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The Honors
Program in Humanistic Studies offers well-qualified, highly motivated
undergraduates the opportunity to do independent, interdisciplinary
research in comparative literature or some area of intellectual or cultural
history. The program is designed to help students arrive at a conceptual
frame for problems or issues that have arisen over the course of their
academic careers. The interdisciplinary orientation of the program enables
students to work on subjects like film, and gives majors outside the
humanities a chance to broaden and combine their studies. Working with the
guidance of a faculty advisor on a senior essay more comprehensive in scope
than a seminar paper helps students acquire solid research skills and
writing ability. Students who complete the program and whose final projects
are accepted by the Honors Board are awarded honors at the Commencement
ceremony and on their transcripts. The Board of Honors Advisors is always
looking for bright, independent students with project proposals, and has
informal gatherings periodically to acquaint prospective students with
current students and faculty. Students interested in the program are
invited to discuss their ideas with the program's coordinator.
The Challenge of an Honors Project
The topics
are various as the students who have participated in the program. In recent
years, titles of honors essays and B.A./M.A. theses have included the
following:
Folly
and the Limits of Metaphysics: Nietzche and Freud
Fantasy,
Denial and Self-Knowledge: Female Characters in Austen, Brönte
and Eliot
Working
in the Museum: Burckhardt, Culture, and Renaissance
Film
and Terrorism in West Germany, 1975-80
Science
and Culture: Ellen Shallow Richards and Nineteenth-Century Nutritional
Science
The
Semiotics of the Hollywood Film: The
Subversive Case of Douglas Sirk
Another
Image of Africa: An Ethno-history of European Cloth Marketed in West Africa, 1873-1960 (published)
Marx's
Problematics
Novels
and Film: Robert Bresson and His Sources
The New York Corpus
Christi Play: Text and Performance
Technical
Reproducibility, Aura, and the Politics of Art
The
Novel of the New Industrial
City
Chinese
Literary Theory and the West
Women
in the Poetry of Baudelaire and Eluard
The
Clinic and Its Theories: Kohut, Kernberg, and Lacan
Joyce
and the Jews
Time
and Language in Faulkner's Fiction
Kierkegaard's
Aesthetics
The
Culture of Biotechnology: Videotape and Text
Castiglione's
The Courtier and the Status of the Artist
The Concurrent B.A./M.A. Degree:
Students
whose work in the Honors Program shows exceptional promise may apply at the
end of their junior year for admission to candidacy for the concurrent B.A./M.A. degree. This degree requires a reading knowledge
(usually at the third-year level) of one foreign language, either ancient
or modern; in the case of some individual's programs a second foreign
language may be necessary. In the senior year, the candidate presents a
thesis of criticism or research more extensive in scope and depth than that
required for the honors B.A., and one that should make an original
contribution to scholarship in the field.
All
inquiries should be addressed to the current coordinator of the Honors
Programs in Humanistic Studies at the Humanities Center, 113 Gilman Hall,
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, Telephone: 410-516-7619.
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