Student Seminars & Essays
Find your seminar below!
Please Note: You will be assigned one of these seminars and will be asked to read preparatory materials before attending. Be sure to follow the timeline for seminar placements and only attend the seminar to which you are assigned.
Seminar assignments and required readings are available below.
Dr. Brian Patterson, Mathematics and Computer Science
In Johann Hari’s new book, Stolen Focus, he discusses how social media applications are designed to attract our attention without any concern for longer term effects. With a philosophy of “move fast and break things,” these apps have been successful in making billions of dollars while charging the user no money to use. So what is the cost to users if it is not money? Our readings will discuss some specific strategies these apps use to get our attention and possible solutions to the issue of stolen focus.
Pete Stobie, Chief Financial Officer
Innovation is a key component to an institution’s success. Creative thinking is a key component to innovation. Without innovation, businesses can struggle to stay relevant, for example, Blockbuster, Eastman Kodak, and Borders Books. Leonardo da Vinci, best known as a painter, had a major impact in architecture, science, music, math, engineering, and was ultimately a master of innovation. Using some of the principals of da Vinci, this seminar will explore ways to become a creative thinker specifically as it relates to innovation and business.
Elizabeth Peterson, Director of the OU Museum of Art
Art may be defined as a visual expression of human creative skill and imagination producing objects to be admired for their emotional power or beauty. That definition sounds very pleasant and innocuous, however it does not give you the whole picture. The world of art and design is also rife with examples of powerfully subversive visual cues made to influence, persuade, and transform you and your behavior. Are you a savvy consumer of visual culture? How can you prepare to identify, interpret, and examine visual propaganda? Is all visual propaganda detrimental or can it sometimes benefit society? We will explore these ideas while considering case studies of works of art by four artists against the backdrop of your readings.
Dr. Jeffrey Collins, Art History & Anthropology
This seminar will discuss the meaning of the 21st century as a transitional period in human civilization. Students will discuss topics such as new energy sources, AI, the genomic revolution, space exploration, nanotechnology, fusion of humans and machines, singularity, and transhumanism. The reading will assume basic scientific literacy but no level of expertise in these fields, and an anthropological interest in such questions as: What is a human, really? Where do we wish to go? What will be our future values? How do we move beyond our present problems? Who will benefit from what technologies?
Dr. Graham Wyatt, Biology
This scientific question has been popularized recently by meme culture. But what does it really mean? And more importantly, what can it tell us about macroevolutionary patterns in other groups of organisms, perhaps even our own species? We will examine these questions and others in our discussion of “carcinization” – becoming a crab.
Dr. Roarke Donnelly, Biology
Invasive species have contributed to many extinctions and are the second or third most common threat to listed species in the United States. Yet, debate continues over whether and how we should control invasive species and past control efforts have had mixed success. In this seminar, we will use the Hawaiian Islands and their many endemic species as a platform from which to examine the aforementioned debate, learn from past control efforts, and inspire a new generation of professionals to protect and restore that which evolved in paradise and beyond.
Dr. Charlie Baube, Biology
Dr. Neil Shubin, of the University of Chicago and Field Museum, argues in his highly entertaining and informative book Your Inner Fish that the evidence of our evolutionary past as humans is within us, if you just know where and how to look. Using a brief review of the thesis of his book published in the University of Chicago Magazine, we will explore Dr. Shubin’s thoughts on our own “inner fish”. A close look at our anatomy, genes and behavior reveals the vestiges of our tetrapod and, deeper still, aquatic ancestry. With vivid, readable and entertaining accounts of phenomena such as hernias, the hiccups and torn ACLs, Shubin provides compelling evidence that the evidence of our ancestry buried in our own bodies. As a first-rate scientist, with expertise in Paleontology, Anatomy and Genetics, the reading is entertaining and informative as Dr. Shubin leads us on a tour of the “3.5-Bbillion year history of the human body.”
Dr. Anna Ziering, Women’s & Gender and Sexuality Studies
Have you seen this T-shirt? This popular slogan is meant to counter common, limited, and often negative images of feminism and feminists. But what does a feminist look like? Who claims the label, who disdains it, and why? What visions of feminism—revolutionary, neoliberal, intersectional, Afrofuturist—are circulating today? What do these visions get wrong or leave out? How do they help us imagine new and better worlds? What are feminism’s goals, and what is your place in it? In this seminar, we’ll consider some of these questions by looking at contemporary feminist texts and constructing our own feminist vision.
Dr. Michael Rulison, Physics
How is the concept of God’s omniscience affected by one of the fundamental consequences of modern quantum theory – quantum indeterminacy? John Jefferson Davis explores this question in a chapter from his recent book The Frontiers of Science & Faith. We will discuss and examine the history and evolution of the concept of God’s omniscience, followed by a consideration of how this idea can, or cannot, be reconciled with the notion of a fundamental limit placed on knowledge by modern quantum theory.
Dr. Linda deCamp, Mathematics
There is a common debate among Mathematicians as to whether Math was invented or discovered. This JEO Seminar will focus on math’s relation to reality. Is the universe governed by mathematics or just susceptible to mathematical analysis? Why does math work?
Thinkers from the Pythagoreans to the authors we will read for this seminar posit differing ideas about the nature of mathematics. We will discuss and explore these thinkers’ views and develop our own premises.
Dr. John Orme, Politics
Influential books were written in the 1990s by Francis Fukuyama, John Mearsheimer and Samuel Huntington. These authors analyzed and explained the trajectory of world politics, or to put it differently, the course of history. Time has passed, and we can look back to assess the validity of their explanations and predictions. Who was right? Why?
Dr. Peter Kower, Economics
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo received the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 2019 for their groundbreaking work in Economic Development. In “Economic Lives of the Poor,” the authors use survey data from households earning less than an equivalent of $1 a day to – the poor – quantify important measures of welfare including consumption, health, and wellbeing. The focus of our seminar will be to understand the constraints that rational decision makers in poor households face in earning higher income.
Dr. Meredith Raimondo, Sociology
If bacteria and viruses do not discriminate, why are there so many inequalities related to health in the United States? We will explore several historical and contemporary case studies, from yellow fever to HIV/AIDS, to understand how health has become a major site of inequality and what can be done to create greater health justice. Through these examples, we will explore the relationship between the promise of health as a human right and a robust and thriving democracy.
Eli Arnold ’06, University Librarian
Within the past few years, there has been a growing focus on uncovering hard truths about our nation–especially when it comes to its history and how we remember. In this seminar, we will discuss times when we learned that history as told to us wasn’t necessarily accurate or the whole story. When did you realize that you weren’t told the complete truth about a situation? What harm is done when history is changed? Who benefits? How do we agree on what historical truth is? While our discussion will begin with Yamacraw leader Tomochichi and the narratives around his relationship with General James Edward Oglethorpe in the early Georgia colony, we will also put this discussion in conversation with other local, national, and personal histories. This conversation will go beyond getting certain facts straight and move toward discussions about bias, unheard voices, and how history is told and remembered.
John Daniel Tilford, Curator of Collections, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art
Past members of the LGBTQIA community were often forced to live, love and create in secret for fear of criminal and social persecution. This seminar will examine the ongoing emergence and rediscovery of art by members of the LGBTQIA diaspora. This contemporary scholarship is a direct effect of recent social justice movements. Works by such artists, previously considered profane or obscene, are now being objectively studied by scholars, curators and collectors in the hopes of creating a more balanced canon of the history of art.
Professor Samantha Sick, Accounting
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has famously remarked that he pays lower tax rates than his secretary and staff. How can that be? This seminar will use historical and global perspectives to assess equity in the tax law today. Students will explore questions like: how progressive is the American income tax system? Where does the country’s money come from, and where does it go? What is fair, and who gets to decide?
Dr. Andrew Walden, Chemistry
Reducing our dependence on fossil fuels is a necessary part of combating global climate change. Alternative energy sources that are currently being utilized or have been proposed often require improvements in efficiency and modifications of our current energy infrastructure in order to become viable alternatives to fossil fuels. In this seminar we will explore the chemistry behind current technologies and the potential of proposed energy sources allowing for a fuller understanding of how the ways we generate, store, transport, and utilize energy will change in the future.
Dr. Chris Martin, Psychology and Core Studies
In the last half century, psychologists have learned a great deal about happiness, but this knowledge hasn’t affected everyday life. Many people still follow an unrealistic theory of happiness that makes them aim for things that will bring them surprisingly little satisfaction. In this seminar, you will learn to separate myths and truths about happiness and gain practical wisdom about small and large life choices.
Dr. Lejla Marijam, Core Studies
We will look at different iterations of this classic fairy tale to discuss how shifting sociocultural paradigms change the take-away. We will touch on the issues of gender and morality, and will discuss the role of fairy tales in modern life.
Dr. Nick Maher, History
In this session we will look at how the Roosevelt administration adopted Mexico’s approach to Nation Building through public art, particularly Murals painted on public buildings.