Course Description: Using Economic Experiments to Understand Incentives and Markets

Effective management practices in all areas of business require managers to understand how people respond to incentives and anticipate the effects of incentives on the behavior of customers, employees, and others. This seminar examines the explanation provided by economics about how people respond to incentives and we will test this explanation by running a few economic experiments in class. The focus will be on the experimental method as a way testing hypotheses and deriving knowledge about this aspect of human behavior.

Seminar Assistant: Anrenee Reasor

Audrey Coleman is head archivist at the Dole Institute of Politics, overseeing archives, special collections, and museum programming. A fourth-generation native Kansan and graduate of the KU Honors program, she has a diverse professional background managing and promoting cultural heritage collections.

Senator Bob Dole served the state of Kansas in the U.S. Congress for over 35 years, and to date is the longest serving Republican Leader in U.S. History. We’ll discuss Dole’s legacy as it relates to Kansas’ identity and national history and politics, related to the programs, resources, and historical collections at the Dole Institute, as well as the 2014 KU Common Book, The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty, the commemorative observance of the 1974 Kansas Senatorial campaign, and other contemporary issues.

Seminar Assistant: Susie McClannahan

Anne Dotter holds a Ph.D. in American Studies; she specializes in visual and media studies, gender and cultural studies and translation. Anne has taught various courses in French, American Studies, and the Humanities and Western Civilization. Originally a native of France, she is also conversant in German and Spanish.

In this Freshman Seminar, you will get to think about one very specific problem an increasing number of women face in the region of Kyrgystan and Kazakhstan. Through this narrow topic, we will be considering demographic, religious and transnational feminist questions. This will also allow us to look at a variety of scholarly disciplines and what asking questions in between all of them means. Primarily, we will be asking ourselves what kind of data needs to be collected and what kind of knowledge constructed to bring attention to and contribute to solving this problem.

Seminar Assistant: Adelle Loney

Joe Gillespie has been a lecturer in the School of Health Professions at the K.U. Medical Center since 2005 and with the K.U. Honors Program since fall of 2012. His areas of expertise include history of the American healthcare system, management of health information systems, patient information privacy and information system security. He has 40 years’ experience in health information management and consulting. He has been the Associate Director of Student Health Services at Watkins Memorial Health Center since 2004. He received a bachelor’s degree in Medical Record Administration in 1974 from Southwestern Oklahoma State University and a Master’s degree in Health Administration in 1987 from Wichita State University. His master’s thesis addressed patient privacy laws and practices in Kansas and was subsequently published by the Kansas Hospital Association as the definitive resource on these matters for all hospitals in the state. He is a Registered Health Information Administrator (RHIA) and is credentialed as Certified in Healthcare Privacy & Security (CHPS) by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA).

The need for healthcare services is something that all people throughout the world have in common although the access, cost and quality of these services differs greatly from country to country. This honors course will introduce the student to the American healthcare system and provide an opportunity to compare and contrast our system with that followed in other countries. The student will learn how to assess information critically so as to form opinions on Health care systems beyond politically-motivated sound bites.

Seminar Assistant: Julia Reynolds and Katie Conard

Marc L. Greenberg (PhD UCLA 1990), Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures, is a specialist in historical linguistics and dialectology with a focus on Slavic languages. He is author of A Historical Phonology of the Slovene Languages in the venerable Historical Phonology of the Slavic Languages series (Universitätsverlag Carl Winter) and was a co-founding editor of two journals, Slovenski jezik / Slovene Linguistic Studies and Slavia Centralis. He has held fellowships from Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the American Society of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society. In addition to serving as chair of the Dept. of Slavic Languages & Literatures, he also chaired the German Dept. and served as Associate Dean for the Humanities.

Archaeology allows us to know about human history and society without written records. Language reconstruction, too, tells us about earlier stages of humanity in the absence of texts. This course examines the best-known language family, Indo-European, and introduces the student to the comparative method, which provides the foundation for establishing linguistic relatedness and reconstructing unattested languages. Students will also read about and contemplate the ideological derivatives of genetic-linguistic knowledge, i.e., ethnopolitics and nationalism.

Seminar Assistant: Crystal Bradshaw

Blane Harding currently serves as the Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs at the University of Kansas. Mr. Harding is also a consultant for private companies and has worked with over 30 institutions of higher learning across the country. In May 2012 after twenty two years of service, he retired from Colorado State University where he served as the Director of Advising, Recruitment, and Retention for the College of Liberal Arts. Mr. Harding has taught courses in African American history and Ethnic Studies for the past twenty two years. Mr. Harding has also served as a retention faculty member with the Council for Opportunity in Education which oversees the national TRio programs. Mr. Harding has presented at national conferences on various topics that focus on African American, Latino(a), Bi-racial, Native American, and Asian/Pacific Island students in higher education. Mr. Harding has published several articles on diversity, multicultural advising, and advisor training.

The demographics of society are rapidly changing and multiculturalism and social justice are central to these changes. When we as individuals and institutions discuss these changes we tend to emphasize the external identities of others. These identities may include race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientations, gender, and a wide range of other socially constructed concepts. This Honors section will allow participants to not only look at their social identity but even more critical is their internal concepts of their personal identity. There will be a series of exercises and discussions that allow us to move from being culturally aware to culturally competent so we begin to understand the role our individual identities play in building relationships with others.

Seminar Assistant: Abigail Fields and John Handley

Edward Healy is Coordinator for Student Development with the KU Honors Program.  He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Biology from the University of Kansas and a Juris Doctorate from Vermont Law School where he specialized in environmental law, public interest and education policy.

In a short time, human species have transformed the earth in an unparalleled way. Through population growth, natural resources, technology and commerce, we have affected the ecosystems in which we reside. This course analyses the environmental changes occurring, the human factors affecting the earth’s ecosystems, the legal framework affecting environmental issues, existing and emerging technology, and the economic and political pressures that shape environmental policy.

Seminar Assistant: Nadia Hamid

 

Instructor Biography: 

Tim Jackson has been a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at KU since 2007. He earned a B.S. degree in Chemistry from St. Cloud State University in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004. Prior to his appointment at KU, he was a National Institutes of Health Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota Center for Metals in Biocatalysis. His areas of expertise include bioinorganic chemistry (the study of transition metals in biological systems) and inorganic spectroscopy. In particular, his research is aimed at uncovering the reaction pathways of environmentally beneficial manganese complexes of relevance to biological and industrial processes. Tim received a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2011, the KU Chancellor’s Silver Anniversary Teaching Award in 2012, and an Outstanding Freshman Seminar Award in 2013.

 

Course Description:  From Data to Knowledge:  From the Chemistry Laboratory to the Textbook

Scientific knowledge is commonly presented in introductory textbooks in the form of laws (or rules) that are removed from their historical context. While this is appropriate for most introductory science courses, a proper appreciation for the scientific process is most effectively achieved by understanding the historical events and figures that were integral in the development of these laws. Often the transition from the laboratory to the textbook is a rocky one, with contentious debates regarding the proper interpretation of data and its implications. With discussions and assigned readings from several recent books on the history of chemistry, this course will examine the development of key laws and rules in the fields of chemistry and biochemistry in the late 19^th and early 20^th century from a historical perspective. Through this process, students will appreciate the dynamic process by which scientific laws are developed on the basis of data. Also discussed will be scientific knowledge currently transiting from the laboratory to the textbook, including genomics, global climate change, and molecular gastronomy.

Seminar Assistant: Molly Bernard

Mark Johnson has taught courses on the First Amendment and Privacy at the University of Kansas’s William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications since 2008. He has also taught a course on election law at KU's Law School since 2010 and seminars on free expression and data privacy in the Freshman Honors Program. Mark serves as board chairman of the University Daily Kansan, the daily student newspaper at KU. In that capacity he oversees the UDK’s business and editorial operations.

Mark received his B.A. in History from Yale in 1977 and a J.D. from Harvard in 1980. As a practicing attorney in Kansas City since 1980 and a partner in the Dentons law firm, Mark specializes in media and telecommunications. He has been listed in the First Amendment and Public Utility sections of Best Lawyers in America since the 1990’s. He advises news media organizations in Kansas and Missouri, including broadcast network affiliate television stations and general circulation newspapers. He makes court appearances on behalf of news organizations seeking access to court proceedings and to advocate placement of cameras in the courtroom to enhance coverage of judicial proceedings. He is also the attorney for the Collegian, the daily student newspaper at Kansas State University, and the Journalism Education Association, a group of several thousand high school journalism educators. He has made numerous presentations on free speech to high school and college press organizations in Kansas.

Course Description: From the Printed Word to the Silver Screen

Everyone goes to the movies -- or at least watches the movies on Netflix. This seminar will examine how several great movies were adapted from short stories, some well-known and others not so well-known. The movies we will study -- along with the stories on which they are based -- include Rear Window, The Shawshank Redemption, Psycho, and Breakfast at Tiffany's. We will read the stories and watch the movies, analyzing each for what the writer and the moviemaker were trying to accomplish, and then determining whether they were successful. We will also consider the elements of movie-making and how they enter into the films we will study.

Seminar Assistants: Heathyr Johnson and Erin Calhoun

Mary Klayder has a special interest in creative non-fiction, particularly memoir and travel writing.  She is also interested in British literature, especially 20th century London, comparative British and American literature, and Post-Colonial Studies.  She works extensively with the Honors Program and regularly directs study abroad programs to the U.K. and Costa Rica.  She won the 2009 H.O.P.E. Award, the 2008 Outstanding Woman Educator Award, the J. Michael Young Advising Award and is a 6-time recipient of the Mortar Board Outstanding Educator Award.

For thousands of years we have depended on writers of literature to express our needs and desires for change, whether those changes are personal or public, social or aesthetic. In the English Department at KU we use the texts of the past and present to explore all of those areas and encourage students to examine those possibilities in their own writing. This course is designed to inform and develop any interest you have in writing and help you understand ways you might develop and sustain that interest while at KU, whether you are an English major or not.

Seminar Assistant: Corbin Stephens and Shawnee Wallace

Kathryn (Katie) Rhine is an assistant professor in the department of anthropology. She has taught at the University of Kansas since 2009, specializing in courses in cultural and medical anthropology, as well as African studies. In addition to the Kansas African Studies Center, she also has affiliations in Global and International Studies (GIST) and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). With the support of a Fulbright fellowship, Katie just spent a year in Nigeria where she began a new project titled, Cultures of Collision: Road Traffic Accidents and the Politics of Trauma Care. This study has branched from over a decade of research among HIV-positive women, who fear, above all else, dying in car accidents. [She also shares this fear when driving in the city of Lagos]. Katie blogs about her recent experiences in Nigeria on the website, Go Slow: Fieldnotes from Nigeria’s Roadscapes [http://culturesofcollision.tumblr.com]. Her findings on women and life with HIV will soon be published in a monograph titled, The Unseen Things: HIV, Secrecy, and Wellbeing among Women in Northern Nigeria.

Description: The concept “global health” signifies the ways in which transnational flows of people, ideas, technologies, and capital influence the presentation of disease across space and time. In this seminar, we will question how these transnational entanglements, social and economic inequalities, and (mis)understandings of “culture” shape the delivery of medical care and the experiences of suffering in diverse global contexts. Specifically, we will focus on childhood epilepsy in the United States, HIV and AIDS in Haiti, cancer in Botswana, and psychiatric disorders in Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Japan, and Tanzania, among others.

Texts: Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. Watters, Ethan. Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. Kidder, Tracy. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. Livingston, Julie. Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic.
Jennifer Roberts, Department of Geology Class # 30301

Wednesday, 1:00-1:50 pm Nunemaker 102

Seminar Assistant: Adam Yoerg

Jennifer A. Roberts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Kansas. She is a native New Mexican, who received her B.S. degree in Geology from Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.  Her research investigates the complex interplay between minerals and microorganisms in a number of subsurface environments including; oil contaminated aquifers, arctic permafrost, tropical soils, modern carbonate shelves and ramps, and deep saline aquifers targeted for CO₂ injection and storage.  She teaches courses in introductory geology, hydrogeology, geomicrobiology, and ethical practices in geoscience.

Scientists rely on multiple types of modern data as well as records of Earth’s climate through geologic time to predict future climate change.  In this class we will focus on the greenhouse gas methane, its inferred role in paleoclimatic change as well as modern records of its concentration, sources and sinks.  Class members will participate in analytical measurement of methane concentration from permafrost samples collected from the instructor’s field site in Svalbard.  Using this data we will discuss data analysis and interpretation as it applies to specific research hypotheses as well as how data of this type fit into larger-scale predictions of climate change.

Seminar Assistant: Ishani Shah and Meghan Schippers

Professor Roney joined the faculty in KU’s School of Education Educational Leadership and Policy Studies department in January 2012 following a 30-year career in higher education administration. As a university administrator, she worked in student services administration, including registrar at Purdue University, Vice President for Student Affairs at The University of Akron, and Vice Provost for Student Success at KU. She teaches graduate courses in the following areas: higher education administration, higher education law, student affairs administration in higher education, and organizational change and leadership in higher education. She enjoys reading, music, bicycling, kayaking and other outdoor activities.

Most students enroll in college to achieve the important goals of improving their intellectual skills and abilities. What many students do not realize is that going to college also has a significant impact on one’s overall development as a young adult, from increased self-awareness and self-confidence to fresh perspectives of the broader world in which we live. This course will explore the theories and research that explain the impact of college attendance on students and focus on how this knowledge is created.

(Instructor listed as Dotter, Anne)