S8E6: What is the UMaine Honors College experience?

Established in 1935, the University of Maine Honors College is one of the oldest continuously-running honors programs in the U.S. Its intellectually-curious students, who are among the top undergraduates at UMaine, explore texts, ideas, the arts and current events through an interdisciplinary lens in an academically rigorous environment. Their class sizes are small and emphasize student engagement and lively discussion. In their senior year, honors students work on a thesis or project that pertains to their major and caters to their passions. In this episode of “The Maine Question” podcast, Dean Ellen Weinauer and four students discuss what it’s like to learn and thrive in the Honors College

The Honors College Experience Reconsidered: Exploring the Student Perspective

Often administrators overlook the student voice in developing strategic plans, mission and vision statements, marketing strategies, student services, and extracurricular programming. Engaging students in these areas may enhance students’ cooperation, interactions, responsibility, and expectations. In order to assess honors students’ perspectives and experiences, the present study, rooted in a phenomenological approach, conducted three focus groups of traditional honors students, senior honors students, and honors college ambassadors. Students described their honors experience in three contexts: connectedness, community, and opportunity. This study informed a new vision and a new set of goals for the University of Southern Mississippi Honors College, and it might serve as a model for other honors colleges and programs

The Honors College Experience Reconsidered: Exploring the Student Perspective

Often administrators overlook the student voice in developing strategic plans, mission and vision statements, marketing strategies, student services, and extracurricular programming. Engaging students in these areas may enhance students’ cooperation, interactions, responsibility, and expectations. In order to assess honors students’ perspectives and experiences, the present study, rooted in a phenomenological approach, conducted three focus groups of traditional honors students, senior honors students, and honors college ambassadors. Students described their honors experience in three contexts: connectedness, community, and opportunity. This study informed a new vision and a new set of goals for the University of Southern Mississippi Honors College, and it might serve as a model for other honors colleges and programs

The Gothic and the Southern Lady : Catherine Warfield\u27s \u3ci\u3eThe Household of Bouverie\u3c/i\u3e

Despite the claim that The Household of Bouverie; or, The Elixir of Gold (1860) is “By a Southern Lady,” the novel lacks many of the markers that we have come to associate with southern literature, at least until its later sections. This essay examines Bouverie’s shifting relationship to region, focusing on the role that the Gothic plays in telling a story of spousal abuse that simultaneously indicts the institution of slavery. While it is unlikely that this “southern lady”—writing on the eve of the Civil War—intended to critique the “peculiar institution,” slavery’s ghosts haunt her novel nonetheless

Undead Wives and Undone Husbands: Poe\u27s Tales of Marriage

Critics have had very little to say about marriage as an institution in Poe’s work, despite a recent historical turn in Poe studies that might lead in that direction. This essay demonstrates that Poe was in fact deeply engaged with the idea of legal marriage—one of the most important social and political issues of his day—and deeply ambivalent about the losses to which marriage subjected both husbands and wives. In the wasted, undead wives featured in such tales as “Berenice” (1835) and “Ligeia” (1838) and the undone, dispossessed husbands in “The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Oblong Box” (1844), Poe considers the profound transformations that legal marriage works upon women and men, and the terrifying unity between husband and wife that marriage demands