2025-2026 Honors Seminars
Honors seminars are small, specially-designed four-unit classes on a variety of topics taught by top UCI faculty. Campuswide Honors offers a selection of seminars each quarter during the academic year. These seminars are open to all rising sophomores, juniors, seniors, and Honors to Honors transfer students in Campuswide Honors to enroll on a first-come, first-serve basis. The seminars are worth 4 units each. Campuswide Honors students may take as many of these seminars as they wish, and can even use one of them to substitute for one quarter of a Classic Track honors core course as designated by Campuswide Honors (see credit descriptions for each seminar below).
Only one substitution total permitted per student.
Sustainable Societies Track is not eligible for honors seminar substitutions.
Fall 2025 Seminars
Social Science Core Equivalent Seminar
Improvisation and Modes of Research and Creative Expression
Instructor: Professor Alan Terricciano
Enroll in: Arts H81
Credit: GE Category IV credit, may substitute for one quarter of Social Science Core
The goal of this course is to recognize, build and apply a set of cognitive skills collectively categorized under the umbrella of “improvisation.” Improvisation utilizes a complex of powerful, formal cognitive tools applicable toward many fields. The course begins by examining improvisatory practices within the arts and extrapolates a set of tools embedded in artistic improvisation – temporal awareness and engagement in time; real-time design; pattern recognition and pattern repetition; and the ability to identify, explore, and illuminate connections between disparate phenomena. Through readings, guest lectures by UCI faculty and visiting artists (when possible), in-class student-centered learning, and project design/presentation, this course sets out to demonstrate how the “tool set” applies across the disciplines, from creative writing to the analysis of large-scale data sets to the application of the scientific method.
Science Core Equivalent Seminar
Drugs and Society
Instructor: Professor Sam Schriner
Enroll in: Pharmaceutical Sciences H80
Credit: GE Category II, may substitute for one quarter of Science Core
The majority of individuals in modern society will use drugs at some point. Most drugs have legitimate medical uses, while some are used recreationally, and drugs from both groups can be abused. This course will introduce some basic physiology, including the brain reward circuit, needed to appreciate drug action. However, it will mostly focus on recreational drugs and where they come from, how they work, how and why people abuse them, the costs of drug abuse on society, which drugs are commonly abused, and how drug abuse can be prevented or treated. Overall, the course will consider the importance of recreational drugs in relation to medicine, public health, science, law, politics, humanities, philosophy, religious beliefs, economics, sports, and innovation. While this course is intended for non-science majors, it would be helpful that students have had biology and chemistry in high school. Grading in the course is composed of three midterms and one final. These may be multiple choice, short answer, and/or essay format. In addition, each student will give two oral presentations on drug-related topics of their choice. Finally, the class will work together to create, administer, and analyze a drug use survey given to the UCI community.
Tentative Winter 2026 Seminars
Social Science Core OR Science Core Equivalent Seminar
Evolutionary Foundations of Human Moral Psychology
Instructor: Professor Kyle Stanford
Enroll in: Logic & Philosophy of Science H83
Credit: GE Category II or III, may substitute for one quarter of Social Science Core OR Science Core
Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in our “moral psychology”: the distinctive ways in which humans experience, reason about, and make judgments concerning what is right or wrong. This course will examine the origins and functioning of this human moral psychology from an evolutionary point of view. We will consider the increasingly influential view that much of our moral psychology represents a complex adaptation for facilitating cooperative, altruistic, and prosocial interactions between the members of ancestral (and contemporary!) human social groups. Along the way we will be exploring some of the most puzzling features of that psychology. For example, although most of our behavior is motivated simply by our subjective preferences and desires, we do not experience moral motivation in this way. Instead we experience moral demands and obligations as somehow imposed on us externally or “from the outside”, requiring each of us to act or not act in particular ways no matter what our own subjective desires and preferences may be. We will draw on both theoretical work and experimental findings from evolutionary biology, social psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, primatology, anthropology, and philosophy. Course assignments include one midterm and one final, as well as contributions to online and in-class discussions.
Social Science Core Equivalent Seminar
What Is/Was a University?
Instructor: Annie McClanahan
Enroll in: ENGL H83
Credit: TBD
The history and present of the modern university, with special attention to the history of the UC system. Problems of social justice, racial equality, class mobility in the university as well as student life and universities in popular culture.
Science Core Equivalent Seminar
Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics
Instructor: Professor Jeffrey Barrett
Enroll in: LPS H141
Credit: No GE, may substitute for one quarter of Science Core
An examination of the standard von Neumann-Dirac formulation of quantum mechanics. The quantum measurement problem is discussed along with several proposed solutions, including GRW, many-worlds, man-minds, and Bohm’s theory.
Tentative Spring 2026 Seminars
Science Core Equivalent Seminars
What is Disease?
Instructor: Professor Lauren Ross
Enroll in: LPS H123
Credit: GE Category II, may substitute for one quarter of Science Core
This course explores philosophical issues regarding human health and disease. It examines theories of how to identify, classify, and explain disease, with a focus on examples from physical medicine and psychiatry. A brief examination of different theories of disease is provided, from the Hippocratic corpus, to 18th and 19th century medicine, and modern times. After this review, the course focuses on various questions related to modern medicine. These include: What is disease and how is it understood and explained in modern medicine? How should we understand appeals to causal concepts such as “mechanism” and “pathway” in contemporary disease explanations? How should disease diagnosis, classification, explanation, and discovery be understood? What challenges face these practices in modern medicine? Are diseases socially constructed concepts or objective things in the world?The goal of this class is to provide students with a critical understanding of these theoretical issues. Previous knowledge of biology, neuroscience, and/or medicine is not needed. Key notions and concepts in these fields will be introduced and explored throughout the course.
What is Space
Instructor: Professor JB Manchak
Enroll in: LPS H81
Credit: GE Category II, may substitute for one quarter of Science Core
What is Space? In this course, we explore this question from a variety of angles: historical, philosophical, scientific, and personal. We begin with the logical paradoxes of Zeno and the queer properties of infinity. We consider a philosophical debate between Newton and Leibniz concerning the question of whether space is “absolute” or “relational” is nature. We then look at Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the senses in which concepts such as “space” and “time” do not exist. We learn about a new four-dimensional object called “spacetime” and some bizarre possibilities associated with it such as “time travel” and “singularities” of various types. We then explore what we can and cannot know concerning the shape of space (the universe). We close with a section on the Zen Budhhist conception of “inner space” and work to cultivate it by meditating together during each class period.