Honors in Political Science
Qualified political science majors may graduate with honors in political science. This program honors students who achieve academic excellence in their studies and who successfully complete additional training in a special topics research seminar (PLSC 395). This course is offered each spring and students may enroll in it in their junior or senior year. Students may apply for admission to the honors program in the first semester of their junior year. Admission requires a 3.5 GPA overall and in political science. Admitted students may register for PLSC 395 in the spring semester of their junior year provided they have successfully completed seven political science classes (21 credit hours). The Honors Seminar will not count toward the 33 credit hours required for a political science major or as one of the required subfield courses.
For more information about the Political Science Honors Program, please contact Professor Alan Gitelson at agitels@luc.edu. Students should apply for admission to the program as soon as possible and no later than November 1, 2012.
PLSC 395: Political Science Honors Seminar
Title:
George Orwell
Description:
George Orwell is best known as the author of two anti-communist works of fiction, Animal Farm and 1984. People who’ve read nothing else by Orwell might assume he was right-wing, but the man who wrote under the pen name George Orwell was in fact a sharp critic of capitalism and a staunch egalitarian. His most famous novels were written not to discredit the socialist cause but to correct its failings. In this honors seminar we will examine a broad range of Orwell’s writings, including the accounts he wrote of his life as a tramp during the Great Depression and of his military service during the Spanish Civil War. While Orwell could not be classified as a political philosopher, he was an important twentieth-century political observer and social critic. Our task in this course will be to reconstruct Orwell’s brand of leftism from his disparate writings and to assess the relevance of his views for the new century in which we live.