Fall 2020 HNRS Courses

In HNRS 2000 this year, faculty and students will be discussing issues of special concern to residents of Louisiana, particularly questions of environmental justice. After reading The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell, the Shared Read for 2020, we’ll be thinking about how climate change and sea level rise are... Read More...

This course offers students the opportunity to read some of the greatest literary works ever written, including F. Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, L. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and E. Zola’s Germinal. Lectures will put these works in historical perspective, vividly contrasting the histories of France and Russia in the nineteenth century.... Read More...

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” –Aristotle

Do you enjoy debating questions of religion and faith? Are you curious about how major thinkers have challenged traditional organized religion?

This course will begin with questions of whether belief in... Read More...

This course will address questions such as: Is spending in college sports out of hand? Should the authority of the NCAA be reigned in? Should student-athletes be paid? Are opportunities for women and men equal?

“Who should I vote for? Who stands for what? What do the TV spots mean? How will they govern?”

If you’ve asked any of these questions, this course is for you. “See How They Run” will explore the 2020 presidential elections on different levels and from various perspectives. Through readings... Read More...

The course analyzes Judaism’s understanding of itself by examining concepts such as identity, gender, food, rituals, scriptures, history, and Messiah. We will look at three thousand years of Jewish history, the foundations of Jewish religion and culture and will discuss the question about Jewish identity.

In this class you'll spend the semester reporting and writing a single story about the Baton Rouge community. You might be backstage at a theater, on the ground in a wildlife preserve, or exploring the cosmos with LSU astronomers. You get to immerse yourself in the stories of the people... Read More...

This course will explore a range of issues surrounding sex and sexuality in the Arab world, including marriage, divorce, adultery, homosexuality, obscenity, rape, slave concubines, eunuchs, FGM, sex-change operations, contraception, abortion, and aphrodisiacs.

This course focuses on the interplay between humans as “agents of change” and choice in determining their health and the role of the environment and society in shaping or limiting those choices. Multiple levels of influence on health, including individual, family, community, and society, are examined from both a micro-... Read More...

This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary ways in which writers at the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century enriched they works with references to visual art to support as well as to warn against challenges of modernization. Through a comparative approach, we... Read More...

This class will give students an opportunity to explore in-depth the interrelationship between art and the Western colonial conquests in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia between 1750 and 1950 from a variety of perspectives (art history, history, political economy, social studies, etc.). We will investigate in particular Napoleon Bonaparte’s... Read More...

This course aims to take different perspectives on the role of music in times of war. Our goal is to study music as a weapon to censor, empower, and torture. Weekly source readings, listening quizzes, and analytical essays will serve as a roadmap for our journey through Russia, Germany, Italy,... Read More...

What is it about opera that has made it the most expressive art form for over four hundred years? Have you wanted to explore it but feared it might be too expensive, too elitist? This course introduces honors students with or without musical background to one of the most encompassing... Read More...

In this course, we'll write about films & make films about poems. We'll explore the realm of the image-makers where the pen becomes a camera and the camera, a pen. A creative class for Louisiana's image-makers by Louisiana's image-makers.

This is a broad introductory course in the current research into the biological underpinnings and evolutionary origins of morality. The course is interdisciplinary, combining psychology, biology, neuroscience, and philosophy; it is both an introduction to cutting-edge research and a chance to revisit perennial questions.

Manon Lescaut is a classic story of illicit passion, punishment, and finally tragic redemption in the wilds of eighteenth-century Louisiana. This class will look at successive adaptations of this tale, tracking how the chosen form – be it novel, opera, or movie – transforms the meaning and moral of this... Read More...

Students will study the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise), a work of great scope that aims to provide a complete picture of the reality of the cosmos and of human virtues and vices. One of the great masterpieces of world literature, Dante’s poem is a compendium of... Read More...

This course will examine German historical and cultural roots in the state of Louisiana from the 18th Century to present day. We will concentrate on the early arrival of German settlers, the historically German geographic areas of Louisiana, the influence of German customs on Louisiana culture, and the shared traditions... Read More...

Octavio Paz writes, “The conception of poetry as magic implies an aesthetics of action. Art ceases to be exclusively representation and contemplation; it becomes an intervention into reality.” In this class, we will investigate the role of poet as medium, conjuring visions from the beyond that explode our political, historical,... Read More...

What does life mean?
Where is your north?
How do you navigate life when there is so much uncertainty, diversity, and possibilities?
How do worldviews drive people?
How might understanding a person’s core assumptions illuminate their behavior?

We will examine theories, concepts, and methods to explore the dynamics of human... Read More...

This course provides an in-depth study of three subject areas within finance; namely, asset management, investment banking and financial markets, as well as learning about career opportunities in the field of finance. Asset management entails managing a portfolio of stocks, analyzing securities, diversifying across various asset classes including hedge funds,... Read More...

Since 2017, the #MeToo movement has shifted public conversations surrounding sexual harassment and rape. Discussing sexual violence and engaging in high level critical analysis of the various ways we communicate about sexual violence in mediated and public life is gravely important.
This course explores how sexual violence is symbolically negotiated... Read More...

This course explores the diverse cultures of medieval Europe and the intellectual development that took place thanks to the encounter between Pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It will challenge commonly held assumptions concerning language, travel, women, warfare, poetry, knowledge production, art, and music from 300 to 1500. From Ireland to... Read More...

This course explores the diverse cultures of medieval Europe and the intellectual development that took place thanks to the encounter between Pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It will challenge commonly held assumptions concerning language, travel, women, warfare, poetry, knowledge production, art, and music from 300 to 1500. From Ireland to... Read More...

In the US academy, a central focus of leadership programs, as Joel Christensen and Eli Embleton note, is the biographical or autobiographical text that features “heroic individuals,” like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, or Bill Clinton. These success narratives have a long history in the US and present an... Read More...

This topical course will introduce the basic principles, applications and latest advances in the area of nano-optics. Students will discover the potential advances nano-scale optics could hold for a broad area of applications, from telecommunication to solid state display, energy and sensing technologies.