The University of Kentucky Honors Program plays a vital role in the University's commitment to excellence in undergraduate education. Through its special multi-disciplinary curriculum and emphasis on active, small-group learning, as well as its related extra curricular and support activities, the Honors Program provides an alternative course of instruction for outstanding, highly motivated students drawn from around the state and throughout the region and country.
View news archive.
News
Poetry as a Way of Knowing: Reading Poems, Writing Poems
Instructor: Dr. Jane Gentry Vance
W 3:00 pm - 5:30 pm
In college classes, poems are most often considered in terms of their form, their history, their nature as aesthetic objects, or as examples of one literary theory or another. In contrast, this Honors proseminar will consider poems as a way of knowing, as a medium of useful, helpful knowledge. We will explore the questions of what we can learn (factually, intellectually, morally, and spiritually) from different kinds of poems, and of how a poem functions, in its voice, its language, its form, to impart knowledge to us. We will also consider what and how poets learn from the process of writing poems.
The major requirements of the course will be much intriguing reading, and either a 12-15 page critical essay, or a collection of 5-6 poems of your own, or a combination of the two.
Texts:
New of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness, ed. Robert Bly
Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, Frank X Walker
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot (ed. Michael North, Norton Critical Edition)
Second Space: New Poems, Czelaw Milosz
American Primitive: Poems, Mary Oliver
Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig, Jane Gentry Vance
Music in Society: A Pianist's Perspective
Instructor: Dr. Alan Hersh
TR 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
The ubiquitous piano has been a pervasive part of our culture for over three centuries, a bane and blessing for students and listeners of all ages. Pianists of varied stripes come from all economic and social classes and have agendas ranging from professional performer to entertainer at the annual Christmas Party. The piano seems to know no geographical limits and is as popular today in China and Japan as it is in Russia, Roumania, and Maysville, Kentucky.
This Seminar will read several texts about music and about the piano specifically. The Seminar will consider the economic, social, cultural, and technological history of the acoustic instrument and will investigate its representation and the representation of its players in several recent and not so recent films.
Seminar participants do not need any background or experience in music. What is needed is a keen and quirky mind, the ability to read carefully, and a willingness to exercise critical judgment about familiar and unfamiliar ideas. The Seminar will culminate with a Research Paper based upon three of the films discussed in the course.
All are welcome!
E-Commerce: An Asian Perspective
Instructor: Dr. Vanessa Jackson
TR 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
This course examines the relationships among culture and e-commerce development, paying particular attention to the influence of culture on the development of businesses on the Internet, government regulations, security and risk differences and much more. Specifically, the course sheds light on such topics as how Asian government influences the development of e-commerce through laws, and the sociopolitical and economic trends in e-commerce development.
The Question of Fear in Postmodern Culture and Philosophy
Instructor: Dr. Sonya Jones
TR 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm
If postmodern human beings are more afraid than our predecessors who lived through untold natural disasters as well as "wars and rumors of war," should the claim that we are predisposed to dread in greater measures that stunt the spirit irreparably go unchallenged? If the impacts of Nazi Germany, 9/11, and ecological assault have had such a devestating effect on the Western imagination, does any way out exist? Are we capable of moving beyond the sarcasm and reliance upon jokes that seem to characterize postmodern sensibility? In addition to cultural problems, what role do individual ego and desire play in the construction of fear, dread, and anxiety? By examining some key films and texts, we will attempt to determine the psychological and ontological nature of fear in postmodern times as well as study some ways that come to us from major Buddhist teachers for healing our existential condition.
Films:
"On the Beach," Stanley Kramer, 1959
In the aftermath of a global nuclear war, the residents of Australia must come to terms with the fact that all life will be destroyed in a matter of months.
"The Birds," Alfred Hitchcock, 1963
A wealthy San Francisco playgirl pursues a potential boyfriend to a small northern California town. The plot takes a turn for the bizarre when flocks of birds begin to attack people visciously.
"A Clockwork Orange," Stanley Kubrick, 1971
Set in Great Britain, allegedly in a future that looks a lot like the early 21st century, particularly with regard to gangs, the film's protagonist, delinquent Alex Delarge, is both charming and dangerous. He is jailed and later volunteers for experimental aversion therapy developed by the government to help solve society's problems with crime.
"Cabaret," Bob Fosse, 1972
A female entertainer in Weimar Republic Berlin romances two men, one of them gay, while the Nazi party rises to power. "Cabaret" begs the complex question: how do the arts both help to disguise collective paranoia and work to take the edge off of fear?
"The Game," David Fincher, 1997
Wealthy financier Nicholas Van Orton gets a strange birthday present from wayward brother Conrad. Nicholas must complete a series of tests which force him to look inside himself and the charade that has become his life.
Texts:
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Alastair Hannay, translator
Penguin Paperback ISBN-10: 0143037579
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be
Yale University Press, Paperback
ASIN: B000GRQP74
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Smile at Fear: Awakening the True Heart of Bravery
Shambhala, Hardcover, ISBN 10: 1590306961
Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
Shambhala, Paperback, ISBN-10: 1590304495
Requirements:
One in-class presentation, one 10 page essay, active seminar participation.
HON 105-007, Spring 2010
Instructor: Walter C. Foreman, English/Honors
TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm, MH 101
This section of HON 105 will devote much of its time to texts that might have been done in a "normal" section, and for current students it will satisfy all requirements that a normal section would, but it will also be a pilot version of a Humanities course which will ultimately be a part of the new General Education and new Honors Program curricula. The course will in some ways deal with the gap between normal HON 101 and normal HON 201, but students who want the traditional kind of coverage of medieval and renaissance culture (with a wider variety of texts) should look at other sections. For help in choosing or changing sections, consult with Meg Marquis, the Senior Academic Coordinator of the Honors Program. For more information about the content of the course than is given below, send an e-mail of inquiry to the instructor at namerof@uky.edu.
Course Goals: This section of HON 105 will look at stories of revenge from four cultural contexts: classical Greek tragedy, the Icelandic saga, the drama of Shakespeare's England, and the American western movie. Our approach will be interdisciplinary, though obviously centered on drama and narrative. We will look at how different cultures try to express and manage their habits and reflexes of retributive violence (not only between individuals and families in the same culture but also between neighboring cultures, our habits of which make the news every day), exploring possible answers to questions such as the following:
- Why is revenge such a widespread practice, or at least a desire?
- Why do people feel that revenge is demanded of them, or what "reasons" do they give for taking revenge — honor, history and precedent, custom, self-preservation, law, justice? (One person's savage revenge is another's simple justice.)
- How does proper information underlie successful revenge?
- How about improper information, or lies?
- How can differences of race, gender, religion, and nationality generate the desire for revenge, a desire that may generate its own occasions?
- Is revenge an attempt to claim or reclaim power in response to what is otherwise social or political or economic impotence, or in the face of our awareness of mortality?
We will consider the possibility that the recurrence of the passion for revenge has genetic origins. A writer on the Icelandic sagas has called them (I quote from memory) "a great body of literature addressing the problem of how men can avoid killing each other." The course would emphasize this problem, that is, asking not only why revenge, but also how not?
Texts: [Classical Greek Tragedies:] Aeschylus, the Oresteia, tr. Peter Meineck; Euripides, Medea, tr. Diane Arnson Svarlien; Euripides, Electra, tr. Janet Lembke and Kenneth J. Reckford; [Icelandic Sagas:] Njal's Saga, tr. Robert Cook; [Drama of Shakespeare's England:] William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Russ McDonald; Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Philip Edwards; Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. A. R. Braunmuller; Thomas Middleton, The Revenger's Tragedy, ed. Brian Gibbons; [American Westerns:] John Ford, Stagecoach, 1938; John Ford, The Searchers, 1956; Clint Eastwood, The Outlaw Josey Wales, 1976; [Non-fiction:] Frank Viviano, Blood Washes Blood: A True Story of Love, Murder, and Redemption under the Sicilian Sun; Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.
Honors students in Dr. Jeffrey Peters's "French Film Noir" proseminar were recently the featured guests on reknowned podcast "Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir." Tune in to hear Dr. Peters, Bethany Futrell, Jesseca Johnson, Ryan Palmer, Nick Purol, and Dan Robbins discuss Jean-Lyc Godard's 1964 Band of Outsiders.
IP orientation sessions will be held on Thursday, Sept. 10 at 9:00 a.m., Monday, Oct. 12 at 3:00 p.m., and Thursday, Nov. 12 at 3:30 p.m. in 1145 POT. Come get information on completing your Honors Program requirements through the Independent Project option.
Click here to meet our ambassadors.
Dr. Bill Rayens of the Honors Program and Statistics department was selected as a Chellgren Endowed Professor. Chellgren Professors are UK faculty members who are outstanding teachers and researchers, each with a compelling interest in undergraduate innovation and excellence. To be named a Chellgren Endowed Professor, a faculty member must propose a specific innovative project aligned with the mission of the Chellgren Center that will be the focus of the professor's scholarly agenda during his or her tenure as a Chellgren Professor.
The Honors Program is pleased to have the support of UK Faculty across disciplines in student research. For a full list of HP Independent Project Advisors for 2008-2009, click here.
All students are required to sign up for the Honors Program listserv to receive important announcements via email. I recommend that students use their university-assigned email address for this list. To sign up, simply send a message to listserv@lsv.uky.edu with "SUBSCRIBE HONORSPROGRAM firstname lastname" in the body (leave out the quotes and substitute your name!). You will receive a confirmation email which will contain a link that confirms your subscription to the list.