Honors Courses Spring 2027
ENGL 105: Honors Introduction to English
Instructor: Sean Kamperman
54452 | TuTh 12:30-1:45 PM | Wescoe 4021
In this course, we will use the lens of food and food studies to practice critical thinking, reading, and writing skills and to meet the KU Core34 Goals of exploring your own experiences and utilizing research to communicate ideas in writing and across varied contexts and mediums. We will begin with overviews of how the metaphor of “cooking” is used to discuss writing processes, drawing comparisons between cooking and writing as generative action and interaction and as activities that are both active and reflective. We will then explore the connection between food, memory, and cultural identity as we read and write food memoirs. Moving from personal to academic writing, we will research and explore food-related issues relevant to our disciplines, with a focus on how food serves as a lens for exploring social/cultural issues (such as the environment/sustainability, health/nutrition, human-animal relationships, labor conditions, food insecurity, food safety, etc.). For the final project, we will turn to the history of cookbooks (with a visit to Spencer Research Library to examine cookbooks in the archives) and will explore the rhetoric of cookbooks and the genre of recipes as we create multimodal projects that contribute to a final collaborative class project: a digital cookbook/website/blog.
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.
