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University of Florida

Spring 2027 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/or 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.

CAMPUS HONORS UF ONLINE

CAMPUS

  • 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: Sarah Gamble, Architecture
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Essential Question: What are the origins of cities, how are they designed and lived in today, and what is our vision for the future?
  • 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: 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: Tim Difato, Digital Worlds Institute
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Artificial Intelligence: What is it? What is it used for? What is at stake?
  • 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: Jarred Elrod, 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: Alison Reynolds, University Writing Program
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How is our understanding of the human condition constructed through and by the stories that we hear and tell, and how can these stories help us understand health, suffering, illness, disability, or disease?
  • Instructor: James Essegbey, Language, Literatures, and Cultures
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How are Creole identities shaped by the confluence of diverse languages and cultures?
  • Instructor: Alan Wiig, Geography
  • Format: 100% Classroom 
  • The Essential Question: How is artificial intelligence changing the ways we live in, work in, and move about cities?
  • Instructor: Hiromi Kaneda, Language, Literatures, and Culture
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do stories shape identity across cultures and generations?
  • Instructor: Eric Kligerman, Language, Literatures, and Cultures
  • 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: How can a nation born as a refuge for the persecuted uphold its moral ideals while confronting the reality of producing refugees of its own, and what does Israel’s story reveal about the ethics of survival and sovereignty in our time?
  • Instructor: Andréa Caloiaro, University Writing Program
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How are writing words and writing music interconnected as a cognitive enterprise and as a cultural practice? Do we ascribe humanistic value to writing words and music, and if so, are the contemporary pushes toward monetization, AI, and automation challenging writing and music as purely humanistic enterprises?
       
  • 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: Tiffany Lu, Music
  • Format: 100% Online
  • The Essential Question: How does music crystallize moments in our history, memory, and collective experience as humans?
  • Instructor: John Palmer, 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: Kaitlin Henderson, Theater & Dance
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How can we use performance to uncover and highlight hidden histories?
  • Instructor: Anton Matytsin, 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

UF ONLINE