Arts and Humanities

Students complete two sections of HONR 2053 between their second and fourth years. HONR 2053 courses offer a thematic, multidisciplinary, and cross-cultural analysis of the arts and artistic expression.

Fall 2025 Courses

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Politics of the Future
Language and Law
The History of Coups d'etat in the Twentieth Century
Music in Film, Film on Music

Cross-listed Honors courses

NOTE: Students must be registered in the HONR section in order to receive UHP credit. For courses that are cross-listed with another department, the UHP can add "credit" for a course to the student's DegreeMAP within the major and/or minor's requirements block. Students must have officially declared the major or minor with their respective school, and it must be reflected on their DegreeMAP at the time of the request. Students may also petition their school/major to accept HONR courses they find are relevant to their curriculum requirements. For any questions, please see a UHP Program Manager.

A cross-listed course is a course that is shared with another department, please pay careful attention to the GPAC attributes associated with each cross-listed course.

Exhibiting History
Democracy and American Political Culture
After the Holocaust
Jane Austen: Literary Icon

Upper-Level Course Substitution Option

On occasion, a UHP student may have a particular interest in a certain course or topic outside of their major which we are not able to offer formally through the UHP but which may nonetheless conform to some or all of the ideals of an Honors course. If a UHP student can demonstrate that they will benefit personally and intellectually from that course, they may be granted an exception to count one non-UHP course toward the UHP upper-level course requirements. Please review the upper-level course substitution option webpage for more information.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A History

Professor Christopher Brick

HONR 2053:10 - 3 Credits

CRN: 33950

TR 12:45PM - 2:00PM

Fulfills:

GPAC Critical Thinking in the Humanities

Course Description: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of the world’s most recognizable documents, “the foundation of international human rights law,” according to the United Nations, and one of the most widely-reprinted texts in human history. While its framers theorized the UDHR as a “Magna Carta for all,” opponents and detractors have routinely cast it instead as an empty vessel, at best, and at worst a dangerous tool of oppression. Is it either of these things, neither, or something else entirely? This course will invite students to consider these questions anew as it examines the Declaration’s conceptual origins in the ancient past, the historical context that led the UN General Assembly to formalize and promulgate a human rights coda in 1948, and the UDHR’s colorful evolution into a flashpoint of controversy for activists, policymakers, intellectuals, and the international community writ large. Please note that in researching their term projects for this course, students will be required to draw upon resources from the permanent collection of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, a research center of the GW History Department and archive of UDHR materials that UNESCO has designated “vital to global heritage and personhood."

Bio: Dr. Brick is an editor and principle investigator of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers project at GW and one of the hosts of the Organization of American Historians’ podcast Intervals.

Politics of the Future

Professor Melani McAlister

HONR 2053:11 - 3 Credits

CRN: 36646

MW 2:30PM - 3:35PM

Fulfills:

GPAC Critical Thinking in the Humanities

Course Description: The course examines how writers, filmmakers, and visual artists have speculated about alternative possibilities for human and non-human life. Exploring narratives about aliens and robots, apocalyptic or magical futures, disaster and transformation, we ask questions about how cultural products help us to think about the possibilities of political life, environmental realities, and moral action. Writers and filmmakers from the US and beyond, with special attention to work by people of color, writers from the global South, and women. Expect significant reading and writing in this class.

Bio: Dr. McAlister is a Professor of American Studies and International Affairs whose research interests focus on ways in which cultural and political history intersect, and on the role of religion and culture in shaping US “interests” in other parts of the world, particularly the Middle East and Africa. In 2024, she published Promises, then the Storm: Notes on Memory, Protest, and the Israel-Gaza War, a book that examines the history and politics of Palestine and Israel, the role of the media, and the power of activism.

Language and Law

Professor Michael McCourt

HONR 2053:12 - 3 Credits

CRN: 37699

TR 9:35AM - 10:50AM

Fulfills:

GPAC Critical Thinking in the Humanities

Course Description: This course pursues questions that arise at the intersection of political philosophy, legal studies, and linguistics. First, speech is used to persuade voters and citizens. But not all persuasive speech is morally equal, as we see in cases of propaganda or the use of "dog whistles." This course will study the different forms that persuasive speech can take, evaluating real world examples with tools from moral philosophy, linguistics, and the philosophy of language. Second, laws are expressed in a linguistic medium, raising familiar challenges when it comes to their interpretation. For example, if laws are texts, who are their authors? Also, should we interpret laws relative to the context in which they were written, or our contemporary context? We'll pursue such questions by applying tools from linguistics and the philosophy of language to case studies drawn from the courts. Third, there are laws that protect rights to speech, as well as laws that regulate the exercise of that right. So, we will discuss the value of "free speech" and the justification of laws that regulate the use of language.

The History of Coups d'etat in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Examination of the Nature of Political Power and Violence

Professor Seth Rotramel

HONR 2053:13 - 3 Credits

CRN: 33951

T 3:30PM - 6:00PM

Fulfills:

GPAC Critical Thinking in the Humanities

Course Description: This course examines the timing and causes of the seizure of executive power by the use or threat of force by some segment of a state’s ruling class or state apparatus. By looking at both long and short-term causes of coups, we will seek to better understand the nature of political power through the lens of political violence. After defining what a coup is and investigating theoretical underpinnings, the course will take a deep dive into a number of case studies that occurred during the twentieth century. Not confining ourselves to any one country or region, these case studies provide a comparative approach that will augment our theoretical understanding with real world examples. Investigating the dramatic events leading up to and following a coup d’état will also serve as a vehicle to examine broader issues affecting humanity. Thus, by examining illegal seizures of governments, we will also be studying the political consequences of poverty, inequality, modernization, political fractionalization, and coercive production structures.

Bio: Dr. Rotramel has served as a historian for the State Department since 2011 and focuses on the history of American diplomacy. He recently compiled and edited a Foreign Relations of the United States document focused on the Carter administration’s approach to the South Asia region in response to the shifting political landscape at the end of the 1970s.

Music in Film, Film on Music

Professor Douglas Boyce

HONR 2053:14 - 3 Credits

CRN: 38084

TR 9:35AM - 10:50AM

Fulfills:

GPAC Critical Thinking in the Humanities

Course Description: In "Music in Film, Film on Music" we engage with films' playful manipulation of audiences' feelings and expectations through its use of music and representation of music making. This course has no prerequisite besides an interest in film (and in the arts in general). We develop analytic skills and terminological fluency through the descriptions of shots, scenes, scores, leitmotifs, and other tools of filmmakers, and question how filmmakers use these devices to support and articulate ideologies, structures of thinking around genius, race, gender, and the nature of music itself. This happens through the study of mainstream movies, indie films, and avant-garde cinema, ranging from Forman's 'Amadeus,' Gray's 'Straight Outta Compton', Wright's 'Pride and Prejudice', Satyajit Ray's 'The Music Room (Jalsaghar)', and Bela Tarr's 'Werckmeister Harmonies', among others.

Students develop mastery of these concepts and terminology through seminar discussions and individual and group projects; these lead toward projects on the ideological, historical, cultural, and philosophical entailments of individually chosen films, presented on video, shared with the class in an end-of-semester collective reflection on both the role of music in film, but our received beliefs as to the nature of music itself.

Bio: Dr. Douglas Boyce is a Professor of Music in GW's Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. He writes chamber music that draws on Renaissance traditions and modernist aesthetics, building rich rhythmic structures that shift between order, fragmentation, elegance, and ferocity.

Exhibiting History

Professor Jenna Weissman Joselit

HONR 2053:81 - 3 Credits

CRN: 36651

R 12:45M - 2:25PM

Fulfills:

This course has no GPAC designations

***Note that UHP students will only receive Arts & Humanities credit if they are enrolled in the HONR 2053 section 81 (CRN: 36651)***

Course cross listed with HIST 3001.82 (CRN: 37802)

Course Description: These days, as long standing monuments topple to the ground and troubling questions about the meaning of history and its relationship to the public square continue to loom large on the contemporary landscape in both the United States and Europe, this interdisciplinary seminar explores the variety of ways in which the past visually and materially intrudes on and affects the present.

Focusing on a number of case studies, ranging from the “1619 Project” to “Hamilton,” and from Kehinde Wiley’s anti-monument monument, “Rumors of War,” in Richmond, Virginia, to a recent controversy in Sandomierz, Poland, over an anti-Semitic painting that has hung for centuries in its cathedral, the course looks at the cultural, social and visual practices by which history is constituted, interpreted, circulated, displayed, downplayed, or erased.

Bio: Dr. Joselit is the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies & Professor of History. Among her many areas of academic study, she specializes in the history and culture of America’s Jews and also writes a monthly column on American Jewish culture for Tablet: The Online Magazine of Jewish Culture.

Democracy and American Political Culture

Professor Elisabeth Anker

HONR 2053:83 - 3 Credits

CRN: 36652

M 3:30PM - 6:00PM

Fulfills:

This course has no GPAC designations

***Note that UHP students will only receive Arts & Humanities credit if they are enrolled in the HONR 2053 section 83 (CRN: 37802)***

Course cross listed with AMST 3950.80 (CRN: 36617)

Course Description: This class will examine major concepts, practices, and cultural visions of democracy in the United States (and in a transnational context). Democracy is one of the most widely-valued systems for organizing politics and political culture, yet there is significant disagreement about the core ideals and practices that comprise it. This class will examine a variety of cultural, literary, and theoretical texts on the promises and perils of democracy in the US. The class will make 2-3 field trips around DC.

Bio: Prof. Anker is a Professor of American Studies and Political Science. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersection of political theory and cultural studies, with a focus on practices of freedom, violence, and power in US politics and culture.

After the Holocaust

Professor Jenna Weissman Joselit

HONR 2053:85 - 3 Credits

CRN: 37701

R 3:30PM - 5:25PM

Fulfills:

This course has no GPAC designations

***Note that UHP students will only receive Arts & Humanities credit if they are enrolled in the HONR 2053 section 85 (CRN: 37701)***

Course cross listed with HIST 3001.86 (CRN: 37577) and JSTD 2002.81 (CRN: 37641)

Course Description: World War II may have come to an end in 1945, but destabilizing conditions – displacement, hunger, political turmoil and prejudice – continued for several more years, affecting millions of people in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. This seminar explores those conditions. Drawing on sources as varied as eyewitness accounts, government proceedings and novels, it looks at the variety of ways in which the war and what became known as the Holocaust shaped life on the ground between 1945-1950.

Jane Austen: Literary Icon

Professor Maria Frawley

HONR 2053W:80 - 3 Credits

CRN: 37946

TR 2:20PM - 3:35PM

Fulfills:

This course has no GPAC designations

***Note that UHP students will only receive Arts & Humanities credit if they are enrolled in the HONR 2053W section 80 (CRN: 37946)***

Course cross listed with ENGL 3820W. 10 (CRN: 38745)

Course Description: This course focuses on the literary achievements of Jane Austen and on her continuing relevance to our own culture. Our reading will include her published novels, some unpublished early writing, and work unfinished at her death. Understanding the social, historical, and political contexts that shaped Austen’s work will be a major preoccupation. Among topics for consideration will be the ways Austen both reflects and responds to social hierarchy and class relations in Regency England; the relationship between gender ideology, “conduct book culture,” and Austen’s representations of women’s lives; Austen’s views of national identity in the era of the French Revolution; and her innovative narrative and linguistic techniques. We will also think deeply about new perspectives on Austen’s writing emerging in our own age, and we will take advantage of an array of opportunities to interact with other Austen communities, thanks to celebrations of her work planned for the fall of 2025 (to coincide with her 250th anniversary)! Students can also expect to come away from this course with the ability to critically assess how and why Austen’s works have been received and adapted over time.

Bio: Dr. Frawley is a Professor of English whose research interests focus on nineteenth-century British literature, social history, and print culture. She served as Executive Director of the UHP for many years and was awarded GW’s Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Faculty Prize in Teaching in 2022.