Departmental Honors

Academic departments across UT’s nine undergraduate colleges sponsor most of UT’s honors coursework, and many departments offer their own departmental honors program.  While any student may usually enroll in any honors course, admission to departmental honors programs is highly selective and occurs at the time students declare a major in the department.  Departmental honors program provide an intimate setting for close faculty/student interaction in disciplinary research and discipline-specific intercultural & international learning. Coordination for UT’s many and diverse honors programs is facilitated by the Honors Steering Committee.

For example, the Department of Mathematics’ Math Honors Program is supported by a $1 million National Science Foundation Grant, which allows the Math Honors Program to provide generous scholarships to students who intend to pursue advanced education in mathematics. 

The Department of History Honors Program provides an extensive honors curriculum in support of the study of the methods of historical research and historiography, while the Department of Classics offers honors concentrations in both Latin and Greek.. 

The Department of English Honors Program offers numerous upper-level honors courses and seminars as well as Honors English Composition (ENG 118), a staple of the university’s honors curriculum for first-year students. 

The range of department honors programs and course offerings is considerable.  Even departments that do not offer formal honors programs typically provide limited-enrollment honors sections of introductory courses, which greatly enhance and enrich the university’s general education curriculum.

Additionally, many departments offer honors courses and honors concentrations within the major.

• » Lower Level Departmental Honors Courses
• » Upper-Level Departmental Honors Courses

A list of Specialized Honors Programs—at both the College and Departmental levels—reveals several more paths to an honors experience at The University of Tennessee.

Departmental Honors Programs

• Arts and Sciences

  • Anthropology
  • Biology
    • Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology
    • Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
    • Microbiology
    • Plant Biology
  • Chemistry
  • Classics
    • Classical Civilization
    • Greek
    • Latin
  • Geology
  • Economics
  • English
    • Creative Writing
    • Individualized Program, English
    • Literature
    • Rhetoric and Writing
    • Technical Communication
  • Geography
  • History
  • Mathematics
  • Modern Foreign Languages
    • French
    • German
  • Physics
    • Academic Physics
    • Applied Physics
  • Political Science
  • Psychology

• Communication and Information

  • Communication Studies

• Engineering

  • Chemical Engineering
  • Civil Engineering
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering
    • Computer Engineering
    • Electrical Engineering
  • Engineering Physics
  • Industrial Engineering
  • Materials Science and Engineering
  • Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering
    • Aerospace Engineering
    • Biomedical Engineering
    • Mechanical Engineering
  • Nuclear Engineering
    • Nuclear Engineering
    • Radiological Engineering