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.
Day/Time: TR 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM
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Description: This course explores the ethical, moral, and existential consequences of human creation through Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, alongside provocative short fiction. Through close reading and comparative analysis, students examine motifs such as obsession, empathy, control, and systemic inequity while considering how Gothic and speculative genres shape moral inquiry. Tracing a path from Romantic ambition to contemporary anxieties about AI and biotechnology, the course challenges students to grapple with the unsettling consequences of human innovation.
Sport in Africa
Instructor: Andreana Prichard
Day/Time: TR 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
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Description: Historians, social commentators, politicians, and “ordinary” citizens have long recognized that sports are “not just a game.” They reflect a society’s preoccupations and can be used as an entrée into the study of social, political, and cultural history. We will look at sports indigenous to Africa and global sports that Africans indigenized; at sport as a form of social control and as a site of resistance; and at the way that African and Western athletes have used sport as a form of activism for social change. In other words, this class will not focus on the outcome of particular sporting events or the performance of particular athletes on the field; we will not be rehashing the greatest games or the plays that netted the best goals. Rather, this class uses sport as a lens through which to learn about Africa and its history. Students do not need to have completed any prerequisites in African Studies or to be athletes; they only need to be open to the power of sport to teach us about the world and about ourselves.
Instructor: Marie Dallam
Day/Time: MWF 1:00 PM – 1:50 PM
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Description: This discussion-based 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: MWF 10:00 AM – 10:50 AM
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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
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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: Amanda G. Minks and Robert B. Scafe
Day/Time: TR 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
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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
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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?
Words of Fire: Exploring Multicultural Western Narratives
Instructor: Timothy G. Bradford
Day/Time: MWF 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM
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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.
American Lives
Instructor: Sarah W. Tracy
Day/Time: T/TH 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM
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Description: What makes an interesting life? What makes a good (auto)biography? In “American Lives” students will explore both the genre of biography and the history of the United States (with some reference to Oklahoma) as they consider how life in America has changed over the previous hundred and fifty years and how the criteria for a “good biography” have likewise evolved. Today, biographers seek to tell larger stories about the political, social, cultural, and economic contexts in which one life – not necessarily a human one –was led. The life of Will Rogers, for example, can tell us something about the nature of humor and of the entertainment industry in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century America, as well as indigenous politics and the politics of the Progressive Era and New Deal. The life of the racehorse “Seabiscuit” similarly offers readers much more than a glimpse into the thoroughbred racing industry during the Depression. It offers important insights into the American character. Students in this course will read a selection of important (auto)biographies and critically consider the nature, opportunities, and challenges of this style of historical writing. Their final writing project will be either an autobiography or a biography of a close friend or relative.
Speaking Truth to Power
Instructor: Eric E. Bosse
Day/Time: MWF 2:00 PM – 2:50 PM
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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?
Boom to Zoom: Generation Gaps
Instructor: Nick LoLordo
Day/Time: MWF 9:00 AM – 9:50 AM
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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, both nonfictional and fictional. 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?
Reacting to the Past
Instructor: Benjamin Alpers
Day/Time: TR 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM
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Description: This is a different kind of Perspectives course. Like other Perspectives courses, you'll be learning about ideas and the American past while developing your writing skills. But unlike other Perspectives classes, you'll be doing these things through role-playing. Reacting to the Past is an innovative pedagogy that uses role-playing to put students in the shoes of historical actors at key moments in history. This semester we'll be playing three games that concern responses to moments of profound political and social change. We'll begin with Engines of Mischief, which takes place in Manchester, England, in 1817 and 1818, a moment when (like today) new technologies are threatening people's ways of life. Characters, from various social classes, have to decide how to respond to the new age of industrialization and automation. In our second game, Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor, and the New Woman, suffragists and labor organizers converge in a New York city restaurant to debate their views with bohemians who seek personal transformations to create the new men and women of the twentieth century. Students must decide which social changes are most needed, the ideals they espouse, and the best ways to realize their goals. Finally, we'll end with a game about the 1968 student strike at Columbia University in New York City. Concerned about the Vietnam War and their largely white university's relationship with the largely Black neighborhoods in which it is located, some students occupy a number of buildings on campus. The characters in this game are Columbia students and faculty who have different attitudes toward this act of protest and the underlying issues it concerned. Among the questions this game will consider are: What is the place of the university in American life? What are the best responses to the political challenges facing Columbia University and the United States in the spring of 1968? Is students’ occupying buildings a practical way to affect change in Columbia and the nation? What should be the limits on student dissent?
Ethnicity and Race
Instructor: Davis S. Song
Day/Time: TR 9:00 AM – 10:15 AM
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Description: Just what is ethnicity? What is race? What is the relationship between the two? This course is about defining these concepts, particularly in relation to colonialism and imperialism, gender, nation, power, social class, the state, and everyday life. Such a task is necessary for addressing issues of activism and organizing, identity, inequality, oppression, and emancipation, and cultural practices such as art, literature, and student clubs. This course will confront students with addressing these questions, through various lenses of social science, ethnography, history, critical theory, and literature.
Underworld Economics
Instructor: Tassie Hirschfeld
Day/Time: MWF 2:00 PM – 2:50 PM
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Description: This class will explore how politics, economics and social relations all change when organized crime groups take over and operate legitimate businesses. Awareness of these dynamics will help students recognize and mitigate risks in their future workplaces as well as better understand the rapidly changing landscape of international political economy. The class will also provide some rudimentary methods training in white collar crime investigations and corporate due diligence research.
Infrastructure
Instructor: Peter Soppelsa
Day/Time: T/Th 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
Building/Room: Cate Center 1 RM 101
Description: Covering recent American history since 1945, this course explores how physical infrastructures such as sewers, the electrical grid, and public facilities like libraries are woven into the fabric of American society. The course responds to our oft-noted “crisis” of American infrastructure since the 1990s by encouraging students to notice, care about, and care for the infrastructures around them. We will address the vital social, environmental, health, and policy questions raised by physical infrastructures.
The Interdisciplinary Poetics of Place
Instructor: Crag Hill
Day/Time: T/Th 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
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Description: This course will introduce students to the interdisciplinary study of place through creative non-fiction, memoir, poetry, and archival research. For each class, we will also read, write, and discuss historical and contemporary poems from Oklahoma and around the world centering issues of place and belonging. The culminating project will be a personal multimodal memoir of the place that students feel most grounded in, interwoven with critical responses to the readings we have engaged in together.
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.
The Great War
Instructor: Ralph R. Hamerla
Day/Time: T/R 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
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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.
Wolves of Wall Street
Instructor: Catherine R. Mintler
Day/Time: MWF 11:00 AM – 11:50 AM
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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,
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?
Oral History and Africa
Instructor: Andreana Prichard
Day/Time: TR 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM
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Description: Oral sources, or what some scholars refer to as "the heritage of the ears," are central to efforts to recreater the African past, and to better understand its present. Historians value personal recollections and reminiscences, oral traditions, songs, and liguistic data, among other oral sources, for the sophisticated picture they help to paint the past. This course will introduce students to the theory and method of oral history by allowing them to grapple with how practioners have used oral sources to write about a range of African actors, from historical elites to marginalized individuals such as rural dwellers, migrant workers, and women; it will also introduce students to the power of oral history as a tool for community development and the advancement of social justice. Legal and ethical issues, the role of digital media, and oral history as activism are central to the contemporary practice of oral history and will be discussed throughout the course. Students will work with African narrators of various backgrounds to produce oral histories for public consumption. Students do not need to have completed any prerequisites in African studies or oral history to be successful in this course; they only need to come to the class with an interest in hearing others' voices.
Music & Meds Across Culture
Instructor: Sarah W. Tracy
Day/Time: TR 9:00 AM – 10:15 AM
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Description: Explores the intersections of music, medicine, and culture. Students study sonic environments, healing practices, and cross-cultural interpretations of sound and health.
African Migrations
Instructor: Daniel Mains
Day/Time: TR 9:00 AM – 10:15 AM
Description: This course examines the political, cultural, and economic dynamics of the contemporary African diaspora. We explore how and why Africans leave the continent and their strategies for making new lives elsewhere. The course begins by examining movements of people between Africa and Europe, giving particular attention to the implications of colonialism for identity formation and power relations. The second half of the course examines case studies of Africans living in the United States, including Somali refugees in Maine and Africans working in the meat packing industry in the Midwest. The course closes with an exploration of intimate relationships and migration. Throughout the course we seek to understand migration from the perspective of migrants, and we read both fiction and nonfiction.
Welcome to the Anthropocene
Instructor: Timothy G. Bradford
Day/Time: MWF 3:00 PM – 3:50 PM
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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.
Whitman Versus Dickinson
Instructor: Vincent N. LoLordo
Day/Time: MWF 12:00 PM – 12:50 PM
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Description: For much of the 20th century, American literary history staged its two greatest poets as two neatly framed opposites: a reclusive New England spinster whose eccentric artisanal books of handwritten verse were almost entirely unknown during her lifetime, and a poet-journalist-novelist-wartime correspondent with a global literary reputation who became the most photographed man of his century. One was Emily Dickinson; the other was Walt Whitman. And yet the streaming television series that ran for three seasons at the beginning of the 21st century’s third decade was entitled, not Walt! but Emily (2019-21). We will explore the shifting reputations, legacies and afterlives of these figures, working from manuscripts and texts through a widening circle of contexts. In the first half of the course we will read intensively in the work of each poet, while the second half will be devoted to a wide-ranging exploration of influence, from the reinvention of Dickinson for 21st century streaming TV viewers to the protagonist of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey, an Asian American bard named Whitman Ah Sing.
Film Noir
Instructor: Benjamin Alpers
Day/Time: TR 1:30 PM – 2:45 PM
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Description: In the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood produced a series of films that told disturbing, psychologically complex stories that were unlike most mainstream American movies. Although related to earlier crime and suspense films, such movies as Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, and Gilda, seemed to many to be somehow different: perhaps more critical, perhaps darker (literally and figuratively), perhaps more downbeat. These films were marked by certain common features: twisty plots, the character of the "femme fatale," low-key lighting, urban settings. By the end of the 1940s, the French had given a name to them: film noir (literally "black film"). This course will view Hollywood film noir in a variety of contexts. We will explore the precursors of film noir, survey Hollywood's noirs of the 1940s and 1950s, and finally examine the ways in which a variety of filmmakers have adapted film noir for their own purposes in later decades.
Economics of Natural Disasters
Instructor: Jayash Paudel
Day/Time: TR 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
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Description: This course introduces principles of economic reasoning to examine the economic impacts of natural disasters. The course also examines the role of markets, government policy, and societies in shaping disaster risk and resilience. Through real-world case studies and basic economic tools, students will gain insights into how societies can reduce the economic and social costs of disasters.
Media and Society: Picture Postcards
Instructor: Peter Soppelsa
Day/Time: TR 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM
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Description: This course aims uses a focused study of a single communication medium, picture postcards, to teach broader lessons about how media technologies work in society. Since the 1860s, postcards have supported a broad range of media practices, including: personal correspondence, collecting, travel and tourism, event RSVPs, appointment reminders, political campaigning, thank you notes, business announcements, and much more. How did visual media develop long before our own era of illuminated electronic screens? What can popular or mass media forms teach us about culture and society?
Adolescence in YA Literature
Instructor: Crag Hill
Day/Time: TR 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM
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Description: In this course, students will delve into the interdisciplinary scholarship on adolescence, reading articles/chapters from psychology scholars in the field of youth studies alongside socio-cultural literary criticism of children’s and young adult literature. Students will explore the neuroscience of nostalgia while positing the appeal of this literature to adult readers and writers, as well the literature in brain science that is changing the way we think about adolescence. Through those scholarly lenses, students will read, discuss, and critique canonical and contemporary young adult novels, ferreting out stereotypes that adult writers may not see.
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: Kalenda Eaton
Day/Time: W 4:00 PM-5:00 PM
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Description: This seminar provides a "front-row seat" to the most dramatic transformation in collegiate sports history. Students explore the evolving landscape through the lens of honors inquiry, examining how the SEC and its member institutions are responding to new economic, legal, and social realities. The course is designed as a "living laboratory," blending local in-person sessions with virtual plenary discussions that connect students across the entire conference.
Key Learning Objectives & Topics
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. Two years later, in 1820, when the second edition was issued in Paris, the literary world learned that the author was none other than Mary Shelley, daughter of early feminist philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft. The novel, already a literary sensation, was considered even more phenomenal when the world learned that Shelly had begun writing it at the age of 18. Legacies of Frankenstein retraces the journey of one of the most taught, adapted, and popularized works of British literature which, 200 years later, remains one of the most read and adapted works of gothic literature. Students will begin reading the original novel and delve into Shelley’s influences from Gothic and Romantic literature, science, and ethics, ending with Benicio del Toro’s 2025 film adaptation to consider Frankenstein’s continued influence on us. Along the way, , students will encounter Frankenstein in various guises: as comedy in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, as hypertext in Patchwork Girl or a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley and Herself by Shelley Jackson, and as a work of global significance in Ahmed Saadawi’s 2018 novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad. Among other questions we will ask: In what ways and to whom should science and scientists be held accountable to humanity and society? What and whose ethics should govern scientific experimentation? What is a human? What is a monster and how do we define the monstrous? Who is the monster in Frankenstein? How, When, and Why?
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
HON 3993: The Spectacular Cinema of Powell and Pressburger Dr. Ben Alpers
This course will focus on one of the most storied partnerships in cinematic history: the English director Michael Powell and the Hungarian-émigré British screenwriter Emeric Pressburger. Typified by innovative cinematography and a penchant for the fantastic, their films from the 1940s and 1950s are among the true landmarks of British – and world – cinema, influencing later directors like Martin Scorsese, Baz Luhrmann, and George Romero. We will consider the technical, aesthetic, social, and thematic dimensions of these films, while placing them in the context of British history in the 1940s and 1950s. Particular attention will be paid to Powell and Pressburger's relationship to the British war effort during World War II and the changed place of Britain in the world following that conflict. | ||
HON 3993: Lifers on the Left, Rascals on the Right: Crime and Criminal Justice in the U.S. and England Dr. Trina Hope
This course explores the three major causes of crime – differences in individual criminality, opportunity for crime, and community social control – within the context of comparative criminology. Each of the topics we cover this session will be contextualized within the broader theme of comparisons of the U.S. and England, drawing on empirical research from both countries to help us understand how two countries with shared cultural and legal beginnings have diverged over time. | ||
HON 3993: Darwin’s England Dean Paul Gilmore
Charles Darwin claimed that he “was born a naturalist,” yet his transformative theories and ideas were as much a product of his environment as his commitment to observation and experiment. In this class, we will read some of Darwin’s most influential works, including Origin of Species in its entirety, within the framework of understanding how he was shaped by, reflected on, and, in turn, influenced mid-nineteenth-century England. Doing so, we’ll examine a variety of contemporaneous literary, philosophical, and scientific works, while taking time to visit his house, south of London, where he concretized many of his ideas. | ||
HON 3993: Environments of Fiction Dr. Brian Johnson
Oxford is a supremely literary town, filled with evocative bits of architecture and landscape, cemetery plots commemorating literary giants, plaques memorializing writers of the past. Our course will focus on the study of iconic works of Oxford-related literature written by Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Kenneth Grahame, and CS Lewis. Our work will emphasize literary analysis, British history, and evolving attitudes toward both children and the relationship between society and nature. In addition to reading some amazing texts, we’ll also visit the places where these authors lived, worked, and wrote!
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