All That Glitters: Honors College Offers Course on Unique Facets of American History This Fall

Honors students can enroll in courses covering two fascinating topics of American history for the fall semester. In Women and Religion in America, topics will include Native American and African American faith traditions, colonial religious practices, revival movements and social justice initiatives from the Second Great Awakening to the present. In The Gilded Age, instructors will use the HBO series of the same name as a lens through which to explore the late 19th-century United States. 

Lynda Coon, dean of the Honors College, encourages students from all disciplines to apply.  

"Our fall Honors College Retro Readings take us into the complexities of American history through the lens of religion and art history," Coon said. "Students can follow the fascinating trajectory of women's involvement in religion or step into the Gilded Age, brought to you live on the U of A campus through the brilliance of the School of Art. It's going to be a ride!" 

In Women and Religion in America, Janet Allured, professor emeritus, will seek to deepen students' understanding of American religious history and women's history by examining religious pluralism and its impact on the American experience. Using primary and secondary sources, including sacred texts, students will explore how race, gender, geography and socio-economic status intersect with religious life. The course will also provide students with the opportunities to evaluate the consequences of excluding women from religious authority and consider how queer theology challenges and reinterprets traditional religious narratives. 

"This approach is particularly relevant given religion's influential role in American history," Allured said. "The course emphasizes women's leadership, contributions and agency within American religious history, areas often underrepresented in typical religious studies courses that tend to focus on men." 

Additionally, students will engage in discussions about religion's impact on contemporary social issues, politics and the ongoing efforts toward gender and racial equality, fostering a comprehensive understanding of religion's multifaceted role in society. 

In The Gilded Age, Jennifer A. Greenhill, director of the Graduate Studies Program for Art History and professor of art history, and Kelvin Parnell, Jr., endowed assistant professor in Arts of the Americas, will use the HBO series to guide students through an exploration of intriguing topics, such as American imperialism, the founding of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, cultural debates about "decadence," the emergence of the Black press and the development of the museum movement.  

"We have much to learn from the historical period known as the Gilded Age," Greenhill said, "particularly given our region's emphasis on business, arts and philanthropy. The HBO series offers a window into the period that set the terms for all three. Dr. Parnell and I will flesh out historical details that the show addresses and, in some cases, overlooks, helping students to identify through lines from the late 19th century to the present." 

The historical period in the United States known as The Gilded Age spans roughly from the late 1870s to the late 1890s, between the Reconstruction and Progressive eras. Many issues seen in today's headlines were also at play in the country at that time: class divisions, immigration, women's rights and deeply divisive political views, among others. The HBO series explores these themes by focusing on characters from different classes of society and levels of wealth, lending voices to stories and topics often relegated to academic history texts. No application is required for these courses, but seats are limited, so students are encouraged to register early.

Janet Allured, is a professor emeritus of history and women's studies at McNeese State University and the U of A. A specialist in Southern women's history, she has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications, including Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times (2009) and Remapping Second-Wave Feminism: The Long Women's Rights Movement in Louisiana, 1950-1997 (2016). Her most recent publication, Southern Methodist Women and Social Justice: Interracial Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (2025), co-edited with M. Kathryn Armistead, reflects her current research focus. 

Jennifer A. Greenhill, director of the Graduate Studies Program for Art History and professor of art history, specializes in 19th- and early 20th-century U.S. art and visual culture, while frequently extending her work beyond this period to examine subjects such as the visuality of literary humor and the politics of racialized beauty in 1960s film. She is the author of Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (University of California Press, 2012) and co-editor of A Companion to American Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), a volume of 35 essays that contest and expand the geographic, historiographic, material and conceptual boundaries of the field. 

As the endowed assistant professor in arts of the Americas, Kelvin Parnell Jr.'s scholarship centers the visual and social histories of sculpture in the United States, situating sculptural production and reception within multiple regimes of value. His work interrogates the relationships among material commodities, three-dimensional art and evolving racial discourses in the 19th century. Core themes in his research include U.S. art and politics, sculptural theory and transatlantic visual culture.