UF Quest

Fall 2025 UF 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
Course Themes Culture Built Environment Literature Music Society Art Theater Dance
General Education Requirements Diversity International 2000 words 4000 words

Campus

ARC 1101: Places and Spaces
  • Instructor: John Maze, Architecture
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What does it mean to dwell between the heavens and Earth?
CLA 1821: Medicine, Science and the Dawn of Reason
  • Instructor: Konstantinos Kapparis, Classics
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: 
    How did humans use the resources of nature and their intellect to find cures for diseases and alleviate pain and suffering?
DAN 1391: Dance, Race, Gender
  • Instructor:  Rachel Carrico, Theater & Dance
  • Format: Hybrid
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: When we see dance - from ballet to Beyoncé – how does it inform our ideas about race, ethnicity, and/or gender?
DAN 1401C: Body, Self, World: Movement through Lived Experience
  • Instructor: Meredith Farnum, Theatre and Dance
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: When practicing conscious awareness of mind/body connections, what revelations can be made through an introspective study of how we see the world through our lived experiences?
IDS 1114: Ethics and the Public Sphere
  • Instructor: Anna Peterson, Religion
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How can we engage ethical issues in public life?
IDS 1307: Writing Life: Art, Drama, Film, Literature, Poetry, and You
  • Instructor: Carolyn Kelley, University Writing Program
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: How do humanities-based texts touch and shape our lives by teaching us about our sense of self and our relationships with other people whose intersectionalities of identity differ from our own? 
IDS 1469: The Posthuman Condition
  • Instructor: Anthony Manganaro, University Writing Program
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Questions: What are the possibilities and perils of a posthuman future, and how should we prepare for it?
IDS 2935: Artistic Revelation
  • Instructor: Colleen Beucher, Music
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What power does music have over us and how does it shape our world?
IDS 2935: Becoming Black
  • Instructor: Abdoulaye Kane, Anthropology
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How is blackness constructed differently across time and space?
IDS 2935: Design for Humanity: Intention, Consquence and Change
  • Instructor: Jason Meneely, Interior Design
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do humans instill values and construct meaning through the design of everyday things? How can the design process become a tool for transformational leadership and social change? What lessons can we learn from the past as we design for humanity's future?
IDS 2935: For the Culture
  • Instructor: Drew Brown, AAS
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: What is Black Popular Culture and how has it changed the world?
IDS 2935: Globalization Cities in Film
  • Instructor: Vandana Baweja, Architecture
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: How is the transformation of architecture and urbanism by globalization processes such as - movement of capital, goods, knowledge, urban paradigms, and people - represented in popular films?
IDS 2935: Human Shelter Development
  • Instructor:  Jason von Meding, Construction Management
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Do all humans have the right to safe and healthy shelter?
IDS 2935: Is there Culture in Architecture?
  • Instructor: Kole Odutola, Languages, Literatures and Cultures
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do learners conceptualize the various spaces they operate in?
IDS 2935: Is There Culture in Dance and Music?
  • Instructor: Augusto Soledade and Kole Odutola, Theatre & Literatures, Languages and Culture
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What does the culture in music and dance tell us about ourselves?
IDS 2935: Life Well Played: Digital Games and Arts
  • Instructor: Eamon O'Connor, Digital Worlds
  • Format: 100% Online
  • The Essential Question: What does the study of play and games have to teach us about living well?
IDS 2935: Mathematics and the Humanities
  • Instructor: Konstantina Christodoulopoulou, Mathematics and Chrysostomos Kostopoulos, Classics
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How have various mathematical ideas shaped our views about reality, our existence, and knowledge, and how has mathematics fostered human flourishing by encouraging us to find truth, beauty, creativity, and imagination in a variety of human endeavors?
IDS 2935: Messages, Media, Social Self
  • Instructor: Todd Best, Religion
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Considering the vast amounts of messaging and information delivered through all forms of media, how might we collectively understand and discuss perceived reality and its imprint on our humanity? 
IDS 2935: Rhetoric of AI
  • Instructor: Zea Miller, University Writing Program 
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question:

    By relying on multidisciplinary knowledge, how will our work on AI bridge the humanities with the technical?

     
IDS 2935: The Nature, Matter, and Agency of Magic
  • Instructor: Ashley Jones, Art & Art History
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: How have people in different societies used the supernatural to try and understand and affect the natural world? What objects, words, rituals, and images have they employed to explain and harness the supernatural?
IDS 2935: What is a Man?
  • Instructor: Trysh Travis, History
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: As the American economy changed after the 1970s, how did men find meaning in their lives?
IDS 2935: Why is there Evil in the World?
  • Instructor: Yaniv Feller, Religion
  • Format: 100% Online
  • The Essential Question: What is evil and how have different traditions confronted it in ways that are meaningful for our lives today? 
IDS 2935: Women Changing Society
  • 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?
IDS 2935: Music and Social Engagement with the Environment
  • Instructor: Laura Dallman, Music
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Who are we in relation to the natural world?
LIN 1140: Language and Emotion
  • Instructor: Eleonora Rossi, Linguistics
  • Format: 100% Online
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: How do we express emotions through language? Starting from studying how we express emotions by means of our language(s), we will understand the processes that are the basis of communication and emotion, from neural processes to facial expressions, bodily expressions, and the human voice. 
MUS 1610: An Echo of the Invisible World: Exploring the Relationship between Music & Spirituality
  • Instructor: Charles Pickeral, Music
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • 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?
PHI 1322: Idea of Happiness
PRT 1515: Soccer Explains the World
  • Instructor: Quinn Hansen, Spanish and Portuguese Studies
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Period 
  • The Essential Question: How does soccer exemplify the dynamics of justice and power both on and off the field of play? 
REL 1107: Nature, Spirituality, and Popular Culture
  • Instructor: Bron Taylor, Religion 
  • Format: 100% Online, Asynchronous
  • The Essential Question: How are cultural creatives involved in popular culture (film, music, novels, museums, etc.) fusing science and spirituality to promote human-nature connections and environmentally sustainable societies - and what do these efforts portend about the planetary future?
SPN 1320: Las Américas: Comida y Conflicto
  • Instructor: Spanish and Portuguese Studies
  • Format: Hybrid
  • The Essential Question: Who has a voice and who does not in deciding how natural resources are to be used? What is the process by which decisions are made about how to use natural resources? What are the criteria for deciding how to use natural resources?
THE 1431: Autobiography in Literature & Performance
  • Instructor: Manuel Simons, Theater and Dance
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • 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.

Honors

IDS 1623: The Anatomy of a Story
  • 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?
IDS 2935: Mathematics in the Arts and Architecture of Renaissance Italy
  • Instructor: Carol Demas, Math
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What makes life worth living? How do we or should we examine a life? What is valuable in life? How is mathematics used in the arts to improve our lives?
ISC 1010C: Secrets of Alchemy
  • Instructor: Alexander Angerhofer, Chemistry
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: Who are we in relation to the natural world? How have humans understood their role in their natural world and their responsibility to it? How do portrayals of nature reflect our values or self-understanding? How have we as humans dominated nature and considered ourselves to be part of nature?

UF Online

DAN 1391: Dance, Race, Gender
  • Instructor:  Rachel Carrico, 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?
LIN 1140: Language and Emotion
  • Instructor: Eleonora Rossi, Linguistics
  • Format: 100% Online
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: How do we express emotions through language? Starting from studying how we express emotions by means of our language(s) we will understand the processes that are the basis of communication and emotion, from neural processes to facial expressions, bodily expressions, and the human voice.
REL 1107: Nature, Spirituality, and Popular Culture
  • Instructor: Bron Taylor, Religion 
  • Format: 100% Online, Asynchronous
  • The Essential Question: How are cultural creatives involved in popular culture (film, music, novels, museums, etc.) fusing science and spirituality to promote human-nature connections and environmentally sustainable societies - and what do these efforts portend about the planetary future?
ARC 1101: Places and Spaces
  • Instructor: John Maze, Architecture
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What does it mean to dwell between the heavens and Earth?
CLA 1821: Medicine, Science and the Dawn of Reason
  • Instructor: Konstantinos Kapparis, Classics
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: 
    How did humans use the resources of nature and their intellect to find cures for diseases and alleviate pain and suffering?
DAN 1391: Dance, Race, Gender
  • Instructor:  Rachel Carrico, 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?
DAN 1401C: Body, Self, World: Movement through Lived Experience
  • Instructor: Meredith Farnum, Theatre and Dance
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: When practicing conscious awareness of mind/body connections, what revelations can be made through an introspective study of how we see the world through our lived experiences?
IDS 1114: Ethics and the Public Sphere
  • Instructor: Anna Peterson, Religion
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How can we engage ethical issues in public life?
IDS 2935: Artistic Revelation
  • Instructor: Colleen Beucher, Music
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What power does music have over us and how does it shape our world?
IDS 2935: Mathematics and the Humanities
  • Instructor: Konstantina Christodoulopoulou, Mathematics and Chrysostomos Kostopoulos, Classics
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How have various mathematical ideas shaped our views about reality, our existence, and knowledge, and how has mathematics fostered human flourishing by encouraging us to find truth, beauty, creativity, and imagination in a variety of human endeavors?
IDS 2935: Mathematics in the Arts and Architecture of Renaissance Italy
  • Instructor: Carol Demas, Math
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What makes life worth living? How do we or should we examine a life? What is valuable in life? How is mathematics used in the arts to improve our lives?
IDS 2935: Design for Humanity: Intention, Consquence and Change
  • Instructor: Jason Meneely, Interior Design
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do humans instill values and construct meaning through the design of everyday things? How can the design process become a tool for transformational leadership and social change? What lessons can we learn from the past as we design for humanity's future?
IDS 2935: Life Well Played: Digital Games and Arts
  • Instructor: Eamon O'Connor, Digital Worlds
  • Format: 100% Online
  • The Essential Question: What does the study of play and games have to teach us about living well?
IDS 1469: The Posthuman Condition
  • Instructor: Anthony Manganaro, University Writing Program
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Questions: What are the possibilities and perils of a posthuman future, and how should we prepare for it?
IDS 1623: The Anatomy of a Story
  • 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?
IDS 2935: Becoming Black
  • Instructor: Abdoulaye Kane, Anthropology
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How is blackness constructed differently across time and space?
IDS 2935: Is there Culture in Architecture?
  • Instructor: Kole Odutola, Languages, Literatures and Cultures
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: How do learners conceptualize the various spaces they operate in?
IDS 2935: Is There Culture in Dance and Music?
  • Instructor: Augusto Soledade and Kole Odutola, Theatre & Literatures, Languages and Culture
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: What does the culture in music and dance tell us about ourselves?
IDS 2935: Women Changing Society
  • 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?
IDS 2935: Rhetoric of AI
  • Instructor: Zea Miller, University Writing Program 
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question:

    By relying on multidisciplinary knowledge, how will our work on AI bridge the humanities with the technical?

     
IDS 2935: Human Shelter Development
  • Instructor:  Jason von Meding, Construction Management
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Do all humans have the right to safe and healthy shelter?
IDS 2935: Music and Social Engagement with the Environment
  • Instructor: Laura Dallman, Music
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Who are we in relation to the natural world?
IDS 2935: Why is there Evil in the World?
  • Instructor: Yaniv Feller, Religion
  • Format: 100% Online
  • The Essential Question: What is evil and how have different traditions confronted it in ways that are meaningful for our lives today? 
IDS 2935: Messages, Media, Social Self
  • Instructor: Todd Best, Religion
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: Considering the vast amounts of messaging and information delivered through all forms of media, how might we collectively understand and discuss perceived reality and its imprint on our humanity? 
IDS 2935: The Nature, Matter, and Agency of Magic
  • Instructor: Ashley Jones, Art & Art History
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: How have people in different societies used the supernatural to try and understand and affect the natural world? What objects, words, rituals, and images have they employed to explain and harness the supernatural?
ISC 1010C: Secrets of Alchemy
  • Instructor: Alexander Angerhofer, Chemistry
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: Who are we in relation to the natural world? How have humans understood their role in their natural world and their responsibility to it? How do portrayals of nature reflect our values or self-understanding? How have we as humans dominated nature and considered ourselves to be part of nature?
LIN 1140: Language and Emotion
  • Instructor: Eleonora Rossi, Linguistics
  • Format: 100% Online
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: How do we express emotions through language? Starting from studying how we express emotions by means of our language(s), we will understand the processes that are the basis of communication and emotion, from neural processes to facial expressions, bodily expressions, and the human voice. 
MUS 1610: An Echo of the Invisible World: Exploring the Relationship between Music & Spirituality
  • Instructor: Charles Pickeral, Music
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • 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?
PHI 1322: Idea of Happiness
PRT 1515: Soccer Explains the World
  • Instructor: Quinn Hansen, Spanish and Portuguese Studies
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Period 
  • The Essential Question: How does soccer exemplify the dynamics of justice and power both on and off the field of play? 
REL 1107: Nature, Spirituality, and Popular Culture
  • Instructor: Bron Taylor, Religion 
  • Format: 100% Online, Asynchronous
  • The Essential Question: How are cultural creatives involved in popular culture (film, music, novels, museums, etc.) fusing science and spirituality to promote human-nature connections and environmentally sustainable societies - and what do these efforts portend about the planetary future?
SPN 1320: Las Américas: Comida y Conflicto
  • Instructor: Spanish and Portuguese Studies
  • Format: Hybrid
  • The Essential Question: Who has a voice and who does not in deciding how natural resources are to be used? What is the process by which decisions are made about how to use natural resources? What are the criteria for deciding how to use natural resources?
THE 1431: Autobiography in Literature & Performance
  • Instructor: Manuel Simons, Theater and Dance
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • 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.
LIN 1140: Language and Emotion
  • Instructor: Eleonora Rossi, Linguistics
  • Format: 100% Online
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: How do we express emotions through language? Starting from studying how we express emotions by means of our language(s) we will understand the processes that are the basis of communication and emotion, from neural processes to facial expressions, bodily expressions, and the human voice.
REL 1107: Nature, Spirituality, and Popular Culture
  • Instructor: Bron Taylor, Religion 
  • Format: 100% Online, Asynchronous
  • The Essential Question: How are cultural creatives involved in popular culture (film, music, novels, museums, etc.) fusing science and spirituality to promote human-nature connections and environmentally sustainable societies - and what do these efforts portend about the planetary future?
IDS 1307: Writing Life: Art, Drama, Film, Literature, Poetry, and You
  • Instructor: Carolyn Kelley, University Writing Program
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: How do humanities-based texts touch and shape our lives by teaching us about our sense of self and our relationships with other people whose intersectionalities of identity differ from our own? 
IDS 2935: For the Culture
  • Instructor: Drew Brown, AAS
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: What is Black Popular Culture and how has it changed the world?
IDS 2935: What is a Man?
  • Instructor: Trysh Travis, History
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • The Essential Question: As the American economy changed after the 1970s, how did men find meaning in their lives?
DAN 1391: Dance, Race, Gender
  • Instructor:  Rachel Carrico, Theater & Dance
  • Format: Hybrid
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: When we see dance - from ballet to Beyoncé – how does it inform our ideas about race, ethnicity, and/or gender?
IDS 2935: Globalization Cities in Film
  • Instructor: Vandana Baweja, Architecture
  • Format: 100% Classroom
  • Class Periods
  • The Essential Question: How is the transformation of architecture and urbanism by globalization processes such as - movement of capital, goods, knowledge, urban paradigms, and people - represented in popular films?

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