The University of Florida Honors Program
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Honors sections are versions of regular UF courses, but specifically designed for honors students
Genetics, will present a comprehensive coverage of the principles, theory and applications of genetics. Topics include the chemical nature and structure of genetic material, gene expression and regulation, cell division, chromosome number and structure variation, principles of inheritance, molecular genetic techniques, and basic concepts in population and quantitative genetics.
The biology of honey bees and the craft of apiculture will be examined by exploring the life cycle of honey bees, biogeography and evolution of beekeeping. Equipment, techniques, management practices, pollination ecology, economic practices and current issues within beekeeping will be discussed.
Honors Quest 1 courses fulfill the UF Quest 1 requirement and 3 credits of General Education requirement in the Humanities. Honors Quest 2 courses fulfill the UF Quest 2 requirement and 3 credits of General Education in Social & Behavioral Science or Physical / Biological Science. Honors students who enter the program in 2023 or later may complete any section of the UF-required Quest 1 and 2 courses.
Quest 1
Why is it important to safeguard humanity's tangible cultural heritage, and who are its rightful owners?
Quest 2
What social, political, biological, and environmental factors led to historic disease outbreaks? What would happen if our planet experienced a pandemic today? How can we prepare for the next disease pandemic?
These are discussion-oriented, one-credit seminar courses centered on a performance or an exhibit.
Perhaps no art form is as commonly shared across cultural, geographic, ethnic, and other boundary lines as film. In theaters, homes, and other public spaces people of all kinds gather in the dark to take in this consummately modern form of storytelling. Of course, there is high entertainment value in movie watching, but also films often involve rich stories that take our minds to places beyond the film itself. Indeed, the ideas conveyed through film frequently create an internal reflective mindset, sometimes resulting in casual conversations with others. And yet, rarely do we make room for a collective intentional conversation to discuss a movie we’ve just watched. This class seeks to do exactly that: to watch films together and then to talk about their relevance to our lived experience. Specifically, we will explore a reinvisioned version of documentary films called creative non-fiction. These films, based in reality, offer imaginative and creative crafting of compelling storytelling rooted in some vision of the real. Creative non-fiction films are centrally driven by the complex stories that lead to curious questions about life in the world, so they become opportunities for talking about subjects that are sometimes difficult, sometimes thorny, sometimes joyous, sometimes restorative, and often something else! This class will seek to do three main things: 1) teach students how to read a film, considering the technical structure, the story itself, and the story beyond the story in the mind of viewers 2) watch films in the creative non-fiction genre 3) discuss films in a context of community learning
Todd Best is a faculty member in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences where he works as an Academic Advisor and teaches. A long-time instructor of Uncommon Read courses, he has taught on issues ranging several areas of the humanities and social sciences, including on the topics of media literacy, higher education, ecological literature, the self, and the common good. He received a master’s degree in religious studies from the University of Florida, focusing on religious pluralism and educational philosophy.
In this course, we will "hack" the museum. Students will incorporate play, theatre, music, and other learning modalities as non-traditional ways of learning in the museum. The artistic medium in this UnCommon Arts Course is the Harn Museum where the museum and all of its exhibitions and spaces will be viewed as an overarching or master text. Each exhibition will serve as a text within the text of the museum such that each exhibition functions as a text within-a-text where the museum is the master text. Or, as we recognize in Literary Studies, a frame. While the Harn will have multiple exhibitions on view; I will focus primarily on the new contemporary exhibition, "Metamorphosis"; a re-imagining of the contemporary artworks in the Harn's permanent collection. For more information please review the link here about "Metamorphosis": https://harn.ufl.edu/exhibitions/metamorphosis-reshaping contemporary-art/ Because we will regard the museum as a text and each exhibition as a subsequent text-within-a-text; we will interrogate how the "texts" or exhibitions are in communication with one another. Students will read critical texts in Museum Studies, Literature, and other multidisciplinary genres to foster critical dialogue and discourse to determine what is the future of museums.
Dr. Porchia Moore is the Associate Director of the Center for the Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship and the Rotating Program Head of Museum Studies at the University of Florida. She is the former Director of Creative Writing and English Literature at Arizona Western College. She is an expert faculty of Johns Hopkins University's master's degree Museum Studies program. Her scholarship examines the intersections of cultural heritage, cultural informatics, community, and 21st-century literacies.
These are discussion-oriented, one-credit seminar courses centered on a book.
History + Biography
This course will explore the history of development in Florida, especially around a time of massive environmental changes occurring in the early 1900s. We will explore the impact humans had on Florida’s environment, including railroad expansion, the plume trade, animal and plant extinctions, drainage of the Everglades, establishment of state and federal preserves, logging, fire ecology, invasive species, and ancient shell middens.
Science (Non-Health) + Science Fiction
Anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to humanity’s way of life on Earth in the 21st century. Concern about the causes and impacts of climate change are arguably at an all-time high, but there is little consensus on solutions that are logistically, economically, and socially feasible. In this course, we’ll consider the solutions proposed by one of society’s significant influential thinkers; working through Bill Gates’ text How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, we will wrestle with the current challenges humans face in addressing the climate crisis. Through weekly Socratic discussions, three short reflection essays, and a presentation, we will explore these topics. By the end of the class, we likely won’t arrive at a cogent answer of how to solve this problem, but we’ll aim to be more able to critically and substantively discuss and understand the complexities surrounding this immensely complex issue.
Health
This course explores the growing research base that supports engaging in and prescribing nature for all- including and especially college students. Through discussion, the reading and a few on-campus field trips, it will research how individuals can find a way into, and a place in nature that is essential to their well being and how that experience can translate into personal and professional practice.
Bio- Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig is archivist and historian in the Health Science Center Library, and Director of Health Humanities in the UF College of Medicine. She has a courtesy faculty appointment in the Center for African Studies at UF and teaches a course-Culture, Health and the Arts in SubSaharan Africa- through them. She teaches health humanities courses to medical and undergraduate students, works with the Arnold P. Gold Foundation’s Gold Humanism Honors Society and UF Chapman Society, and studies history of medicine, focusing on eugenics, and theories on race, and comparative. She studies nature and nature/arts based therapies, promoting access to healing nature. She also team teaches a Zoology/Botany course that counts toward the International Scholars Program.
Society + Culture + Politics
Business + Economics
Literature
In 2021, Japanese manga artist Kentaro Miura passed away before he could finish his long-running series Berserk. Considered to be a masterpiece, Berserk is a manga that would come to influence video games (such as Dark Souls), bands (such as Brand of Sacrifice), and the entirety of the "seinen" genre from the late 1980s onward. The dark fantasy series follows the main character Guts as he traverses the world with mercenaries fighting different mythical beings. At the same time, Guts is out for revenge. Aside from being a thrilling narrative, Berserk is beautifully illustrated and is high literature in its own right. This class will be of interest to fans of manga, anime, horror, and/or fantasy.
Other
Following an illustrious career as ancient Rome’s top poet for nearly two decades, the writer Ovid was suddenly banished in 8 CE to the faraway Black Sea by the emperor Augustus. Nonetheless, he continued to publish his work and even suggested he was banished because of “a poem and an error.” Contemporary scholars continue to wonder about the “error” but have all but accepted that Ovid’s 1 BCE work Ars Amatoria (“The Art of Love”) was his poetic indiscretion. This didactic poem in three books addresses the reader directly to teach young men how to find and court a lover (books 1-2) and then young women how to do the same (book 3). In this course, we’ll read the English translation of Ars Amatoria to discover how ancient Romans at the turn of the common era viewed love and romance. Reading this controversial work allows a contemporary audience to investigate gender roles, patriarchy, and the general attitude at Rome during the fledgling years of empire. Through a close reading of Ovid’s “The Art of Love,” as well as selections from Ovid’s other poetry, modern scholarship on gender, sexuality, love, and desire, and physical evidence like art and graffiti, we will build our own understanding of the amorous environment at Rome and determine whether Ovid’s indiscretion was warranted.
These courses are interdisciplinary in nature and often team-taught.
What role do arts and creativity play in the formation of “place” and the way we value different areas and cultural goods within our city? Who decides and who benefits when the arts are incorporated into economic and community development strategies?
This 3-credit, hands-on Honors course will address these questions and others by engaging local artists, business owners, and other creative stakeholders in Gainesville. Through a series of workshops and guest speakers, students will develop their own “creative toolkit” that includes skills such as design thinking, sketching and visual communication, mindfulness and ways of seeing, problem solving and creative ideation.
As a culminating project, student groups will pair with local creative stakeholders (business owners, artists, and organization leaders) to put their creative toolkit to a real-world application by generating a proposal tailored to address an expressed need or challenge faced by the stakeholders. The proposals will be presented in an open-to-the-community forum at the end of the term.
SUMMER B
These courses are aimed at developing skills that will help students over their career.
In this course we will explore the concepts of digital logic and how those concepts can be applied to create digital components using redstone in the game Minecraft. We will discuss the behavior of various redstone components in Minecraft and how this behavior can be leveraged to create redstone circuits that function the same way as real life electrical circuits. Students will learn fundamental computing concepts and will see how simple digital components can be used to create machines with complex behavior. The course will focus on implementing these ideas in Minecraft and will demonstrate how it is possible to build a computer using Minecraft’s redstone circuits. Students are not required to have any previous knowledge of digital logic or computing concepts but experience with Minecraft or similar games is recommended.
Matthew Cohen is currently a Master’s student in the college of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is a recent UF alumni who graduated with a bachelors in Computer Engineering from UF in Spring 2023. Currently, Matthew works as a graduate research assistant in a lab led by Dr. Jie Fu that focuses on intelligent and (semi-)autonomous systems through the integration of control theory, machine learning, and formal methods.
Summer A
Summer B
This professional development series aims to prepare students for future careers by gaining valuable and marketable experience and expanding their knowledge beyond the classroom. Students will participate in weekly professional development seminars to learn from each other’s experiences and contextualize research projects and other college experiences within their field of interest.
The seminar themes are as follows: what is research, mentor/mentee relationship building, scientific literature (field trip to meet with research librarians!), research ethics, data & information life cycles, developing a career plan, applications for graduate/professional school & industry jobs, writing your research results, elevator pitches for your research, and designing a scientific poster.
All weekly meetings are hybrid – if you are in Gainesville, you are welcome to join the seminar in person.
Signature Seminars
UnCommon Classrooms
Join Dr. David Blackburn, Professor and Curator of the Florida Museum of Natural History for this rare opportunity to explore several museums of the Smithsonian like never before. Engage in behind-the-scenes tours and talks with leadership and staff at the National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of American History, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Library of Congress.
The course will run from May 19 to May 23, 2024. The cost in Washington, D.C. is estimated to be $1,250. Applications are being accepted; space is limited. Only those willing to commit to participating in the course should apply; travel planning and purchasing commences immediately upon application approval.
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