Upper Division Seminars
Two Upper Division Seminars (3 credits each) are required to graduate with Honors. Click for the dropdown menu to see the course description. Western professors can apply to teach an Honors seminar and each year, topics are chosen in a competition like fashion. Each seminar topic is offered no more than once every other year and is exclusive to Honors. Seminars typically have between 10 and 15 students.
Additionally, you can explore past years' seminars by clicking the below button to explore our archive.
Fall 2026
Lori Martindale, Honors
We will delve into international legends, folklore, mythology, fairy tales, and literature, — as well as contemporary literary re-imaginings and subversions of those stories with a focus on the Witch. We will read literature in an international context as well as study Arts (book illustrations; painting), historical essays on the witch hunts, and philosophical critiques of these tales, particularly within the trope of the wise, cackling Crone. Through reading, discussion, and creative responses, we will explore the ambiguous, strange, and magical trope of the witch. From Hecate to the Baba Yaga, Tituba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and many more, be ready to delve into a variety of stories and works which spark creative ideas. Students will create and craft their own works, as well as write transformative reading responses, and then ignite these ideas into a research paper or creative project.
Paul Dunn, Honors
In this class we will explore several controversial debates in biomedical ethics, honing our analytical and perspective-taking skills to understand and evaluate different positions, scrutinize the coherence of our intuitions, and articulate and argue more effectively for our own views. Course requirements will include small weekly writing assignments, class participation, two short papers, and a longer final paper. Some of the questions we will explore include:
- Do people have a right to medical assistance in dying, and under what circumstances? What morally relevant considerations are at stake in institutionalizing such practices?
- What is the moral status of pre-natal and neo-natal humans, and what moral obligations do their parents and healthcare professionals have toward them? Under what conditions is it morally permissible to terminate a pregnancy or end the life of a newborn?
- Is there a moral difference between medical therapy and medical enhancement? If such therapies are genetic, how do the rights of parents and their unborn children intersect?
- Is there a right to health care, and if so, what does it encompass? How should limited medical and health care resources be allocated, and what roles do individual freedom and personal responsibility have in those considerations?
Maura O’Leary, Linguistics
In this seminar, we will explore the linguistic science behind translation issues in the world’s most widely read book: the Bible. The Bible is generally read in the language most familiar to the reader (in the US, often English or Spanish), despite the fact that it was not written in those languages. Therefore, most Bible readers are placing a lot of faith (pun intended) in the work of Bible translators – that they will faithfully and accurately communicate in a modern language what was written in an ancient language from a different culture with different standards of communication. However, perfect translation is a nearly impossible task, especially when trying to keep the translation of verses and chapters to a succinct length. In this class, we will learn about the linguistic factors that play a role in making a perfect translation so difficult: the inflection of words (morphology), grammar (syntax), ambiguity (semantics), and implications (pragmatics).
Max Barahona, Finance and Marketing
This Honors Seminar explores artificial intelligence as a defining yet deeply contested phenomenon of the twenty-first century, situated between technological promise and societal anxiety. Rather than focusing on technical programming, the course examines AI as students most often encounter it: through culture, politics, ethics, media, work, and public debate.
Students develop a clear understanding of what AI is —pattern-recognition systems, predictive models, and generative technologies— and what it is not, including consciousness, autonomy, or neutrality. Using a comparative and international perspective, the seminar analyzes why societies interpret AI so differently, drawing on cultural frameworks, governance models, and case studies from the United States, Europe, China, and the Global South.
Through discussion, debate, and applied analysis, students learn to critically assess claims about AI’s risks and benefits, articulate nuanced positions, and engage thoughtfully with one of the central global debates of their generation.
Kristina Podesva, Art & Art History
In this seminar, we will ask and answer– what is color and how does it signify? While traditional approaches to color in art have focused on formal theories of mixture, temperature, value, and balance, its conceptual study has been less practiced despite being a subject in philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, science, literature, music, and film, among other disciplines. To answer these questions, students will examine color’s historical significance and suppression (specifically of queer, feminine, exotic, cosmetic, spiritual, and pathological bodies). Departing from Renée Green’s sculpture in the WWU collection, Space Poem #15, this course encourages students to create socially, culturally, and philosophically informed palettes inspired by artists and other thinkers. In addition to reading, viewing, and listening assignments, students will create weekly color diaries while building a visual archive. Final projects will materialize as an artwork, essay, film/video, story, poems, ethnographic study, or research paper among other possibilities.
Derek Moscato, Journalism
From the upcoming Los Angeles Olympiad to the 2026 World Cup of Soccer, global sport pursued at professional and amateur levels serves as a conduit through which to understand larger economic, cultural, and media systems, as well as political relations within and between nations. This is underscored by the political economy generated by professional associations like the Premier League, Formula One, the National Football League, and Major League Baseball; and international sport institutions such as the International Ice Hockey Federation, World Rugby, and the International Cricket Council. More recently—and locally—it is emphasized by the multibillion-dollar investments made by public and private stakeholders to bring events to the cross-border Cascadia region such as the 2026 World Cup of Soccer in Seattle and Vancouver, the latter city’s previous hosting of the Winter Olympics in 2010, and thriving professional sporting enterprises in the region including the Seahawks, Mariners, Canucks, Kraken, Torrent, Storm, Sounders, and Lions.
Using global sport as a relevant and evolving touchstone for students, this class draws from the political economy of media paradigm. This includes history, labor, organizing structures, marketing, political relations, broadcasting and media rights, and merchandising. This course also connects sport to public diplomacy, which is defined as communicating strategically on behalf of nations in order to establish dialogue and influence international publics. This focus highlights the role of global athletics in mediating national relations between nations from North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. To this end, students will connect to sport as economically dynamic, geopolitically salient, and socially impactful.
Pam Kuntz, Theatre and Dance
This course is an investigation of habitual patterns and choice making through analysis of our ability to squat. Using the lens of somatic practices such as the Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, Body Mind Centering, and basic dance conditioning, students will take a deep dive into their ability to squat. Readings and discussions will provide the foundations of various somatic practices and help prepare us for the physical work. By engaging in the physical work of these practices students will discover habitual patterns, how to change them if they choose, and explore the new choices available to them as a result. While the squat is the vocabulary of our research, discovering effective use of the self is the work of this class. Our energy will be spent discovering how we can use ourselves more effectively, respond the way we want, and ultimately achieve the goals we set out to achieve.
Greg Youmans, English and Film Studies
The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was one of the most influential cultural figures of the twentieth century and an important bridge between literary modernism and postmodernism. His elegant and succinct stories often take the form of a Möbius Strip, unfolding in a manner that seems wholly rational yet somehow ends in paradox. In this seminar, we will move chronologically through Borges’s work, centering his fiction while incorporating a good deal of his poetry and non-fiction. Along the way we will explore such topics as: how cultural forms and influences travel, both geographically and linguistically, between the Global South and the Global North; the relationship between high (“literary”) and low (“popular”) genres; literary games, puzzles, and hoaxes; and how Borges’s work relates to current ideas in philosophy, mathematics, physics, and computer science.
Zuoting Wen, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
This course examines the writings of Chinese travelers who ventured across distant lands, documenting encounters with diverse peoples, environments, and cultural practices. Students will explore themes of mobility, exchange, and knowledge production from a Chinese perspective, and analyze how travel writing shapes collective memory and cross-cultural understanding. The course highlights figures such as the Buddhist pilgrim Faxian (337–422), the naval explorer Zheng He (1371–1433), and the reformist thinker Kang Youwei (1858–1927), showing how their travels enriched Buddhism, expanded maritime trade networks, and inspired modern societal reforms. Students will also gain foundational knowledge of Chinese history and geography, enabling them to understand China’s cultural and historical connections to the wider world.
Winter 2027
Christie Scollon, Psychology/Honors
Work is an essential feature of most of our lives, but work can mean different things to different people. Does work give your life purpose? Is work something to pay the bills and fund the things you really want to do? Is work part of your identity? What would you do if you didn’t have to work? How can people achieve work-life balance? This seminar will address these questions and more. We will explore the concept of work from the perspective of history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literature. We will examine the role of economic systems, technology, culture, education, and public policy on work. This will not be a class where all we do is rail on the capitalist system (though there will be a bit of that). Instead, the major goal of the class is for students to understand and question various perspectives of work as they also examine head on the role of work in their personal constructions of the Good Life.
Tristan Goldman, Honors
We are going to be exploring prehistoric conceptions of femininity and masculinity as they pertain to the ecosystem of the planet and the lifeforms that call it home. More often than not, these concepts are reflected in ancient religious terms by the time that there is evidence that is accessible to us. For example, the rebirth of the planet in the springtime is associated with femininity in antiquity, while the death of the prior year in the winter is associated with masculinity (thus the title of the seminar). These associations no doubt have changed over time. We shall be discussing the possible reasons for these changes. Over the course of the seminar, we shall be reading three different works that touch on the ideas that we are interested in. The first is Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; the second is The White Goddess by Robert Graves; and the last is Community and Society by Ferdinand Tönnies.
Zander Albertson, Environmental Studies
This discussion-oriented seminar examines the environmental and sociopolitical dimensions of water in the American West. We will use case studies to learn about traditional systems of water management, understand how America was engineered into "dam nation", and explore current issues including dam removal, adjudication, treaty rights, and climate change. No prior environmental knowledge required - only a curious mind!
Liz Mogford, Sociology
The media is inundated with images and stories of global inequities and injustices, and witnessing the pain and suffering of people and the planet often creates cognitive, emotional, and spiritual dissonance. As a result, many conscientious, empathetic individuals feel compelled to do something in response. This course contextualizes and problematizes Westerners’ drive to “save the world,” linking good intentions to the Savior Industrial Complex.
We examine how the modern manifestation of global charity is a byproduct of the social construction of race, rooted in the doctrine of discovery and colonialism. The course interrogates the historical Western premise that Western philosophies, epistemologies (ways of knowing), and ontologies (ways of being) are superior, and therefore should be imposed upon (colonialism) or offered (development aid) to the rest of the world.
The goal is to scaffold individuals’ instincts to help, fix, and aid with sustained questioning of motives, enabling us to evaluate why people want to help whom, where, when, and how. Students will work toward situating their identity and positionality within a global movement grounded in equity and justice. Readings center voices from the Global South and individuals who have been on the receiving end of saviorism. Class is interactive and discussion-based, engaging history, cultural representations of saviorism in art, film, and writing, case studies, and potential solutions.
Sarah Watkins, Global Humanities and Religions
The Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s was a moral panic centered around accusations of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) throughout the United States and Canada. It brought to light the controversial practice of recovered memories through psychotherapy and grew to encompass the fields of social work, law enforcement, child welfare, and the courts. Yet a 1994 report from the National Center of Child Abuse and Neglect “found no evidence for large-scale cults that sexually abuse children.” This course is designed to investigate the origins and context of the Satanic Panic, placing it within its late-twentieth century moment of women’s and children’s liberation, but also as an exemplar of American moral panics dating back to the Salem Witch Trials in 1692, and as an instructive warning for today’s panics over transgender people and immigrants.
Dustin Hughes, Sociology
Sociology of Bluey introduces students to the science of sociology. This seminar will use episodes and dialogue in the show as units of analysis, then explore their relation to academic texts. As is the case with other television shows, and media more generally, Bluey can be understood as a reflection of the social world. But as an animated children’s cartoon, it may also paint a highly idealized world—one that we may strive to attain or one that ignores certain parts of social life. In any case, Bluey presents us with an opportunity to understand the structure of families: the relationships between members, the roles assigned to each member and their relation to each other, and how families interact with other social institutions. We will draw upon interdisciplinary research—sociology, psychology, and media studies—to help us analyze Bluey and make meaning of families and the social world.
Lindsey Smith, Languages, Literatures and Cultures
Regularly cited among the world’s top tourist destinations, France is celebrated for iconic museums, exquisite food, and rich contributions to fashion, philosophy, and the arts. However, perceptions of France and of the French language vary widely across la francophonie, an international community connecting over 300 million people across five continents.
In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will study films, literature, and selected academic works to gain a better understanding of this complex linguistic legacy. For, if French is seen as a language of opportunity for some, it is considered a form of oppression by others. Through discussions of perspectives from Algeria, Mauritania, Rwanda, French Polynesia, and other parts of the francophone world, we will investigate the echoes of empire and the nuanced ways in which language can complicate the pursuit of independence and sovereignty.
Jill MacIntyre Witt, UEPP, ESCI and Health and Human Development
This seminar course provides weekly discussions and assignments around a variety of topics to help understand climate emotions, ultimately leading to the creation of a personalized climate wellness action plan. Students will examine their place in the world beginning with understanding implicit bias and how it relates to our position in society and our sphere of influence for change. Students will discover the breadth of climate emotions and how to navigate them for building resiliency in their own lives and community. We will also explore what activism entails in regard to climate justice and collective action. We will examine positive psychology and how it relates to taking action as well as other interdisciplinary approaches to motivation, behavioral change, stress management, resiliency, wellness, and habits. Students will develop personalized climate wellness action plans to present to the class to aid in accountability. Some of the questions we will explore include: What kinds of emotions do you encounter around the climate crisis? What are your personal strengths and values? How do you navigate through challenges on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis? What are priorities for personal health and wellness, community, society, and the planet? What is your sustainable plan of action?
Spring 2027
Julie Dugger, Honors
Why do people walk? What does it do for the mind, the body, the spirit, the self, the community, and the imaginative life? This class will explore the culture of walking and its association with liberty, place, and creativity from the Romantic period to the present. Topics we’ll consider include nature walking, urban walking, recreational walking, walking as transportation, and walking as protest or pilgrimage. Course texts may include essays, memoir, poetry, graphic novels, and film. You will walk in this course—lots!—and read and write about walking, and spend substantial time developing and revising what you write. We’ll define walking expansively enough to make assignment options available to experienced walkers, new walkers, and disabled walkers alike.
Thomas Hummel, Honors
Avoidance is a violence. It prefers prone to precaution, wounded to witness. And in our classrooms, our lasting spaces of collaborative care, when we avoid confrontations with cruelty, abuse, deprivation, and violation, what we’re really doing is choosing—at our peril—present comfort over future confidence.
This course rejects the notion that safe spaces are built from safe materials. It’s an exercise in existential encounter. An experiment in practice and proximity. We will develop a language of looking where we do not want to look. We will read together in silence. We will help one another. We will not have devices. There will not be a Canvas page.
In every conceivable sense, the works we engage will intimidate, unsettle, disgust, and debase. Through them, with one another, and in pursuit of collectivity alive with contemplation, we will use the time we have to reimagine presence, reassess refusal, and redefine support.
Kathleen Brian, Honors
A period of being away, of not-being-ness. Mental preoccupation or inattention, often with abnormal movement. Occasionally with failure. Frequently with want, lack, privation. A sudden loss or alteration of consciousness or an instance of this, as contrasted with presence.
Contemporary discourses are infused with imperatives of abundance, becoming, flourishing.
Why, then, might we desire nullification? When do we seek decay, vacuity, obliteration? What possibilities might un-being reveal? How can we metabolize (in) a void?
Tracey Pyscher, Secondary Education
Trauma is having a moment. Generations of researchers have exposed the capacity of systemic, intellectual, and popular discourses that contribute to reproducing the inequities of US society in relation to theorizing trauma. In this course, the category of trauma is not taken for granted but rather is unraveled and interrogated to assess the political and cultural work that trauma does especially in relation to our bodies, our social and cultural, and psychic experiences. In designing final projects, students will move towards envisioning new conceptualizations of trauma based on their unique interdisciplinary interests. The course is a co-facilitated conversation between the professor and students.
Mart Stewart, Department of History
This course will first acknowledge that gardens understood broadly can be found everywhere in the history of humans and nature. It will look at gardens as markers of cultural values and practices – as texts that can be read to understand larger cultural systems, as well as what their makers consider to be a well-designed world. This course will pay particular attention to edge gardens, doorstep gardens, kitchen gardens, the “botanical gardens of the dispossessed,” to pea patches of identity and sustenance, victory gardens of every stripe and the place and role of all of these as historical phenomena in particular times and places – but also what they might mean collectively as resources for the future. Your gardens, too. This course will assume that gardening is always a community- building endeavor.
Jeanine Amacher and Clint Spiegel, Chemistry
The United States biotechnology industry is responsible for saving millions of lives every year. As of 2025, there are 3,229 businesses in the US biotech industry. Furthermore, this market is rapidly growing, from $621.8 billion in 2024 to a projected >$2 trillion within 10 years. Recent major advancements include the rise in cancer immunotherapies, targeted gene therapies (including CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing), and other major recent innovations (including major effects of AI which are ongoing). However, the biotech industry must be understood within the context of intellectual property law and the capitalist economic system. This course will discuss major characteristics of the biotech industry in the United States in the modern era, as well as focus on specific case studies (including specific drugs and/or gene therapies, therapeutic approaches, and entire companies) to generate discussion and discourse regarding how health and disease are approached in the modern era.
Keenan Burton, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Whether called māhū, transgender, hijra, pansexual, two-spirit, lesbian, or Faʻafāfine, queer, gender non-conforming, and sexually diverse people have existed in every human culture and across time. Before Queerness will explore the stories, performances, and artistic creations of gender-creative and sexually diverse Europeans from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. We will assess a wide range of evidence, including literary works, operatic performances, material culture, personal writings, and medical treatises to examine how people that we might consider queer today understood and articulated their identity and sense of self in a cisheteronormative world. Many of these sources, such as the memoirs of the intersex individual Herculine Barbin and the vocal music of the castrati, will ask students to reconsider notions of gendered personhood and grapple with the limits of the two-sex system. This is a class about queer people – their lives, struggles, joys, and triumphs – and what they can teach us about both the past and the world we live in today.
Jennifer Long, Decision Sciences
We are constantly navigating complex information environments. From digital experiences to physical spaces, we traverse information structures that influence how we understand, belong, and move through the world. Yet the design of these structures is often invisible. This honors seminar introduces students to the concepts of Information Architecture (IA) as both an intellectual ideology and as a practical methodology for navigating complexity and creating shared meaning.
The field of Information Architecture is best understood as an art and science of creating order from chaos. The conceptual ideas exist at the intersection of many different academic disciplines, including: Design, Psychology, Linguistics, Mathematics, Business, and Computer Science. This course views IA as a human-centered discipline focused on how people encounter and understand information and navigate systems to achieve their goals.
Imran Sheikh, Environmental Science
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a revolutionary technology, but it also has hidden energy costs and environmental impacts. Training and running large AI models consume enormous amounts of electricity, drive construction of new power plants, increase carbon emissions, and potentially lead to higher energy prices. In this seminar, students will develop an understanding of why AI is causing a surge in electricity demand and then critically examine the range of impacts of AI’s energy use, with a focus on impacts that relate to the environment, social equity, and the economy. We will also think innovatively about solutions that may reduce negative impacts of AI energy use in the future.
Tom Moore, Global Humanities and Religions
It Can’t Happen Here asks whether a repressive political regime is so much of anomaly that it could never arise in America. That’s what the Germans thought before the rise of Hitler in the 1930’s; that’s what the people of Chile thought before their democratically elected president was overthrown by a military coup in the 1970’s. Of course, there are broader and narrower authoritarian regimes, but each has at its core a set of values that regard some human beings as ‘others’ who are deemed to be without rights or freedoms. We will explore this question through readings by James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Pable Neruda, and films such as State of Siege, Triumph of the Will, and Eyes on the Prize.