Courses

The goal of this class is to address the question “could a machine ever be a person, and what would the consequences be if the answer is yes?”. We will begin by examining competing accounts of personhood and how they have evolved with emerging technologies. We will then explore the rapidly advancing world of artificial intelligence, and try to determine if an artificial person is possible or likely, and whether we could know when a machine… Continue Reading – The Ghost in the Machine: AI, Ethics, and Personhood

This course will explore, describe, and attempt to define religion in American urban space during the twentieth century. By focusing on urbanization, diversity, and the cityscape, we will look at the ways that various groups worship, engage ritual, and organize in a religiously pluralistic environment. Both in class and through visits to different religious spaces, we will see how the city, the social concerns of urban environments,… Continue Reading – When God Came to the City: Urban Life and the Transformation of Religion

The seminar addresses the representation of walking in Western culture. Rooted in the everyday, in ordinary gestures, the experience of walking is pivotal to the shaping of our experience of place. Strolling relates to our most immediate way of staying in the world, examining and describing it. In the wake of modernity, the new urban subjects have fashioned walking as a style of apprehension and appropriation of their surroundings. Through… Continue Reading – Walking in the Metropolis

Our views of the universe have evolved in recent years by astronomical observations and experimental measurements performed in laboratories. We now have a better understanding of its initial conditions. In this course, we will be discussing what the universe is made of and what holds it together. Knowledge from various subfields of physics including nuclear, particle, quantum and astrophysics is required to describe the universe, especially… Continue Reading – Three Minutes after the Big Bang

What is the actual effect of “Freudianism” on life in this century?  How are Freud’s ideas widely misunderstood and misappropriated, and which ideas have been correctly assimilated in our culture?  Is Freud really anti-woman, anti-homosexuality, and obsessed with sex to the exclusion of all other cultural experience, as is often charged?  In this course, we will read some of the most fascinating of Freud’s essays on culture and… Continue Reading – Third Millennium Freud: Cutting Edge or Chopping Block?

The “problem of evil,” commonly phrased as the question, “why do bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad?,” began its life as a theological problem, as far back as the Old Testament’s Book of Job, but it’s also a modern secular problem, which began its life at least since Rousseau’s public dispute with Voltaire midway through the eighteenth century, as Susan Neiman has convincingly argued in her 2002 Evil in Modern Thought (… Continue Reading – The Problem of Evil in Philosophy and Popular Culture

“Call me Ishmael.”  Moby-Dick’s opening line is one of the most famous in all of world literature.  2019 will mark the 200th anniversary of Herman Melville’s birth and provides an apt time to explore the continued resonance of his best-known work.  A critical and popular failure when it was first published in 1851, Moby-Dick, as the novel’s narrator says of the eponymous whale, has become “not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for… Continue Reading – The Many Lives of Moby-Dick: "Not only ubiquitous, but immortal"

We live in the Anthropocene, an epoch whose predominant narrative is one of decline and fall—of transformation, deterioration, and loss. Transformative changes in production of secure and sustainable food, energy, and water (FEW) sources are among the most significant challenges of the Anthropocene. This course invites student to identify the most promising opportunities to increase sustainability at the FEW nexus, and to identify the most… Continue Reading – The Food-Energy-Water Nexus in the Anthropocene

The class will focus on the following problem. How can we explain the temporal asymmetries we experience in everyday life—that coffee cools and ice melts, not the reverse; that light appears in a room after we flip the switch, not before; that we have memories of the past and not the future; that we can causally affect the future but not the past—when the underlying laws of physics are symmetric in time, allowing for the time-reversed… Continue Reading – The Direction of Time

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has been held up as a blank slate for the dreams of reformers and entrepreneurs of all stripes to reinvent schooling, housing, and cultural production, amongst other realms. The previous mayor, Mitch Landrieu, has stated that “New Orleans is the nation’s most immediate lab for innovation and change.” Others, like Naomi Klein, have cast the Post-Katrina transformation of the city in a more critical light,… Continue Reading – The American City as Racial Laboratory: Experiments from New Orleans to San Francisco

Science communication is an integral part of scientists’ everyday lives.  From writing papers and proposals, to giving talks, creating lectures, or composing tweets, it is imperative for scientists to learn how to effectively communicate to a wide range of audiences in order to be successful.  Science communication has become a field within the scientific community in recent years and it generally refers to the public presentation… Continue Reading – Talk Science to Me

The spectacles of violence against people of color, acts of xenophobia, and patterns of persistent racial inequalities (of housing, health care, and education) across the United States remind us that earlier celebrations of an American “post-racial” society were strikingly premature.  Political rhetoric and policies of the last few years, in fact, point to a rapid return to racial incivility.  But what does a “post-racial” or “… Continue Reading – Race, Culture, and Colorblindness

Quantitative research uses measurable data to formulate facts and uncover patterns in research, and is the standard in most scientific disciplines. Content courses help students generate research ideas, but do not teach them how to convert ideas into actual experiments. This course offers students the unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience on how to design, conduct, and analyze quantitative experiments. Beyond quantitative data… Continue Reading – Quantitative Research: A Hands-On Preparation

Application required

In the Fall of 2017, a wide range of SAS students worked in tandem with design students at Mason Gross to create a multilingual political poetry exhibition for the new Rutgers Academic Building, to frame and accompany an international, interdisciplinary colloquium on the theme of poetry's relations to politics. The purpose of this exhibition was to gather and celebrate powerful political poems from all over the… Continue Reading – Poetries - Politics II: A Multilingual Political Poetry Collection

Several major theories of addiction revolve around the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine (DA). Three distinct theories will be chosen, and the class will continually evaluate them throughout the course, in light of whether they are supported by original research papers. Each theory will “belong” to a group of five or six students, and within each group, each student will be responsible for knowing the details of that particular theory.… Continue Reading – Neurobiology of Addiction

What do proteins, DNA, and RNA look like? Where do these molecules fit in your body and how do they work? This seminar will introduce you to the basics of structural biology using human anatomy, physiology, and disease as themes.

The focus of the 2019 Molecular View of Human Anatomy course will be to understand the structures and functions of proteins involved in Antimicrobial action and resistance. Student learning and discussion… Continue Reading – Molecular View of Human Anatomy: Molecular Mechanisms of Antibiotic Action and Resistance

*Study Abroad embedded trip May 20-June 1

Why spend a semester exploring the rise and fall, religious and social achievements, artistic and architectural legacies, and contemporary mystique of the Monastery of Cluny, located in Burgundy, in the heart of France? For those impressed by massive buildings, Cluny is fascinating first and foremost for its magnificent abbey church, which in its time was the largest Romanesque… Continue Reading – Medieval Cluny, Christendom & Islam

This seminar will introduce students to a system of psychology that, after having been overshadowed by Freudian psychology in the 20th century, is finally coming into its own in the 21st. It will present basic principles and paradigms, and will engage students in a number of practical applications in the areas of the psychology of everyday life, the role of mythology in dreams and social life, religion, the analysis of films and literary… Continue Reading – Jung for the 21st Century

In 1991, while doing preliminary excavations for the construction of a federal office building in New York City, traces of human remains were found.  Archaeologists concluded that these remains were those of free and enslaved African Americans who lived and died in colonial and antebellum New York.  The burial ground, long forgotten and covered with layers of city construction, forced New Yorkers to come to terms with something that… Continue Reading – Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Marriage is the union of two consenting adults in love. Right? Many would argue “yes” and view arranged marriage and polygamy as backward. Yet, the idea of marrying for love is a relatively recent one and the conjugal couple is not so traditional at all. So when did love conquer marriage, and why? Are romantic love and freedom to marry viewed everywhere as normal ways to organize intimate lives and relations? Why are some forms of intimacy… Continue Reading – Intimate Matters: Sex & Marriage in Global Perspective

This class will address the non-human other in global colonization of the Middle East. Does globalization and its justification of subjection disrupt the notion of the human and mark the other as animal to the extent that the notion of  “identity was disengaged in terms of who was and who was not human,” according to Spivak’s speculation? What are the effects of wars in the Middle East on refashioning the “human” category?

Some… Continue Reading – HumAnimals in Middle Eastern and North African Literature

The practice of slavery has risen and faded a number of times, and even exists in some regions today. Its most extensive practise took place during the colonial era, in the Age of Mercantile Capitalism in  the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, between 1450 and 1860,  but its legacy is continues down to the present day.  Colonial era slavery involved the translocation and control of millions of people and its enormity is… Continue Reading – Historical Archaeology of Slavery

In several recent graphic memoirs, the memoirist includes episodes of going to see a psychoanalyst—e.g., David Small’s Stitches, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother. In all cases, the interactions are positive, and enable the memoirist to gain insight and motivation. Bechdel’s becomes intensely connected to the work of D. W. Winnicott, who is not her therapist but an influential English psychoanalyst who specialized… Continue Reading – Graphic Novels & Psychoanalysis: Alison Bechdel & D. W. Winnicott

Life appears to have originated on Earth nearly 4.5 billion years ago when the oceans boiled and the atmosphere had no oxygen.  The changing conditions on our planet have defined the parameters within which life has existed.  An increase in the amount of oxygen in the air from 2.5 billion to 500 million years ago eventually permitted “modern” animals to exist.  Massive extinctions (especially at the end of the Permian Period)… Continue Reading – Genes and Evolution

This course explores whether and how emerging digital technologies (social/mobile/wearable media, virtual worlds and games, sensor-laden devices and environments, robotics, drones, implantable chips, artificial intelligence, etc.) contribute to disruptive changes in relationships, organizations, societies and selves. Multiple perspectives on communication, information, and media will be applied in analyzing the extent to which the structure,… Continue Reading – Digital Technology and Disruptive Change

Recent developments in molecular and cell biology indicate that Bohr’s principle of complementarity originally derived from quantum physics may apply to living processes in the form of information-energy complementarity.  Complementarity-like concepts also occur in many other fields, including psychology, computer science, philosophy, semiotics (the study of signs), and world religions.  The universality of Bohr’s complementarity… Continue Reading – Complementarism

For the last century most economic systems around the world have called themselves capitalist or socialist, while most political systems have called themselves democratic.  This course explores the philosophical and historical relationship between these systems.  In the first half of the course, we will see how and why capitalism and socialism emerged in the nineteenth century and spread around the world in the twentieth.  In… Continue Reading – Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

*Study Abroad embedded trip May 20-29

This course will examine the experience of Poles, both Christian and Jewish, and Ukrainians, both Christian and Jewish, under Nazi and Communist rule in the 20th century through primary historical documents, memoir literature, poetry, and film.

In order to understand the experiences of belonging, dislocations, extermination—and their memory—this course will introduce students to the… Continue Reading – Between Nazism and Communism

This course investigates the depiction of animals in relation to the human – by introducing pertinent works in particular of the German literary and visual tradition: What defines an animal? Can the animal speak, can it suffer, can it be understood? What does it mean to be looked at by an animal? What happens when we love a pet? In what way does the animal challenge our thinking of ethics, gender, and identity? How do writers and artists… Continue Reading – Animal Spirits

This seminar will examine social science approaches to addiction. We begin by examining the current opioid addiction in historical context. We will also explore how different social science approaches can be useful in understanding both why the current epidemic developed, how it did, and its consequences for those with addictions and their families. Among the approaches we will examine include theories of stigma, suicide, stress, resilience,… Continue Reading – Addiction: Epidemic, Devastation, Loss

This seminar will consider the importance of connecting oneself to a specific place as well as to the natural world as a whole. Do we really need to be rooted? (Some have argued that we have more to lose than to gain by the connection.) And, if so, how to attach oneself to a particular place (other than by birth)? By buying/building a house or creating a garden—a human space in nature? By working and caring for the land? By creating art or… Continue Reading – A(t) Home in the World?