Honors Program Faculty and Staff

Faculty

Erika Williams
Scholar-In-Residence (2005)
B.A., Wellesley College; M.A., University of Pennsylvania; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Williams wrote her dissertation on the relationship between aesthetics and subjectivity in the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance. She recently published an entry on W.E.B. Du Bois’s novel Dark Princess in Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Routledge Press, 2004). She is currently working on two projects: the revision of her dissertation into a book-length manuscript on the connection between aesthetic judgment and the African-American critical tradition and a presentation on the politics of cultural segregation in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk for PAMLA’s standing session on African-American Literature (November 2005.) Her research and teaching interests include African-American literature and culture, American literature, women’s studies, critical race theory, and aesthetic theory.

Current Courses: (SPRG08)

Code	Course Information
HS103	Honors Writing Symposium 4.00 The Honors Writing Symposium is taken in conjunction with HS 102 and develops students' skills in research, critical thinking, and writing. The course stresses revision, relies on frequent workshops of student writing, and aims to sharpen students' ability to research, evaluate, and use evidence in a reasonable, convincing way. Each student will write an extended research paper on a topic related to HS 102. Fulfills General Education Communication core requirements.
IN123	Women Artists in Philosophy, Literature, and Culture 4.00 How have the history and politics of gender placed women at the margins of artistic (and otherwise creative) practice? To what extent has aesthetic philosophy sustained the paradox by which women are simultaneously doubted as creative agents and proffered as sources of artistic inspiration? As they occupy a position simultaneously inside and outside the domain of art, women writers and artists compel us to challenge conventional wisdom both about the meaning of gendered identity and about the nature and scope of artistic practice, revising, in the process, such concepts as beauty, pleasure, and genius. By engaging a variety of texts drawn from literature, philosophy, cultural criticism, memoir, film, visual art, and print media, we will explore the phenomenon by which women acknowledge, lament, and subvert the tension arising from the juxtaposition of "woman" and "artist." We will examine and analyze these readings from the diverse perspectives of literary criticism, aesthetic theory, feminism, and cultural studies.
LI208	U.S. Multicultural Literatures 4.00 This course is an introduction to some of the poetry, fiction and other genres produced in the multicultural U.S.A. Focusing on four major American literatures we will examine the ways that writers from disparate communities have used various literary forms to articulate resistance, community and citizenship. We will situate these literary texts in their historical contexts in order to better understand the writing strategies of each author. We will broaden our understanding of literature to include essays, journalism, and films, so that we can learn how diverse cultural texts work to represent America. Fullfills the Literary Perspective of the General Education requirements and the U.S. Diversity requirement.

Full Time Faculty
Erika Williams, Scholar-In-Residence
Departmental Faculty Who Teach in the Honors Program
Elizabeth Baeten	Wendy Walters
Part Time Faculty
Robert Dulgarian Nigel Gibson	Jason Roush

Staff

Nigel Gibson
Director
Ph.D., Columbia University