Current Students
Tampa Summer 2026 Honors Courses
The Judy Genshaft Honors College offers courses on all three campuses, as well as off-site locations. Honors courses are open to students from any home campus, but may require a permit. Unless noted specifically in the course description, Honors courses require in-person attendance.
Click a category below to browse all related courses:
- IDH 3100: Honors Arts and Humanities
- IDH 3600: Honors Seminar in Applied Ethics
- IDH 4200: Honors Geographic Perspectives
- IDH 4950: Honors Capstone
- IDH 4970: Honors Thesis
IDH 3100: Honors Arts and Humanities
IDH 3100: Honors Arts and Humanities courses explore how different types of creative production such as art, literature, drama, music, or film are interwoven with the pressing issues of society, politics, history, and culture. Classes may focus on a certain historical period, region, type of media, or theme.
001 | Exploring Leadership Through Literature and Film
- Category: Summer A
- Course Code/Section Number: IDH 3100-001
- Instructor: Deepak Singh
- Schedule: Monday, Wednesday, Friday | 9:30 - 11:50 a.m.
- Format: Online, Synchronous - Permit Required
This course explores leadership through the lens of literature and film, using creative narratives to investigate the complexities, moral dilemmas, and responsibilities tied to leadership. Students will engage with literary works such as:
- Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
- The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- The Red Convertible by Louise Erdrich
- The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
- "The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
Alongside these, students will examine films like:
- The Great Gatsby adapted from F. Scott Fitzgeralds novel
- Death of a Salesman adapted from Arthur Millers play
- Gandhi directed by Richard Attenborough
- Bicycle Thieves directed by Vittorio De Sica
- The Song of Sparrows directed by Majid Majidi
These works provide a rich canvas for examining how characters confront issues of power, ethics, and transformation.
Students will participate in discussions and produce two response papers, analyzing
how leadership challenges are addressed in the texts and films. The final paper will
encourage students to reflect on their own leadership potential, informed by the themes
and insights developed throughout the course.
Please ensure you have a reliable internet connection, a computer with a working microphone
and camera, and a quiet space where you can fully focus and participate. If you have
work commitments that conflict with class time, please make arrangements in advance
so you can give the course your full attention. Attendance and participation account
for 40% of your final grade.
IDH 3600: Honors Seminar in Applied Ethics
IDH 3600: Honors Seminar in Applied Ethics courses aim to cultivate an understanding of ethical ideas and practice, as well as to guide students in evaluating and applying ethics in specific, real-world scenarios. Through these courses, students sharpen their ability to engage in productive conversation and action.
001 | The Mattering of Life: From Death Row to the Dinner Table
- Category: Summer B
- Course Code/Section Number: IDH 3600-001
- Instructor: Ulluminair Salim
- Schedule: Tuesday, Thursday | 1 - 4:45 p.m.
The Mattering of Life examines moral and ethical complexities at the borderlands between human and other from death row to the dinner table. During the course, we will problematize the category human and perform a social autopsy of sorts: examining the body as a site upon which we tell the story of who and what we are. While well examine real-world phenomena about the mattering of life, well also straddle the fuzzy edge between the real and the imagined, confronting a sci-fi world in which humans become monsters and monsters become human.
What is mattering? What does it mean to matter? Well begin the course with philosophical, ethical, and theoretical constructs, first making sense of mattering. Well then map mattering onto bodies, questioning what it means to be human and what it means to matter. To do so, we will read selected bodies as texts, including animal bodies; human and human-animal hybrids; monstrous and alien bodies; fetal and aging bodies; minority, queer, and gendered bodies; disabled bodies; trafficked and imprisoned bodies; immigrant and undocumented bodies; cloned, enhanced, and modified bodies; machine, cyborg, and AI bodies; and military bodies, risky bodies, and (dis)advantaged bodies.
Several questions animate this course:
- What does it mean to be human?
- What is consequential about the category human, and what are the rights, privileges, and protections therein?
- What are the ways in which being human(e) matters, and in which contexts?
- At what point, if any, is someone no longer considered human and thus rendered other?
- By extension, what does it mean to have human rights, and in the absence of rights, are we no longer human?
- Who can live while others must die, and who decides what/who is deserving of life and death?
Foundational to this pursuit, we will examine film and literature. Exemplary films include:
- Us (2019)
- Annihilation (2018)
- The Shape of Water (2017)
- Sorry to Bother You (2018)
- "The Platform (2019)
- Avatar (2009)
- The Companion (2025)
Select novels and novellas may include:
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Test" by Sylvain Neuvel
As with all imaginative pursuits, this course is experimental and students will have the opportunity to shape it with Dr. Salim.
IDH 4200: Honors Geographic Perspectives
IDH 4200: Honors Geographic Perspectives courses broaden students horizons through a close examination of specific nations or regions and the people who inhabit them. These courses often focus on how a global issue is experienced in a local context, and how that local context may influence or be influenced by other places or peoples. Students will learn to critically explore global relationships in our interconnected world.
001 | Sick Around the World: Geographical Perspectives on Global Health
- Category: Summer A
- Course Code/Section Number: IDH 4200-001
- Instructor: Donna Ettel-Gambino
- Schedule: Tuesday, Thursday | 1 - 4:45 p.m.
This course is designed as a comparative presentation of current issues across international health care systems with a focus on South Africa, Italy, Japan, and France. Emphasis is on discussing diverse areas of health and is appropriate for students of any major interested in health care delivery, personal health, or health education. We will discuss and debate topics such as:
- Health care delivery systems
- Medical malpractice
- Physical/mental health
- Physician-assisted suicide
- The opioid crisis
- Womens reproductive health
- Medical devices
- Health care disparities in the United States and abroad
This is a hands-on class, and students will be actively engaged and working in teams to complete a project. Although health and health care in other countries might seem far removed from our daily concerns in the United States, many nations face issues of uneven access, constrained resources, and a focus on improving the efficiency of services. Understanding how different nations confront issues of universal coverage, access, equity, and quality will enhance students ability to develop new ideas and approaches for addressing these challenges in the United States. Students will be introduced to community partners of 做厙TV Area Health Education Center (AHEC) for project ideas.
002 | Conflict and Cooperation in Politics
- Category: Summer B
- Course Code/Section Number: IDH 4200-002
- Instructor: Arman Mahmoudian
- Schedule: Tuesday, Thursday | 9:30 a.m. - 1 p.m.
This course examines the forces that drive conflict and cooperation in political life, focusing on why some political rivalries remain peaceful while others escalate into instability and violence. It explores the boundary between normal political competition and destructive political breakdown, analyzing the social, institutional, and psychological factors that shape political outcomes.
Through historical and comparative case studies, students will investigate how political conflicts have emerged, evolved, and been managed across different political systems and time periods. The course begins with early examples of political violence, such as the assassination of Julius Caesar, and moves through major modern cases including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, illustrating how struggles over power, legitimacy, and authority can intensify into violence.
Key themes include:
- The role of political institutions in regulating conflict
- The impact of ideology and polarization
- The influence of leadership and mass mobilization
- The conditions under which political competition breaks down.
Students will also examine contemporary debates on political violence, extremism, and democratic resilience.
By the end of the course, students will be able to identify recurring patterns that explain when political conflict turns violent and how political systems can promote cooperation and manage rivalry through peaceful and legitimate means. The course encourages critical thinking about citizenship, political responsibility, and the importance of institutions in sustaining stable political life.
IDH 4950: Honors Capstone
IDH 4950: Honors Capstone is a culminating classroom experience focused on integrative and applied learning. In this course, an instructor guides students to engage deeply with a specific topic through research and community engagement. The capstone concludes with a final scholarly, creative, or public contribution generated by student groups, bridging the gap between Honors learning and other spheres of life.
Honors Capstone courses are restricted to students with 90+ earned credit hours the first week of registration. The restriction is lowered to 60+ earned credit hours the second week of registration.
002 | Civic Literacy and Current Events
- Category: Summer A
- Course Code/Section Number: IDH 4950-002
- Instructor: Daniel Ruth
- Schedule: Tuesday, Thursday | 9:30 a.m. - 1 p.m.
This class is designed to give students an enhanced understanding of world events and civic institutions that influence their lives. Having a better grasp of the daily news is essential to becoming a more engaged citizen. To that end, students will be required to read the online editions of The Tampa Bay Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as follow other information platforms such as NPR, CNN, Fox News and other news outlets. This course will include a weekly news quiz. Students will also participate in weekly team presentations.
It is said that journalism often presents the first draft of history. The goals of this class are two-fold. First, students will become better informed and thus more aware of the stories that will serve to shape their world view. Second, students will also gain a keener understanding of the journalistic challenges associated with bringing the news to the public's attention.
IDH 4970: Honors Thesis
IDH 4970: Honors Thesis guides students as they develop a substantive, original, interdisciplinary final project under the direction of a faculty mentor. Students individually craft their thesis based on research methods and guidance of their chosen field and may be expressed as an academic paper, a design project, a creative performance or portfolio, or an organizational plan. Students should enroll in Thesis I when they are in the final 2-4 semesters of completing their degree. Please read the Honors Thesis page for more information and compare different Research Track options.
001 | Thesis I
- Category: Summer C
- Course Code/Section Number: IDH 4970-001
- Instructor: Atsuko Sakai
002 | Thesis II
- Category: Summer C
- Course Code/Section Number: IDH 4970-002
- Instructor: Atsuko Sakai