Overview
Faculty are involved in the Eckardt Scholars program in a variety of ways: recommending first-year students for admission to the program; teaching Eckardt seminars; advising capstone projects; and serving on the Eckardt Steering Committee.
Learn more about specific requirements on the course catalog.
Recent Eckardt Seminars
Knowing and Being Oneself, Professor Richard Matthews (ECK 281, Spring 2024)
This advanced seminar explored the question of whether an can individual find a meaningful and authentic existence in contemporary America–or, whether it is easier to accept the commercial inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. Students critically discussed works in political philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, literature, and film to consider how to avoid a life of “quiet desperation.”
Digital Identity in an AI World, Professor Jeremy Littau (ECK 081, Fall 2023)
This first-year seminar examined how online communication technology has helped us form digital versions of our identity that will increasingly be living alongside artificial intelligence communication that looks, reads, and feels authentic. What does it mean to be ourselves, and to be human, in a world of synthetic media and influence? Students explored social platforms and networks that create digital versions of the self and challenged themselves with how to interact with AI in human terms.
The Problem of Living Together, Professor Khurram Hussain (ECK 281, Fall 2023)
This advanced seminar addressed political, social, economic, and cultural theories about the nature and meaning of human communities, and the relationship between the individual and society as a whole. Students engaged critically with expositions of social and communal organization that may seem thoroughly alien to our modern, Western imagination but which nonetheless reveal something fundamental about the human condition.
Cultures of Data, Professor Ed Whitley (ECK 081, Fall 2022)
This first-year seminar examined data collection and visualization practices in the nineteenth century and today. In it, students engaged in hands-on projects that enabled them to attend to the idiosyncratic data models of the nineteenth-century as a way to better understand our current moment of big data.
Humans, Power, and Education, Professor Nandini Deo (ECK 281, Fall 2022)
This advanced seminar explored our past to identify the variety of ways we can organize our political and educational institutions, paying special attention to how power is institutionalized in particular educational spaces, like our own. Students considered how they might escape these disciplining forces to create educational journeys that liberate us and the people around us.