The -ISM Seminar

The -ISM Seminar

HNRS 301H1-003

Lynda Coon

Spring 2025

T 5:00 - 6:15 p.m. 

GEAR 129

In 1943, the University of Arkansas bestowed an honorary degree on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In turn, Director Hoover praised the state of Arkansas as a “bulwark of freedom, free of “isms.” This Honors College Retro Reading will unpack the “isms” Hoover found so distasteful. The term “ism” first appeared in the English language in the early modern era, morphing into an explosion of words during the Industrial Revolution. The earliest “isms” are familiar to us now: nationalism, capitalism, socialism, colonialism, feminism, agnosticism—all products of the Western intelligentsia during the 19th century. In this seminar, we shall tackle a different “ism” each week by reading and discussing a classic work related to that way of thinking. In doing so, we shall set the stage for understanding Hoover’s denunciation of the “ism” in the 1940s as well as the role of the “ism” in contemporary culture wars, where the storied term has experienced yet another historical metamorphosis.

Course Credit

• Course credit coming soon. 

About Lynda Coon

Lynda Coon (PhD, University of Virginia) brings a deep commitment to honors education and a fresh vision for the future to her role as dean of the Honors College. She has launched the Honors College Forum, a one-hour course that explores timely issues, the Honors College Mic lecture series, and Honors College Signature Seminars, an interdisciplinary series of courses on cutting-edge issues taught by the university's top professors. 

Coon joined the University of Arkansas faculty in 1990 as a history professor in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. She has mentored nearly two dozen honors students on their thesis projects and served as honors advisor in the history department for a decade. Several of her students were awarded SURF and Honors College research grants and a number of them have moved on to graduate studies at institutions such as Cambridge University, Columbia University, Yale University, and the University of Virginia. 

In 1995 she helped to launch the Honors Humanities Project (H2P), an interdisciplinary three-semester sequence of courses taught by teams of top professors. She served as director of H2P from 1998-2004 and continues to be actively involved in the program, which has become a cornerstone experience for many honors students. Coon also led the effort to develop H2Passport, which sends H2P students and professors to key sites and monuments around the globe following a semester of intensive study. 

Coon earned a bachelor’s degree in history at James Madison University and master’s and doctoral degrees in history from the University of Virginia. She served as an associate dean of fine arts and humanities and director of the Religious Studies Program in Fulbright College prior to her appointment as Honors College dean. Coon also led the Fulbright College Study Abroad Program in Rome from 2001-04 and chaired the department of history from 2008-13.