New Spring Class and SR&D Update

Check out our recently added Self and Society course, as well as changes to a Scientific Reasoning and Discovery section (with the changes in red!), just in time for Spring 2016 registration!


Gender Activism in the Muslim World

Professor Kelly Pemberton
HONR 2048.MV – 3 Credits
CRN: 77947
R 1:00-3:30 PM
Course Description:  This undergraduate course is suitable for students who have little to no background in Islamic studies or the Muslim world. It focuses on women’s rights activism and activists in Muslim-majority countries and Muslim communities in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and North Am. We will explore this activism with respect to the intersection of history, society, and geopolitics, using the theoretical lens of socio-cultural anthropology, and in consideration of of cultural complexes and social relationships within their particular historical contexts and geographic environments. These perspectives will give us a unique vantage point for exploring some of the present characteristics of women’s rights activist communities in Muslim-majority lands and communities, including coalitions among secularists, Islamic, and non-Muslim religious groups, while we investigate some of the major cultural and ideological factors that are shaping these movements. The course will feature at least one guest speaker who is a Muslim activist for women’s rights, and will also offer an opportunity for an off-campus visit to a local mosque or Muslim community center.


Human Biology- The Nutrition Edition

Professor Carly Jordan
HONR 1034:MV2 – 4 Credits
CRN: 77382
TR 9:00-10:50 AM
Fulfills: CCAS: Natural/Physical Science with Lab, ESIA: Science, GWSB: Science
Course Description: Every day we hear all sorts of claims about how to live a healthy life. From what to eat to whether or not to get a vaccine or take a certain drug, we are constantly bombarded with advice about how to live our lives.Who do you listen to? How do you know if the claims you hear are true? In this course, you will develop science literacy and critical thinking skills necessary to make sense of the information you encounter every day. You will learn quantitative skills and basic statistics that will help you interpret data. The major project in this course will be to find a claim and investigate its validity. You will determine the legitimacy of its makers, learn where to find primary sources to support or refute the claim, propose additional studies to help clarify confusing information, and create a dissemination piece to share your understanding with your peers. In this course, we will analyze serious medical claims and silly urban legends, but we will do it all using sound logic and the scientific method. At the end of the semester, you will be armed with the knowledge and skills to make informed decisions about your health.
Note: Spring 2016 will focus on the science of nutrition, metabolism, and exercise.

Still Tweaking Your Fall Schedule? Take a Second Look at These Classes

Still trying to ensure the perfect fall 2015 schedule? Take a look at some of these Honors courses with open seats!
HONR 2048:11 – Islamic Economics, Finance and Development: Theory versus Reality w/ Prof. Askari
CRN: 65653; R 12:45-3:15 PM
Islam is an immutable rules-based system with a prescribed method for humans and society to achieve material and non-material development grounded in rule-compliance and effective institutions. The collection of rules from the Quran and the life of the Prophet Mohammad, which in turn defines institutions, afford guidelines for economic and financial systems and for development. We survey the essential features of Islamic economic and financial systems, and the Islamic vision of human and economic development. While the ideal is not in place anywhere in the Muslim world, we endeavor to explain the divergence from the ideal in human, economic and political development in the Middle East region (or their “Islamicity”).


HONR 2048:12 – The Way We Now Think w/ Prof. Grier
CRN: 67219; W 3:30-6:00 PM
Much of how we approach daily life, how we conceive the activities of our day and how we respond to events, has been shaped by the literature of production. This literature has been largely ignored in the academy. We teach the newest and latest theories of production as the most efficient ways of running a company and the best changes of making money, but we dismiss the older ideas as out of date or, at times, wrong. This course considers the literature of production as a coherent body of knowledge and shows how this literature has shaped our organizations and the way that we think. It considers older workers in this literature in the same kind way that we consider classic fiction and poetry, as exemplars of their time and as building blocks for our modern approach to production. Because of this approach, the course stops substantially short of our age. The newest literature it considers comes from the late 1980s and early 1990s.


HONR 2048W:80 – Race, American Medicine, and Public Health: African-American Experiences w/ Prof. Gamble
CRN: 66977; MW 12:45-2:00 PM
This course focuses on the role of race and racism in the development of American medicine and public health by examining the experiences of African Americans from slavery to today. It will emphasize the importance of understanding the historical roots of contemporary policy dilemmas such as racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care. The course will challenge students to synthesize materials from several disciplines to gain a broad understanding of the relationship between race, medicine, and public health in the United States. Among the questions that will be addressed are: How have race and racism influenced, and continue to influence, American medicine and public health? What is race? How have concepts of race evolved? What are racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care? What is the history of these disparities? What factors have contributed to these disparities? How have African Americans, the medical and public health professions, and governmental agencies addressed disparities in health and health care? What have been the experiences of African Americans as patients and health care providers?


HONR 2053:MV – Past and Future, w/ Prof. Caws
CRN: 67224; W 11:10-1:00 PM
According to one well-known theory of time, past and future do not exist. The present is all that exists (or all that exists is in the present); the past once existed but does so no longer, the future will exist but not yet. According to a rival theory everything exists all at once and it is only our position in this totality that makes some events appear past and some future. There are problems with both of these theories, and one of the tasks of the seminar will be to look for answers to them. Past and future, however, have content and meaning far beyond academic exercises in the theory of time. They pervade our lives, which are continually in transition from the one to the other. There are many pasts, personal, familial, social, institutional, national, all the way up to galactic or cosmic, and as many futures, feared or conjectured or hoped for. People troubleshoot when the past delivers an unacceptable present, or strategize when deciding what to do now about an uncertain future. They reminisce, or they plan. How much of the past (how far back) can we recall, or recover? How much of the future (how far off) can we foresee, or prepare for? From tradition to prophecy, from historical novels to science-fiction fantasies, from the Big Bang to the eventual dissipation of the universe, there are enough puzzles and projects in this domain to keep conversation going for the rest of our lives, let alone a semester. The seminar will as always be driven, once it has gotten underway, by the interests of its members, but perhaps it will help us to find some point of reflection and understanding that will make sense of our complex relation to such a perennial topic. There is a statue of “The Future” outside the National Archives, bearing the Shakespearean inscription “the past is prologue.” Whoever chose it cannot have read Shakespeare very carefully – or maybe it represents only too accurately a particularly American attitude. In any case it is an example of how past and future penetrate public space. A good one to begin with.

Freshmen Small Group Advising [Sign up!]

The original small group.
The original small group.

It’s time again for small group meetings! Freshmen will meet with Catherine and Mark to go over the pressing matters of these hectic times.
The topics:

  • Registration and Course Selection
  • Remaining Honors requirements (Trust us, you need to hear this!)
  • Declaring your major
  • Study Abroad

Register online for the most convenient time, but hurry, spots are limited and this is mandatory!
Small groups meet the week of March 3rd (next week!).  Specific days and times are available at the online registration page.  Sign up now!

Advising without an Appointment….. and Pizza

Pizza-Wallpaper-pizza-6333801-1024-768Privileged registration is Friday, November 1st.  Are you prepared?
Meet with Catherine in Foggy Bottom for walk-in advising from 10am-4pm on Thursday (Halloween, spOOoOOoOOOoky!) and on Friday of this week.  Show up between 12-2pm on Thursday (Halloween, spOOoOOoOOOoky!) and we’ll have pizza for you too!  (Halloween pizza, taAAaAAaAAAasty!) You don’t need an appointment! Just come in!
CCAS students can get their advising holds removed by Catherine, and everyone  can get all their advising and scheduling questioned.
Don’t miss it! You don’t need an appointment, just come in.

Message From the Director: New Senior Capstone

Dear University Honors Program Students,
A month or so ago I met with a small group of UHP students for one of our semi-regular “lunch with the director” gatherings. Those students were excited when I told them about a new curricular direction for the program, and I hope you all are too. Over the past year the UHP faculty, staff, and I have decided to revamp the capstone course designed for seniors. While we recognize the value of the senior thesis or project as one key component of a capstone experience, we felt for a variety of reasons – some philosophical, some logistical — that our capstone course could and should take a new form and direction.
The new capstone course will continue the ideal of bringing UHP students together during their senior year to reflect on what they learned during their four years at GWU and what direction their future lives and careers might take. Rather than develop a single course on a single, if broad, theme, we will now offer a series of very short courses – month long mini-seminars. You need only register for one such “mini seminar” during your senior year. These mini-seminars will tackle a big theme – an “enduring question” – from whatever disciplinary perspective a faculty member might represent, or from a variety of perspectives that interest seminar participants. One goal is for you to be able to study again with a faculty member who taught you earlier in the program. Another goal is for you to have a more relaxed academic experience –to engage in intellectual discussion without the “carrot or the stick” of grading. The new capstone course will not have any written requirements or tests associated with it. While it will carry one credit, the only expectation will be that you read material assigned and come prepared for a lively, but informal, conversation with each other and with the faculty member. We are choosing themes that are broad enough to interest all of us. This fall the theme will be love; next spring it will be time. This fall, Professors Winstead, Ralkowski, and myself will offer mini-seminars; next spring, Professors Creppell and Christov will offer mini-seminars, and Professors Kung and Aviv will team-teach one. Each will meet only 4 times over the course of a month.
When registration for Fall 2013 courses appear, you will see descriptions for this fall’s offerings, and next fall the descriptions will be available for the spring offerings. We hope you find the new format enticing and that you will look forward to this component of the senior capstone experience with as much enthusiasm as we feel about it. We have a ways to go in developing our ideas between now and next fall, but with Registration Season upon us, we wanted to let you know right away of the coming change.
-Maria Frawley, Director, University Honors Program