All course descriptions posted below are for Honors College Perspectives/Colloquium/Seminar classes only. For Honors elective course descriptions, please consult the course's catalog entry at ozone.ou.edu
For information about a class's general education standing, please consult the General Education Planner at ou.edu/genplanner
NOTE: Class schedules and descriptions are subject to change
"Perspectives" is a three-credit, interdisciplinary, introductory level seminar that explores a broad issue (or issues) from different perspectives. This course is writing intensive, requiring at least 15 pages of writing per student, and includes a component wherein each student works with an Honors College writing assistant. Specific topics vary based on the professor's area of study.
Instructor: Daniel Mains
Day/Time: T/R 09:00 AM - 10:15 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: Globalizing Africa explores the relationship between economic and cultural processes associated with globalization and sub-Saharan Africa. To better understand the nature of globalization and its implications for inequality and day-to-day life, we will examine case studies dealing with topics like the marketing of soap in colonial southern Africa, conflicts over the extraction of resources in Nigeria, and African immigrants in the US. The course begins by briefly examining coffee and Ethiopia as an example of globalization in Africa. We then investigate colonialism in Africa. We will explore similarities and differences between colonialism and contemporary globalization, especially in relation to issues of exploitation and the extraction of resources from Africa. This will be followed by a series of readings related to consumption and movements of culture between Africa and the rest of the world. We will give particular attention to the importance of cloth and clothing to understand how identity is constructed within a context of globalization. The third section examines global movements of people, especially between Africa, France, and United States. This course fulfills requirements for an Honors Perspectives course and Gen Ed Humanities World Culture.
Instructor: Marie Dallam
Day/Time: MWF 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: This course considers religion in conjunction with aspects of American statehood, broadly conceived, and will emphasize the myriad nuances of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. How have Americans understood their identity as citizens in relation to their religious identity? What have they believed about how issues of national concern should reflect particular religious ideals? What does “freedom of religion” really mean, practically and legally, historically and today? In what ways does the First Amendment shape the answers to these questions? With these questions in mind, we will explore topics including:
• Who we are as a nation: Puritan theocratic intentions; the Founding Fathers and the documents they authored; the religious lives of American presidents; conflicts of citizenship rights and religious belief; religious ideals in wartime.
• How we think about American behavior: first amendment cases on issues such as religion in public schools, “illegal” religious ceremonies, the public display of religious symbols, religious rights in the workplace, personal religious identity, censorship, and many others. No prior knowledge of religious history or First Amendment issues is necessary; the course is geared toward beginners in these areas.
Instructor: David S. Song
Day/Time: TR 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214
Description: This course introduces students to Asian American Studies, as the product of an intellectual and political movement that emerged in response to racism in the United States and American imperialism abroad. Learning through a mix of contemporary research, current issues, and primary historical sources will provide an insightful lens into this field of study, which will allow students to access perspectives that are largely underrepresented in the university. This course is designed so that students with no prior knowledge of Asian American studies will be able to take this class, gaining an appreciation for the selected texts and subject matter. This class attends to “Asian American” issues, as well as shows how the presence of Asian peoples in America (and in Asia) is fundamental to how people understand themselves as American, Afro-American, Chicanx and Latinx, Indigenous and Native, Pacific Islander, and White subjects.
Instructor: Ralph R. Hamerla
Day/Time: T/R 7:30 AM - 8:45 AM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 180
Description: I want to change the way you think about science! Most of us accept science and scientific knowledge as a privileged form of understanding with powerful implications for the way we live. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with such a view, BUT I want you to enable you to think more critically, or more analytically, about the creation of scientific knowledge, the operation of scientific institutions, and the culture of science in general. To do this we will read a number of books and articles that examine the nature of the scientific enterprise locally, nationally, and globally over time. This literature focuses on science as an evolving and contingent body of knowledge, as a dynamic and powerful way to explore the world, as a professional community, as a culture with its own idiosyncratic conventions, and as a contested source and object of political power.
Instructor: Sarah W. Tracy
Day/Time: TR 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214
Description: What makes a good scientist? What makes an interesting life? What makes a good biography? In “Lives in Science” students will explore both the history of biography and the history of science, considering how the life and biomedical sciences have changed over the previous hundred and fifty years and how the criteria for a “good biography” have likewise evolved. Once derided by social historians for the telling the “exceptional stories of exceptional men,” biography today seeks to tell larger stories about the political, social, economic, contexts in which one life – not necessarily a famous one –was led. The life of Charles Darwin, for example, can tell us much not only about the nature of natural history, but also about the relationship between religion and science, the career options and gender expectations of the British middle class, and the colonial enterprise in nineteenth-century Britain.
Students in this course will be asked to read a selection of important scientific and medical biographies as well as essays and monographs on the evolution of biography and the nature of writing biography. Like any historian or storyteller, biographers must make decisions about which aspects of their subjects’ lives are important and which are trivial. Writers of biography also wrestle with the ethical issues posed by examining both the professional and personal milestones of their subjects; and biographers often have to deal with their subjects’ living family members and intellectual descendents. Writing the lives of those still living presents still more opportunities and challenges. Participants in this class will address these issues and others as they explore what makes a good scientific biography, and as they conduct research on a scientist or physician of their choosing.
Instructor: Amanda G. Minks and Robert B. Scafe
Day/Time: TR 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 180
Description: This course examines social, aesthetic, and scientific debates about music and the sonic environment. Students will be asked to tune into the music, sounds, and noises of their daily lives, and to write about how their experience is shaped by the “soundscape” in ways that often go unnoticed. We will examine the relations among music, sound, and noise in three contexts: environmental soundscapes, mediated music, and acoustics in the built environment. These contexts show how music, sound, and noise are cultural constructions rather than fixed entities, and they can be used intentionally to foster desired effects. The course draws on multidisciplinary perspectives from the humanities to the social sciences and architectural sciences, helping students understand different paradigms and develop mixed methods for researching complex social phenomena. The students’ final project will contribute to a long-term research project in architectural acoustics led by the OU Construction Science professor Dr. Kofi Asare.
American Gangster
Instructor: Catherine R. Mintler
Day/Time: MWF 9:00 AM - 9:50 AM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: An iconic figure in American history and popular culture, the gangster has achieved an almost mythic stature. American culture has so long romanticized both historical gangsters and fictional gangsters that their notoriety and, at times, cultish popularity renders them protagonists and even heroes in the shared narrative we call the American Dream. Unlike the outlaw, a regional criminal embraced by folklore, the gangster is a product of modernity and the modern imagination that emerges from urban, ethnic, and immigrant subcultures. Yet the arc of the gangster’s life and death alludes to classical myth and tragedy. Throughout the 20th century and beyond, the gangster figure continues to influence popular culture, most notably Rap artists, who use certain aspects of gangster culture, gender identity, style, and language to criticize poverty, violence, and racial discrimination. As we explore the gangster as celebrity figure and cultural trope, tracing its evolution and echoes throughout film, literature, and music, we will try to uncover the sources of America’s romanticized fascination with gangsters and gangster culture. Is the root of our national fascination with gangsters and gangster culture—with what defines the American Gangster as American—hidden in the paradoxes, contradictions, and prejudices that comprise American identity?
21st Century Great Gatsby
Instructor: Catherrine R. Mintler
Day/Time: MWF 11:00 AM- 11:50 AM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: Even before The Great Gatsby entered the public domain on January 1, 2021, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel has influenced literature, film, and music, resulting in adaptations, imitations, spin-offs, and new work by contemporary novelists, filmmakers, musicians, and fandoms. We will engage with adaptive reimaginings of the original novel in contemporary media to make sense of the irony of how and why Fitzgerald’s most unpopular, least lucrative, and most disappointing novel became one of the most influential literary works of the twentieth century after his death.
Words of Fire: Exploring Multicultural Western Narratives
Instructor: Timothy G. Bradford
Day/Time: MWF 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 312
Description: Westward Expansion, pioneers, cowboys, Native Americans, gunslingers, and saloons are familiar, almost stereotypical elements of American western narratives, but how do these narratives change when complicated by multicultural perspectives such as those from Latine cowboys, Exodusters, Chinese railroad workers, Cherokee Freedmen, and African American feminists? In other words, how do diverse cultural narratives related to the frontier and western literature transform our perceptions of the American west and approaches to learning about the same from its conception to present day? This course gives us a chance to ask and answer this question via historical, anthropological, and literary texts as well as by having the option to attend and volunteer at the 2025 Western Literature Association Conference in September in Oklahoma City, where students can experience an academic conference in person while helping to make it happen. Optional pre- and post-conference volunteer and field work ranging from promotional and documentary efforts will also be available, as will the opportunity to meet and talk with scholars in this field. Potential topics in this course include oral traditions and narratives, multicultural perspectives in western literature, Indigenous Oklahoma, multiculturalism in the Archives, literary responses to historical and contemporary issues in Oklahoma, black feminist thought and stories of the American west, representations of resilience and community in western fiction and drama, Latine/Latinx narratives, the role of environmental and social justice in western literature, and others.
From Spirituals to Hip-Hop
Instructor: Timothy G. Bradford
Day/Time: T/TH 1:30 PM - 2:45PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: Spirituals, work songs, blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, and hip-hop: African Americans have created some of the most vibrant and influential musical genres in the world. How did a relatively small group of people, who started in such difficult circumstances, use music to survive, innovate, and even thrive in a country that was, and in ways remains, indifferent if not hostile? How did these music forms become so influential and popular? And what can we learn about African American and American history and culture by examining these music forms? With these questions in mind, we’ll explore this music and related literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century with an emphasis on their roles in survival, identity, pride, leadership, and innovation. Excerpts from Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, Kevin Young’s The Grey Album, and Tricia Rose’s Black Noise, various documentaries, and our own Spotify playlists will serve as the main texts for the course and as inspiration for asking great questions that we will attempt to answer through our listening, reading, research, and writing.
Gender and Justice
Instructor: Eric E. Bosse
Day/Time: T/TH 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 312
Description: How do gender and justice intersect in contemporary society? This honors perspectives course examines the complex relationships between gender identities, social structures, and systems of power. Students will explore how intersectionality—the overlapping of gender with race, class, sexuality, ability, and other aspects of identity—shapes lived experiences and access to justice. The course investigates feminist and womanist thought, transgender rights, and the experiences of gender-nonconforming individuals within societal frameworks that both enable and constrain. Through critical analysis of laws, policies, and institutional practices, students will develop sophisticated understandings of how gender justice operates across multiple domains. We will examine the ways individuals and communities resist oppression, advocate for change, and reimagine more equitable futures. This interdisciplinary exploration draws from gender studies, legal theory, political philosophy, sociology, and activist narratives to foster nuanced perspectives on how gender shapes—and is shaped by—our social, political, and cultural landscape.
Speaking Truth to Power
Instructor: Eric E. Bosse
Day/Time: MWF 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 312
Description: This honors perspectives course examines the intellectual foundations, rhetorical strategies, and historical impact of dissent and truth-telling in confronting injustice and challenging established power structures. Students will explore theoretical frameworks for understanding power dynamics before analyzing how institutions maintain and legitimize systems of privilege and oppression. The course investigates truth-telling as both ethical imperative and strategic practice across various social movements and historical contexts. Students will examine the rhetoric of resistance, the evolution of protest methodologies, and the complex relationship between bearing witness to injustice and creating social change. We will analyze the conditions under which speaking truth to power succeeds or fails, and the mechanisms through which established systems respond to challenges. This interdisciplinary exploration draws from social movement theory, political philosophy, media studies, rhetoric, history, and sociology to foster sophisticated understandings of how truth functions as a catalyst for justice. Throughout, we will investigate a central question: What makes confronting power with truth not just morally significant but potentially transformative in reshaping social structures?
Creativity: Gutenberg to GPT
Instructor: Nick LoLordo
Day/Time: MWF 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: Human artistic practices have been undergoing continual technological reinvention since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. This course is an experiment to test a hypothesis: that the age of print culture (recently dubbed the “Gutenberg Parenthesis”) is over. The meteoric rise of generative AI since late 2022 has brought the digital creation of words, images, and video to anyone with a networked computer, affecting seemingly every genre of cultural production. Our readings and discussions will revolve around a group of linked questions: Has the age of writing come to an end, or will this new technology liberate human creativity? What can key historical episodes teach us about the relationship between productivity and creativity; between technology and selfhood? And what sort of things might we still want to make ourselves? From Gutenberg to GPT, a span of almost 600 years—what next?
Boom to Zoom: Generation Gaps
Instructor: Nick LoLordo
Day/Time: MWF 12:00 PM - 12:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214
Description: Mythologizing a “Lost Generation” after WW I, mining data to build the collective identity constructs of today, for more than a century the American media has imagined our history in generational terms. And it has labelled those generations with language ranging from the resonant to the generic—Lost, Silent, Greatest, Millennial, X, Z, and, last but certainly not least, the much-reviled, still-dominant Boomers. Your cynical, flannel-clad Gen X professor (jk) will guide our tour of this landscape, exploring a variety of cultural forms, non-fictional and fictional alike. We’ll range from data-driven predictions to psychological explorations, from fiction to pop music, from movies to memes, considering how all these texts represent and enact collective struggles over power, wealth and opportunity. What might the lens of generational analysis show us about the true nature of an increasingly unequal society—& what might it obscure?
Space Invaders
Instructor: Anna K. Trevino
Day/Time: MWF 9:00 AM - 9:50 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214
Description: Sheehy and Leander (2004), in Spatializing Literacy Research and Practice, define space as a product and process of shifting relationships. Understanding space as a relationship rather than as a static or empty place or thing allows us to examine not only how we are all implicated in the process of creating spaces, but also the socio-cultural practices and processes that currently define and/or restrict what is possible for, real to, and experienced by people. In this honors perspectives class, we will explore concepts that determine and fill space, including but are not limited to investigations of boundaries/borders (us/them, here/there, either/or binaries), hybridity (both/and), access (who gets to go where), agency (who gets to make and enforce decisions), literacy, and identity (race, gender, social class, and so on).
Latine Music and Superstardom
Instructor: Anna K. Trevino
Day/Time: MWF 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214
Description: In this honors perspectives class, we will explore Latine artists' rising influence in the American music scene and we will consider what it takes to be a music superstar in an increasingly boundaryless world full of global consumption. We will deconstruct and celebrate the genre of Latine music and question its politics. As a result, we will also explore concepts such as race/ethnicity, colorism, cultural appropriation, linguistic privilege and prejudice, colonialism, sexism and other related topics. With the complexity of those concepts in mind, ultimately, we will seek an answer to whether or not Latine music artists can be considered global superstars, and if so, at what costs?
The Child in World Cinema
Instructor: Vicki Sturtevant
Day/Time: MWF 12:00 AM - 12:50 AM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: This course examines the figure of the child in global cinema, using examples from many national contexts to consider questions of how pre-adolescent childhood is both a protected status within diverse cultures, and a wild, imperfectly socialized time of human potential. A figure of both the past (the filmmaker’s remembered childhood) and the future (new generations who will face the consequences of today’s decisions), cinematic children often crystallize a community’s fears, hopes, and social fractures, particularly in times of change or upheaval. Specific films will include Pan's Labyrinth (Spain), Children of Heaven (Iran), ET (US), Whale Rider (New Zealand), Okja (Korea), Pelo Malo (Venezuela), and more.
Interpersonal Communication
Instructor: Elena Bessarabova
Day/Time: T/Th 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: This course surveys theory and research related to interpersonal communication, with a focus on effectively managing interpersonal relationships. The course format includes lectures, group discussions, experiential activities, and written assignments that require active student involvement. It is an interdisciplinary course that integrates literature from Communication, Psychology, Sociology, Biology, Management Studies, and Neuroscience.
The "Colloquium" is a three-credit, interdisciplinary, discussion-based advanced seminar on a specialized topic, and is best suited for juniors and seniors. The colloquium is writing intensive, requiring approximately 30 pages of writing per student, and the assignments will also involve library research. Topics vary based on the professor's area of study.
World War I
Instructor: Ralph R. Hamerla
Day/Time: T/R 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 180
Description: In this class we study, in depth, World War I (1914-1918). It was a cataclysm that tore Europe apart, resulted in the death of millions, led to total collapse of the existing European order, and reshaped the entire world generally. It led to the rise of Communism in Russia, laid the foundations for the post-war growth of Fascism across much of the continent, was the death knell of the colonialism, and it catapulted the United States into the status of a major world power. It also planted the seeds of the Second World War that, in another sense, laid the foundation for the Cold War. In short, the Great War set the stage for the Twentieth Century.
Instructor: Daniel Mains
Day/Time: TR 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: Much of our lives are devoted to consumption through shopping, earning money to consume, and interacting with the things we have purchased. These activities are inseparable from broader social inequalities and the formation of identities. This course examines the relationship between consumption, identity, and inequality in a global context. The course is organized around three key questions: What are the implications of the commoditization of people and things in different cultural contexts? What is the role of consumption in forming identities, reinforcing or subverting social hierarchies, and promoting fairness? How are consumer practices and associated inequalities shaped by globalization? This course fulfills requirements for Gen Ed Social Science and Honors Colloquium.
Instructor: Amanda G. Minks
Day/Time: TR 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: How do engineers communicate in a global corporation? How do medical professionals use language to examine their patients? How do office workers negotiate power and politeness through small talk and meetings? This course will help students understand talk in interaction across a range of work contexts. By approaching talk as a practice and achievement, students will also develop their skills in using language for their own professional purposes.
Instructor: Sarah W. Tracy
Day/Time: T/R 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 180
Description: Does the discovery of new drugs drive the definition of disease? Is addiction a disease, a moral failing, an artifact of consumer society? Why are some drugs legal and others illegal? “Psychoactive Substances in American Culture” is a course designed to introduce students from any background to the issue of drug use in America – from chocolate to marijuana. The starting point for this course will be the realization that popular images of alcohol and drugs, government policy on the same, and expert opinions on drinking and drug use, comprise important barometers of social change in America. This spring, for the first time, we will also explore American drug policy with a comparative perspective on drug problems and policy in Europe. Students will examine the use of licit and illicit drugs from historical, economic, anthropological, sociological, and personal viewpoints. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which the market economy and global and national politics have affected competing visions of drugs, their users, and their regulation.
Wolves of Wall Street
Instructor: Catherine R. Mintler
Day/Time: MWF 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: This course considers Wall Street historically, metaphorically, and as a construct of the American cultural imagination. The signing of the 1792 Buttonwood Agreement that led to the emergence of the New York Stock Exchange establishes Wall Street as the economic trading center of the newly independent thirteen colonies, setting in motion the almost relentless focus on the tenets of economic prosperity and social class mobility at the core of the American Dream. Challenges to Wall Street emerge as early as Herman Melville’s 1853 novella “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” a critique that returns in 2011 in the Occupy Wall Street Movement protests. Historically seismic financial events like the 1921 burning of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street suggest how the veneration of Wall Street restricted which Americans had a right to wealth and to the name “Wall Street.” Lastly, throughout the semester, we will encounter historical and fictional “wolves”—from Alexander Hamilton to Gordon Gecko to Jordan Belfort—to dissect the wolf metaphor that have always informed cultural narratives about Wall Street,
Welcome to the Anthropocene
Instructor: Timothy G. Bradford
Day/Time: MWF 2:00 PM - 2:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214
Description: The Anthropocene, a relatively new term for this geological epoch marked by significant human impact on the Earth, begins anywhere from 15,000 years ago to 1945, depending on your perspective. Regardless of its start, it’s clear the current human population of 7.8 billion, projected to be 9 billion by 2037, is profoundly changing the planet. For example, 24.7 million acres of forest are lost annually, an estimated twenty-four species go extinct per day, and atmospheric carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, is over 400 parts per million, the highest level in 800,000 years. How did we get here, what does this mean, and where are we headed? And what can be done to lessen our impact? Using The Climate Book and other anthologies as well as related digital media to guide us, this course will ask these and related questions that we will attempt to answer while exploring our place in the conundrum of the Anthropocene.
The Writer's Journey
Instructor: Eric E. Bosse
Day/Time: MWF 2:00 PM - 2:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: How do writers forge their artistic identities while navigating personal, political, and social challenges? This honors perspectives course examines the complex relationship between creative practice and identity formation across diverse literary traditions. Students will explore how social position, cultural context, and lived experience shape both literary expression and reception. The course investigates the material conditions of writing—the spaces, communities, and resources that enable or constrain creative work—while analyzing how writers develop distinctive voices in response to these conditions. We will examine writing as a form of resistance and imagination, considering how literary creation challenges existing power structures and opens possibilities for personal and social transformation. This interdisciplinary exploration draws primarily from literature and literary studies but also includes perspectives from sociology, psychology, creative writing pedagogy, and cultural criticism to foster complex understandings of the writer's journey. Throughout, we will consider a central question: How does the interplay between identity and craft enable writers to transform both themselves and their worlds through language?
Engendering American Genius
Instructor: Nick LoLordo
Day/Time: MWF 3:00 PM - 3:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 312
Description: What would you say if I told you that in 1935, the most famous living American writer was not somebody you read in high school, but a woman who had lived for decades in Paris creating experimental works that almost no one understood before suddenly producing a best-seller by ghost-writing the “autobiography” of her own wife? This writer was Gertrude Stein, whose career path took her from artistic avant-garde in New York City, to the literary luminaries of the Lost Generation, and ultimately to the general American public—including that of Oklahoma. In 1935 a Daily Oklahoman reporter observed that “her accent is like that of your next door neighbor…[she] prides herself on being the most ordinary American, though she is the most extraordinary woman of letters.” Down-to-earth yet larger-than-life: the reporter identifies the paradox of “American genius.” With her work as lens, we’ll consider portraiture, dramatic performance, celebrity studies, and LGBTQ+ history, examining the relation of gender, genre, and genius and exploring the complexities of modern identity from self-discovery to self-promotion. In Stein’s spirit, this course will challenge students to self-consciously explore the tension between creative inspiration and the “professional” rules of writing. Who gets to break those rules?
Students’ Right to Language
Instructor: Anna K. Trevino
Day/Time: MWF 12:00 AM - 12:50 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: In this honors colloquium we will engage notions of Standardized American English, broken English, and what is considered appropriate academic language. The course will center the 1974 statement by the Conference on College Composition and Communication on students’ right to “their own patterns and varieties of language” and will include discussions of identities (race/ethnicity, social class, gender, and so on), language and power. We will explore the relationship between identity, language, and power.
Segregated Cinema
Instructor: Vicki Sturtevant
Day/Time: MWF 2:00 PM - 2:50 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: This course will use archival newspapers, films, newsreels, maps, and other documents to examine the history of both legal and informal racial segregation of filmmaking studios, theaters, and communities in 20th century America. Specific topics will include
Deception
Instructor: Elena Bessarabova
Day/Time: T/Th 3:00 PM - 4:15 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 214
Description: Deception occurs in communication behavior across species, and lying (i.e., intentional deception) is a pervasive phenomenon in human communication. This course will explore the varieties of deceptive communication, their causes and consequences in a wide range of contexts (advertising, art, interspecies contact, family and romantic relationships, journalism, mass media, and politics), and the strategies used to detect their occurrence (behavioral cues, interrogations, integrity testing, polygraphs). The course draws from research in communication, philosophy, social psychology, biology, criminology, and neuroscience.
Any course taught by the Honors College that does not fall into the Perspectives or Colloquium sections will be covered below. These courses count toward your nine hours of Honors elective credit.
These courses count toward your nine hours of Honors elective credit. Check each individual description for how many credit hours each class is worth.
Instructor: Heather R. Ketchum
Day/Time: W 5- 7:40 PM
Building/Room: Dale Hall 103
Description: In partnership with the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the Honors College offers an opportunity for first-year Honors students to participate in laboratory research. This course, the Honors First-Year Research Experience (FYRE) is open to Honors College students from all majors. Through a competitive application process, students are matched with ongoing research projects led by OU professors in numerous disciplines. Selected students will participate in active laboratory research for 8-10 hours per week, culminating in a poster presentation and awards ceremony. The application process occurs in the fall semester, and the research work occurs in the spring semester. Students earn 3 hours of Honors credit for successful completion of the course.
Instructor: Brian Johnson
Day/Time: T/R 12:00 -1:15 pm
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 201
Description: What is good writing? How can we develop our writing skills? What struggles do intelligent students have to contend with when they are required to write essays? How can we be of service to others as they seek to express themselves through the written word? In "HON 3970: Writing Workshop," we will address these questions and more! Additionally, Writing Workshop will help you refine your own writing practices and will prepare you for work in the Honors College Writing Center
**Class requires additional permissions
Students wishing to graduate with Honors will need to complete nine hours of elective credit.
If there is not an elective course listed that fits your schedule, or your major does not allow for the felxibility required to complete nine hours of Honors electives, you may contract a non-Honors course for Honors credit. The form can be downloaded from our Honors Forms page.
If you have questions, please contact the Honors College main office (405) 325-5291 or make an appointment with an Honors College academic advisor at iadvise.ou.edu
All course descriptions posted below are for Honors College Perspectives/Colloquium/Seminar classes only. For Honors elective course descriptions, please consult the course's catalog entry at ozone.ou.edu
For information about a class's general education standing, please consult the General Education Planner at ou.edu/genplanner
NOTE: Class schedules and descriptions are subject to change
"Perspectives" is a three-credit, interdisciplinary, introductory level seminar that explores a broad issue (or issues) from different perspectives. This course is writing intensive, requiring at least 15 pages of writing per student, and includes a component wherein each student works with an Honors College writing assistant. Specific topics vary based on the professor's area of study.
Black Music International
Day/Time: T/R 10:30-11:45 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 214
Description: Critic Wesley Morris writes in his essay on the national and international influence of Black music, “If freedom’s ringing, who on Earth wouldn’t also want to rock the bell?” This course will begin with an overview of the American musical genres created primarily by African Americans–spirituals, work songs, blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, and hip-hop. It will then turn its attention to the ways in which many of these genres have been adopted and adapted by non-Western cultures, who incorporate their own musical aesthetics and worldviews. For example, we’ll consider how jazz has influenced Indian classical musicians and vice versa; why American funk artist James Brown so heavily influenced Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the creator of Afrobeat music; and how hip-hop has been reimagined and deployed by Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and South American artists, as well as Indigenous peoples all over the world. (Fulfills World Culture Gen Ed)
Day/Time: T/R 1:30-2:45 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: From Plato to Carl Jung, Western cultures have a long tradition of attempting to define and understand the familiar yet enigmatic and problematic phenomenon of self. After a quick overview of these attempts and some of their conclusions, this course will turn its attention to the same efforts in select Asian cultures to explore how different world views and approaches yield radically different perspectives. We will read Taoist, Confucian, Hindu, and Buddhist texts and commentaries, explore related shamanic practices, and read contemporary takes on these traditions and their findings too. Some light field research and non-denominational meditation practice (both moving and static) will also inform our inquiries. (Fulfills World Culture Gen Ed)
Instructor: Nick LoLordo
Day/Time: M/W/F 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: Mythologizing a “Lost Generation” after WW I, mining data to build the collective identity constructs of today, for more than a century the American media has imagined our history in generational terms. And it has labelled those generations with language ranging from the resonant to the generic—Lost, Silent, Greatest; X, Z, A, and, of course the much-reviled, still-dominant Boomers. Your cynical, flannel-clad Gen X professor (jk) will guide our tour of this landscape, exploring a variety of cultural forms, non-fictional and fictional alike. We’ll range from data-driven predictions to psychological explorations, from fiction to pop music, from movies to memes, considering how all these texts represent and enact collective struggles over power, wealth and opportunity. What might the lens of generational analysis show us about the true nature of an increasingly unequal society—& what might it obscure?
Instructor: Nick LoLordo
Day/Time: MWF 12:00-12:50 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: In this course, we’ll move from classical bards to beat poets, from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe to the Instagram poets of today, from orality to print and back again. Considering the relationships between page and stage, speech and music, poem and oratory, and tracing a history of poetry’s connection to the human voice and body, we’ll explore the past to inform our thinking about how and why poetry matters now.
Instructor: Catherine Mintler
Day/Time: MWF 9:00-9:50 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 214
Description: On January 1, 1818, one of the most disturbing works of literary merit written in English, an early work of science fiction that blended elements of eighteenth-century Gothic and early-nineteenth-century Romanticism, was published anonymously in London, England. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. When the second edition was issued in Paris two years later in 1820, the literary world learned that the identity of the author, Mary Shelley, the daughter of early feminist philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft. The novel, already a literary sensation, and over 200 years later one of the most read and adapted works of gothic horror, was considered even more phenomenal when the world learned that Shelly had begun writing it at the age of 18.
Instructor: Catherine Mintler
Day/Time: M/W/F 1:00 - 1:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 214
Description: An iconic figure in American history and popular culture, the gangster has achieved an almost mythic stature. American culture has so long romanticized both historical gangsters and fictional gangsters that their notoriety and, at times, cultish popularity renders them protagonists and even heroes in the shared narrative we call the American Dream. Unlike the outlaw, a regional criminal embraced by folklore, the gangster is a product of modernity and the modern imagination that emerges from urban, ethnic, and immigrant subcultures. Yet the arc of the gangster’s life and death alludes to classical myth and tragedy. Throughout the 20th century and beyond, the gangster figure continues to influence popular culture, most notably Rap artists, who use certain aspects of gangster culture, gender identity, style, and language to criticize poverty, violence, and racial discrimination. As we explore the gangster as celebrity figure and cultural trope, tracing its evolution and echoes throughout film, literature, and music, we will try to uncover the sources of America’s romanticized fascination with gangsters and gangster culture. Is the root of our national fascination with gangsters and gangster culture—with what defines the American Gangster as American—hidden in the paradoxes, contradictions, and prejudices that comprise American identity?
Instructor: Eric Bosse
Day/Time: MWF 11:00-11:50 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 214
Description: How do gender and justice intersect in contemporary society? This honors perspectives course examines the complex relationships between gender identities, social structures, and systems of power. Students will explore how intersectionality—the overlapping of gender with race, class, sexuality, ability, and other aspects of identity—shapes lived experiences and access to justice. The course investigates feminist and womanist thought, transgender rights, and the experiences of gender-nonconforming individuals within societal frameworks that both enable and constrain. Through critical analysis of laws, policies, and institutional practices, students will develop sophisticated understandings of how gender justice operates across multiple domains. We will examine the ways individuals and communities resist oppression, advocate for change, and reimagine more equitable futures. This interdisciplinary exploration draws from gender studies, legal theory, political philosophy, sociology, and activist narratives to foster nuanced perspectives on how gender shapes—and is shaped by—our social, political, and cultural landscape.
Instructor: Eric Bosse
Day/Time: MWF 1:00-1:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 312
Description: This honors perspectives course examines the intellectual foundations, rhetorical strategies, and historical impact of dissent and truth-telling in confronting injustice and challenging established power structures. Students will explore theoretical frameworks for understanding power dynamics before analyzing how institutions maintain and legitimize systems of privilege and oppression. The course investigates truth-telling as both ethical imperative and strategic practice across various social movements and historical contexts. Students will examine the rhetoric of resistance, the evolution of protest methodologies, and the complex relationship between bearing witness to injustice and creating social change. We will analyze the conditions under which speaking truth to power succeeds or fails, and the mechanisms through which established systems respond to challenges. This interdisciplinary exploration draws from social movement theory, political philosophy, media studies, rhetoric, history, and sociology to foster sophisticated understandings of how truth functions as a catalyst for justice. Throughout, we will investigate a central question: What makes confronting power with truth not just morally significant but potentially transformative in reshaping social structures?
Child in World Cinema
Instructor: Victoria Sturtevant
Day/Time: MWF 12:00-12:50 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 180
Description: This course examines the figure of the child in global cinema, using examples from many eras and national contexts. Many of the most celebrated filmmakers working today (Guillermo del Toro, Stephen Spielberg, Bong Joon Ho, Jafar Panahi, Celine Sciamma, Sean Baker, and so many more) have made at least one film considering the world from a child's vantage point. This course asks how these storytellers have captured the complicated subjectivity of children and what these films have to teach us about a society's ethical responsibilities to present and future kids. Across nations and decades, cinematic children often crystallize a community’s fears, hopes, and projections, particularly in times of change or upheaval.
Instructor: Elena Bessarabova
Day/Time: T/R 12:00-1:15 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: This course surveys theory and research related to interpersonal communication, with a focus on effectively managing interpersonal relationships. The course format includes lectures, group discussions, experiential activities, and written assignments that require active student involvement. It is an interdisciplinary course that integrates literature from Communication, Psychology, Sociology, Biology, Management Studies, and Neuroscience.
The "Colloquium" is a three-credit, interdisciplinary, discussion-based advanced seminar on a specialized topic, and is best suited for juniors and seniors. The colloquium is writing intensive, requiring approximately 30 pages of writing per student, and the assignments will also involve library research. Topics vary based on the professor's area of study.
Wolves of Wall Street
Instructor: Catherine Mintler
Day/Time: MWF 11:00-11:50 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 101
Description: This course considers Wall Street historically, metaphorically, and as a construct of the American cultural imagination. The signing of the 1792 Buttonwood Agreement that led to the emergence of the New York Stock Exchange establishes Wall Street as the economic trading center of the newly independent thirteen colonies, setting in motion the almost relentless focus on the tenets of economic prosperity and social class mobility at the core of the American Dream. Challenges to Wall Street emerge as early as Herman Melville’s 1853 novella “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” a critique that returns in 2011 in the Occupy Wall Street Movement protests. Historically seismic financial events like the 1921 burning of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street suggest how the veneration of Wall Street restricted which Americans had a right to wealth and to the name “Wall Street.” Lastly, throughout the semester, we will encounter historical and fictional “wolves”—from Alexander Hamilton to Gordon Gecko to Jordan Belfort—to dissect the wolf metaphor that have always informed cultural narratives about Wall Street.
Instructor: Andreana Prichard
Day/Time: T/R 10:30-11:45 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center one RM 312
Description: This course explores oral sources—sometimes described as “the heritage of the ears”—as vital tools for reconstructing Africa’s past. Students will examine how oral traditions, storytelling, and memory serve as historical records, while also considering the challenges and opportunities they present for understanding African societies, cultures, and identities.
Instructor: Marie Dallam
Day/Time: M 5:00-7:40 PM
Building/Room: Prison
Description: In this course we will be examining a range of issues and ethical questions that stem from death and dying. These issues include grieving processes, scientific measures of death, philosophical definitions of death, physical aspects of death and options for body disposal, interpretations of suicide, and artistic expressions about death, among others.
Instructor: Nick LoLordo
Day/Time: MWF 3:00-3:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 101
Description: What would you say if I told you that in 1935, the most famous living American writer was not somebody you read in high school, but a woman who had lived for decades in Paris creating experimental works that almost no one understood before suddenly producing a best-seller by ghost-writing the “autobiography” of her own wife? This writer was Gertrude Stein, whose career path took her from artistic avant-garde in New York City, to the literary luminaries of the Lost Generation, and ultimately to the general American public. In 1935 a Daily Oklahoman reporter observed that “her accent is like that of your next door neighbor…[she] prides herself on being the most ordinary American, though she is the most extraordinary woman of letters.” Down-to-earth yet larger-than-life: the reporter identifies the paradox of “American genius.” With Stein’s work as lens, we’ll consider portraiture, dramatic performance, celebrity studies, and more, examining the relation between genre and genius and exploring the complexities of modern identity from self-discovery to self-promotion.
Instructor: Anna Treviño
Day/Time: MWF12:00-12:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 101
Description: In this course, we’ll tackle one of life’s biggest questions—what does it mean to be human?—through five unforgettable novels that dive into the emotional, political, and often surreal experiences of people pushed to their limits. You’ll read about haunted minds, divided countries, generational trauma, and otherworldly encounters that force us to reconsider what truly defines us.
Punching Up: Horror and Satire
Instructor: Eric Bosse
Day/Time: MWF 2:00-2:50 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 312
Description: How do terror and ridicule become tools for the same job? This Honors Colloquium explores horror and satire as twin modes of transgressive critique that challenge power through different but related strategies. Students will investigate how both genres function as weapons of resistance, using distortion and defamiliarization to expose uncomfortable truths about authority and inequality. From gothic monsters embodying class anxieties to satirical grotesques skewering elites, we'll trace how artists deploy shock and ridicule to punch up at those in power. Through interdisciplinary analysis drawing from literary theory, film studies, and cultural criticism, students will develop frameworks for understanding how transgressive art creates social catharsis while challenging dominant structures.
Instructor: David Song
Day/Time: T/R 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 312
Description: This course is a review of anthropological and sociological scholarship, published within the last decade, on contemporary Asian American communities, broadly defined as immigrants and refugees from the continent of Asia, including the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Who are these communities? What are their cultural, economic, and political concerns and agendas? How are they shaped and how do they shape themselves in relation to social conditions and forces such as race and racism, assimilation, the formal education system, urban and suburban space, class mobility, and capitalism and political economy? Readings in this course will especially privilege ethnographic and interview-based methods, and will appeal to students interested in ethnic studies and the humanistic social sciences. Readings in the course will also give attention to communities and populations sometimes marginalized within the category of "Asian America," including refugees; undocumented migrants; and South Asians, Southeast Asians, and West Asians. Students will also read a number of "classic" sociology readings that allow them to think and engage with readings through a sociological lens. Key concepts relevant to this course include: ethnicity, migration, race and racialization, social class, and social mobility.
Instructor: Victoria Sturtevant
Day/Time: MWF 10:00-10:50 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 312
Description: The term "ecocinema" refers to films that deal in some way with the relationship between humans and the natural environment. This course will consider examples of ecocinema across decades, nations, and genres, including documentary, science fiction, comedy, horror, action/adventure, animation, and children's cinema. We will examine how these films frame nature, humans, and animals in ethical relation to each other, how they address contemporary issues of climate change and environmental activism, and how they construct imagined futures in the form of eco-utopias and dystopias.
The Great War & 20th Century
Instructor: Rich Hamerla
Day/Time: T/R 9:00-10:15 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 101
Description: In this class we study, in depth, the Great War (1914-1918), or what most remember today as World War I or the First World War. It was a cataclysm that tore Europe apart, resulted in the death of millions, led to total collapse of the existing European order, and reshaped the entire world generally. It led to the rise of Communism in Russia, laid the foundations for the post-war growth of Fascism across much of the continent, was the death knell of colonialism, and it catapulted the United States into the status of a major world power. It also planted the seeds of the Second World War that, in another sense, laid the foundation for the Cold War. In short, the Great War set the stage for the Twentieth Century.
Global South Environmentalism
Instructor: Timothy Bradford
Day/Time: T/R 3:00-4:15 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: The current human population of over 8 billion, projected to be 9 billion by 2040, is profoundly changing the planet and putting unprecedented strain on all resources. While the world’s financial wealth and resource usage are concentrated primarily in the Global North, these unprecedented environmental and socio-economic strains are being particularly felt in the Global South (Latin American and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, with some exceptions). This course will explore this problem and related solutions from the perspective of the Global South, especially non-Western and Indigenous cultures, through the works of various writers, artists, activists, officials, and scientists, as well as through the research and actions of groups such as the Centre for Science and Environment in India, the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, and the Green Belt Movement in Kenya. (Fulfills World Culture Gen Ed)
Indigenous Collections & Comms
Instructor: Amanda Minks
Day/Time: T/R 10:30-11:45 AM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 101
Description: From the age of colonial exploration to the digital age, Indigenous cultural materials have been added to collections in private homes, museums, and libraries. This course traces the cultural contexts of Indigenous collections in a variety of places around the world, including the U.S., Latin America, and Oceania (Pacific islands). We will visit nearby archives and museums in person, and students will learn about movements of repatriation and digital return that reconnect Indigenous collections to communities. For the final project, students will conduct research using online digital collections of archival or museum objects, as well as studying their cultural significance.
Deception
Instructor: Elena Bessarabova
Day/Time: T/R 3:00-4:15 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 312
Description: Deception occurs in communication behavior across species, and lying (i.e., intentional deception) is a pervasive phenomenon in human communication. This course will explore the varieties of deceptive communication, their causes and consequences in a wide range of contexts (advertising, art, interspecies contact, family and romantic relationships, journalism, mass media, and politics), and the strategies used to detect their occurrence (behavioral cues, interrogations, integrity testing, polygraphs). The course draws from research in communication, philosophy, social psychology, biology, criminology, and neuroscience.
Any course taught by the Honors College that does not fall into the Perspectives or Colloquium sections will be covered below. These courses count toward your nine hours of Honors elective credit.
These courses count toward your nine hours of Honors elective credit. Check each individual description for how many credit hours each class is worth.
Instructor: Christina Bourne and Javeed Kittur
Day/Time: T 5:00-7:40 PM
Building/Room: Dale Hall 218
Description: In partnership with the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the Honors College offers an opportunity for first-year Honors students to participate in laboratory research. This course, the Honors First-Year Research Experience (FYRE) is open to Honors College students from all majors. Through a competitive application process, students are matched with ongoing research projects led by OU professors in numerous disciplines. Selected students will participate in active laboratory research for 8-10 hours per week, culminating in a poster presentation and awards ceremony. The application process occurs in the fall semester, and the research work occurs in the spring semester. Students earn 3 hours of Honors credit for successful completion of the course.
Outdoor Leadership Training
Instructor: Dan Mains and Andreana Prichard
Day/Time: M 7:00-8:00 PM
Building/Room: David L. Boren Hall RM 182
Description: Students learn to lead others in challenging situations, use backpacking equipment, administer wilderness first aid, and plan meals and routes for a multi-day backpacking trip. All these skills are necessary to lead students through difficult situations and help them to work together as a group.
Instructor: Brian Johnson
Day/Time: T/R 1:30 -2:45 pm
Building/Room: Cate Center One RM 101
Description: What is good writing? How can we develop our writing skills? What struggles do intelligent students have to contend with when they are required to write essays? How can we be of service to others as they seek to express themselves through the written word? In "HON 3970: Writing Workshop," we will address these questions and more! Additionally, Writing Workshop will help you refine your own writing practices and will prepare you for work in the Honors College Writing Center
**Class requires additional permissions
Students wishing to graduate with Honors will need to complete nine hours of elective credit.
If there is not an elective course listed that fits your schedule, or your major does not allow for the felxibility required to complete nine hours of Honors electives, you may contract a non-Honors course for Honors credit. The form can be downloaded from our Honors Forms page.
If you have questions, please contact the Honors College main office (405) 325-5291 or make an appointment with an Honors College academic advisor at iadvise.ou.edu
