Spring 2026 Honors First Year Seminars & Launches

MW , 3:35 pm – 4:50 pm. Instructor(s): Carribeth Bliem. Enrollment = 35.
Chemistry 101 is the first half of a yearlong overview of the exciting field of chemistry, the study of the properties and changes of matter and energy. Students will be exposed to many new concepts, techniques and phenomena including atomic and molecular structure, stoichiometry, conservation of mass and energy and thermochemical changes. Chemistry 101 (or 101H) is a pre-requisite for Chemistry 102, and together, Chemistry 101 and 102 are the gateway to all courses in chemistry

 

Carribeth Bliem has been teaching in the Chemistry Department since 2002.  A physical chemist by training, she enjoys teaching General Chemistry and senior-level physical chemistry courses.  Convincing students of all the ways that chemistry impacts their daily life is a goal of every course.

TBD, . Instructor(s): TBD. Enrollment = 24.

?

TBD, . Instructor(s): Matthew Taylor. Enrollment = 24.
What will our world look like in ten years? Fifty? One hundred? Will the future be a utopian paradise or a dystopian wasteland? Through a wide-ranging survey of popular science writing, novels, and films, this first year seminar will examine fictional and nonfictional attempts to imagine the future from the nineteenth century to the present. We will explore everything from futurology and transhumanism to warnings of imminent environmental collapse. Our focus will be less on assessing the accuracy of these predictions and more on determining what they tell us about the hopes and fears of the times in which they were made. The course will culminate in a short research paper on a future-oriented topic of your choosing.

FIRST YEAR STUDENTS ONLY.

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.

MW, 8:30 am – 9:45 am. Instructor(s): Jane Thrailkill. Enrollment = 24.
When medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman writes that “illness has meaning,” he reminds us that the human experience of being sick involves more than bodily symptoms. Moreover, the effects of illness and disability are rarely confined to one person. In this course, we will analyze a diverse collection of writers who work to make sense of illness and disability through a range of genres including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, film, comics, on-line lectures, and scholarship. We will explore the ways that people experience, make meaning from, and represent illness, caregiving, and disability.

 

FIRST YEAR STUDENTS ONLY.
MAY SUBSTITUTE FOR THE ENGL 268H / GATEWAY COURSE REQUIREMENT FOR THE MEDICINE, LITERATURE, AND CULTURE MINOR.

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.

 

 

 

MWF, 12:20 pm – 1:10 pm. Instructor(s): David Ross. Enrollment = 24.
Science fiction supposedly pines for gleaming gadgetry. Even at its giddiest and wonkiest, however, science fiction remembers Frankenstein. It remembers that monsters develop ideas of their own; that they wind up haunting and even hunting us; that our innovations—however seemingly benign—threaten to escape our control and comprehension and embark on whole new careers of unintended consequence. Our course traces the genealogy of this machine anxiety. Our guiding questions will be: What are machines? Are machines “natural” or “unnatural”? Are their dangers inherent? How do they change us? Is an artificially intelligent “machine” really a machine?

FIRST YEAR STUDENTS ONLY.

David A. Ross is a graduate of Yale and Oxford. He has been a member of the Department of English & Comparative Literature at UNC–Chapel Hill since 2002. He is the author of A Critical Companion to William Butler Yeats (2009) and the co-editor/co-translator of The Search for the Avant-Garde, 1946–1969 (2012), the descriptive catalogue of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. A collector and amateur scholar of traditional Chinese paintings and Japanese woodblock prints, he has served as president of Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies and as both editor and book review editor of the Southeast Review of Asian Studies.

TR, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm. Instructor(s): Ana Silva Campo. Enrollment = 24.
This seminar explores early modern witchcraft and magic to introduce students to the ways in which historians think about questions of gender, power, and belief in historical perspective. The seminar will focus on how historians pose problems, collect evidence, and evaluate knowledge about how witchcraft and magic reveal broader tensions in the early modern world.

NO INSTRUCTOR BIO ON FILE

MWF, 1:25 pm – 2:15 pm; Recitation: W, 3:35 pm – 4:25 pm. Instructor(s): Joseph Compton. Enrollment = 34.
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.

FIRST YEAR STUDENTS ONLY.

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.

Joe Compton holds an M.S. in Mathematics from Wake Forest University and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to graduate school, Joe taught math at a high school in his hometown. He has been teaching math courses at UNC since 2019 and became a Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC in 2024. Joe earned the Linker Award for his teaching as a graduate student in 2024 and the Goodman-Petersen award for Excellence in Teaching in 2025, both presented by the UNC Mathematics Department. His professional focus is on creating an environment in the classroom where curious students learn together by doing. Research interests include algebra and representation theory.

W, 2:30 pm – 5:00 pm. Instructor(s): Terry Holt. Enrollment = 20.
A workshop in autobiographical and creative short story, focusing on the complex connections between story-telling, interpretive skill, and the practice of medicine. Students will write and present autobiographical and and creative short stories about illness and medical care; the seminar will meet weekly to discuss these stories, attempting to identify and articulate the key issues each story expresses about what it means to be sick, what it might mean to take care of others in their illness. The writing and (especially) interpretive skills acquired in this workshop are directly valuable to anyone contemplating a career in medicine, but are equally valuable to anyone who might at some point encounter (in themselves or in someone they care for) the trauma of illness. In addition to the weekly workshop, participants will have one-on-one conferences with the instructor (himself an MD with an international reputation as a writer). A semester-long journal, focusing on the reverberations of the pandemic on the writer’s daily (actual and interior) life, will form the basis for a final project, which may (at student option) be in the form of written narrative, an audio composition, or a film, composed using the tools available at the University’s Media Resources Center.

FIRST YEAR STUDENTS ONLY

FULFILLS FC-CREATE requirement.

 

Terrence Holt taught literature and writing at Rutgers University and Swarthmore College for a decade before attending medical school. Hailed as “a work of genius” by the New York Times, his 2009 collection of short fiction, In the Valley of the Kings, was one of Amazon’s Best Books of the Year. Internal Medicine, his New York Times bestselling memoir of medical training, was named best book of 2014 by three industry journals.  Holt teaches medicine at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

MW, 3:35 pm – 4:50 pm. Instructor(s): Douglas MacLean. Enrollment = 24.
Modern (post-Enlightenment) moral philosophy is primarily concerned with analyzing or defining moral concepts.  This includes basic or “thin” concepts like good, bad, right, wrong, and ought; and it includes “thick” concepts that are more cognitively specific, such as kindness, cruelty, courage, cowardice, empathy, integrity, or selfishness.  Thick concepts are often used to characterize moral virtues and vices.

Another aim of moral philosophy, which has been less pronounced in the modern era but was the central moral question in ancient times is: What is the proper or ideal life for a human being?  How ought we to live?  This seminar will focus on that ancient question, but it will draw heavily on modern philosophical works and concepts to help illuminate it.

We will begin with the Socrates, the first philosopher in the Western tradition to focus specifically on ethics, and then we will look briefly at other Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.  From there we move to more modern and contemporary philosophy, examining what modern moral theories tell us about the nature of a morally ideal life and what critics of these theories say about how human beings ought to live.

Readings will be drawn primarily from philosophy but some literature and movies will also be on the syllabus.

The class will be conducted as a seminar, and students will be expected to take the lead in discussing various topics.  There will be no exams, but there will be at least five papers plus reports to the class.  Students will also be required to come up with examples of morally good lives and explain and defend their choice of those examples.

FIRST YEAR STUDENTS ONLY.

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, 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm. Instructor(s): Jennifer Arnold. Enrollment = 24.
As adults we constantly make judgments about other people’s beliefs, desires, goals, knowledge, and intentions from evidence like eye gaze and inferences from their words and actions.  These judgments together can be called mindreading, or theory of mind (where “theory” refers to the theory someone might hold about another’s mental state, not a scientific theory).  This information is known to guide some aspects of language use — for example, you wouldn’t ask someone to hand you “that book” if they don’t know it exists.  But sometimes you might ignore what someone else does or does not know – for instance asking someone for “the red book” when that person is sitting in front of two red books.  This course examines how people infer the mental states of others, and how they use it to guide decisions during speaking and understanding.  In a project-based learning format, this class also teaches techniques in experimentation, quantitative reasoning and analysis from evidence. Students design and carry out a novel experimental study, discuss primary research articles, and present their findings in spoken and written formats.

 

FIRST YEAR STUDENTS ONLY.

Dr. Jennifer Arnold is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. She studies the ways that our minds handle the jobs of speaking and understanding. How do speakers choose words and produce them? How do listeners pick out the speaker’s meaning? Her research is guided by questions about how people represent the thoughts, intentions, and mental activities of other people, and how this information influences specific linguistic processes.

MWF, 9:05 am – 9:55 am; Recitation: T, 3:30 pm – 4:20 pm. Instructor(s): Nicolas Fraiman. Enrollment = 35.
This course combines three perspectives: inferential thinking, computational thinking, and real-world relevance. Given data arising from some real-world phenomenon, how does one analyze those data to understand that phenomenon? The course teaches critical concepts and skills in computer programming and statistical inference, in conjunction with hands-on analysis of real-world datasets, including economic data, document collections, geographical data, and social networks. It delves into social issues surrounding data analysis such as privacy and design. This course will enable you to use the combination of programming and statistics to think critically about the world around you. You will learn to select the right statistical tools for the job, quantify and understand uncertainty in data, not take data for granted, think of ways that you could be wrong, and turn your data analysis into a decision. The honors section is for students who want to dig deeper in this knowledge and will have a more active learning approach during class taking advantage of the smaller class size.

 

Nicolas Fraiman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research. He received his Ph.D. from McGill University in 2013 and after that he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. He works on Probability and its connections with Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Dynamics. His current research focuses on probabilistic analysis of random structures, the algorithmic and statistical applications of these models, and the effect these models have on stochastic processes.