This spring I had the pleasure of teaching a seminar in the honors program for the first time. The class I designed, “Music and the Place of Performance,” attempted to formulate an alternative vision of the history of classical music—one seen through the eyes and accomplishments of famous performers.

Technology shapes almost every aspect of our lives—the spaces we inhabit, how we interact with each other and nature, and the way we do our jobs and take our recreation. Moreover, because the rate of technological change is so fast, it drives social and cultural change more than any other factor. Emerging technologies also often raise controversial moral issues regarding such things as privacy (information technologies), mixing species (genetically modified organisms) and creating novel forms of life (synthetic biology). For these reasons, understanding the human situation in the modern world requires attending to and reflecting on emerging technologies.

HONR 1204 – Comparative Arts: Towards Understanding and Appreciation, was an Inquiries and Arts and Humanities course offered through the Honors program in Fall 2010. This course was an introduction to the arts via interdisciplinary methods of analysis. In this course we placed the “texts” (music recordings, poems, paintings, dances, readings) side‐by‐side to see what one could teach the other.  Sources of these texts included Internet links, YouTube videos, podcasts, PowerPoints, and mp3s – there was no single textbook. Additional “texts” were the works of art that honors students experienced outside of the classroom – including performances of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall, visits to the Museum of Fine Arts, plays at the Huntington Theatre, and numerous other arts-based events offered throughout the city of Boston.

This past Fall I had the pleasure of serving for the third year in a row as Writer in Residence for Northeastern’s Honors Department. For the third year I taught the the seminar class I created for the department in 2008: Non Fiction Writing and Social Justice Issues – HONR 3341.  Every year, some students who enter my writing class have not previously been in “seminar” classrooms. The circle set-up and casual tone of the class can throw students off, at first. But they get over it when the pizza arrives.

This past fall all of the entering Honors first year students participated in the first part of the Enhancing Honors course. This course is designed to engage students into the Honors’ community, Northeastern University’s community, the city of Boston and beyond.  Enhancing Honors is unique in that it is co-taught by the Honors Program’s director, Maureen Kelleher, and a new record of sixty upper class mentors.

As a student enrolled in “Enhancing Honors” in the fall of 2009, I became acquainted not only with the many opportunities of the Honors program at Northeastern, but also with the city of Boston, its neighborhoods, and the vital history that surrounds us on every street corner. One of the most interesting reading assignments of the semester was The Hardest Working Man by James Sullivan, a book about the great rock and roll icon, James Brown, and how he “saved” Boston. Brown was scheduled to perform at the Boston Garden on the night after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. While many other cities around the country erupted in riots, Boston remained relatively calm because of the way Brown handled this highly charged situation.

We hit the ground running. The lot of us being strangers in a strange land, we meshed quickly and were soon exchanging directions, Italian phrases, Euros, and umbrellas. It had only been a few short hours after we had landed in the Eternal City and we were already navigating our way through the epic ruins of the Roman Forum and then through the labyrinthine streets of the city itself.