Honors Program Courses

Spring 2025: Seminars 

DRAM 220-H: Scene Study with Professor Martin Shell

This is a practical “hands-on” course for developing actors that is primarily focused on scene work, and we’ll work from a wide range of plays and styles of theater. We’ll connect performance abilities and ensemble skills to the exploration of a variety of physical and vocal techniques needed for everything from the classics of Western theater to contemporary dramas to experimental original works. Students learn research methods for characterization, period movement, and interpretation of scenes that reflect a deepening understanding of how theater illuminates its society and culture. We’ll demonstrate our learning in ongoing actor training, frequent scene presentations, rehearsal logs, research papers, and a final presentation and critique.

ENGL 250-H: Literature and the Law with Professor Justine Dymond

Literature as wide-ranging as Sophocles’s drama Antigone, Franz Kafka’s story “The Trial,” and Layli Long Soldier’s contemporary poetry collection Whereas focuses on how the law– legal and political contexts– shapes human experience. What does it mean to be wronged? What avenues do we have for seeking justice? How do we reconcile the horrible injustices of the past with the hope for peace in the present? How does literature intersect with law, and how might we bring the tools of literary analysis to bear on our understanding of the law? These are some of the key questions that will drive our inquiries in this course into the myriad intersections of literature and the law.

HNRS 284: Seminar in History—Public History with Professor Ian Delahanty

This course introduces students to the field of museum and archival studies. Students collaborate to research, plan, and produce a museum exhibit about Springfield College’s history based on research in the Springfield College Archives and Special Collections. Students select the archival materials to be exhibited, prepare captions and other explanatory materials for the museum exhibit, and consider how best to display the results of their archival research.

RELI 209-H: Religion and Food with Professor Katherine Dugan

Think about the last time you ate a meal with your family. How was eating with loved ones different from eating alone? Are there special traditions that your family has–a specific meal before a big event or a birthday tradition? Does someone in your family have a special dish that they always bring to family meals? Food matters and how we share it reflects our culture, values, and personalities. Food is a tangible way that religious norms are expressed and religious ideas shape how humans eat or do not eat. We’re going to spend the semester exploring norms around religious foods, and ideas about food, religion, and power. We’ll look at food and ritual, food and values, religious food and communities.

Spring 2025: Colloquia

HNRS 192: The Business of Sports Venues with Professor Daigo Yazawa 

This colloquium will explore the business aspects of sports venues in the United States. Students will examine a chosen sports stadium/arena from a variety of business perspectives, including management, marketing, design, finance, and economics. We will explore all of the behind-the-scenes and other unique aspects that go into a sports venue. The goal of this colloquium is to gain new perspectives and skills to analyze a sports venue from multiple business perspectives and apply them to other sports venues around the world.

HNRS 192: Fiction in Science with Professor Luke Pelton

This course will provide an in-depth examination of some of the many challenges and flaws within scientific inquiry. Using Stuart Ritchie's Science Fictions as a primary text, students will explore critical issues such as data manipulation, publication bias, and ethical misconduct, all of which undermine the credibility of scientific findings. The course will emphasize how systemic pressures, personal biases, and negligent practices can distort the scientific process, leading to exaggerated or false claims. Students will learn how to critically evaluate scientific literature, identify red flags in research practices, and understand the broader implications for policy, public trust, and the advancement of knowledge.

HNRS 192: Future Studies with Professor Rebecca Lartigue 

In this colloquium, we’ll analyze the ways that past and present societies have envisioned “the future.” To what degree can the past help us understand and anticipate the future, and how are our visions of the future affected and shaped by the past? We’ll consider a wide range of topics, from the calendar-making of ancient societies, to the cultural role of prophecy and divination, to competing dystopian and utopian visions in sci-fi, to myths about the Apocalypse. By studying the methodologies different disciplines use to model or “predict” the future (e.g., actuarial math, trendcasting, meteorology and climate science, economic forecasting, political science election predictions), we’ll attempt to identify the limitations of these methodologies and their resulting models. 

HNRS 192: Music and Movement with Professor Jasmin Hutchinson

This colloquium delves into the dynamic interplay between music and movement, with a particular focus on how music influences physical activity, sports performance, and exercise behavior. By integrating research from psychology, kinesiology, neuroscience, and musicology, students will explore how music can enhance motivation, improve athletic performance, and facilitate the psychological and physiological aspects of exercise.

HNRS 192: Puzzle Me This with Professor Chris Hakala 

This colloquium will study the popularity of intellectual puzzles and brain games similar to those in the New York Times. The focus of the colloquium would be the psychology behind them with a goal of understanding the cognitive strategies involved in solving puzzles, the emotional impact of puzzles, and the social and interactive nature of solving intellectual puzzles. The course will be grounded in social and cognitive psychology and would also draw from the world of statistics. The colloquium would be applicable to a number of different applications, including real world problem solving and work-related challenges. 

HNRS 192: Sustainable Springfield College with Professor Chelsea Corr-Limoges

This colloquium introduces key sustainability principles and explores how they are applied to address the complex environmental problems of today. We will analyze a diverse range of sustainability efforts, spanning from personal decisions regarding natural resource consumption to collective international initiatives outlined in the U.N. Sustainable Development Agenda. These discussions will inform a culminating collaborative project that addresses a specific sustainability challenge on campus. We'll work together with other campus partners to design and implement a project that promotes sustainable practices (e.g., waste reduction) at the College to better our campus community and planet. 

Fall 2024: Seminars 

ENGL 241-H: Myths of America with Dean Rachel Rubinstein

This course investigates the imaginative, mythic, historical, and aesthetic meanings of “America,” from its earliest incarnations through the mid-nineteenth century. We will read both major and unfamiliar literary works from this period, and examine how these works embody, envision, revise, and respond to central narratives about national purpose and identity. 

PHIL 105-H: Introduction to Philosophy with Professor Bob Gruber

Get ready to explore three BIG questions that will keep you up at night. Do we have free will? Do we have souls? Does God exist? These questions have occupied philosophers for thousands of years, and we will get a chance to study some popular answers. More importantly, we will learn about how to explain and evaluate philosophical arguments, a technique that will help us to make our own progress on answering these enormous questions

SCSM 101-4H: Springfield College Seminar with Professor Kari Taylor

In this three-credit hour course, you will have the opportunity to form a community with your fellow honors students who are new to Springfield College as we dialogue about complex real-world issues. The course helps you learn how to have vibrant, student-led discussions while you explore how to make connections and integrate ideas across a range of subject areas such as historical and social literacy, wellness, and aesthetic expression. You will culminate your learning through an integrative project and presentation. Overall, the course offers both the challenge and support you need to start your college experience off strong. 

Fall 2024: Colloquia

HNRS 192: Exploring the Theory of Health at Every Size with Professor Megan Harvey

Is good health achieved by taking personal responsibility for health behaviors like eating nutritious foods, physical activity, and maintaining a body mass index in the normal range? In this colloquium, we will examine the premise and validity of the concept of personal responsibility for health, and examine the bias associated with using body mass index as a proxy for health. This colloquium will explore the theory of Health at Every Size, a concept rooted in a social justice and systems-oriented frame with an eye towards incorporating this information into our lives and our careers.

HNRS 192: Intersectional Feminism in Literature and Pop Culture with Professor Allie Eaton

This colloquium will explore the ways in which feminism, race, and cultural identity intersect in literature and pop culture. We will start by reading the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who introduced the concept of intersectionality, and discuss her theories in relation to one or more literary texts, as well as pop cultural figures such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. We will also critique the practice of racial binarism, which erases the experiences of people of Asian, Latinx, Indigenous and other nonwhite and nonblack populations. 

HNRS 192: Philosophizing about Animals with Professor Bob Gruber

We will explore several philosophical issues that emerge in the study of animals, and we will also explore philosophical questions regarding the relationships between human and non-human animals. Questions to be explored include: What (if anything) can we know about the experiences of other animals? Do nonhuman animals have cultures, genders, and societies? Is animal suffering ‘less important’ than human suffering? Should we display animals in zoos? Should we attempt to revive extinct animal species? Is it morally defensible for humans to eat other animals? Do we have an obligation to let wild animals ‘be wild’? 

HNRS 192: The Rhythms of Life with Professor Chris Abdullah

We are all constantly interacting with rhythms from within our body, among interactions with the world around us, and even from larger celestial forces. Day-night cycles. Breathing. Train schedules. The emergence of cicadas. Daylight savings time. The driving beats of a Beyoncé song. The revolution of the earth around the sun. This colloquium will explore how your body needs rhythms to survive, how the body responds to rhythms, how we can modulate the body with rhythms, and how sometimes you just need a good rhythm to make your body move.

View Past Honors Program Courses: 

Honors Colloquia (HNRS 192)       Interdisciplinary Seminars (HNRS 282)

Seminars in a Discipline (HNRS 283)   Guided Study Courses (HNRS 141 and HNRS 499)