Humanities Honors Program at UCI

Director: Alice Fahs
Location: 143 HIB, Phone: 949-824-5132

The Honors Program of the School of Humanities is a two-year, upper-division program designed to challenge superior students from all fields by providing special opportunities for interdisciplinary work within an intellectually charged framework. Small seminars and the opportunity for independent research are some of the advantages offered by the Program, which is open by invitation to all UCI students regardless of their majors.

Students in the Program benefit from their involvement in the campus community of Humanities scholars. They enjoy a close relationship with the faculty and profit from intense interaction with their intellectual peers. Formal as well as informal gatherings, including student-organized social activities ranging from pizza nights to theater parties augment a wide range of campus activities. Humanities Honors students have the opportunity to become some of the campus' best informed scholars on a broad range of topics: from artificial intelligence to medical ethics, from Shakespeare to Gilbert and Sullivan, from problems of the ancient Near East to the dilemmas of modernity.

Humanities Honors students complete a two-part course of study. In their junior year, students take three quarters of interdisciplinary Proseminar (Humanities H120) organized about a single topic or problem, such as crime and punishment, the other, the self, nature and nurture, the American dream. The sequence is designed to compare and contrast modes of analysis and critical thinking in history, literary studies, and philosophy. In a small seminar setting, students are encouraged to become reflective about their own chosen disciplines.

In their senior year, students take a sequence beginning in the fall with a Senior Honors Seminar (Humanities H140), and continuing in the winter and spring with the Senior Honors Thesis (Humanities H142W) and the Senior Honors Colloquium, prepared as an independent research project under the direction of a faculty member on a topic chosen by the student. Students present their thesis in an informal gathering with their faculty advisors in the spring, and a prize is awarded for the year's outstanding thesis.

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