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Students are expected to complete five Honors sections of the twelve required Core Curriculum classes during their course of study at Bradley University. Alternatively, any of the courses may be completed as electives.
CIV 113-114 is a year-long course that satisfies both the BCC Fine Arts requirement and either the Multidisciplinary Integration requirement or the Humanities requirement. Completion of the sequence also satisfies two of the five Honors course requirements.
Students must complete both courses to receive BCC credit.
CIV 114 – Unified Fine Arts and Western Civilization I
COM 103 – The Oral Communication Process
WGS 200 – Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies
ENS 110 – Environmental Science
ENG 125 – Literatures of Identity (Vulnerability)
In this course, we will read, analyze, and discuss literary works that focus on vulnerable populations in our society. We’ll investigate the ways in which various contemporary pieces of written literature (i.e. works of short fiction, poetry, memoir, blurred-genre, and essay) attempt to give voice to the “voiceless” as well as raise awareness and empathy in readers. Finally, we’ll identify and examine societal and systemic beliefs and practices that promote and normalize mistreatment of vulnerable populations.
WGS 200 – Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies
ENS 110 – Environmental Science
SOC 100 – The Sociological Perspective
ENG 305 – Advanced Writing—Technical Writing
ENG 306 – Advanced Writing—Business Communication
ENG 125 – Literatures of Identity (Vulnerability)
Tentative: M E 308 – Thermodyn Fluid Flow
PSY 400 – Honors Research in Psychology
CIV 113-114 is a year-long course that satisfies both the BCC Fine Arts requirement and either the Multidisciplinary Integration requirement or the Humanities requirement.Completion of the sequence also satisfies two of the five Honors course requirements.
Students must complete both courses to receive BCC credit.
CIV 113 – Unified Fine Arts and Western Civilization I
COM 103 – The Oral Communication Process
ANT 101 – The Anthropological Perspective
RLS 340 – Japan: Religion and Culture
ENS 110 – Environmental Science
CHM 110 – General Chemistry I
ENS 110 – Environmental Science
ENG 101 – English Composition
ENG 305 – Advanced Writing—Technical Writing
PHL 103 – An Inquiry Into Values
M E 101 – Foundations of Mechanical Engineering
M E 351 – Engineering Materials Science I
HON 100-40 – Do you really know what you think you know?
W 12:00-1:50 (7 weeks)
Prof. Wendy Beanblossom, Biology Department
Open to first- and second-year Honors floor students. Please contact Dr. Dzapo to enroll.
This seminar focuses on using practices of science to evaluate conventional wisdom and potential myths and misconceptions. As students leave home and start to live independently, this course will focus on practical science that will help them make decisions about everyday life. The class is built around collaborative projects that extend from the classroom into the dorm. Projects will be used to generate discussion about how we choose to live, which practices we grew up with are scientifically accurate, which are just tradition, and which we want to continue practicing. This interdisciplinary approach branches both physical and life sciences. Is it really ok for your dog to lick your face? What is the purpose of adding salt to boiling water? The class will work together to determine which questions will be explored.
Open to first- and second-year Honors floor students. Please contact Dr. Dzapo to enroll.
Dr. Sara Netzley, Communications Department
Today's conspiracy theories are bigger, faster, and more influential than ever. This seminar will examine the media practices and psychological motivations that make people susceptible to these beliefs, along with the social and political consequences such theories can create.
Open to first- and second-year Honors floor students. Please contact Dr. Dzapo to enroll.
Dr. Jennifer Jost, Biology Department
Why do we love to eat? How do we find joy in cooking? Why does a particular food taste great to you but terrible to someone else? This course will examine cooking from a variety of perspectives including personal experience with food, the culture of food preparation, and the underlying science of farming and cooking. Topics will include the various flavor profiles and how they vary between geographical regions, the scientific processes behind cooking and baking, and the future of agriculture in the face of climate change. Discussions will include the Peoria community and both the challenges and successes that exist locally. There will be opportunities to prepare and consume food during class in addition to class readings, discussions, and assignments.
Dr. Dan Getz, Philosophy and Religious Studies Department
Bradley University has announced in its 2021 Strategic Plan that your education at Bradley is an “investment in the life you want.” This declaration bears the weight of all of your aspirations, hopes and dreams for the future, promising that your Bradley education will lead to a life of success. As satisfying that promise might be, it leaves a sense that something is missing. The question of what kind of life one might want is reframed in this class, suggesting that a more fundamental question must first be pondered: What should one want? Focusing on this prior question of how one should lead one’s life, the seminar will examine the issue through a lens created twenty-five hundred years ago by Confucius. Participants will read The Analects of Confucius, a text that has had an outsized influence in shaping Chinese civilization. While one of the goals of the seminar is to challenge participants to understand this text in its original Chinese cultural and linguistic context, this classic will at the same time be explored for its manifest wisdom in offering universal insights into the human condition. You’ll be pondering these questions in an intergenerational community of learners, half of whom are undergraduates, with the other half drawn from retirees participating in the Bradley OLLI Program. As an undergraduate, you will, in witnessing the dedication of your older classmates, be rewarded with the realization that learning is a life-long pursuit. They in turn will derive benefit from the excitement, energy, and fresh ideas that you will be bringing to our conversations.
Dr. Rustin Gates, History Department
This course examines Japanese popular culture in an effort to understand contemporary Japanese society, economy, and culture. Topics include manga (comic books), JPop (music), anime (Japanese animated films) and feature films, and the impact of the globalization of Japanese culture at home in Japan and abroad. Extensive consumption of various media will occur both inside and outside of the class meetings. Students will write short response papers and produce a final presentation.
Dr. John Nielsen, History Department
When the Gospel writers recorded that Magi from the east followed a star to Bethlehem, they were reflecting a contemporary respect for Babylonian astrology as a field of knowledge that revealed divine will. At that time, ancient temples in Mesopotamia were still functioning and observations of planetary movements were still being recorded on clay tablets in the ancient cuneiform script. Cuneiform script was developed in the 4th millennium BCE and the last dated cuneiform tablet is from the 2nd century CE. If we consider that the Phoenician antecedents of our own alphabetic Latin script can be traced back to c. 1000 BCE, we must recognize that cuneiform was older when it “died” then our own “living” alphabet is today! While cuneiform was probably developed to write Sumerian, it is not a language but rather a writing system, and it worked differently from an alphabet. Because Babylonian scholars believed that the gods “wrote” their will onto the physical world, the fluid nature of cuneiform signs shaped how scholars interpreted the will of the gods. Babylonian scholarship as a predictive science tried to understand the will of the gods through omens, medicine, and ultimately through the development of mathematic astronomy. These ancient traditions would have a profound impact on Greek scholars. We will not learn to read cuneiform in this class, but we will learn how cuneiform worked in order to understand how Babylonian scholars developed a system of knowledge that had features that resembled our own scientific system but was also very alien from our own. Participation will include in-class presentations and short papers.
Dr. Seth Katz, English Department
This section is offered to incoming first-year students only.
Through reading, writing, and conversation, we will approach different answers to this question, and a number of others, including but not limited to:
Assigned readings will include classic and contemporary texts, all available online.
Prof. Leslie Russell, English Department
This seminar will provide an intersectional examination of some of the archetypal representations of feminine gender identity in horror media, including literature, film, and television, as well as the influence of the four waves of feminism on the horror genre. The seminar will involve the reading/viewing of a culturally diverse selection of films/texts that exemplify some of the common feminine archetypes in horror, as well as the reading of critical theory to facilitate analysis. Some of the archetypes to be examined will include final girls, witches/magical women, mean girls, bimbos, and vengeance-seekers.
Prof. Heidi Rottier, Marketing Department
Why do we use social media? What about social media keeps us coming back again and again? Around the globe, nearly half the world’s population turns to social media for information, social interaction, shopping advice, and so much more. Although you may use social media every day (2+ hours/day!), you may not be aware of the psychology behind it. This seminar will explore the reasons why social media keeps us coming back for more. We will also discuss the impact social media has on our mental health, relationships, and perception of the world around us.
Dr. Andrew Kelley, Philosophy and Religious Studies Department
This class will look at the issue of the role of work in the life that a person wants by focusing on two texts: The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us & How to Build Better Lives by Jonathan Malesic, a scholar of religion, and also Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by the philosopher Matthew Crawford. Several other short readings and videos will also be assigned. This course is part of a three-seminar sequence that includes “The Life that You Want: Confucius Speaks” [Dr. Dan Getz] and a third class in Spring 2024 that involves a study abroad trip to Copenhagen over Spring Break.
Dr. John Williams, History Department
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to divide yourself into two different personalities who knew nothing about each other's lives? How it would feel to experience different versions of yourself from across the multiverse? Whether you could survive the zombie apocalypse on a speeding train in South Korea? What you would do if a humanoid, skull-faced rabbit told you that the world was going to end in 28 days, and only you could save it? In this seminar we will watch and talk about movies and TV shows that switch between alternate realities as a way to explore human nature and the meaning of life. Showings include "Donnie Darko," "Run Lola Run," "Mulholland Drive," "Everything Everywhere All At Once," "Train to Busan," "Severance," and episodes of "Black Mirror," "Atlanta," and "The Good Place."
Dr. Jennifer Jost, Biology Department
Students in this program will examine the unique and integrated nature of sub-organismal, organismal, and supra-organismal sub-disciplines of the field of biology through discussions and demonstrations of the scientific method and experimental approaches used across breadth of biology.