Thursday, 7:00 - 8:30 pm Nunemaker 102

Seminar Assistant: Jake Doerr

Mr. Sampson graduated with honors from the University of Kansas with a major in history and attended law school at KU where he was selected for Order of the Coif and other awards.  He is currently a partner at Shook Hardy and Bacon, in Kansas City, a position that led him to try more than 80 jury cases, teach more than 100 programs on trial practice, litigation strategy and legal writing, publish on the topic of trial practice and serve as President of the DRI, the nation’s largest association of lawyers.  Throughout his career he has been awarded numerous honors and recognitions, including Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Kansas School of Law, Missouri Litigation Star, and listed in The Best Lawyers in America among many others. 

We will begin with the Greeks, exploring how war has not only threatened society over the ages but has also rescued it.  Commanders had success in proportion to their mastery of weapons, certainly, and in proportion to their study and application of battlefield tactics.   But the great commanders, the ones whose imprint we still feel today, imposed their personality, their genius, and their will upon their adversaries.  For their nations and their time, they were the difference between victory and vanished.  From Caesar to Washington, from Nelson to Eisenhower, it is these people, their wars, and why they made that difference that we will read about and discuss.

Seminar Assistant: Paige Selman

John Staniunas is a Professor of Directing, Acting, Movement and Musical Theatre. He served as Chair of the Department of Theatre for six years and four years as Artistic Director for the University Theatre. John Staniunas is a professional actor, director and choreographer with a long list of credits from regional and university theatres. He has staged over 100 musicals and plays from original works to classics. He is the co-author of Between Director and Actor: Strategies for Effective Performance with Mandy Rees of CSU-Bakersfield. John was a recent recipient of a William J. Fulbright Senior Scholar Award in 2004.

Tap dance is one of the most important cultural additions to the American canon of dance forms (jazz, modern, hip-hop, Charleston, etc.).  This seminar will explore the social and political ramifications of the tap dance form and pose cultural and racial implications of the dance style. Students will also explore the form itself and learn all the basic steps as well as present a final "concert" highlighting the many styles and cultural differences inherit in the dance.

(Instructor listed as Dotter, Anne)

Seminar Assistant: Christine Schultz

Your instructor for this Freshman Honors Seminar is Matthew Stein. He is a practicing physician (Oncologist) in Lawrence, Kansas, where he has lived with his family and worked throughout his professional life. He and his wife are parents of KU, Washburn, and Baker graduates and have a life-long interest in the education of their own children and stimulating the intellectual lives of those with whom they come into contact. He has taught in various capacities over the years both on campus in Lawrence and as a clinical preceptor for aspiring health care professionals from KUMC and other institutions.

A brief introduction and exploration of health care from divergent perspectives emphasizing scholarship and the development of research skills, proficiency in various modes of communication (reading, writing and discussion), and a general appreciation and knowledge of the health care system as it exists today (history, development and current practice).

Seminar Assistant: Ryan Steele

(History, Science, Architecture, Engineering, Social Dynamics, Governance, Economics, and Politics)

This seminar will serve as a broad interdisciplinary introduction to all aspects of the Internet and its role in society, and is intended for students of all majors.  Topics examined will include:  History of networks and the Internet and key people from antiquity to the the Web, Lolcats and the IoT (Internet of Things); Science and architecture of the Internet and introduction to its operation and protocols; Social networking and interaction paradigms of people and organizations; Governance and regulation of the Internet; Service provider economics and net neutrality politics (discrimination based on content provider); Privacy, censorship, and international issues.
Celka Straughn, Spencer Museum of Art Class # 30183

Friday, 10:00 – 11:30am KS Union Alcove G

Seminar Assistant: Kassandra Valles

Celka Straughn has served as the Andrew W. Mellon Director of Academic Programs at the Spencer Museum of Art since fall 2009. She received her PhD in art history in 2007 from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include modern European art (in particular German and Jewish art) and artist networks, as well as exhibition and collecting histories and practices. She is also currently exploring issues of cultural competency and museums as well as the digital, environmental, and medical humanities.

Japanese prints, American paintings, Bohemian glass, ancient Coptic textile fragments, Chinese snuff bottles, ceramic doorknobs and 19th-century trade and valentine cards are just a few of the objects from around the globe acquired by Kansas City philanthropist Sallie Casey Thayer. Donated to the University of Kansas in 1917, her extensive collection forms the basis of what is today the Spencer Museum of Art. In preparation for a centenary exhibition of her gift, this seminar will examine Mrs. Thayer’s collecting practices (including where, how, and why she purchased works) and motivations, in particular how her “ideas of spending money are inextricably mixed with civic affairs, municipal culture.” We will further explore questions of taste, consumption, gender, and patronage. Additionally, this course will study some of the objects acquired by Mrs. Thayer and consider how objects contribute to the formation of knowledge about the past, the present and communities and cultures from different regions of the world.

Seminar Assistant: Jose Herbas

Kala M. Stroup, a national leader in the nonprofit sector and former University President, will teach this course. Kala M. Stroup was a KU Watkins Scholar and participated in the early days of the KU Honors program as a student, faculty and staff adviser. She has served as a faculty member at four universities and has been a consultant to numerous universities designing courses and academic programs in nonprofit/philanthropic studies, civic engagement and citizen leadership.

Your generation has clocked many volunteer hours and is actively involved in your communities as tutors, mentors, participants in fund-raising events (5k runs), food bank volunteers, Eagle Scouts, 4-H leaders, nursing home friends, advocates for causes, environmental awareness speakers, and international relief supporters. While volunteering, you have been part of the workforce of the large nonprofit/philanthropic sector with over 65 million volunteers a year, over 1.8 million organizations, and a GDP the size of Australia. This tutorial is for you to gather data, which you will analyze by assessing the validity of the content and contextualizing it; in the process you will acquire a deeper knowledge of the nonprofit/philanthropic sector. Volunteers, civic leaders and advocates of social change must know about the nonprofit/philanthropic sector and its dynamics. Integrating experiential volunteering with research and information about the nonprofit sector will be the focus of the course. There will be a service learning component in this course which counts toward earning service-learning certification.

Seminar Assistant: Alex Kuhn

Dr. Dave Tell is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. His research interests include rhetorical theory, cultural studies, civil rights, architectural theory, and postmodernity. His scholarship has won numerous awards. The National Communication Association gave him their Marie Hochmuch Nichols Award (2013), their Golden Anniversary Monograph Award (2013), the Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award (2012), and their Gerald R. Miller Dissertation Award (2007). KU has also recognized Dr. Tell as an outstanding teacher. In 2011 the Department of Communication Studies awarded him a Graduate Faculty Mentorship Award. And, in 2012, the Chancellor’s Office awarded him one of KU’s highest teaching honors, the Ned N. Fleming Trust Award.

This course is grounded in Simon Winchester’s 2005 National Bestseller, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Winchester tells the bizarre, behind-the-scenes story of how the world’s most authoritative dictionary was created. As his title suggests, Winchester teaches us that the dictionary was not simply the product of smart people banded together for the tedious task of defining words. Rather, the Oxford English Dictionary—now the world’s foremost authority on the English language—was a product of a London murder and a psychopath with a passion for language.

 Seminar Assistant:  Abby Schletzbaum

 

Instructor Biography:

Mathematics Professor Erik Van Vleck has been a faculty member at KU for the last ten years. His research is in computational mathematics and dynamical systems with a focus on problems that occur in different areas of science and engineering. Of particular interest are models of biological and physical phenomena with an underlying discrete spatial structure, time dependent stability of solutions of differential equations, and mathematics to understand climate dynamics. He was an undergraduate at KU, received a Master's degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the PhD in Applied Mathematics from Georgia Institute of Technology. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Simon Fraser University, he was a faculty member at Colorado School of Mines before moving to KU in 2002.

 

Course Description: Computational Mathematics and Climate Dynamics

The focus of this seminar is on advances in computational mathematics and their application to understanding climate dynamics. The seminar will provide an introduction to the computational mathematics package matlab, high performance computing, and tools for numerical detection of bifurcation phenomena in which there is a major change in the state of the system. We will also introduce simple models of ocean and atmospheric dynamics and then focus on how computational mathematics tools can assist in the understanding of these models. Students in this seminar will receive an introduction to web publishing software and will use this as a medium to produce their final projects.

Seminar Assistants: Alex Kong and Abby Petrulis

Prof. Vitevitch is a faculty member in the Psychology Department, and a Faculty Fellow in the Honors Program. He teaches an Honors section of General Psychology in the Spring, and can often be found underground (his psychology lab is in the basement of Fraser Hall, and his Honors Program office is in Nunemaker).

This seminar will examine (1) how scientific knowledge really changes over time (via evolutionary increments or revolutionary shifts), and (2) how science is really done on a smaller time-scale (i.e., how do scientists figure out what to do next?). We’ll use the fields of Cognitive Psychology and Psycho-linguistics as our “subjects” of study, but the skills you acquire can be applied to any social or physical science. 

Seminar Assistant: Chad Uhl

A native Kansan and an alumna of the KU Honors Program, Anne Wallen is the Assistant Director of National Scholarships and Fellowships at KU. She received an MA in German Studies and a Ph.D. in German and Scandinavian Studies from the University of Minnesota.  She has also studied abroad in Germany, Denmark, Russia and Sweden. Her interdisciplinary research interests focus on transcultural literary interactions in Northern Europe since the 18^th century.

Have you ever noticed how many novels contain maps? Or how often maps are used in films? Space and location have always been important to literature, and this seminar will introduce you to interdisciplinary cultural studies by exploring how and why maps and mapmaking are used in narratives. Whether entirely imagined or based on “real” places, whether included whole in a text or merely described, maps and borders provide important information for us as readers or audience members. We will read articles about geocriticism and cartographic writing, we will expand our knowledge of mapping, and we will learn to evaluate the use of maps in literature and film.

 Seminar Assistant: Cody Christensen

 

Instructor Biography:

Dr. Wiles’ teaching and research interests include U.S. politics, political theory, international relations, and constitutional law.  His PhD is in political science, and he typically advises Honors students who are studying POLS, GIS, and/or interested in law school.