Honors Courses Spring 2027
ENGL 105. Honors Introduction to English: Murder, They Wrote
Instructor: Megan Dennis
54452 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Fraser 223
How do we understand representations of crime and victimhood in literature and culture? Representations of crime, victims, and suspects have broader implications for the ways we understand embodiment, social mores, and justice. Crime and detective stories have retained a foothold in the Western imagination since the days of Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. These texts hold us in suspense, while also revealing anxieties among society’s members, particularly regarding containment of behavior and identities society deems improper or dangerous. Through critical engagement with literature across a variety of genres and time periods, this course will delve into the realm of crime literature as a means to interrogate the dominant frameworks in which we live. Students can expect to engage with such works as Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, as well as true crime cases presented in popular podcasts such as My Favorite Murder (and others). Our writing assignments will include some shorter reading responses/ in-class writing activities, as well as three major writing projects and a final reflection.
ENGL 205: Freshman-Sophomore Honors Proseminar: The Odyssey and Its Adaptations
Instructor: Sarah Van der Laan
57609 | TuTh 11:00-12:15 PM | Wescoe 4019
A victorious hero, cast adrift on uncharted seas on his return from a cataclysmic war, struggles through unimaginable dangers and powerful temptations to return to the wife and home he left twenty years ago. The Odyssey—one of the oldest surviving works of European literature—continues to inspire films, plays, novels, poems, graphic novels, and artworks: war stories and love stories, postcolonial and feminist revisions, parodies and tragedies. We will discover how contemporary authors and directors from Derek Walcott to Madeline Miller to the Coen brothers reinvent myths for new audiences and examine the nature of adaptation itself. Students will explore these adaptations and ask why Homer’s tales of Troy, with their questioning of ideals of honor and glory, their awareness of the human cost of warfare, and their struggle to find heroism in human experience, remain necessary today.
ENGL 598: Honors Proseminar: Robot Writing: Literacy and Literature in the AI Era
Instructor: Sean Kamperman
59287 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4021
How are so-called generative AI technologies changing the way people read, write, think, and communicate? What can literary explorations of automated writing technologies teach us about the relationship between technology and human expression? What happens when current debates about “AI” elide the long history of automated writing? In this course, we will attempt to cut through the hype around AI to explore the real impacts of synthetic text generators on schools, literature, the publishing industry, the public sphere, and everyday acts of literary and rhetorical production.
