The Honors Program at the Humanities Center

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, Dell House 302A, The Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, Telephone: 410-516-7619.