A study of works of literature that treats the themes of inquiry and discovery--its risks, its creativeness, its ambiguities and complexities, and its moral dilemmas--through selected works from literature and other media, including theater, music, visual arts, and film. Each work is analyzed in terms of its historical context and internal structure as well as its treatment of inquiry and discovery.

R: Restricted to Students in the University Honors Program

GEP Humanities

Typically offered in Fall, Spring, and Summer

Seminar for University Honors Program students, repeatable if content varies, meeting GEP requirements in Humanities and US Diversity co-requisite. Interdisciplinary in character and often team-taught.

Restricted to students in the University Honors Program. Other students upon approval.

GEP Humanities, GEP U.S. Diversity

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Seminar for University Honors Program students, repeatable if content varies, meeting GER requirements in mathematics, interdisciplinary in character and often team-taught.

Prerequisite: HON student

GEP Mathematical Sciences

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Seminar for University Honors Program students, repeatable if content varies, meeting GER requirements in the natural sciences, interdisciplinary in character and often team-taught.

Prerequisite: HON student

GEP Natural Sciences

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Seminar for University Honors Program students, repeatable if content varies, meeting GEP requirements in Interdisciplinary Perspectives and and Global Knowledge co-requisite. Interdisciplinary in character, and often team-taught.

R: Honors or Scholars

GEP Global Knowledge, GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Seminar for University Honors Program students, repeatable if content varies, meeting GER requirements in the Humanities, and interdisciplinary in character.

Prerequisite: HON student

GEP Humanities

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Seminar for University Honors Program students, repeatable if content varies, meeting GER requirements in the social sciences, interdisciplinary in character, and often team-taught.

R: Honors or Scholars

GEP Social Sciences

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Seminar for University Honors Program students, repeatable if content varies, meeting GER requirements in Interdisciplinary Perspectives.

R: Honors or Scholars

GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Seminar for University Honors Program students, repeatable if content varies, meeting GEP requirements in Interdisciplinary Perspectives and US Diversity co-requisite. Interdisciplinary in character and often team-taught.

R: Honors or Scholars

GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives, GEP U.S. Diversity

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Research/independent Study for University Honors Program students. Repeatable if content differs. Research or independent study under supervision of faculty members. Project approval by the Honors Program Advisory Committee necessary prior to registration. Permission of the University Honors Program required. Individualized/Independent Study and Research courses require a "Course Agreement for Students Enrolled in Non-Standard Courses" be completed by the student and faculty member prior to registration by the department.

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Seminar for University Honors Program students, repeatable if content varies, meeting GER requirements in Visual and Performing Arts, interdisciplinary in character and often team-taught.

R: Honors or Scholars

GEP Visual and Performing Arts

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Theories of race are linked to eugenics, a belief and practice of improving the genetic quality of the human population drove much of American social policy in the early 20th century. The practice and science that supports it has historical roots in the US and in particular for poor people and people of color. This course will examine race, membership, and eugenics and the impact on American society, as well as explore the scientific and social trends that supported the movement. Course restricted to University Honors Program Students; others by permission of the UHP.

R: University Honors Program Students; others by permission of the University Honors Program

GEP U.S. Diversity

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

What is creativity in the context of the sciences? How does the creative process in science differ from and how is it similar to the creative process in other fields? This interdisciplinary perspectives course helps students to develop an understanding of scientific creativity through readings in history and philosophy of science, in the psychology of creativity, in original scientific papers, in biography and in memoirs. Student will analyze representations of scientific creativity in films and literature, conduct interviews with scientists, artists, musicians, and humanists, and analyze the social and institutional context of creativity.

GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives, GEP U.S. Diversity

Typically offered in Spring only

Cultures differentiate and frame events in various ways. At the heart of conceptual events are WORDS: an inventory of the ways a particular group of people depict and understand the interactions they have with each other and with the world around them. Through a detailed examination of lexical phenomena in cultures around the world, we will become familiar with the ways in which language and culture interact, the extent to which these surface in our everyday lives and the explanations proposed by various fields for their existence.

GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives, GEP Global Knowledge

Students will evaluate disease outbreaks from multiple different perspectives, including the biology of the infectious agent, clinical implications, and social/economic/political factors contributing to the spread of the disease or that were impacted by a major epidemic/pandemic. This course will be inquiry-guided. The instructor will not generally be "presenting material", but rather providing the structure in which students will be guided to investigate the issues from multiple perspectives through the use of case studies, primary and secondary literature, student-driven research and presentations, and concept mapping.

GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Fall, Spring, and Summer

This course invites first-year students into a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit our cultural inheritance and ideas. "Reading Machines" takes a long view of how we got to now, from the history of manuscripts and books to the electronic platforms of the digital present. These are all machines of reading; in turn, this class will "read" those machines as objects of study. The course proposes that 1) then and now, our technologies for sharing text, image, and data crucially shape the ideas which they convey, and 2) these contexts can help students plan and execute new mechanisms for communication in the present. The course's modules offer critical frameworks of background readings and discussions, a lab-like experience with the materials or skills involved, and applied projects for students to experiment with and study.

GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

This course looks at several key works of twentieth-century American literature and asks what they reveal about the society in which they were produced. The first half of our class will consider the many ways literature in the Jazz Age represented and critiqued the era - from stories published in popular magazines, which find their modern-day equivalent in streaming services, to authors of the Harlem Renaissance. The second half of the class will take us to the second half of the century, where we will consider how authors like Ken Kesey, Shirley Jackson, and Margaret Atwood reveal and challenge prevailing conformity. To continue with our metaphor, the frame for our mirror will consist of the social, cultural, and material contexts in which these works were published, understood, and interpreted.

R: Honors or Scholars

GEP Humanities, GEP U.S. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Typically offered in Fall only

For a variety of reasons, "religion" is one of the most controversial subject matters in contemporary cultures. Beyond sensationalism and outrage, though, modern societies have taken shape in part through complex debates about the role (or lack thereof) of religion in public life. At the core of these considerations are clashing understandings of the relation between religion and freedom, two broad categories with a range of different meanings. This course will explore these differing understandings by considering: legal arguments proposing freedom of religion, and the challenges of religious pluralism; arguments urging freedom from religion, in defense of secular public life; and invocations of freedom through religion, via human creative expression, social activism, ritual, or cosmology. We will examine not just scholarly writings about religion but literature, films, and other media that have shaped the ongoing conversation.

R: University Honors Program Students; others by permission of the University Honors Program

GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Fall only

A study of contemporary metaphysics organized around the topic of time travel. David Lewis, perhaps the foremost contemporary metaphysician, argues that time travel is possible. His argument is based on ingenious positions about three central topics of metaphysics, personal-identity, causation, and free will. Students will consider each of these topics in some detail, always with an eye to their implications for time travel.

Prerequisite: HON student

GEP Humanities, GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Spring only

In this course students will be introduced to foundations of morality by exploring one of the most significant moral theories in the history of philosophy, Kantian ethics. The course will focus on Kant's ideas about morality and discuss his proof of the fundamental principles of ethics. Students will be introduced to some of the enduring moral questions, such as What ought I to do? What can I hope? Are there universal moral principles and whether I ought to follow them? They will learn a variety of approaches to ethical issues and their reflection in social and political reality.

GEP Humanities

Typically offered in Spring only

Students in this seminar course actively explore human singularity: the properties, if any, that distinguish persons from animals and machines. Do we have souls? To what extent can we give physical explanations of our thoughts and actions? What, if anything, do scientific experiments tell us about our differences from chimps and artificial intelligences? What are the ethical implications of new biotechnologies? Should we be allowed to use genetic and neural engineering to change human nature? Students read articles, watch videos, stimulate class discussions with prepared questions, write short essays and a final paper, and participate in a 60-minute team presentation.

GEP Humanities, GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

This course explores the complex and interrelated concepts of freedom and the self. The bulk of our time will be devoted to a close reading of several philosophical texts in which these concepts loom large. The course ends with a careful examination of three novels that, in various ways, take up the central themes of the class. Our intention in doing so is to reflect on the way that imaginative novelists treat these themes. This will enable us to ask broader and more interesting questions about freedom and selfhood.

R: University Honors Program Students; others by permission of the University Honors Program

GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives, GEP Humanities

Typically offered in Spring only

Consider the range of emotions that one experiences in a lifetime, from the joy of being with your loved ones to the fear of losing them, from the thrill of success to the sadness of defeat. Pleasant or aversive, emotions play a central role in our lives. Despite their obvious importance, emotions have been considered by many philosophers to be inferior to another distinctive faculty in human beings, namely reason. The idea that emotions are primitive, irrational and dangerous and thus to be controlled and constrained by reason has been embraced by eminent thinkers from Plato and the Stoics to Kant. In this course, we will focus on the relationship between reason and emotion in moral cognition and cognition more generally, and we will investigate how/to what extent reason can be said to be distinct from and superior to emotion.

Restriction: University Honors Program students. Open to other students by permission of the UHP.

GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Fall only

What is the purpose of schooling? What role does it play in producing particular types of citizens and social structures? Theorists have imagined education as a space for democracy, as a way to cultivate identity, or as a method to train workers. All of these imaginaries attempt to understand interrelationship between the self, schooling, and the social order. This course will survey major social theories and, within the context of those theories, encounter texts which examine how schooling serves to maintain or subvert the social order. Course restricted to University Honors Program students; others by permission of the UHP.

GEP Social Sciences, GEP U.S. Diversity

This course will introduce you to the architecture of one language. Students will work from scratch with a speaker of a language that none of us know, with the goal of unlocking the mysteries of that language at all levels - sound system, word formation, sentence structure, semantics and pragmatics. You will learn how to elicit field data through direct questioning and gathering of texts, how to organize field data, how to prepare entries in a field dictionary, and how to organize and write grammar. Course restricted to University Honors Program students; others by permission of the UHP.

GEP Global Knowledge, GEP Social Sciences

This course explores the history and unintended consequences of U.S. (and international) agricultural policy. We will develop tools to assess the logical, objective, and critical analysis of agricultural policies. Every policy intervention involves winners and losers and your objectives will be to identify and evaluate how welfare is affected by government intervention. Students will explain, hypothesize, or interpret a disciplinary issue, based on critically analyzed evidence. Current events will be emphasized and students will investigate how trade tensions between the U.S. and other countries often result in retaliation against U.S. agriculture. Grades will be based on student presentations, debates, class participation, and a final policy paper.

R: Honors or Scholars

GEP Social Sciences

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

While we live in a Digital Age, we have only begun to understand its full significance. What new possibilities arise in a virtualized future? Can we escape scarcity, this planet, even death? What problems might our technologies solve? Modern technologies also raise new existential challenges: Why has the increased prosperity that technologies provide been met with seemingly impoverished and unhappy lives, loneliness, and alienation? How does technology mediate our sense of identity and the relations we have with society, nature, and ourselves? This course will explore the phenomenology of technological life - that is, the descriptive study aimed at looking at the relations between humans and our world, a technologically-mediated world. We will use this experiential and descriptive approach to consider the moral dimensions and psychological and sociological consequences of digital and emerging technologies, especially information and communications technologies (ICTs) like the internet and social media.

R: Honors or Scholars

GEP Global Knowledge, GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

In 2015, The Washington Post reported that on average, Americans consumed 126 grams of sugar per day, more than double the amount recommended by the World Health Organization. Yet China and India, which had the earliest known mass production of sugar, consume much less. Why? Applying the overlapping theories and methodologies of cultural history and anthropology as well as other components of Food Studies, this class will explore the world travels and vicissitudes of sugar as a commodity and cultural marker. We will trace sugar's production in the first age of capitalism and its reliance on the global slave trade for production as well as the development of its rituals of consumption, in conjunction with other stimulants and intoxicants, such as chocolate, tea, and rum. We will consider the rise of the modern western obsession with sweets in comparison to other cultures, using our own experiences and observations.

R: Honors or Scholars

GEP Global Knowledge, GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Fall and Summer

Music and Resistance will examine how people use music both as a tool of oppression and a method of resisting oppression. Course topics will include the use of western classical music by colonial powers; music and torture; music during World War II (including the use of music in concentration camps and as propaganda in Allied and Axis countries); music in Indian Boarding Schools; music in the American Civil Rights Movement; and hip hop as the music of oppressed populations in Europe and the United States. Reading assignments will come from a wide range of sources and disciplinary perspectives including scholarly articles, book chapters, and personal memoirs. We will listen to and discuss music from multiple genres including hip hop, pop, jazz, folk, and the western classical tradition. No previous musical experience as a performer is required to be successful in this class.

R: Honors or Scholars

GEP Global Knowledge, GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

HON 367 (Introduction to Interdisciplinary Biomedical Teamwork is a special weekly seminar that will introduce students to Team Science (teamwork) and Biomedical Research. Students will be introduced to the Comparative Medicine Institute (CMI) U-STAR program, faculty mentors involved with the program and cutting-edge research associated with the program. Seminar topics will include: CMI and interdisciplinary research on campus, instructional seminars on literature searching, scientific writing, research ethics and research overviews by U-STAR training faculty.

Typically offered in Fall, Spring, and Summer

In this course, students explore the diverse musics of the Celtic world, from cultural practices of the ancient Celts to folk and popular traditions of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Galicia, Cape Breton, and the United States. They investigate the origin and meanings of "Celtic music," and study its diverse instrumental, vocal, and dance traditions, and its varied performance practices, occasions, and purposes. Through history, literature, poetry, spirituality, and mythology, students examine the realities and fictions of the ancient and modern Celtic world. Through live and recorded music and dance performance, they consider the continuities of Celtic culture across time and space, and the significance of Celtic music today in terms of cultural identity, tradition, and globalization.

R: University Honors Program

GEP Visual and Performing Arts, GEP Global Knowledge, GEP Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Typically offered in Spring only

Experimental work in government or industry for Honors Program students with two semesters completed in Honors. Typically students work 40 hrs/week with salary. Work supervisor, faculty adviser and Honors Program Director must sign HON 395 Honors Cooperative Ed contract. NC State cooperative Education requires paper work; student must pay fee rate for a 0-5 credit hour course. No other courses permitted along with HON 395. Student report of the independent project is required.

Prerequisite: Two semester full time in University Honors Program

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Opportunity for significant hands-on involvement in extension and engagement research/project as mentored by NC County Extension employees often in cooperation with community employers/executives, local and government officials, and county citizens. Approved plan of work required with significant independent research/project including a reflective journal, a final paper and presentation at the NC State Undergraduate Research Symposium or a venue appropriate to the discipline. Students must provide their own transportation.

Prerequisite: One semester good standing in University Honors Program

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

A seminar or other learning experience within an academic framework that may be on- or off-campus. Enables the development of new HON courses outside the GER list.

Typically offered in Fall, Spring, and Summer

Honors Seminars open to Juniors and Seniors in all disciplinary Honors Programs, and others with permission of the University Honors Program. Repeatable if content differs. A series of seminars with differing subjects, interdisciplinary in character and sometimes team-taught, allowing advanced students to explore topics from a multidisciplinary perspective and to apply their knowledge to issues and problems in the present world. Permission of the University Honors Program

Prerequisite: HON student

Typically offered in Fall and Spring

Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research (BioMR) Science Capstone Seminar. This seminar is intended to provide practical real-world engagement to integrate interdisciplinary biomedical team science teamwork, communication, and leadership. The seminar will include exploring and engaging with a science-based Common Reading where students will use leadership, communication, and team science skills to evaluate multiple aspects of team dynamics including unconscious bias. The seminar will also include active engagement opportunities in the areas of academics, government, and industry. These diverse experiential learning opportunities will further allow students to explore team science, leadership, and communication. This course will also involve an end of semester roundtable conversation and service component, all designed to reinforce the learning outcomes.

Typically offered in Fall, Spring, and Summer

Opportunity for hands-on faculty mentored research/creative project. Course may be stand-alone project completed in one semester/summer, or serve as part of a two semester project that is completed at the end of Honors Research/Creative Project 2 (HON 499). Approved plan of work required with significant independent research/creative project culminating with final paper and presentation at the NC State Undergraduate Research Symposium or other venues appropriate to the discipline. Research within or outside the student's discipline may fulfill experience. Individualized/Independent Study and Research courses require a Course Agreement for Students Enrolled in Non-Standard Courses be completed by the student and faculty member prior to registration by the department.

Prerequisite: One semester in good standing in University Honors Program, UHP student

Typically offered in Fall, Spring, and Summer

Opportunity for hands-on faculty mentored research/creative project. Course serves as final part of a two-semester project that began with Honors Research/Creative Project 1 (HON 498)or approved disciplinary research experience. Approved plan of work required with significant independent research/creative project culminating with final paper and presentation at the NC State Undergraduate Research Symposium or other venues appropriate to the discipline. Research within or outside the student's discipline may fulfill experience. Individualized/Independent Study and Research courses require a Course Agreement for Students Enrolled in Non-Standard Courses be completed by the student and faculty member prior to registration by the department.

Prerequisite: One semester in good standing in University Honors Program, UHP student

Typically offered in Fall, Spring, and Summer