Free to rethink the undergraduate curriculum, the Louisiana Scholars' College has developed courses steeped in the Great Books, based on critical thinking, reading and writing, and designed to foster student engagement.  Many are interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary and may cover topics normally reserved for graduate study.

Here are the catalog descriptions of some of our more unique courses. For a complete listing of LSC and other NSU courses, download the NSU catalog.  [Warning:  this is a very large file.]

Common Curriculum:
  • SCRT 181W. CRITICAL READING, CRITICAL WRITING. (4-4-0). Exercise in verbal argument and analysis, in conjunction with the study of major writers, major thinkers, and significant cultural issues. Disciplines and topics vary; may be taken for credit only once.
Subtitles:
  • 01-Justice, Virtue, and the Good. A close study of ethical writings by Plato and Aristotle, emphasizing both moral ideas and philosophical reasoning: Plato’s Euthyphro, Gorgias, and Republic, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
  • 03-Selfhood and Community. An inquiry into changing conceptions of the “self’’ and shifting relations between individuals and communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
  • 04-Utopian Visions. Versions of perfection in utopian works written in Europe and America from the sixteenth century to the present—utopian perspectives on perfection, including those of Christian humanism, liberalism, socialism, aesthetic
    Marxism, and feminism. Examinations of contemporary assumptions about what is “natural’’ and possible in our own time and in the future.
  • 05-Greek and Roman Art: A General Survey. An overview of the development of Greek and Roman art organized to complement the material presented in Texts and Traditions I.
  • 06-Southern Fiction. An introduction to Southern fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing literary analysis, but also examining social and historical contexts as well as the issues of race, class, and gender. Chopin, Faulkner, O’Connor, Welty, Percy, Hurston, Walker, among others.
    07-Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Gender. An interdisciplinary course exploring gender relations through literature, art, history, sociology, and biology.
  • 09-Popular Culture in History. Examination of the political function and social sources of popular culture in Europe and America since 1600, with emphasis on the development of writing skill.
  • 10-Physical Concepts of Time. Introduction to the study of time, as viewed from the perspectives of natural philosophy, mathematics, and modern physics. Zeno’s paradoxes; relativity and block universe; “time’s arrow” in thermodynamics and cosmology.
  • 11-Writing About Film. A writing-intensive seminar offering an introduction to the vocabulary and perspectives of film criticism.
  • 12-History and Philosophy of Natural Science. A writingintensive seminar designed to help students understand how scientists think and why we know what we know. Students will be given a background in “scientific thought processes”.
  • 13-Writing about Literature: The Lost Generation. An
    introduction to college-level critical reading and writing skills through study of the literature of Americans and American expatriates between the World Wars.
  • 14-The Influences of Science on Art. An exploration of the relationship between art and science, including an interdisciplinary examination of media, materials, color, light, and perspective in art and architecture.
  • 15-A study of the history of legal writing as literature, and a study of what literature has to teach about the history and interpretation of law and methods of legal argument.
  • SCTT 1810. TEXTS AND TRADITIONS I: THE SHAPING OF WESTERN THOUGHT. (5 5 0). A close study of selections from the history of western thought, including major philosophical, scientific, literary, political, and artistic works. The ancient world; early myth, the Old Testament, classical antiquity; works by authors such as, Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Vergil, Juvenal, and others.
  • SCTT 1820. TEXTS AND TRADITIONS II: THE SHAPING OF WESTERN THOUGHT. (5 5 0). A continuation of 1810. The Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; works by authors such as Boethius, Dante, Machiavelli, Descartes, Galileo, Shakespeare, and others.
  • SCTT    2810. TEXTS AND TRADITIONS III: THE SHAPING OF WESTERN THOUGHT. (5 5 0). A continuation of 1820. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; works by authors such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Austen, Marx, Mill, Darwin, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and others.
  • SCTT    2820. TEXTS AND TRADITIONS IV: THE SHAPING OF WESTERN THOUGHT. (5 5 0). A continuation of 2810. The twentieth century; works by authors such as Freud, Conrad, Weber, Woolf, Eliot, Levi-Strauss, Böll and others.
  • SCTT    3810. TEXTS AND TRADITIONS V, DEMOCRATIC VISTAS: THE IDEA OF AMERICA. (4 4 0). Major documents from the American cultural tradition, including works by Winthrop, Edwards, Franklin, Jefferson, Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Fuller, Dickinson, Mark Twain, Charles Ives, Jasper Johns, Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and others.
  • SCTT    4810. SENIOR COLLOQUIUM I. (2 2 0).
        Subtitles:
    • 07 Crime and Punishment in the Modern World: An exploration of the proper relationship between crime and punishment, liberty, and social repression during the modern era and focusing on Europe and America.
    • 08-Science and Religion: Background Issues: Examination of the relationship between religion and science from ancient times to the present, from a number of perspectives. This course will focus on the historical roots of both disciplines and look carefully at the reasons for their divergence.
    • 09-Pharmacology, Society and the Law: A study of medical, political, legal, economic and cultural effects and ramifications of drug abuse and the war on drugs.
    • 10-The Nineties:  A Critical Retrospective.
    • 11-The 1960s: An examination of the political, economic, social, cultural, and technological advances of the Sixties and an introduction to the   individuals who made history in that decade.
  • SCTT    4820. SENIOR COLLOQUIUM II. (2 2 0).
        Subtitles:
    • 05 Crime and Punishment in the Modern World. An exploration of the proper relationship between crime and punishment, liberty and social repression during the modern era and focusing on Europe and America.
    • 06-Science and Religion: The Scopes Trial and its Consequences: This is the second semester of a two-semester course focusing on religion and science. This semester will emphasize the Scopes trial and its consequences, including the modern-day discussion of creationism vs. evolution.
    • 07-Pharmacology, Society and the Law. A study of the medical, political, legal, economic and cultural effects and ramifications of drug abuse and the war on drugs.
    • 08-The Nineties:  A Critical Retrospective.
    • 09-The 1960s: Continuation of 4810.  An examination of the political, economic, social, cultural, and technological advances of the Sixties and an introduction to the individuals who made history in that decade.