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University of Florida

Spring 2026 Quest 1 Courses

About UF Quest

UF Quest invites students to consider why the world is the way it is and what they can do about it. Students examine questions that are difficult to answer and hard to ignore in a world that is swiftly changing and becoming increasingly more complex. What makes life worth living? What makes a society a fair one? How do we manage conflicts? Who are we in relation to other people or to the natural world?

The UF Quest 1 Requirement

UF Quest 1 courses fulfill the UF Quest 1 requirement and may fulfill 3 credits of the General Education requirement in the Humanities (see the  UF Quest Requirement page for more information). Some UF Quest 1 courses may also fulfill the International (N) requirement and/or count toward the Writing requirement. 

UF Quest 1 Courses

Click on the links below to learn more about the individual courses and to access course syllabi, which will be posted at least 3 days before the semester begins. Click the Campus, Honors, or UF Online button to filter by program or type in the search field to look for a particular subject, topic, instructor, etc. For the day and periods that the classes meet, please consult the Schedule of Courses.

CAMPUS HONORS UF ONLINE

        CAMPUS

  • Instructor: William Billups, History
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How does one change what is not just? Who has the power to make change? What is powerful about social justice?
  • Instructor: Kenneth Sassaman, Anthropology
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How can Indigenous values about the relationship between nature and culture help us address the challenges of climate change, food insecurity, public health, and social justice?
  • Instructor: Alice Klima, Art & Art History
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Why is it important to safeguard humanity's tangible cultural heritage, and who are its rightful owners?
  • Instructor: Matthieu Felt and Stephan Kory; Languages, Literatures and Cultures
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What would identity look like if it was not premised on modern, Western, and classical liberal ideas? What alternatives exist, and have existed, for defining self and society that do not rely on notions of inherent rights, freedoms, and liberties, and what does that suggest about humanity, societal construction, and the natural order?
  • Instructor: Victoria Pagan, Classics
  • Format: 100 % Classroom
  • The Essential Question: To what extent do representations of gardens in literature and art increase our enjoyment of the gardens we visit in real life?
  • Instructor:  Xan Burley, Theater & Dance
  • Format: Hybrid
  • The Essential Question: When we see dance - from ballet to Beyoncé – how does it inform our ideas about race, ethnicity, and/or gender?
  • Instructor: Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Digital Worlds
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Artificial Intelligence: What is it? What is it used for? What is at stake? Each week we will explore AI core concepts from three perspectives: Art, Science, and Fiction. By the end of this course, you will be able to separate the facts from the hype and learn how to leverage fiction to prototype the future.
  • Instructor: Seojoo Han, Art & Art History
  • Format: Hybrid
  • The Essential Question: How does design work as a tool for shaping, understanding, and communicating identity—“the fact of being who or what a person is”—in everyday life?
  • Instructor: Marsha Bryant, English
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How would your life change if you lived during the American 1950s, and how would that shape your UF experience?
  • Instructor: Kaitlin Henderson, Theater & Dance
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How can we use performance to uncover and highlight hidden histories?
  • Instructor: Darby Walters, University Writing Program
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What is the connection between body, mind, and culture?
  • Instructor: Mariana Oliveira, Spanish and Portuguese Studies
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How might learning about Brazilian society help us improve our own?
  • Instructor:  Chrysostomos Kostopoulos, Classics
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do you identify yourself as an individual in a complex diversified environment?” How do you preserve your personal identity in the face of a national of transnational context?
  • Instructor: Katerie Gladdys, Art & Art History
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Thinking systemically and individually, how do phenomena like car culture, agriculture, and productivity impact your quest for a just and equitable society?
  • Instructor: Kole Odutola, Languages, Literatures and Cultures
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do learners conceptualize the various spaces they operate in?
  • Instructor: Jairo Baquero-Melo, Center of Latin American Studies
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do communities in the Global South innovate with limited resources? What role do local knowledge, culture, and collaboration play in addressing pressing social and economic challenges?
  • Instructor:  Dustin Hall, Women's Studies
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How does being born female dictate human experience?

     

  • Instructor: Pasha Agoes, Dial Center
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What is orientalism and colonialism, and how do these ideas promote further global and intercultural awareness and understanding?
  • Instructor Anthea Behm, Art & Art History
  • Format: Hybrid
  • The Essential Question: How do contemporary artists address issues of identity and what are the political implications of various modes of representation, the right to represent, the influence of artists' identities on interpretation, and the relationship between art and broader fields discussing identity?
  • Instructor: Rachel Gordan, Religion
  • Format: 100 % Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What does it mean to consider the legacy of the Holocaust? How do our contemporary understandings of post-traumatic stress influence our understanding of how Americans continued to respond to the Holocaust?
  • Instructor: Michael Gorham; Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do fairytales and folklore reflect and shape our view of the world, communities, and people around us?
  • Instructor: Paula Golombek, Linguistics 
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How does language inform and express our identities as individuals and members of distinct speech communities?
  • Instructor: Eric Kligerman, LLC
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How is political violence represented, conceptualized and memorialized across shifting literary and visual texts? What ethical questions arise in our engagement with representations of traumatic limit events and the experience of horror these events entail?
  • Instructor:  Roy Holler, Jewish Studies
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question:
  • Instructor: Danielle VanTuinen, Music
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How have women expressed their agency, authorship, worldview, and their power through their contribution to various movements in music and how have women transformed the production and consumption of music?
  • Instructor: Ben Sasse and Mark Power Smith, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What are the primary beliefs and ideas that shaped the United States at its birth, throughout its history, and into the twenty-first century? 
  • Instructor: Barnaby Crowcroft and Yujie Li, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How can we explain this transformation? What is the nature of the political world in which we now live? How is it different to those that have come before – and why? What does it mean for a political community to be independent? 
  • Instructor: Jill Ingram, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How is comedy an expression of citizenship: that is, how do we use comedy as responsible citizens in a democratic republic?
  • Instructor: Brandon Warmke, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What does it mean to be free and equal?
  • Instructor: Giulia Ricca, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do we develop the character to handle life’s conflicts and tragic events?
  • Instructor: Alex Green, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What is the relationship between religious belief and human reason? How much of life do we attribute to divine providence, and to what extent do we rely on human initiative, effort and creativity? Are the positions of faith and reason reconcilable, or are they in perennial conflict?
  • Instructor: David Dusenbury, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What is the place of feeling in modern life? What is the value of desiring things we can never have, or mourning things we have already lost? Can even positive experiences of love, longing, and awe create a “storm”? And can negative emotions like fear, dread, and confusion have a positive meaning?
  • Instructor: Thomas Vozar, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Are we better than the Ancient Greeks and Romans? What do we owe them, and how have we surpassed their achievements? What does it mean to define ourselves as “modern” in contrast to classical antiquity?
  • Instructor: Robert Stone, Hamilton Center
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do leaders use rhetoric to persuade others? What role does the art of rhetoric have in the making of politics, art, and community?
  • Instructor: Max Skjönsberg, Hamilton School 
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What constitutional arrangements secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
  • Instructor: Carlos Casanova, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What is the common good and how is it harmonized with individual rights?
  • Instructor: Mattias Gassman, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What is immortality? Can we live forever? What would it mean to live forever, and should we want to? What part of us would live on -- and who, after all, are we?
  • Instructor: David McPherson, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What does it mean to live in a secular age? How does living in a secular age offer new opportunities and challenges for the perennial human quest for meaning? 
  • Instructor: Adela Halo, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What exactly is liberalism, and what is the source of its “crisis”? Is liberalism responsible for its own failures? Does it encourage too much individualism? Does it lead to the dissolution of community, family, and religion? Does it promote exclusion and inequality? Has liberalism led us inevitably toward an illiberal future? What, if anything, can be done to preserve the liberal values of freedom and equality?
  • Instructor: Christian Ruth, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Does the capitalist system erode community or enhance it?
  • Instructor: Yujie Li, Hamilton Center 
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What would the ideal society look like? Should we try to imagine a perfect world?
  • Instructor: Belinda Nettles, Landscape Architecture
  • Format: 100% Classroom 
  • The Essential Question: What is nature? How can we incorporate nature into urbanized areas to provide societal benefits and allow people to connect with nature and place in everyday urban life? How can we use this knowledge across multiple professions to improve quality of life and affect positive change in our urban communities?
  • Instructor: Nicholas Serrano, Landscape Architecture
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do landscapes mediate culture, frame everyday life, and shape identities in the American South?
  • Instructor: Carmen Martinez Novo, Latin American Studies
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What are the rights that all humans are expected to share? When, where and how did the idea of human rights start and how did it evolve? How is the concept of human rights applied or neglected in Latin America? What challenges have Latin Americans faced in claiming and implementing human rights?
  • Instructor: Colleen Beucher, Music
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What power does music have over us and how does it shape our world?
  • Instructor: Tiffany Lu, Music
  • Format: 100% Online
  • Gen Ed: Humanities
  • The Essential Question: How does music crystallize moments in our history, memory, and collective experience as humans?
  • Instructor: Jose Ruiz-Resto, Music
  • Format: 100% Online
  • The Essential Question: What role do music entrepreneurs play in empowering various sectors of society, encompassing philanthropy, digital commerce, and for-profit industries, through the convergence of music, technology, missions, and entrepreneurship?
  • Instructor: Imani Mosley, English
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Who makes tomorrow's music? Who controls tomorrow's music? Who owns tomorrow's music?
  • Instructor: Charles Pickeral, School of Music
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How does music move us spiritually? Or, to put it another way: Why do organized sounds have the power to catalyze spiritual experiences? How does music shape our spiritual experience and how do our spiritual beliefs and practices shape our musical taste and aesthetic experiences?
  • Instructor: Nathan Rothschild, Philosophy
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What makes life worth living?
  • Instructor: David Grant, Philosophy
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How AI is changing society, and how should we, as citizens, respond? Is AI generated art truly "art"? Is there a difference between AI-generated text and ideas generated by human thought? In a world of extraordinarily competent AI, is there anything uniquely valuable about our humanity?
  • Instructor: Quinn Hansen, Spanish and Portuguese Studies
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How does soccer exemplify the dynamics of justice and power both on and off the field of play? 
  • Instructor: Terje Ostebo, Religion
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What is Extremism – and what is religious about Extremism?
  • Instructor: Manuel Simons, Theater and Dance
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Description: The course explores the ways in which modern and contemporary American artists and writers have utilized self-examination as the basis for artistic creation.  Often merging the factual with the theatrical or dramatic, autobiographical performance and literature personalizes the values, incidents and relationships that shape human experience and give life meaning.
  • Instructor: Laura Dedenbach, Urban and Regional Planning
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How does our connection to place, as expressed through placed-based narratives, shape and strengthen our individual and community identities?
  • Instructor: Matthew Strickland, History
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Were pirates pariahs, or were they vigilantes seeking justice against tyrant monarchs, and what does this tell us about the motivations of people for engaging in piracy?

HONORS

  • Instructor: Matthieu Felt and Stephan Kory; Languages, Literatures and Culture
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question:
  • Instructor: Patrick Scanlon, University Writing Program
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What effect does the magical have on our thinking and research pursuits?
  • Instructor: Jill Ingram, Hamilton School
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What does it mean to be wise and what does it mean to live heroically?

UF ONLINE

  • Instructor:  Xan Burley, Theater & Dance
  • Format: 100% Online, Asynchronous 
  • The Essential Question: When we see dance - from ballet to Beyoncé - how does it inform our ideas about race, ethnicity, and/or gender?
  • Instructor: Jose Ruiz-Resto, Music
  • Format: 100% Online, Asynchronous
  • The Essential Question: What role do music entrepreneurs play in empowering various sectors of society, encompassing philanthropy, digital commerce, and for-profit industries, through the convergence of music, technology, missions, and entrepreneurship.
  • Instructor: Tiffany Lu, Music
  • Format: 100% Online
  • The Essential Question: How does music crystallize moments in our history, memory, and collective experience as humans?