Each year, the Honors Journal combines undergraduate work from all academic fields including art, architecture, creative nonfiction, fiction, engineering, humanities, multimedia, the natural sciences, poetry, the social sciences and more. The Honors Journal is distributed and available to all students and departments at the University of Colorado, as well as other honors departments at other universities across the country. In order to reach a broader audience, the Journal has recently expanded to an online version (see Archives).
The Honors Journal was established and first published in 1992 under the supervision of faculty mentor, Professor E. Christian Kopff and with the support of Honors Program Director, Jack Kelso. The first volumes were devoted to undergraduate research, highlighting an article by an outstanding Honors Professor and abstracts from all summa cum laude theses.
From 1995 to 1998, the Journal went on hiatus. In 1998, Honors Program Director Dennis Van Gerven reinstated the Journal under the supervision of faculty mentor Dr. Claudia Van Gerven. In 1998, the Journal expanded by adding poetry, fiction, and black-and-white artwork.
In 2002, the University of Colorado's Department of Publications entered the Honors Journal into the Council for Advancement and Support of Education District VI Competition. The cover from this edition of the Honors Journal won the "Case District VI, Silver Award of Excellence in Graphic Design."
In 2010, the Journal's editorial board elected to expand the Journal from its traditional 6" x 9" format to an 8.5" x 11" format to allow for greater diversity of printable subject matter. This was the first year that architecture and engineering were included in the print edition.
In 2012, the faculty advisor role was appointed to Dr. Abby Hickcox, the Associate Director of the Honors Program. Under Dr. Hickcox’s leadership, the Journal continued to expand and so did its editorial board. The editorial board was reformatted in 2024 from a student club into a novel course program offered to honors students across the College of Arts & Sciences.
