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
Buddhism, Consciousness, and the Human, Professor Annabella Pitkin (ECK 281, Fall 2026)
This advanced seminar explored theories of mind, consciousness, and what it means to be human from an interdisciplinary perspective. Course topics included Buddhist theories of cognition, personhood, and meaning-making; contemporary studies of psychology, cognition, and health; and recent research on AI and related technologies. Students read sacred texts, literature, poetry, and academic articles; practiced writing and research in multiple genres; analyzed selected interactions with AI tools; and creatively experimented with visual art and ritual.
How Did I End Up Here? Telling Stories of Immigration and Migration in the U.S, Professor Ed Whitley, (ECK 081, Fall 2026)
This first year seminar explored stories of immigration to and migration within the United States. Students then told stories about their own movement--and the movement of their families and ancestors--using a variety of different media.
Justice: From Practice to Theory, Professor Lloyd Steffen (ECK 281, Fall 2025)
This advanced seminar drew on the insight of Reinhold Niebuhr that only those who suffer injustice and are involved in the struggle for justice can know what justice is. The course looked to literature and philosophical, political and religious reflection to help students draw on examples of injustice to construct the idea of a just society and a just person. Discussions included the meaning and limits of equality; concern for the common good and for attending to the least advantaged; the relation of love to justice; and distributive, retributive, commutative and restorative notions of justice.
Eating, Professor Peter Zeitler (ECK 081, Fall 2025)
This first year seminar explored eating, from the most basic principles of physics and chemistry, to how it is intertwined with culture and identity, health, our environmental impact, equitable distribution of resources, and even language. Students engaged in reading, research, and viewing; worked on written, spoken and graphical communication; and, of course, did some eating.
Living a Feminist Life, Professor Ida Yalzadeh (ECK 281, Fall 2024)
This advanced seminar explored what it means to take a feminist approach to living, and how people practice doing so in their lives as learners. Students read seminal work from women of color and transnational feminist writers like Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldúa in order to think intentionally about how they want to show up in our lives. Students put their insights into practice with a final digital zine project meant to engage the communities that they care about most.
Sensing Religions, Professor Jodi Eichler-Levine (ECK 081, Fall 2024)
This first year seminar explored how human beings practice and experience different religious cultures through their five senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound. Students learned through reading sacred texts, literature, and poetry, but also through music, food, visual arts, objects, and more.
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.