Honors College Retro Readings Seminars to Tackle Texts Covering Five Centuries of Cultural Discourse

For generations, college students have lamented required reading of texts first published decades and centuries before they were born, asking "How does this apply to my life today?" The Honors College Retro Readings address this age-old question by inviting students to read texts using a contemporary lens with the help of faculty who are experts in their subjects. Next spring, three courses will be offered to honors students.

Freddy Dominguez, associate professor of history, will teach a discussion-based course incorporating a variety of contexts and points of view to encourage students to consider how different peoples and cultures have perceived Machiavelli's The Prince, a text that asks the always relevant question: "Do the ends justify the means?"

"Though written in the 16th century," explained Dominguez, "Machiavelli's book The Prince is in a class of its own in terms of its influence on modern political culture and beyond. I'd like students to think about why the book has had such an enduring impact and, more broadly, how it has helped mold what people think about power and how it is exercised. I also want participants to consider how The Prince informs the ways we separate the private from the public, the relationship between who we are and the versions of ourselves we project in our quest to belong and thrive."

Jarvis Young, assistant professor of African American literature and English, will use an archive of "radical" and polemical speech acts from African and Black American authors who strive to include their voices and concerns in European traditions to uplift the narratives and arguments of men and women who have overcome communal and cultural struggles from the Enlightenment period to today. Through study of these words, students will be encouraged to ask themselves, "How have activists influenced our perception of ourselves and our society?" 

"My years of teaching early Afro-diasporic writing and African American literary traditions has attuned me to how students think about the similar literary aesthetics and tools that authors use in response to injustice," Young said. "This has become my goal in teaching; to encourage students to discover why people of African descent, from around the world and from different periods, have creatively inhabited Western genres to influence movements and the way people think." 

Lynda Coon, dean of the Honors College, will delve into the often divisive and confusing world of "isms." Students will tackle a different "ism" each week by reading and discussing a classic work related to that way of thinking and unpack its historical metamorphosis in contemporary culture. Are you willing to create your own "ism," including a logo, mission and objectives, as part of a final project? 

"We have dubbed the spring 2025 term the semester of 'isms,'" Coon shared. "Each of our three fabulous Retro Reading Seminars approach the subject 'isms'—Black Radicalism, Machiavellianism and the analysis of 14 of the 2,932 isms in the English language — through interdisciplinary study and conversation. I look forward to taking a deep dive into the complex and disturbing world of the 'ism.'" 

Interested students should register as early as possible to ensure they get a seat.

SPRING 2025 RETRO READINGS SEMINARS 

Afro-Diasporic Literature: The Rhetoric of Black Radicalism  

This course will focus on the history of African and Black resistance to oppression and injustice, from the early republic to the present, through different forms of radical speech acts. Students will be asked to consider the question, "How do radical speech acts shape and inform our understanding of social and political issues, including our very conception of the United States as a nation and ourselves as a people?" The eminent writers and activists of African descent featured in this seminar were known for their dynamic presence, stirring crowds with their essays and narratives, charming audiences with their performances and inspiring congregations with their sermons. People of African descent in Britian, the U.S and the Caribbean wrote, published and read through eras of enslavement and segregation, at times defying legal restrictions, economic obstacles and violence. Writers and abolitionists Toussaint Louverture, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, David Walker and Maria Stewart, and contemporary activists such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Alicia Garza were notable for developing Afro-Caribbean, Afro-British and African American literary cultures, identities and trends in print. Students will study how these individuals forged communities and identities through print and how their radical slogans, such as "Black Lives Matter," became powerful cultural movements. 

The -ISM Seminar 

In 1943, the U of A bestowed an honorary degree on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In turn, Hoover praised the state of Arkansas as a "bulwark of freedom, free of '-isms.'" This Honors College Retro Reading will unpack the "-isms" Hoover found so distasteful. The term "-ism" first appeared in the English language in the early modern era, morphing into an explosion of words during the Industrial Revolution, with some of the earliest "-isms" being familiar to us now: nationalism, capitalism, socialism, colonialism, feminism and agnosticism, to name a few. In this seminar, students will tackle a different "ism" each week by reading and discussing a classic literary work related to the term. In doing so, they will develop a deeper understanding of Hoover's denunciation of "-isms" in the 1940s as well as the role of the "ism" in contemporary culture wars, where the storied term has experienced yet another historical metamorphosis. 

Reading Machiavelli's Prince 

In this course, students will tackle the age-old question, "Do the ends justify the means?" and many more via Niccolo Machiavelli's most influential book, The Prince. Written in Italy at the beginning of the 16th century, the small tome discusses what the author sees as the (sinful) truths of human nature and the ways in which individuals can maintain power given that nature. Machiavelli's text became one of the most controversial books in the Western tradition, with some of his contemporaries calling it immoral and even demonic. In contrast, in modern times, political and industry leaders have considered the book as a source for wise counsel for achieving success. Students will be asked to consider The Prince in its historical context and think about why it elicits such strong reactions, why people still read it for advice and what that might tell us about our current society. 

The Faculty Experts

Lynda Coon (Ph.D., University of Virginia) brings a deep commitment to honors education and a fresh vision for the future to her role as dean of the Honors College. She joined the U of A faculty in 1990 as a history professor in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and chaired the Department of History from 2008-13. Coon mentored nearly two dozen honors students on their thesis projects while serving as honors adviser in the History Department for a decade. She served as an associate dean of fine arts and humanities and director of the Religious Studies Program in Fulbright College prior to her appointment as Honors College dean and led the Fulbright College Study Abroad Program in Rome from 2001-04. Coon is a member of the U of A Teaching Academy and has received three top teaching honors at the university: the Fulbright College Master Teacher Award in 1998, the Charles and Nadine Baum U of A Teaching Award in 2000 and the U of A Honors College Distinguished Faculty Award in 2014. 

Freddy Dominguez (B.A., Brown University 2004; M.A./Ph.D., Princeton University 2011) is a historian of early modern Europe, with a focus on political culture, religion and book history. He is also interested in historiography and historical culture(s) from the Renaissance through today. His first book, Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), dealt with the writings of 16th century English Catholic exiles in continental Europe. His second monograph, Bob Dylan in the Attic: The Artist as Historian (UMass Press, 2022), considers the singer/songwriter through the lens of historical culture. Dominguez has edited a collection of essays with William Bulman titled Political and Religious Practice in the Early Modern British World (Manchester University Press, 2022). He continues to work on several book and essay projects and is the book review editor for the Sixteenth Century Journal.

Jarvis Young (B.A./M.A. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, M.A./Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University) currently serves a double appointment position as an assistant professor of African American literature in the Program of African and African American Studies (AAST) and Department of English at the U of A. His research interests center on African American literature and Afro-diasporic writing in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. His current book project, Freethinking and Divine Revelation: Toward a New Literary History of Early Afro-Diasporic Writing, offers a crucial corrective to early Afro-diasporic literary history's tendency to view early Black writing as extensions of Protestant Christianity. Young seeks to rupture histories that overlook a self-conscious literary tradition of freethinking that were born out of the early writings of Lemuel Haynes, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Maria Stewart. His work underscores freethinking as a mental exercise that displays the intellectual abilities of people of African descent, in that their thoughts may be commensurate to that which is divine. Consequently, he argues that a distinct point of origin for an Afro-diasporic literary tradition is "free Black thought," a polemical and performative act of resistance that writers of African descent engaged in within their seemingly religious writings. This project was influenced in part by a 2019 exhibition that he co-curated with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University called "Movements: Black Print Culture in the United States, 1773-1940," which was put on display in the Milton S. Eisenhower Library.