNC’s seminar, Theory and Politics of Relationality, and currently involved with community projects aimed at making visible and viable alternative ecological ways of being.

TR, 3:30 pm – 4:45 pm. Instructor(s): Susan Pennybacker. Enrollment = 24.
New historical approaches to the history of the former British Empire provide a ‘transnational’ vantage point on imperial ventures. Historians consider the movement of people, ideas, commodities, and cultural forms in global patterns that integrate modern domestic British history into varied, comparative and global studies of the histories of the Middle east,  Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, and parts of the British Isles. We will read four representative works in this new literature. Anti-colonialism, cultural expression, slavery and its aftermath, colonial labor policy, the history of medicine and health, the creation of new urban infrastructures, warfare, and the expressions of racial, gender and religious difference, are central themes. The course emphasizes the discussion of our four recent works of history and memoir, short written responses, essay-writing, power point presentations, and work with historical documents and visual media.

 

Susan D. Pennybacker, Chalmers W. Poston Distinguished Professor of European History, is a modern British specialist. She is the author of two previous works: A Vision for London, 1889-1914 (Routledge, 1995 and 2013), and, From Scottsboro to Munich: race and political culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, 2009). Her work on the 1930s focused on anti-colonial and anti-fascist dissent, European responses to Jim Crow in the US South, and the complex racial politics of the domestic, imperial and British-European interwar era. She is completing a 3rd London study of groups of political dissenters and exiles from several parts of the former empire, Fire By Night, Cloud By Day: refuge and exile in postwar London (Cambridge). Her research involves archival and oral history work in the UK, South Africa, India, and the Caribbean. Pennybacker also has strong interdisciplinary interests, and has worked on collaborative projects in urban history, documentary film, and photography. She has visited the Caribbean intermittently, and lived for extended periods of time in New England, Britain, India, and South Africa. She directed Honors London in 2013, and Honors Cape Town, in 2017.

MW, 3:35 pm – 4:50 pm. Instructor(s): Jens-Uwe Guettel. Enrollment = 24.
This course looks at German history from the founding of the modern German nation state in 1871 until the end of WWII through the lenses of colonialism and genocide thus exploring possible ties between German and European colonialism in the 19th century and the Holocaust. It allows students to take an in-depth look at European expansionism, specifically the so-called “scramble for Africa,” and the various developmental strands that lead from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European colonial policies first to World War I, then to the genesis of fascism as a political movement during the 1920s, and finally to Nazi expansionist and exterminatory policies in the European East.

Required Texts:

Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A Short History (available as Ebook from our library)

Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire (on reserve)

David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780 – 1918 (on reserve)

Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire (on reserve)

 

 

TR, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm. Instructor(s): Lauren Jarvis. Enrollment = 24.
Sub-Saharan Africa has long been at the center of two related — if seemingly paradoxical — trends: on the one hand, it has been the site of some of the most exploitative and violent labor practices in the world; on the other, it has been subject to some of the most concerted (and internationally renowned) efforts to make business and trade more ethical. We will consider the history of these efforts in order to shed light on themes central to modern African history. Topics covered will relate to slavery, colonialism, the establishment of independent African nations, and globalization in the late 20th century. No prior knowledge of African history is required. Students will have the opportunity to do public-facing research and writing about topics relevant to this course. Major assignments include group papers, short essays, and a presentation-based final.

 

Lauren Jarvis is an Associate Professor of History. She grew up in Chapel Hill and earned her BA in History at that school down the road (rhymes with “fluke”). She then received her PhD in History at Stanford. Jarvis’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century South Africa. At UNC, she teaches classes in South African, African, and Global History.

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am. Instructor(s): Brett Whalen. Enrollment = 24.
Jesus Christ, understood by Christians as the Son of God, was seemingly everywhere in the European
Middle Ages: featured on stain-glass windows, illuminated in manuscripts, carved in stone on church
facades, performed in passion plays, invoked in sermons, celebrated during the Christian Mass. As
represented in the medieval world, there were multiple and diverse iconographies of Christ: the child in
manger, the miracle-worker, the man of sorrows on the cross, and the dreadful judge at the end of time
to name a few.

This course will explore the “medieval lives” of Jesus in Christian texts and artistic traditions, focusing
mainly on the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. This is not a class about the biblical or historical
Jesus. Rather, we will explore the figure of Jesus as mediated through medieval sources and ask
questions about the significance of Jesus for medieval politics, culture, and society. For example, how
did the idea of Christ as king inform medieval views of kinship? How did the concept of avenging Christ
contribute to the ideology of the crusades? How did feminized visions of Christ respond to forms of
women’s spiritual devotion?

The historical permutations of medieval Jesus are nearly endless. The class will also explore possible
disjunctures and connections between medieval and modern attitudes toward Jesus, above all in the
contemporary United States.

Class meetings will involve informal lecture, common readings, and active discussion, but the course will
also be project-based, requiring students to devise and carry out evidence-based research projects
related to the topic of Jesus Christ in the Middle Ages.

3.0 CREDIT HOUR COURSE

FULFILLS HS-HISTORICAL ANALYSIS & WB-WORLD BEFORE 1750 GENERAL EDUCATION REQUIREMENT UNDER THE MAKING CONNECTIONS CURRICULUM.

FULFILLS (FC-PAST OR FC-KNOWING) & RESEARCH GENERAL EDUCATION REQUIREMENT UNDER THE IDEAS IN ACTION CURRICULUM.

Brett Whalen is associate professor in the department of history. His first book, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, explored the medieval idea that all of humankind would join together under the Christian Church before the end of time. Since then, he has published and taught widely on topics including the crusades, the history of the papacy, pilgrimage, and medieval science. In 2012, he won the UNC-CH Chapman prize for excellence in teaching. He currently serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in History.

TR, 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm; Recitation: W, 3:35 pm – 4:25 pm. Instructor(s): Idris Assani. Enrollment = 35.
This is the Honors section of Math 232. It offers a more demanding and deeper treatment than the regular sections as well as more involved applications. There will be more emphasis on understanding theory than in other sections. In addition, this section will cover extra topics, such as surface area, elementary differential equations, and calculus using polar coordinates as well as the standard topics of applications of integration, techniques of integration, improper integrals, sequences and series, and Taylor series.

PREREQUISITES: SCORE OF 5 ON THE AP CALCULUS AB TEST OR AS THE AB SUBSCORE ON THE AP CALCULUS BC TEST OR A GRADE OF AT LEAST B+ IN MATH 231/231H.

 

TR, 3:30 pm – 4:45 pm. Instructor(s): Shrawan Kumar. Enrollment = 35.
Logic and proofs, Sets and Functions, Number theory, Induction, Counting, Discrete probability, and Relations (Chapters 1,2,4,5,6,7 and 9 from Rosen’s Discrete Mathematics text).
This is the honors section of math 381. The usual course topics will be treated in a deeper and more demanding manner than in the regular sections. In particular, we will go through strategies for proofs very carefully.

PREREQUISITE: MATH 232 OR 283.

My main interests lie in Representation Theory of finite dimensional semisimple groups and their Kac-Moody analogs and the geometry and topology of their flag varieties. In addition, I have been interested in the moduli of semistable principal G-bundles over curves in its connection to Verlinde formula for the dimension of the space of conformal blocks and also the G-analog of the classical Hermitian eigenvalue problem, where G is any complex semisimple group.

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am. Instructor(s): Dan Weser. Enrollment = 35.
The main topic of this course is ordinary differential equations (ODEs) from two points of view. The first point of view is how ODEs model a wide range of applications from biology, chemistry, engineering and physics. In particular, the laws of chemistry, physics and Nature are not given as “formulas”, rather, they are typically given in terms relations between a function and its derivatives. Classic examples include “population” models where the population might be humans, bacteria, radioactive species, or many other populations. The evolution of the population size is governed by rates for growth versus decay. The second point of view is the methods to solve ODEs, studying a wide range of ODEs for which we exact solution methods are known as well as an even larger range of ODEs for which we must use approximate or numerical solution methods.
The honors section will place greater emphasis than other sections on understanding how the behavior of solutions is tied to the properties of the structure of the ODE itself. E.g., if the ODE is “linear” or “nonlinear” in the unknown function and its derivatives, how does that influence both the methods of solution and the behavior of solutions. This perspective allows one to understand the limitations or successes in how well a given model describes the application it was derived for.
The honors section will be graded on the basis of homework, in-class exams, and a semester project that the instructor and student agree upon ahead of time. Depending on one’s present major, the project may be more mathematical (e.g., methods of proof or underlying mathematical concepts for qualitative behavior or quantitative solutions), or it can involve how ODEs are used in an area of application of interest to the student (e.g., biology, chemistry, economics, finance, marine sciences, social sciences). It is possible for a pair of students to create a team project.
Prerequisites: A grade of B+ or higher in Math 233 or 233H at UNC, or permission of the instructor in special cases.

 

M, 12:20 pm – 12:50 pm. Instructor(s): Leyla Mangual-Santiago. Enrollment = 10.
This course is entirely hands-on. Under the direction of the newsroom managers, students will write, produce, and broadcast a weekly TV news program and provide news content for other MJ-school platforms. Students will fill all normal newsroom positions.

 

PRE-REQUISITE: MEJO 522.001

INSTRUCTOR CONSENT REQUIRED.

Leyla Santiago joined the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media in the fall of 2023 as the Daniels Executive-In-Residence. Santiago has worked in local, national and international newsrooms as a broadcast journalist. Most recently, she was a correspondent for CNN, based in Miami, and was at the forefront of CNN’s coverage on natural disasters, immigration, the Covid-19 pandemic, politics, and the relationship between the United States and Latin America.

After her extensive coverage of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, Santiago was nominated for a Peabody Award and her team won an Edward R. Murrow award. She was one of the first to reach some of the most remote parts of the island after the hurricane. Officials added more cases to the list of hurricane-related deaths after her investigation exposed inaccuracies in the government’s low death toll.

In 2020, Santiago joined CNN’s political team to report from the campaign trail. She covered the presidential bids of Congressman Beto O’Rourke and Senator Elizabeth Warren and captured the campaigns’ courtship of voters, focusing on the issues that mattered most to communities across the country.

In April of 2018, Santiago spent nearly a month traveling through Mexico with a caravan of migrants thrust into the national spotlight after President Trump tweeted about the group. Santiago introduced viewers to the families of the caravan and explained the complexities of U.S. immigration laws. She also garnered the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont award for the documentary, “The Journey Alone,” about the surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America and Mexico crossing the U.S southern border in 2014.

Santiago was named to Crain NewsPro’s “12 to Watch in TV News” in 2019.

Before joining CNN, She reported as a journalist for WRAL in Raleigh, North Carolina; KBAK/KBFX in Bakersfield, California, KTUU in Anchorage, Alaska; and NBC29 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

M, 9:00 am – 12:30 pm. Instructor(s): Charles Tuggle. Enrollment = 10.
This course is entirely hands-on. Under the direction of the newsroom managers, students will write, produce, and broadcast a weekly TV sports program and provide sports content for other MJ-school platforms. Students will fill all normal newsroom positions.

PRE-REQUISITE: MEJO 522.001

INSTRUCTOR CONSENT REQUIRED.

C.A. Tuggle — Dr. T to his students — enjoyed a 16-year career in local television news and media relations before returning to academia to educate and train a new wave of broadcast journalists. He spent 11 years at WFLA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Tampa/St. Petersburg, the nation’s 13th largest media market. He has held many newsroom titles, but he spent most of his career as a sports reporter/producer.

His forte as a teacher is developing storytellers — journalists who can use the language and all the tools available to them to turn out memorable broadcast reports. Broadcast and electronic journalism students broadcast one live installment of the TV news program Carolina Week, one live episode of the radio newscast Carolina Connection and one live installment of the sports highlights, analysis and commentary show SportsXtra per week.

Tuggle is the recipient of an Edward Kidder Graham superlative faculty award, the David Brinkley Teaching Excellence Award and the Ed Bliss Award, which is a national honor for broadcast journalism educators who have made significant and lasting contributions to the field throughout their careers.

W, 11:15 am – 12:30 pm. Instructor(s): Adam Hochberg. Enrollment = 10.
A practicum class in which students work under faculty guidance to produce news stories, features, interviews, sports stories, podcasts, and other audio content. Student work is broadcast on “Carolina Connection” — a weekly radio program — and is distributed on Spotify and other digital platforms. Students is 523H.003 also work as producers and mentors for the weekly program, setting each week’s coverage agenda and assigning other students to cover stories as needed.

 

PRE-REQUISITE: MEJO 522.001

INSTRUCTOR CONSENT REQUIRED.

Adam Hochberg teaches journalism at the University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism. Students in his practicum class produce a weekly radio newsmagazine and podcast. In 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2021, the program received the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio-Television Digital News Association, which named it the nation’s top student newscast. Five times, the program has received the top national collegiate award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Hochberg has also taught accountability journalism and journalism ethics. He is often interviewed in the media on issues of ethics and journalistic standards.
Hochberg is a veteran journalist and educator with over two decades of experience in national news. A former correspondent for NPR, he has won multiple national journalism awards, including an Edward R. Murrow Award for national investigative journalism in 2013.
Hochberg leads “The American Homefront Project,” a nationwide collaboration of public radio newsrooms that produce in-depth journalism on military and veterans issues.
A native of Chicago, Hochberg received his master’s degree in 1986 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He graduated from Ohio University in 1985. He lives with his wife and daughter in Chapel Hill.

MW, 12:20 pm – 1:35 pm. Instructor(s): Charles Tuggle. Enrollment = 20.
This is a serious course for serious students. This course is entirely hands-on. Under the direction of the instructor, students from the School’s various specialty areas will work together to find, produce and market stories that would attract the attention of professional media partners throughout the state and region, and at times, the nation. We will produce multiple versions of each story and expect each to be at a level of quality to warrant publication. We expect you to be an expert on your particular platform, and conversant enough with the other platforms to earn the title of APJ. (all-platform journalist) We will look for stories with broad appeal. We will concentrate on trends and developments that many news organizations don’t have the manpower to cover. The course will involve and require substantial field work from all students enrolled.

The majority of the work in this class will be fieldwork — from chasing down leads to investigating tips, securing sources, performing print, audio or video interviews, capturing video and audio, pitching stories to news directors, promoting the students’ work regionally, etc. Each week, every student on every team will spend a majority of his or her time working outside the classroom to capture and gather the raw materials necessary to turn these packages into professional-quality work. The stories will involve local, regional and national issues, and the teams will pitch all the completed packages to professional news outlets across the state, region and country.
This is not your typical college course, so don’t treat it like one. This will mimic the professional journalist’s work environment more than any other class in the School of Media and Journalism.

The marketing team is charged with coordinating with the content teams so that we might keep our professional partners apprised as we move through the newsgathering, production, and delivery phases of the work. As a team, the marketing group will produce contact lists for media outlets across the state, building on the strong relationships established in earlier semesters. The marketing team will also continue to brand the Media Hub initiative, chart pickups by professional outlets, develop best practices, and contribute to the degree possible to content creation.

INSTRUCTOR CONSENT REQUIRED.

C.A. Tuggle — Dr. T to his students — enjoyed a 16-year career in local television news and media relations before returning to academia to educate and train a new wave of broadcast journalists. He spent 11 years at WFLA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Tampa/St. Petersburg, the nation’s 13th largest media market. He has held many newsroom titles, but he spent most of his career as a sports reporter/producer.

His forte as a teacher is developing storytellers — journalists who can use the language and all the tools available to them to turn out memorable broadcast reports. Broadcast and electronic journalism students broadcast one live installment of the TV news program Carolina Week, one live episode of the radio newscast Carolina Connection and one live installment of the sports highlights, analysis and commentary show SportsXtra per week.

Tuggle is the recipient of an Edward Kidder Graham superlative faculty award, the David Brinkley Teaching Excellence Award and the Ed Bliss Award, which is a national honor for broadcast journalism educators who have made significant and lasting contributions to the field throughout their careers.

MW, 4:40 pm – 5:55 pm. Instructor(s): Xinyan Zhao. Enrollment = 16.
This course will equip you with the knowledge and skills required to analyze digital data, plan effective digital strategies, and develop research-based digital campaigns. Through a combination of readings, lectures, case studies, hands-on assignments, and projects, you will build a robust skill set that will be invaluable for future careers or internships in digital marketing. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to apply the concepts and skills learned by creating a digital campaign for an organizational client.

Dr. Zhao is an expert on strategic communication and social media. Her research and teaching focuses on the roles of social media and social networks in strategic communication using computational and quantitative methods.

TR , 11:00 am – 12:15 pm. Instructor(s): Matthew Taylor. Enrollment = 24.
This course provides an introduction to Health Humanities, an interdisciplinary field that combines methods and topics from literary studies, healthcare, and the human sciences.  We’ll read novels, screen films, learn about illnesses and treatments, and hear expert speakers as we investigate the importance of narrative in the time of high-tech medicine.  We’ll play close attention to how ideas about sickness have changed over time and across cultures. Topics will include the clinician-patient relationship, medical detection, the rise of psychiatry, racism and social determinants of health, epidemics and the “outbreak narrative,” and the quest for immortality.

Prerequisites: This course welcomes students from all fields—especially humanities majors and those interested in careers in healthcare and health affairs.

Class format:  There will be two informal, interactive lectures and one discussion section per week. We will have frequent visiting speakers (including clinicians, journalists, researchers, novelists, and scholars).

Texts:  Literary works may include Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a science fictional exploration of the lives of medical clones; first-person narratives of illness; and movies such as How to Survive a Plague. Nonfiction works will include articles drawn from journalism, medicine, anthropology, and history. We’ll conclude with selections from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, a powerful reflection on longevity and humane care for those at the end of life.

Assignments: Two analytical papers, reading quizzes, short creative assignments, a midterm exam, an illness narrative, and a take-home final. Students enrolled in ENGL 268H will also complete a research project on a particular illness, investigating the cultural, literary, and biological aspects of their selected topic.

 

My research focuses on the intersections among environmental humanities, critical theory (including posthumanism, biopolitics, science and technology studies, and critical race theory), and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. My first book, Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature (Univ. of Minnesota Press), examines cosmologies that challenge the utopianism of both past and present attempts at fusing self and environment.

TR, 8:00 am – 9:15 am. Instructor(s): Jane Thrailkill. Enrollment = 24.
This course provides an introduction to Health Humanities, an interdisciplinary field that combines methods and topics from literary studies, healthcare, and the human sciences.  We’ll read novels, screen films, learn about illnesses and treatments, and hear expert speakers as we investigate the importance of narrative in the time of high-tech medicine.  We’ll play close attention to how ideas about sickness have changed over time and across cultures. Topics will include the clinician-patient relationship, medical detection, the rise of psychiatry, racism and social determinants of health, epidemics and the “outbreak narrative,” and the quest for immortality.

Prerequisites: This course welcomes students from all fields—especially humanities majors and those interested in careers in healthcare and health affairs.

Class format:  There will be two informal, interactive lectures and one discussion section per week. We will have frequent visiting speakers (including clinicians, journalists, researchers, novelists, and scholars).

Texts:  Literary works may include Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a science fictional exploration of the lives of medical clones; first-person narratives of illness; and movies such as How to Survive a Plague. Nonfiction works will include articles drawn from journalism, medicine, anthropology, and history. We’ll conclude with selections from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, a powerful reflection on longevity and humane care for those at the end of life.

Assignments: Two analytical papers, reading quizzes, short creative assignments, a midterm exam, an illness narrative, and a take-home final. Students enrolled in ENGL 268H will also complete a research project on a particular illness, investigating the cultural, literary, and biological aspects of their selected topic.

 

Jane F. Thrailkill swerved away from a career in health care and instead earned her Ph.D. in English and American Literature. Her interest in clinical practice has persisted, however: her first book studied the influence of medical ideas on American authors such as Mark Twain, Henry James, and Kate Chopin. She is Co-Director of HHIVE (Health & Humanities: Interdisciplinary Venue for Exploration) and teaches part-time in UNC’s School of Medicine. Her talk for TEDxUNC looks at the serious issue of hospital-based delirium and describes how literary study can give insight into medical problems. Dr. Thrailkill has been recognized for her commitment to undergraduate teaching by a number of university-wide teaching awards.

 

 

 

T, 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm. Instructor(s): Matthew Nielsen. Enrollment = 24.
This course is designed to supplement knowledge obtained through the traditional pre-medical curriculum in order to enhance students’ development as health care providers. It has the following objectives:

1) Work in the health professions provides many different pathways for individuals to find meaning, purpose, and impact in the world.  We will explore a variety of perspectives through a series of invited speakers from our community.
2) Broad and overlapping currents in the organization of medical care, payment for healthcare services, performance improvement, government regulation, and innovation have been shaping the environment within which care is delivered in this country for decades.  These will continue to shape the environment for the decades to come.  The seminar will provide students with an overview of changes in the delivery of medical care across several of these areas.
3) The course will explore dimensions of person- and family-centered care, which has led to many advances in research and clinical care delivery.  This can also include understanding the social situation of your patient, including environmental, financial and familial factors.
4) The course will provide students with information about navigating the medical training system as well as an introduction to the interprofessional team-based nature of health care delivery.

HONORS CAROLINA THIRD AND FOURTH YEAR STUDENTS ONLY. 1.0 CREDIT HOUR COURSE.

Matthew Nielsen, MD received his medical degree from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and completed his residency at the Brady Urological Institute of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. After residency, Dr. Nielsen served on the faculty at Johns Hopkins prior to joining the UNC Urology faculty in 2009. In addition to his position as Professor with Tenure with the UNC Department of Urology, Dr. Nielsen also serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Health Policy & Management at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Dr. Nielsen’s clinical practice is focused in urologic oncology—in particular, the treatment of bladder, prostate and kidney cancer. He is a member of the integrated Multidisciplinary Genitourinary Oncology Group at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, and he served as Director of the Division of Urologic Oncology from 2013-2018. Dr. Nielsen is committed to providing compassionate, individualized, patient-centered care, and has been selected by his peers to be named among the Best Doctors in America in Urology since 2013. His research in medical decision making, cancer care quality and treatment outcomes has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and The American Cancer Society, and nationally recognized by the Rising Stars in Urology Research Award.

Alongside his clinical, research and teaching activities, Dr. Nielsen is actively engaged in quality improvement and patient safety efforts as Associate Director of the UNC Institute for Healthcare Quality Improvement and other leadership roles in the UNC Health Care System, where he received the Physician Friend of Nursing Award in 2017. He has been an active contributor to multiple national organizations, as a member of the Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Committee of the American Urological Association, serving as Chair from 2019-2022, as well as the Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI) and the American College of Physicians’ High Value Care Task Force and Performance Measurement Committee. In 2019, he was appointed to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Technical Expert Panel for the CMS Quality Measure Development Plan and Quality Measure Index.

TR, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm. Instructor(s): Mark Crescenzi. Enrollment = 2.
This course introduces you to world politics from an analytical, social scientific perspective. The goal is to understand why and how political actors in the international arena make decisions that affect us all.  Why do nations fight? Why do they cooperate, both economically and politically? Why do we have such a hard time solving the puzzle of global warming, or poverty? How can we understand the mechanisms that encourage cooperation over conflict in world politics?   This course goes beyond learning how others have studied problems in world politics. Our goal is to demonstrate how theories of world politics can be constructed and applied, and, in turn, to have you engage in this process of application using cases drawn from recent and current events.

CROSSLISTED W POLI150H

Mark Crescenzi is the Nancy Hanes White Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research area is in International Relations and World Politics with a focus on peace and conflict. His recent work includes studies on the importance of market power politics, reputation, and conflict environments in the occurrence of violence and war.

TR, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm. Instructor(s): Robert Jenkins. Enrollment = 2.
This course explores the institutional makeup, political processes, and impact of international organizations on global politics. International organizations (IO’s) have become increasingly important in resolving a wide range of global problems and are key players in the current system of global governance. IO’s reflect state efforts to bring more order to the anarchic world in which they operate. This course offers a historical perspective and explores a number of approaches to understanding IO’s. The thread that ties the diverse themes together is the issue of state sovereignty and how international organizations and global issues such as terrorism, transnational crime, and global warming have challenged it.

Robert M. Jenkins is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  A long-time specialist in Central and Eastern Europe, his expertise also includes the European Union, NATO, international organizations, and climate change policy. His current research includes projects on comparative Transatlantic policies on climate change and international intervention into the post-conflict Western Balkans. Dr. Jenkins is committed to study abroad programs, leading semester programs in Brussels (2022, 2023, upcoming 2025), Cape Town (2013, 2016), and a long-running 6-week summer program in the Balkans and Vienna (11 times since 2002, upcoming 2025).

 

MWF, 11:15 am – 12:05 pm. Instructor(s): James Pryor. Enrollment = 24.
This course will be an introduction to philosophy in the analytic tradition, by focusing on a few representative issues:

1. How can we tell whether animals and future computers have “minds” — that is, their own thoughts, experiences, ambitions, self-awareness, and so on — or whether they’re instead just mindless automata?

2. Relations between minds, brains, and machines: Are your mind and body made of different stuffs? If a machine duplicates the neural structure of your brain, would it have the same thoughts and other mental states that you have?

3. What does it take to have free will? Is this incompatible with one’s choices being programmed or physically determined?

The course will place a strong emphasis on learning how to read philosophical texts and how to evaluate and produce philosophically compelling arguments. The format will vary between lectures and in-class group discussion.

 

Jim Pryor joined the Philosophy department in 2020. Before that, he spent time at NYU, Harvard, and Princeton. His research and teaching spans epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.

MWF, 9:05 am – 9:55 am. Instructor(s): John Roberts. Enrollment = 24.
Mathematical logic, a.k.a. symbolic logic, is a family of formal systems that were originally developed with the goal of shedding light on the philosophical foundations of mathematics.  But it is also used to serve other purposes, including the analysis of philosophical arguments, the study of the structures of languages, and the study of the possibilities for automating different kinds of reasoning processes (and what we now call “computer science” started out as a branch of mathematical logic).  In the standard PHIL 155 course, students are introduced to two systems of logic, called “propositional logic” and “first-order predicate logic.”  In the Honors version, we will cover those two systems much more quickly, leaving time to move on to other topics.  In particular, we will look at some attempts to use symbolic logic to provide a foundation for mathematics, and we will learn the “Incompleteness Theorem” of Godel.

 

John T. Roberts received his BS in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology and his PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He has been teaching philosophy at Carolina since 1999. His book The Law-Governed Universe was published by Oxford University Press in 2009.

TR, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm. Instructor(s): Roaslind Chaplin. Enrollment = 24.
“Suppose you make it your aim to live a happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life. Will pursuing a life that is good in this sense also lead you to be a morally good person? In this introduction to moral theory, we will explore these and other classic questions about what it is to be moral, what it is to live a happy life, and how being moral and living a happy life relate to one another. In our studies of being moral, we will explore consequentialist, deontological, and virtue ethical approaches to right action. In our explorations of happiness and the good life, we will cover subjectivist and objectivist approaches, questions about the role of meaning in living a good life, questions about how a theory of the good life should accommodate an account of disability, and more.”

 

Professor Chaplin specializes in Kant, early modern philosophy, and ethics and moral psychology. In her historical research, her projects focus on Kant’s idealism, his criticisms of traditional metaphysics, disputes about the infinite and the indeterminate, and other debates in early modern metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In her research in ethics and moral psychology, she focuses on the moral emotions, the role of reactive attitudes in our responsibility practices, and the significance of close personal relationships for a compelling account of the reactive attitudes.

TR, 3:30 pm – 4:45 pm . Instructor(s): David Reeve. Enrollment = 24.
Our focus this year will Plato’s masterpiece, The Republic, acknowledged to be on of the greatest works of Western Philosophy.
Required texts:
Plato, Republic (Hackett) ISBN 0-87220-763-3

Class is taught Remote Only

 

Most of my books are on Plato and Aristotle, with frequent asides on film, and on love and sex.

MW, 3:35 pm – 4:50 pm. Instructor(s): Douglas MacLean. Enrollment = 19.

Douglas MacLean’s current research focuses on practical ethics and issues in moral and political theory that are particularly relevant to practical concerns. Most of his recent writing examines how values do and ought to influence decisions, both personal decisions and government policies.

MWF, 9:05 am – 9:55 am. Instructor(s): Stefan Jeglinski. Enrollment = 24.
Physical Computing is an introduction to the computing archetype known as the microcontroller. Microcontrollers are ubiquitous but mostly hidden in our lives – they are the brains of almost anything electronic that you interact with – virtually all appliances, vehicles, and consumer products that require any sort of input/output display, and/or remote connection or automation, and/or some degree of computation, contain at their heart a microcontroller.
A microcontroller is an electronic interface to the outside world. Its interface facilitates measurements of an environment and then controls that environment as needed. The environment can be either local (e.g., adjusting the speed of an automobile engine in response to an accelerator pedal) or remote (e.g., sensing the presence of a person in a room on the other side of the world and turning a light on in response). Microcontroller implementations use sensors and actuators, support electronics, and programing to accomplish these tasks.
Students that finish this course will be able to prototype basic microcontroller implementations using sensors, actuators, and support electronics, and write code that ties the pieces together. Honors students will perform extra course projects that extend these prototypes.
The course is structured to work for either in-person or remote learning. Although the lectures are officially in person, they are recorded, and all labs are performed by students on their own time and in their own setting.
In addition to the lecture and lab activities, all students will learn the mechanics of writing a “feasibility proposal” suitable for research grant submissions. A special assignment will require all students to analyze and write such a proposal.
This course has prerequisites because it is an elective in the Physics dept; however, the instructor waives all such prerequisites and permission is granted to all who want to take the course. No experience is necessary – the course is designed to teach students the basics of electronics and programming needed to accomplish the course objectives.
The course prereq is either PHYS114 or PHYS118 or instructor permission. I always grant instructor permission – with only a few caveats, the course is open to all. The need for a prereq is related to our other physics BS/BA programs, but would not apply to non-majors. I’m not sure what the best way is to communicate this, but I typically use Class Notes to mention this aspect. I don’t know if it’s appropriate, but I would suggest the honors description acknowledge the prereq but explicitly suggest that the instructor be contacted for more information.

In a previous 30-year engineering career, Stefan Jeglinski designed and built instrumentation, learned to program from scratch, and performed research and development for large and small companies. For five years he was an actual rocket scientist, so when he says “this ain’t rocket science,” he knows what he’s talking about! He broke away from rockets to complete his PhD in experimental condensed matter physics at the University of Utah, and then returned to industry where he spent over 15 years in all aspects of product development for electron microscopy.
Since arriving at UNC in 2010, Dr J (as he is known to students) has helped transform the introductory sequence of physics course, developed a First Year Seminar in Mechatronics, and teaches his favorite course, Physical Computing, which does a yearly deep dive into the latest microcontroller technology. Not originally an academic, he is here to share everything he’s learned about the intersection of electronics, computer hardware, and programming.

TR, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm. Instructor(s): Mark Crescenzi. Enrollment = 22.
This course introduces you to world politics from an analytical, social scientific perspective. The goal is to understand why and how political actors in the international arena make decisions that affect us all.  Why do nations fight? Why do they cooperate, both economically and politically? Why do we have such a hard time solving the puzzle of global warming, or poverty? How can we understand the mechanisms that encourage cooperation over conflict in world politics?   This course goes beyond learning how others have studied problems in world politics. Our goal is to demonstrate how theories of world politics can be constructed and applied, and, in turn, to have you engage in this process of application using cases drawn from recent and current events.

CROSSLISTED W PWAD150H

 

Mark Crescenzi is the Nancy Hanes White Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research area is in International Relations and World Politics with a focus on peace and conflict. His recent work includes studies on the importance of market power politics, reputation, and conflict environments in the occurrence of violence and war.

MW, 3:35 pm – 4:50 pm. Instructor(s): Ashley Anderson. Enrollment = 24.
This course is designed as an introduction to contemporary Middle Eastern politics for advanced undergraduates. The goal is to provide students with the historical background and theoretical tools to address key questions about the region: 1) How has Western colonialism shaped contemporary state development? 2) How do patterns of authoritarian rule differ in the region and why do they persist? 3) Why do some Middle Eastern countries suffer from sectarian and political violence while others do not? 4) What accounts for the region’s current economic underdevelopment? 5) Why have Islamist parties emerged as prominent opposition forces within some countries? And finally, 6) Why have citizens across the region risen up to try to overthrow dictators and authoritarian regimes?

To explore these questions, the course combines systematic analytical approaches to big questions with concrete knowledge of events and developments in specific countries. In so doing, it aims to give students a critical understanding of politics while simultaneously building empirical knowledge about the Middle East/North Africa region. POLI 130 is strongly recommended; however, the course is suitable for students with all levels of knowledge on the region.

Ashley Anderson is an assistant professor in the Political Science department at UNC. She specializes in Middle Eastern politics, authoritarian governments, and social movements, and received her Ph.D. in Government at Harvard in 2016.

 

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am. Instructor(s): Caitlin Andrews-Lee. Enrollment = 24.
This course provides an overview of major topics in the study of Latin American politics. It is aimed at students with a desire to understand how Latin American societies and governments are organized, what the major problems are that these societies are facing, and what accounts for different outcomes from the point of view of the welfare of citizens. We shall examine both common traits in the region’s history, culture, and economic, political, and social structures, and important differences between countries in these dimensions. We shall gain an understanding of the diversity of national experiences and a somewhat deeper knowledge of a few select cases: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico.

 

Caitlin Andrews-Lee is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas at Austin and was an Assistant Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University prior to joining UNC. Andrews-Lee’s research and teaching interests are in comparative politics and political behavior, with an emphasis on charismatic leadership and followership in Latin America. She is the author of The Emergence and Revival of Charismatic Movements: Argentine Peronism and Venezuelan Chavismo (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Her research has also been published in several academic journals. Her current project investigates the gendered nature of charismatic authority and explores under what conditions women can defy expectations and establish legitimacy as charismatic leaders.

TR, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm. Instructor(s): Robert Jenkins. Enrollment = 22.
This course explores the institutional makeup, political processes, and impact of international organizations on global politics. International organizations (IOs) have become increasingly important in addressing a wide range of global problems and are key players in the current system of global governance. IOs reflect state efforts to balance sovereignty and cooperation in global politics. This course offers a historical perspective and differing approaches to understanding IOs in the areas of peace and security, human rights, economic governance and development, and the environment. The course will include a student simulation exercise of the UN Security Council on climate change.

 

Robert M. Jenkins is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  A long-time specialist in Central and Eastern Europe, his expertise also includes the European Union, NATO, international organizations, and climate change policy. His current research includes projects on comparative Transatlantic policies on climate change and international intervention into the post-conflict Western Balkans. Dr. Jenkins is committed to study abroad programs, leading semester programs in Brussels (2022, 2023, upcoming 2025), Cape Town (2013, 2016), and a long-running 6-week summer program in the Balkans and Vienna (11 times since 2002, upcoming 2025).

 

W, 2:30 pm – 5:00 pm. Instructor(s): Niklaus Steiner. Enrollment = 24.
While the global movement of products, services, ideas, and information is increasingly free, the movement of people across borders remains tightly controlled by governments. This control over international migration is a highly contested issue, and it is complicated by the fact that never before have so many people had the ability to move from one country to another while at the same time governments have never had so much power to control this movement. This class explores the moral, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of this movement across international borders. The class is based on discussions (as opposed to lectures) and tackles thorny questions like: do we have an obligation to let poor people into our rich country? what constitutes persecution? how do foreigners affect national identity?  how should citizenship be allocated? We will pay particular attention to the distinction between migrants who move voluntarily (immigrants) and those who are forced to flee (refugees) – is this an important distinction to make, and does one group deserve admission more than the other?  No prior knowledge or experience is needed; instead, students need to be ready to dig deep into all sides of migration issues through reading, writing and discussion. This class encourages students from a wide range of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives to enroll because it benefits significantly from such diversity.

NO FIRST YEAR STUDENTS.

 

Niklaus Steiner is a Professor of the Practice in Political Science. A native of Switzerland who moved to the U.S. in his youth, Steiner has had the good fortune of moving between cultures all his life, and this experience shapes his academic focus. Steiner earned a B.A. with Highest Honors in International Studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in Political Science at Northwestern University. His research and teaching interests include migration, refugees, nationalism, and citizenship.

 

 

TR, 5:00 pm – 6:15 pm. Instructor(s): Gary Marks. Enrollment = 22.
This course engages the European Union and the political causes and consequences of Brexit, nationalism, political polarization, and Trumpism. What kind of polity is emerging at the European level? How is European integration contested? Is European integration the beginning of the end of the national state in western Europe, or will states harness the process within their current institutional structures? In this class, students will have an opportunity to analyze the character and dynamics of European integration and the current economic crisis by reading speeches of contemporaries, evaluating alternative theories of European integration, and by using additional resources.
This course has a double purpose: to think critically about one of the world’s most important experiments in governance–the European Union and to probe the future shape of politics in the West and the wider world.
The course will critically assess the emergence of the Europe Union, Brexit, the future of the EU, the rise of nationalism, political polarization, and the response to Trumpism. Is the West breaking up into regional blocks? Is the EU an consensual empire? What are the political pressures that shape it? How does the European Union compare with other international organizations such as the United Nations, NAFTA, the African Union, or the World Trade Organization?

Gary Marks is Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. He was educated in England and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. In 2010 he was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize for his contributions to political science. He co-founded the UNC Center for European Studies and EU Center of Excellence in 1994 and 1998, respectively, and served as Director until 2006. Marks has had fellowships and visiting professorships at Oxford University, the Free University of Amsterdam, the Free University of Berlin, the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg, Pompeu Fabra, the Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna, Sciences Po, Konstanz University, McMaster University, the University of Twente, and was National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His publications have received more than thirty thousand citations. His teaching and research are chiefly in comparative politics and multilevel governance. His books include Multi-Level Governance and European Integration (2001); It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (2001); European Integration and Political Conflict (2004); The Rise of Regional Authority (2010); Measuring Regional Authority (2016) and Community, Scale, and Regional Governance (2016).

TR, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm. Instructor(s): Robert Jenkins. Enrollment = 19.
This course explores the background, history, and aftermath of recent conflicts in the Balkans and attempts by international organizations to secure peace and rebuild states in the region.  Topics include nationalism, ethno-national violence, state formation, international intervention, and European Union enlargement.

 

Robert M. Jenkins is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  A long-time specialist in Central and Eastern Europe, his expertise also includes the European Union, NATO, international organizations, and climate change policy. His current research includes projects on comparative Transatlantic policies on climate change and international intervention into the post-conflict Western Balkans. Dr. Jenkins is committed to study abroad programs, leading semester programs in Brussels (2022, 2023, upcoming 2025), Cape Town (2013, 2016), and a long-running 6-week summer program in the Balkans and Vienna (11 times since 2002, upcoming 2025).

 

TR, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm. Instructor(s): Todd Thiele. Enrollment = 24.
This course is designed to introduce the student to the topic of animal learning and behavior. We will consider Pavlovian or “Classical” learning, operant learning, and the role of learning in drug abuse and dependence. Students will acquire knowledge of the procedures used to study learning, the ways that learned behaviors are expressed, and theories that have been proposed to explain how learning is represented in memory. Because neuroscience has had such a tremendous impact on our understanding of learning, memory, and behavior, we will also consider new findings from neuroscience that have allowed an understanding of the underlying brain substrates.

PREREQUISITE: NSCI 175 or PSYC 101.

Dr. Todd Thiele is a professor in the Behavioral & Integrative Neuroscience Program of the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience. He is funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) to study the neurocircuity in the brain that modulates binge alcohol drinking. Dr. Thiele’s teaching interests are in the brain mechanisms that underlie learning and behavior, and how these mechanisms drive alcohol use and abuse.

TR, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm. Instructor(s): Charlie Wiss. Enrollment = 24.
: This course will focus on providing an overview of many of the major psychological disorders, with a focus on adult disorders. The major objectives of this course will be for the students to:
· Gain mastery of the diagnostic criteria and identifying features that are associated with each disorder
· Identify and distinguish the disorders
· Have a thorough understanding of the etiologic theories associated with each disorder.
· Understand the major treatment approaches associated with each disorder.
The course will utilize a variety of formats including lectures, discussions, videos, and group presentations. We will attempt to move beyond the definitions of the disorders toward a more nuanced understanding of how they manifest in real life and how modern social, cultural, and biological forces may impact them.

 

My background is in Clinical Psychology and my early career was spent providing psychotherapy for children, adolescents, and adults; with a focus on adolescents with moderate to severe mental illnesses. This background informs my teaching and I tend to focus more on clinical presentation than statistical trends.

TR, 9:30 am – 10:45 am. Instructor(s): Dan Bauer. Enrollment = 24.
Goals of the course: Evaluating hypotheses through the statistical analysis of empirical data is one of the cornerstones of modern science. In this course, we examine how the General Linear Model (GLM), including the multiple regression model, is used in psychological science. Goals of the course are for you to:
-Gain an understanding of how to specify GLMs that are both appropriate for your data and that provide direct tests of theoretically motivated hypotheses.
-Become competent in fitting GLMs within the statstical program R.
-Become a thoughtful and critical consumer of psychological research using the GLM

PREREQUISITE: ECON 400 or PSYC 210 or SOCI 252 or STOR 155.

Dan Bauer is a Professor and the Director of the L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina. He teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in psychometrics and statistics for which he has won teaching awards from the University of North Carolina and the American Psychological Association.  He conducts research at the intersection of quantitative and developmental psychology and has published over 100 papers. He is the co-founder of CenterStat, an organization that provides online training and other resources related to quantitative methodology to researchers in the behavioral, health, and social sciences.

M, 4:40 pm – 7:40 pm. Instructor(s): Alice Ammerman. Enrollment = 24.
The innovative and sustainable nature of entrepreneurial pursuit can benefit public health initiatives, especially when entrepreneurship identifies economically self-sustaining solutions to public health challenges. This three-credit course will introduce students to basic concepts and case studies of commercial and social entrepreneurship as applied to the pursuit of public health through both for-profit and non-profit entities. This course features many guest speakers with successful experience in public health entrepreneurship in diverse arenas.

At the core of this course is a real-world project where students will work in groups to design their own start-ups, refining both their idea throughout the semester and pitching it to experienced entrepreneurs for feedback.

 

Dr. Alice Ammerman is interested in design, testing, implementation and dissemination of innovative clinical and community-based nutrition and physical activity interventions for chronic disease risk reduction in low income and minority populations. She is Director of the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention (HPDP). Dr. Ammerman and colleagues have developed and are testing the “Med-South” diet which is the Mediterranean diet adapted to agricultural availability and taste preferences in the Southeastern US. Her research addresses the role of sustainable food systems in health, the environment, and economic well-being, emphasizing the social determinants of health, particularly food access and food insecurity.  Dr. Ammerman teaches courses in Nutrition Policy and Public Health Entrepreneurship. She has a developing interest in Culinary Medicine to improve medical training programs and uses social entrepreneurship as a sustainable approach to addressing public health concerns.

TR, 8:00 am – 9:15 am. Instructor(s): Manuel Schechtl. Enrollment = 24.
This course will introduce students to public policy as a discipline and the policy analysis process. The process involves defining a public problem and understanding stakeholders and their perspectives; describing public problems with quantitative data; understanding market failures and other rationales for government involvement; selecting criteria relevant for decision-making; constructing policy alternatives; evaluating the different alternatives against the stated policy criteria; and making and communicating a recommendation. This is a research-based and communication-intensive course, which requires the completion of a policy brief in several, iterative steps. The course incorporates current events and relevant case studies to motivate and explain the policy analysis process.

 

Manuel Schechtl is an assistant professor in the department of public policy. His work examines multiple facets of wealth inequality and accumulation, with a particular focus on the impact of inheritances and inheritance taxes as well as social consequences of exposure to wealth inequality. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Humboldt University Berlin and holds degrees in Economics, Political Science, and Sociology from the University of Munich.

TR , 9:30 am – 10:45 am. Instructor(s): David Lambert. Enrollment = 24.
In this course, students learn to read the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament through a number of different interpretive lenses. They begin the course by analyzing the text as historical-critics have done with an attempt to place the text in its ancient Israelite context. They then turn to a study of the Bible’s earliest actual interpreters who lived around the turn of the Common Era and are challenged to discover that these early readers’ approach to the text was quite different from that of the historical critics. For all intents and purposes, they were reading a different Bible. Their mode of reading must be seen as a product of their own time and place and not any intrinsic meaning in the biblical text itself. In fact, students will recognize that their own interpretive assumptions can often be seen as a complex mix of these two different approaches to the biblical text. The course is thus designed to make students adept at switching the interpretive lenses with which they approach a literary work, identifying the historical sources of those lenses, as well as understanding the complex history of the text (AIS). It is also designed to make students aware of their own assumptions and biases at work in their approach to the biblical text (WK). Students become adept at combining close reading of original, primary source material with a recognition of the assumptions with which they approach such reading. Small in-class group work and on-line posting will allow students to experiment with a variety of reading practices. They are asked in the final project to reflect explicitly on their own assumptions and their own interpretive approaches going into the course and the various other interpretive frameworks that we analyze over the course of the semester. They are also asked to reflect explicitly on the multifaceted nature of the Bible as a literary work ultimately dependent on its communities of readers for not only determining its meaning but its very nature. Final presentations will require students to provide a close explication of texts before the classroom.

 

My work is in the Hebrew Bible and its history of interpretation. My goal is to further elucidate the Bible by making readers aware of the interpretive tendencies that they bring to bear on the biblical text. In that vein, I look to bring historical critical approaches to the Hebrew Bible into closer conversation with the history of biblical interpretation.

This theme comes to the fore in my book, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2016 AAR Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Textual Studies. It considers how the primacy accorded repentance within Hellenistic Judaism leads to the development of a series of interpretive practices whereby Jewish and Christian communities read repentance back into Scripture. It asks what it might mean to read the Bible without this penitential lens and, through a close reading of a series of biblical and extrabiblical passages, offers alternative descriptions of a variety of ancient Israelite practices and phenomena: fasting, appeal, confession, the phrase, “return to YHWH,” and prophecy, as well as redemptive expectations among sectarians in the Second Temple period.

I am now focusing on a series of studies that aim to assess more broadly how modern Western notions of the subject have shaped biblical interpretation and, especially, translation practices. In 2017-2018, I was on leave pursuing these questions as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem as part of a research group working on “The Subject of Antiquity: Contours and Expressions of the Self in Ancient Mediterranean Culture.” Articles on the topic include: “The Book of Job in Ritual Perspective,” Journal of Biblical Literature 134:3 (2015); “Refreshing Philology: James Barr, Supersessionism, and the State of Biblical Words,” Biblical Interpretation 24:3 (2016); and “‘Desire’ Enacted in the Wilderness: Problems in the History of the Self and Bible Translation” in Self, Self-Fashioning and Individuality in Late Antiquity (2019).

In my teaching, I also aim to integrate historical critical approaches with attention to the history of interpretation in such courses as “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Literature” (Reli 103) and “The Bible and its Translation” (Reli 603). My main pedagogical goal is to train students to become critical readers of texts by gaining awareness of their own interpretive presuppositions.

Finally, Reli 602, “What is Scripture? Formations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Canon?” represents for me another research interest, namely, in the formation of the Hebrew Bible as Scripture. What is Scripture, and how did we arrive at the concept? Is Scripture a uniform idea and was there, therefore, a singular canonical process, or is the very idea of Scripture itself contested and multiform? This project will be appearing as a monograph, “Is Bible Scripture? Assembling the Biblical in Ancient Judaism and Beyond” with Yale University Press. An initial article on the topic has been published: “How the ‘Torah of Moses’ Became Revelation: An Early, Apocalyptic Theory of Pentateuchal Origins,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 47:1 (2016).

TR, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm. Instructor(s): Joseph Lam. Enrollment = 24.
It is hard to overstate the importance of sacrifice in the history of theorizing about religion. Sacrifice has often been viewed—explicitly or implicitly—as the quintessential religious act, not only because of its prevalence among the world’s cultures, but also because it is understood to express some fundamental human or social impulse (such as communion, violence, or exchange, to name a few). In this course we will examine the phenomenon of sacrifice with particular focus on examples from the ancient Mediterranean world—here broadly defined as encompassing ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Levant (including ancient Israel), Egypt, and Greece. By considering this wide range of primary text material on sacrifice informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives, we will develop modes of close reading and analysis that enable critical reflection on other texts and cultures (including our own).

Joseph Lam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. He received his Ph.D. (with Honors) from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on ancient Near Eastern religious texts and practices, with an emphasis on the diverse written traditions of the Levant (Syria-Palestine) in 2nd and 1st millennia BCE, including the Hebrew Bible. At Carolina, he has taught courses on Classical Hebrew language, Hebrew Bible, ancient Near Eastern culture, and the place of metaphor in religious language.

MWF, 10:10 am – 11:00 am. Instructor(s): Brandon Bayne. Enrollment = 24.

Brandon Bayne is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, specializing in Religion in the Americas. In addition U.S. religions, he teaches courses on early modern Christianity, Catholicism, martyrdom, colonial borderlands, and Latin American religions. His current book project looks at tales persecution, suffering, and martyrdom in the Jesuit missions of northern New Spain, a space that became the Mexican-American border region. He also maintains research interests in contemporary Latina/o religion, having published work on the 20thcentury borderlands healer Teresa Urrea as well as the 1960s search for and display of Father Eusebio Kino’s body in Magdalena de Kino, Sonora. Before UNC, he taught at Fordham University, Indiana University, and Claremont School of Theology.
Th.D., Harvard University, 2012
M.Div., Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, 2004
B.A., Columbia University, 1997

TR, 3:30 pm – 4:45 pm. Instructor(s): Guang Guo. Enrollment = .
SOCI 111H Human Societies is an introduction to sociology and the course focuses on social inequality.

The course has two parts. The first part is based on the textbook Human Societies. The book seeks to explain social and cultural characteristics of a society (such as the degree of social inequality, family structure, women’s status, division of labor, and even the nature of religious beliefs and the games people play). The ecological-evolutionary theory, which is the guiding theory for these materials, states that the level of subsistence technology (e.g., the technology used in hunting and gathering, plant cultivation and industrial production) is a prime determinant of social and cultural characteristics in a society.

The second part of the course focuses on social inequality in the contemporary world, especially in the contemporary United States. We examine social inequality along three main social “faultlines”: economic classes, race/ethnicity, and gender/sex. Topics to be covered include health inequality and the opioid epidemic in the US; the lives and thoughts of the superrich; income inequality; classic sociological literature on power, the elite and social stratification; racial inequality and the origin of races and ethnicities; gender inequality, and the origin of sex and sexual orientation.

Guang Guo has a PhD in sociology from Princeton University and has taught at UNC Chapel Hill for more than two decades. He is Dr. George Alice Welsh distinguished professor in the department of sociology. His work has focused on social genomics, or the intersection between social sciences and genetics. The second half of the course will have an introduction to genetics and their impacts on social sciences.

MWF, 11:15 am – 12:05 pm. Instructor(s): Jo Lindquist. Enrollment = 11.
This course is designed for students in the Honors Program, who have been recommended by their SPAN 261 instructor, or who have received the approval of the SPAN 301 course coordinator. The main theme of the course is “Art and Literature a Symbiotic Reflection of its Cultural Environment.” The course prepares students to analyze texts in at least three literary different genres (theater, poetry, essay, or narrative) in conjunction with film, fashion, and art works to reflect the cultural context in which it was created. In this process, students will improve their language proficiency in Spanish as they are exposed to different world views through the study of literature, art (including art history), fashion, and culture. SPAN 301H differs from SPAN 301 in several ways; all writing assignments are challenging in terms of their research expectations within the context of a world view with the interlacing literature, art, and culture.  Students use their Spanish to hone their Spanish speaking skills to give a group live performance (micro-play or scenes from a play) or an artistic presentation based on their final artistic project (art presentation, original poem recitation, short story, or original artwork) that reflects the main theme of the course.  The course will have a close collaboration with the Ackland Art Museum to coordinate the artworks currently at the Ackland with the students’ projects.

REGISTRATION LIMITED TO MEMBERS OF HONORS CAROLINA.
Prerequisite, SPAN 261 or SPAN 267

 

Dr. Josefa Lindquist is Australian born of Spanish origin. She holds an M.A in Medieval Studies from the University of Utah and a PhD. in Medieval Arthurian Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Lindquist is a medievalist with Merlin and King Arthur in all their incarnations as the center of her academic research. When it comes to research, Lindquist is torn between teaching and scholarly research. The focus of her research is the Arthurian Legend’s literary texts and its representation in art and film, as well as the influence of 17th century Dutch landscapist in Golden Age Spain.

The Ackland Art Museum and the NC Museum of Art are part of her new collaborative work to use foreign language teaching in the galleries of well-known museums. She promotes foreign language use in museums as a learning tool in a new partnership effort between students, scholars, and foreign language learners.

Dr. Lindquist delights in serving as the Teaching Class instructor and Coordinator for SPAN 105. Her dedication in the classroom is evident as she researches the materials the students receive in her classes, guiding the students to understand the methods, techniques, and strategies the authors use to produce meaning that stimulates the students’ emotions and challenges their belief systems about social and cultural mores and norms so that they can relate them to their personal experience. Her dedication is also evident in her role as coordinator, ensuring that instructors feel comfortable and supported while pushing them to achieve the excellence of teaching required at UNC.

Dr. Lindquist is dedicated to UNC’s academic mission by participating a in plethora of committees at the university and departmental level. She was part of several committees such as Ackland Planning Committee, mentor for the Carolina Covenant Scholarship, participated in the Office of Undergraduate Research Committee, among others. She is still and active participant Conduct Board, formally known as the University Hearing Board Member.

Through her innovative teaching strategies, fosters a welcoming environment where her mentorship inside and outside the classroom positively impacts the lives of many undergraduate and graduate students. She highly values the opportunities she has had to mentor, especially working with new instructors that need guidance and training in her Teaching Class. She, as a coordinator, supervises novice and veteran instructors in their Spanish teaching journey.

MWF, 11:15 am – 12:05 pm. Instructor(s): Jo Lindquist. Enrollment = 9.
This course is designed for students in the Honors Program, who have been recommended by their SPAN 261 instructor, or who have received the approval of the SPAN 301 course coordinator. The main theme of the course is “Art and Literature a Symbiotic Reflection of its Cultural Environment.” The course prepares students to analyze texts in at least three literary different genres (theater, poetry, essay, or narrative) in conjunction with film, fashion, and art works to reflect the cultural context in which it was created. In this process, students will improve their language proficiency in Spanish as they are exposed to different world views through the study of literature, art (including art history), fashion, and culture. SPAN 301H differs from SPAN 301 in several ways; all writing assignments are challenging in terms of their research expectations within the context of a world view with the interlacing literature, art, and culture.  Students use their Spanish to hone their Spanish speaking skills to give a group live performance (micro-play or scenes from a play) or an artistic presentation based on their final artistic project (art presentation, original poem recitation, short story, or original artwork) that reflects the main theme of the course.  The course will have a close collaboration with the Ackland Art Museum to coordinate the artworks currently at the Ackland with the students’ projects.

 

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE IN SPAN 261 OR 267. STUDENTS MUST OBTAIN RECOMMENDATION FORM FROM THEIR CURRENT FOREIGN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTOR AND DELIVER IT IN PERSON TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES.
Prerequisite, SPAN 261 or SPAN 267

Dr. Josefa Lindquist is Australian born of Spanish origin. She holds an M.A in Medieval Studies from the University of Utah and a PhD. in Medieval Arthurian Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Lindquist is a medievalist with Merlin and King Arthur in all their incarnations as the center of her academic research. When it comes to research, Lindquist is torn between teaching and scholarly research. The focus of her research is the Arthurian Legend’s literary texts and its representation in art and film, as well as the influence of 17th century Dutch landscapist in Golden Age Spain.

The Ackland Art Museum and the NC Museum of Art are part of her new collaborative work to use foreign language teaching in the galleries of well-known museums. She promotes foreign language use in museums as a learning tool in a new partnership effort between students, scholars, and foreign language learners.

Dr. Lindquist delights in serving as the Teaching Class instructor and Coordinator for SPAN 105. Her dedication in the classroom is evident as she researches the materials the students receive in her classes, guiding the students to understand the methods, techniques, and strategies the authors use to produce meaning that stimulates the students’ emotions and challenges their belief systems about social and cultural mores and norms so that they can relate them to their personal experience. Her dedication is also evident in her role as coordinator, ensuring that instructors feel comfortable and supported while pushing them to achieve the excellence of teaching required at UNC.

Dr. Lindquist is dedicated to UNC’s academic mission by participating a in plethora of committees at the university and departmental level. She was part of several committees such as Ackland Planning Committee, mentor for the Carolina Covenant Scholarship, participated in the Office of Undergraduate Research Committee, among others. She is still and active participant Conduct Board, formally known as the University Hearing Board Member.

Through her innovative teaching strategies, fosters a welcoming environment where her mentorship inside and outside the classroom positively impacts the lives of many undergraduate and graduate students. She highly values the opportunities she has had to mentor, especially working with new instructors that need guidance and training in her Teaching Class. She, as a coordinator, supervises novice and veteran instructors in their Spanish teaching journey.