Proposals Sought for 2024-25 Humanities Honors Seminar

August 30, 2023

Submitted By: Nicholas Ealy

Full-time faculty from all colleges of the University are invited to submit a course proposal for the Humanities Center’s Seminar in the academic year 2024-25.

The proposal should outline a broad, interdisciplinary theme that will attract students from across the University. Past themes have included “Framing War,” “Love and Desire,” “Utopia/Dystopia,” “Our Monsters, Ourselves,” “Living in a Post-Truth World,” “Transversing Gender,” “Lights, Camera, Activism,” “Irrationality, Anti-Politics and Conspiracy Theories,” “Decolonizing the University: Ethnic Studies” and, for 2023-24 “Fiction, Fabulation, Futurity.” Past seminar leaders have found that working with the University’s best students and with colleagues and visiting lecturers who share their interests is intellectually rewarding.

Here’s how the seminar works and what one needs to do to submit a proposal:

• The seminar leader is the instructor for two honors courses on a particular theme, HON 389 in the fall and HON 390 in the spring. The seminar meets each semester on Monday evenings from 5:00-7:20 p.m. and is taught to student fellows, fifteen excellent students from across the University. Students must apply to be fellows and must take the seminar in both semesters. In addition, three to five faculty fellows, who are working on research projects related to the Center’s theme, are chosen to give lectures in the spring and to contribute in other ways as agreed upon with the seminar leader.

• The leader works with the director to plan a public lecture series in the spring that supplements the course’s interdisciplinary focus. Each faculty fellow presents one of the spring lectures. The seminar leader also invites outside speakers to participate in the spring lecture series. The lecture series counts toward the leader's teaching load as HON 390.

• The seminar leader receives a stipend of $1,500 for planning the course.

• Please submit your proposal to Nicholas Ealy, Director (ealy@hartford.edu) by Nov. 3, 2023, and include a description of the proposed seminar theme, topics the seminar would address, possible readings, a brief discussion of the format you would use, and a brief CV. Let the director know if you have any questions and/or are interested in obtaining samples of previous successful proposals before submitting.

• Remember that the seminar should emphasize the humanities but also approach the proposed topic from multiple disciplines (not necessarily limited to the humanities). The center specifically welcomes proposals dealing with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as those dealing with Ethnic Studies and minoritized populations. The opportunity is open to all full-time faculty from all colleges of the University.