03/11/19
Fall 2019 Honors Seminars
Posted by Tim on March 11, 2019 in Academics, Honors Seminars
ASI 400: Service Learning in Buffalo Public Schools
Instructor: Dr. Joe Gardella
Mondays, 3:00 p.m. to 5:50 p.m. | 134C Greiner Hall
TO ENROLL in ASI 400 (CN: 21236): You will add this course to your shopping cart and register for it just as you would your other courses. This is no longer a restricted enrollment, and may count towards your Honors Experience credits, as long as you have not reached the maximum of 9 credits for the Honors Seminar category.
Course Description: Throughout the service-learning course you’ll serve as a mentor, tutor middle school students, and support teachers in the Buffalo Public Schools. The work for this course allows you to put your love of your own academic background and commitment to community engagement to work.
Student Experiences:
“It was about making a difference in that moment. About brightening their day for maybe only 40 minutes.”
“Furthered my own understanding of diversity and my leadership abilities.”
“This experience provided me with insight as well as the pure joy of seeing a nine year old smile.”
About the Instructor: Joseph A. Gardella, Jr. is the John and Frances Larkin Professor of Chemistry at UB, and has been on the faculty since 1982. He also serves as the Director of the UB/Buffalo Public Schools Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Partnership (ISEP, isep.buffalo.edu), a National Science Foundation funded program which serves as the basis for collaboration with the Buffalo Public Schools in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. Professor Gardella’s research interests are in quantitative analysis and surface chemistry, broadly applied to the study of environmental effects at polymer surfaces and tissue engineering with synthetic biomaterials. Besides his research interests, he has long standing interests in curriculum development for scientists and non-scientists. Professor Gardella has been active in program development in undergraduate research, interdisciplinary studies, service learning and other academic reform areas. He was the UB representative during the founding of the Western New York Service Learning Coalition (WNYSLC). He has been recognized locally and nationally for his work in all areas of academic endeavor.
HIS 419: Should I Stay or Should I Go?: “Home” and the Politics of Place in the African Diaspora
Instructor: Professor Dalia Muller
Mondays, 4:00 p.m. to 6:40 p.m. | 108 Capen
TO ENROLL in HIS 419 (CN: 24181): You will add this course to your shopping cart and register for it just as you would your other courses. This is no longer a restricted enrollment, and may count towards your Honors Experience credits, as long as you have not reached the maximum of 9 credits for the Honors Seminar category.
Course Description: This course explores place-making and place-taking as forms of resistance among afro-descendants in the Americas from the 1500s to the present. People of African descent resisted forced displacement, enslavement, dehumanization, exploitation, discrimination and exclusion through flight, as well as through diverse forms of radical stasis. But to “stay” or to “go” was in many senses a false choice, as peoples of African descent found themselves besieged regardless of their decision to move or to stay put. Freedom, dignity and equality remained (and to a degree continue to be) elusive.
In this class, we will explore examples of flight (including maroonage, migration and repatriation), and examples of staying-in-place (such as affirmations of citizenship/belonging, rights-claiming and strategic assimilation). However, we will also explore examples of responses that map less neatly onto a resistance/assimilation continuum, or that reject the continuum altogether. Faced with the choice to stay or go, some afro-descendants chose something akin to “hovering.”
That is, they chose to stay but refused the demands and the terms of assimilation. In this class, we will examine “hovering” as a form of resistance that has not been adequately explored by historians of the African diaspora and that has the potential to reveal to us elements of Afro-Diasporic liberatory thought that have yet to be recognized.
This is a research-intensive course that is framed around one central project to which all students will contribute. Each student will be responsible for a major research contribution in the form of a 25-page paper, which will be subjected to peer critique. All papers will then be brought together in the form of a “book.” Class members will work together to title and organize the volume, as well as to write an introduction to the collected works. This course is appropriate for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, especially those writing or preparing to write senior theses on related topics. However, all students excited about the subject matter and eager to participate in a rigorous course are welcome!
About the Instructor: Dalia Antonia Muller is an associate professor of Caribbean and Latin American history at the University at Buffalo, as well as Director of the Honors College and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education. Her research centers on transnational history in the Americas, with a particular focus on Cuba, Mexico and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within this broad frame, she studies race, class, gender, mobility and movement, tracing the cross-border lives of itinerant individuals from political exiles to economic migrants and refugees. Her first book, “Cuban Émigrés and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World” (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), traces the migratory routes, diaspora communities and the unique transnational politics that Cuban émigrés developed during the three decades of the wars of Cuban independence. Her current book project, “The Boundaries and the Bonds of Citizenship in Cuba During a Time of Transition,” explores the claims made to, and against the state by Cuba’s “Africans” as they struggled to carve out a place for themselves in an emerging nation and world increasingly determined to eradicate them.
PSY 446: Animal Cognition
Instructor: Dr. Eduardo Mercado
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30 p.m. to 1:50 p.m. | 109 Capen
TO ENROLL in PSY 446 (CN: 23706): You will add this course to your shopping cart and register for it just as you would your other courses. This is no longer a restricted enrollment, and may count towards your Honors Experience credits, as long as you have not reached the maximum of 9 credits for the Honors Seminar category.
Course Description: Dr. Mercado’s “Mammalian Minds” seminar will focus on animal cognition and the philosophy of mind. Dr. Mercado is one of the few scientists in the world to conduct experiments on the minds of dolphins and whales. Students taking this seminar would learn about the history of animal cognition research, seminal demonstrations of various cognitive abilities in non-humans, and would gain a deeper understanding of how human cognition relates to the mental abilities of other animals. An overarching message of the seminar is that extensive training can dramatically affect how humans and other animals think and remember, and that neural plasticity is critical to determining what any individual of any species can do mentally.
About the Instructor: Eduardo Mercado is a cognitive neuroscientist with interests in brain plasticity as it relates to learning, memory, and perception. His interdisciplinary training includes degrees in computer science, electrical engineering, and psychology, as well as training in the philosophy of science and in computational neuroscience. Both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have funded his research, and he was named a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 2009. He is also the coauthor of an an innovative undergraduate textbook—Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior (currently in its 3rd edition)—that was the first to integrate findings from experimental psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and clinical neuropsychology, as well as the first to fully integrate findings from both human and animal studies. He is currently working to develop new physiological monitoring techniques that can enable students to identify times during the day when their brains are maximally plastic.
