Residential Engagement in Academic Life (REAL) is a unique housing option open to 60 members of the class of 2015. Students live together on the 3rd and 4th floors of South residence hall and take one of four courses in the South residence hall 4th floor lounge and seminar rooms with one of Hamilton's best teachers. Your REAL professor is also your faculty advisor. Students have a chance to connect with faculty and one another around both intellectual and social activities. This has become a very popular housing option.
The following popular courses are offered in South this fall:
Philosophical inquiry into whether or not any of our moral beliefs can be justified and intensive examination of specific moral theories, including theories of justice, equality and rights. Writing-intensive. Taught by Robert Simon, Professor of Philosophy.
What is a self? Does each person have one? Does each person have only one? How is the self related to the soul? Is it unchanging or in constant flux? What is the relationship between the self and the body? Examination of personal identity, the self and the soul as these topics are addressed in traditional philosophical texts, literature and neuropsychology. Writing-intensive. Taught by Marianne Janack, Professor of Philosophy.
Through a forensic or close analysis and discussion of selected texts by writers such as John Donne, Shakespeare, Poe, Melville, Edna St Vincent Millay, Dylan Thomas, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez and August Wilson (considered in their contexts), students will acquire the skills necessary for critical thinking and communication of their insights about literature. Writing-intensive. Taught by Vincent Odamtten, Professor of English.
We will look at texts in which characters work to interpret the world in which they live and come to some self-understanding in the process. Reading their stories, we too will face questions of interpretation as we try to make sense of the fictional worlds before us. We will read two plays—Middleton's The Changeling and Soyinka's Death and the King’s Horseman; two novels—Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Dickens's Great Expectations; stories by writers such as Chaucer, Melville, Wharton, and Banerjee; and a selection of poems. Writing-intensive. Taught by Professor of English, Margaret Thickstun.
Students enrolled in REAL - Academic Engagement will be assured registration in one of these courses. Maximum enrollment in each course is 16 students. Each course is writing intensive.
Questions? Contact Nancy Thompson
