First Year: The Global City

Lay the Groundwork

Form tight bonds with your peers in a small, year-long course, focused on developing advanced writing skills through intensive study of the urban environment

All first year students begin with HON 101 (even students who earned AP/IB credit in high school). This year-long sequence is designed to help you develop the reading, writing, and analytical skills that will serve as a foundation for the Honors thesis -- and for all your undergraduate and graduate work. Each term, we will focus on a specific set of linked skills: summary of argument, explication, placement in relation to a discourse community. The texts you will read both help you learn the scholarly skills and provide the occasion for engaging in meaningful inquiry.

Each section of The Global City will have different reading material, but the writing tools studied throughout the year are the same from section to section.

HON 101A, 102A, and 103A

Dr. Pelin Basci: Women in Middle Eastern Cities

Focusing on questions of women and gender, this course invites the participants to reflect on women's experiences critically in modern Turkish, Arab, and Iranian contexts. We examine diverse experiences, observe connections to the United States, and explore how gender intersects with class, education, and ethnoreligious standing, among others.

HON 101B, 102B, and 103B

Dr. Paul McCutcheon: Race, Capital, and the City

This section of the Global City will consider the transnational history of capitalism, colonialism, segregation, imperialism, settlement, protest, and political struggle to understand how something seemingly “local” in scale- like the events surrounding George Floyd’s death - connect to, and intersect with, systems and processes at the national and global scale. As we travel, we will consider the historical relationship between urban activism within communities of color to national and transnational movements. Our goal will be to understand how networks of racialized capital forged in the 17th century mapped themselves onto the contours of contemporary urban space.

HON 101C, 102C, and 103C

Dr. Harry York: Historical Narratives of the City as Contact Zone

This Global City sequence takes an historical approach to analyzing the city as a space for shaping identity and social experiences. We will begin by considering the pre-modern cities of Rome and Tenochtitlan as spaces formed in moments of civil war and conquest. We'll proceed to the age of imperialism and consider the impact of colonialism in shaping London and Lagos. We'll conclude our historical survey by examining representations of cities in a decolonized future through the lens of science fiction.

HON 101D, 102D, and 103D

Dr. Eric Rodriguez: Writing the City

This course examines the numerous ways writing is used as an instrument of power within urban environments. We will scrutinize key texts produced by activists and radicals -- both within and outside academic institutions -- to better understand the rhetorical strategies and styles that shape and influence the cities we inhabit and how we can better use these strategies in academic environments.

HON 101E, 102E, and 103E

Dr. Alberto Ganis: TBD

HON 101F, 102F, and 103F

Dr. Amy Borden: Cinema's Urban Modernity

Go back over 100 years to walk the streets of Shanghai, Berlin, Paris, and New York with flappers, avant-garde artists, and new filmgoers in a modernizing world bursting with energy, joy, danger, and excitement. Come experience a movie-mad, once-new way of seeing in a time when a modern world was born!