Honors Courses Spring 2027
ENGL 105: Honors Introduction to English- Topic: Robot Writing: Literacy and Literature in the AI Era
Instructor: Sean Kamperman
54452 | 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.
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: "Semi-Human"
Instructor: Paul Outka
59287 | MW 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4037
This course will examine figures from the early nineteenth-century to contemporary speculative fiction and artificial intelligence whose human status is in question, whether because of how they were made or the often self-serving ways they were characterized by “normal” humans. Neither wholly alien nor fully human, such figures pose a particularly intimate challenge to how race, gender, and sexuality are constructed, as well as “our” relation to nonhuman animals, cyborg figures, and artificial intelligence. Texts will include fiction, films, contemporary developments in artificial intelligence, as well as secondary criticism.
