Astrobiology, History of Dermatology, Future of College Sports Among Eclectic Offerings in Fall Honors College Schedule

Casting a wide net, the Honors College is offering a selection of Honors Forums and Advanced Special Topics this fall thoughtfully designed for interdisciplinary appeal.  

HONORS COLLEGE FORUMS 

The Honors Forums courses bring exceptional faculty and top administrators together with honors students for 75 minutes on a weekly basis. Seats in honors forums are limited, and some require applications.  

Lynda Coon, dean of the Honors College, believes the selection will be irresistible to students interested in small bites and deep dives.  

"What an intellectually rich smorgasbord of delights awaits the adventurous honors scholar this fall," Coon said. "We are thrilled to offer students an opportunity to dip their toes into amazing one-hour seminars on subjects ranging from SEC athletics to midterm elections and back again to the history of dermatology and AI, robots and medicine. Who could resist?" 

Midterm Elections: This timely course is built around weekly, discussion-based sessions that examine questions such as: Will Democrats be able to build on recent momentum from significant victories in New Jersey and Virginia? Will Republicans maintain control of both chambers of Congress? If they do not, what impact would a GOP defeat have on the second half of President Trump's term?  

The semester will begin with a foundational study of Congress, with students assigned a congressional race to follow throughout the semester. Students will also examine the recent history of midterm elections, including major "change" elections in 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2018.  

This course will be taught by Noah Pittman, associate dean of enrollment for the Honors College. As an undergraduate, Pittman interned in the offices of U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen and worked on Harold Ford Jr.'s 2006 U.S. Senate campaign. At the U of A, he earned a master's degree in higher education leadership and a doctorate in public policy. He has taught honors courses on campaigns and elections, the American presidency, political partisanship and higher education policy. 

"Although often overlooked when compared to presidential cycles, midterm elections continue to be incredibly important facet of the American political system," Pittman said. "This will be the third time the Honors College has offered a forum on the midterm elections, and honestly, 2026 may prove to be the most pivotal cycle we have covered so far in the course." 

An application is required to enroll in this course. 

Skin Disease and the History of Dermatology: This returning course will explore the history of dermatology, tracing how physicians and societies have understood and misunderstood diseases of the skin. After thousands of years of speculation and debate, followed by two centuries of scientific specialization, modern dermatology now allows many once-devastating afflictions to be treated quickly and effectively.  

One course's primary goals is to examine what physicians knew about the skin and its diseases—and when—across history. Students will study pivotal and troubling episodes, including the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the Holmesburg Prison experiments. 

Scott M. Jackson, M.D., will teach the course. He is a board-certified dermatologist based in Bentonville and the author of Skin Disease and the History of Dermatology (2022) and Differential Diagnosis for the Dermatologist (2012). Jackson earned a bachelor's degree in history from Tulane University in 1998 before pursuing a career in medicine. His academic and professional work reflects a sustained effort to unite his dual interests in history and dermatology. 

"To provide students with an appreciation for the history of medicine, we will take an in-depth look at how skin disease was viewed by both societies and medical practitioners," Jackson said. "We will consider how it evolved, from ancient Mesopotamia to present day, and also look at skin disease within the broader framework of the history of medicine."  

An application is required to enroll in this course. 

The Future of College Athletics: This unique offering is a collaboration between 10 universities in the SEC—more than half of the conference—that will convene a shared forum on the future of college athletics.  

In this one-credit-hour course taught by Pittman, students will gain rare insight into both campus-level operations and the conference-wide forces reshaping college athletics. The discussion and coursework will provide a workforce development opportunity with unparalleled, cross-institutional exposure to the business, legal and media dimensions of the sport.   

Half of the course will be delivered via Zoom through plenary sessions with honors students from the other SEC institutions, with a focus on viewing today's college sports landscape from a range of professional perspectives. Students will also examine recent legal developments and their intended—and unintended—consequences. The remaining portion of the course will be conducted on campus, featuring professionals from the U of A and beyond who work across diverse areas of college athletics.  

"There is no denying that college athletics has gone through major transformations over the past decade," Pittman said. "SEC honors students enrolled in the course will be able to learn about major developments from industry leaders and what implications they have for the future of college athletics." 

An application is required to enroll in this course. 

AI & Integrative Health: The rapid development and adoption of artificial intelligence has created new possibilities for addressing challenges facing the U.S. healthcare system. Significant technical, ethical and policy questions remain: Will AI improve health outcomes? Will it make health care more accessible and affordable? Will it fundamentally transform the health and health care industries?  

This course is offered in partnership with The Institute for Integrative & Innovative Research (I³R) at the U of A , a public research institute that pioneers solutions to complex societal challenges through convergence research across academic, industry, government and nonprofit sectors, advancing research excellence and driving economic development by creating and deploying innovations at scale.  

Students will consider how diverse stakeholders shape the future of AI and integrative health, including consumers of health products, patients and their families, clinicians and their livelihoods, health care institutions and their financial sustainability, and the government programs and policies that influence health and healthcare systems.  

The course will be taught by Alejandro Martin Gomez, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and James Abbas, professor of biomedical engineering.  

Gomez, a member of the I³R, currently leads computer vision and imaging efforts for a major industrial partnership and oversees the integration of augmented reality into surgical workflows. He recently served as workshops chair for the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.  

"It's clear that AI is here to stay," Gomez said. "When we started designing this course, we considered its relevance to healthcare, especially in our country. Given the many challenges facing the healthcare system, we see AI as a tool with real potential to drive improvement, if used responsibly and effectively." 

Abbas is also a member of the I³R, where he leads the institute's work in neural-enabled prosthetics and helps oversee clinical trial partnerships. He is a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors and IEEE, and serves on the steering committee for the Data Resource Center of the NIH SPARC Initiative. 

"We're not only considering how tools like ChatGPT might affect health and healthcare," Abbas said, "but also how AI is embedded in devices that people use every day, often without even realizing it's there. Most people are familiar with tools like ChatGPT, but that there's another side to AI that often gets less attention: its integration into medical and healthcare devices. That breadth of AI applications, and how deeply it's woven into healthcare, is an important part of the conversation." 

No application is required for this course.  

Advanced special topics 

Advanced special topics courses give faculty the chance to teach on emerging issues, timely themes or areas of personal expertise not typically offered in the regular curriculum. These courses allow students to explore new ideas, test out innovative approaches and engage with material that reflects current conversations in research and society. There is no application required for these courses. 

Crisis: Offered virtually in May, this course will bring together students from multiple Arkansas universities that make up Honors Arkansas to learn from leaders in state government, public safety, health care, higher education and global business and engage in a multidisciplinary exploration of strategies for navigating crises.  

Guest speakers include representatives from the Office of the Governor, the Office of the Attorney General, the Arkansas National Guard, Walmart, Arkansas Children's Inc., universities and nonprofit organizations statewide, offering students insight into how crisis decisions impact communities, institutions and public trust. 

"Honors students entering any profession, from law to medicine to research to politics, will be at some point in their career involved in crisis communications," Coon said. "Why not spend the May 2026 Intersession learning from the professionals who have led PR efforts to combat negative national and international press? Each seminar will feature a workshop where you, the student, get to be part of a crisis team workshopping a real-life scenario. There is no better professional development opportunity than this one." 

The course will provide opportunities to examine real-world scenarios with a goal of training students to navigate crises, communicate under pressure and protect organizational credibility, drawing directly on real-world scenarios from across the state. Rather than focusing on theory alone, emphasis will be placed on communication planning, stakeholder engagement and media strategy during moments of disruption, skills increasingly essential across industries.  

No application is required for this course. 

Astrobiology in Popular Culture: This seminar will examine how popular culture imagines astrobiology—the scientific search for life in the universe—and how those portrayals influence public understanding of science.  

Each week, students will screen a major film and use it as a springboard for discussion, unpacking both the science and the storytelling to explore how imagination and evidence shape one another. The class will also engage with readings from astrobiology, planetary science and film theory to build connections between scientific reasoning and cultural analysis. 

Vincent F. Chevrier, associate research professor at the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences, will teach this course. Chevrier's work centers on the stability of volatiles—brines, ices and clathrates—and their role in the evolution and potential habitability of Mars, Titan and other planetary bodies. As principal investigator on multiple NASA-funded projects, he combines laboratory experiments with spacecraft observations to model how water and other volatiles interact with planetary minerals under extreme conditions.  

"I proposed this course to show that thinking seriously about extraterrestrial life doesn't happen only in scientific papers. It also happens in popular culture," Chevrier said. "Films give us a space to test our assumptions about life, intelligence and the unknown in ways that science alone often can't." 

No application is required for this course.  

Languages of Neurodiversity: This seminar will examine the concept of neurodiversity and the language used to describe it. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for autism or ADHD and assumed to stand in opposition to "neurotypical."  

Students will analyze the language of neurotypicality and investigate how individuals who identify as neurodivergent articulate their experiences, while also questioning the usefulness and limitations of the terms neurodivergent and neurotypical themselves. They will also explore the many "languages" through which neurodiversity is expressed: linguistic, cultural, sensory, spatial and temporal. The seminar is designed to embody the principles of the neurodiversity movement—all neurotypes are welcome. 

This course will be led by Dr. Jennifer Hoyer, an inaugural U of A Humanities Center Research Fellow. Hoyer joined the U of A German Section in 2007 and founded the university's Jewish Studies program in 2015, directing it through 2025. Their teaching portfolio includes Introduction to Literature, German Civilization, European High Modernism, poetry, cinema, and medieval and early modern German cultural production. 

"Neurodivergence is relevant to everyone, everywhere, and is generally only barely understood," Hoyer said. "In this seminar, we will look at history as well as the current trends, from scholarship to social media, to really grasp what neurodivergence means and how that is evolving every day. We'll also ask what we even consider language, what we value, what we don't and why." 

No application is required for this course.  

About the Honors College: The University of Arkansas Honors College was established in 2002 and brings together high-achieving undergraduate students and the university's top professors to share transformative learning experiences. Each year the Honors College awards up to 90 freshman fellowships that provide $80,000 over four years, and more than $1 million in undergraduate research and study abroad grants. The Honors College is nationally recognized for the high caliber of students it admits and graduates. Honors students enjoy small, in-depth classes, and programs are offered in all disciplines, tailored to students' academic interests, with interdisciplinary collaborations encouraged. All Honors College graduates have engaged in mentored research.