The Honor College offers a wide variety of courses for students. Over 300 courses are available every year. Current and previous course examples are described below.
Alternately, you can explore our current course listing.
Echoes in Blues challenges us to examine our truths (personal knowledge) and dreams, and our quest for individuality within the parameters ofcommunity. Our main focus will be on "how do I feel?" instead of on "why do I feel this way?" We will work on our individual answers through reading& writing, discussions, and playing music. In addition to musical recordings and written documents, we will also work with oral narratives (takenfrom the collection of the instructor): translating an oral narrative into a written narrative will take us to many "crossroads," moments of crucialdecisions.
This class is not as much about ingenious constructs of celebrated writers and musicians as it is about how YOU react to their creative voicings. Notas much about historical junctures in Time as how YOU react to your present.
The blues is part of an African-American oral narrative which probably began after the Civil War. Its voices chronicle the social, economic, racial,and spiritual attitudes of a culture within the American experience. Over time the blues has served as a source of inspiration not only to musicianssuch as Bessie Smith, George Gershwin and B.B. King, but also to authors such as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Sherman Alexie and Toni Morrison.
Through the diatonic harmonica* the students will learn to shape colors & rhythms of the blues language. This integral component of the seminarwill not only confront us with a creative musical process but with our individual strengths and weaknesses as well.
The Ethics of Food Course uses readings and documentary films to examine a range of ethical and societal issues associated with theproduction and consumption of food.
These include: ethical responsibilities toward animals (including consideration of "factory farming" and vegetarianism), arguments for and againstagricultural subsidies, arguments for and against organic or community based agriculture, ethical and social perspectives on genetic engineering, andthe pros and cons of pursuing biofuels.
Students are expected to choose a particular research topic to explore extensively, and then lead a session of the class related to that topic. Thereis also a service-learning component to this class--namely, each student will be expected to spend roughly 10 hours over the course of the semesterhelping with the Green Quad community garden here at USC. This not only assists the Green Quad but also provide students with a hands-on opportunity tolearn about the strengths and weaknesses of organic and community-based agricultural initiatives.
Thirty years ago, it was rare to see much more than grayscale graphs and charts in scientific publications; today we are flooded with rich, beautiful, captivating images and animations. CP Snow warned us that the two cultures have no common language, but we now live in an even more complex multi and cross-disciplinary world. This course will discuss the relationship of these images in art and science and how the visual arts can help effectively explore, understand, and mediate the complexity of contemporary science and technology. The course will start out with a visual overview of what art is, how it functions in our world, and quickly move on to an exploration of the corollaries between the two disciplines in traditional areas such as color, illusion, and perception, and then more complex and controversial areas such as statistics, quantum physics, nanotechnology, robotics, and transhumanism. Participants will have the opportunity for concentrated research and investigation both verbally and visually using the digital environment as an assistive tool.Class outcomes include an understanding of the role of art in contemporary culture, its role in scientific investigation, the relationship between art and science, and the difference between a image, representation, scientific visualization, and work of art.