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01:090:292: H3
Andrés Mario Zervigón, Professor of the History of Photography
Thursday, 3:50 PM - 6:50 PM
Honors College, E-128

New York Times photography critic Gideon Jacobs published a column with the following title: “A.I. Is the Future of Photography. Does That Mean Photography Is Dead?” The query, as our seminar will suggest, strikes not just at photography’s very identity as a medium. It also serves as a proxy for larger questions about the apparent threat that artificial intelligence poses for the human imagination. This seminar will correspondingly… Continue Reading – Photography and Artificial Intelligence

01:090:297: H5
Dr. David Bushek, Professor Marine and Coastal Sciences Director, SEBS/NJAES Marine Field stations , Dr. Peter Oudemans, Professor, Plant Biology Director, SEBS/NJAES Farms
Fridays
Cook Douglass, MSB 203
New Jersey reveals a mosaic of innovative production systems spanning marine and coastal sciences, agriculture, food systems, and engineering. This dynamic landscape is supported by more than a dozen twelve outlying research centers as well as county offices staffed by Rutgers faculty who work directly with communities, industries, and natural resources. Drawing on the collective knowledge, history, and problem-solving expertise of this… Continue Reading – Beyond Campus - Research at Rutgers Off Campus Stations
01:090:294:H3
Professor Trip McCrossin
Thursday, 10:20 AM - 1:20 PM
Honors College, E-128
When it comes to our present-day climate, we know that we must act and for the most part how we must act, but routinely fail to act. In this all-hands-on-deck moment, in addition to COP-style inquiries, it may be worth contemplating others. In this spirit, we will look for what-is-to-be-done clues in the coordination of two distinct sorts of climate-crisis intervention, which have otherwise… Continue Reading – The Climate Crisis in Philosophy and Popular Culture
01:090:294:H2
Professor Trip McCrossin (Philosophy)
Tuesday, 8:30 - 11:30 AM
Honors College, N-106
“Why do bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad?” Given the problem’s deep and wide-ranging roots in intellectual history, we can’t reasonably aspire to sample it all. Rather, we’ll adopt a more episodic approach—an exploration of the problem’s conventional touchstone, the Book of Job, and a selection of its literary and cinematic adaptations; the development in the eighteenth century of a secular version of the problem, in… Continue Reading – The Problem of Evil in Philosophy and Popular Culture
01:090:297: H4
Professor Bice Peruzzi
Monday, 12:10 PM - 3:10 PM
College Avenue, Scott Hall, SC-105
Together we will investigate how movies have been inspired by the Classical past, focusing on larger themes that have been routinely appropriated by the industry (e.g., heroism, gender, “otherness,” war). It will combine the analysis of ancient texts and material culture with the exploration of cinematic adaptations of the very same theme across the decades. The nature of this course is multidisciplinary and will include a… Continue Reading – (The) Classics and Hollywood
01:090:297: H3
Professor Emily Alen-Hornblower, Classics
Thursday, 2:00 - 5:00 PM
College Avenue, Brett Hall, BRT-155
Why do we do what we do? What shapes our thoughts and decision-making processes, and what leads us to take certain actions? This question, essential to every aspect of our daily existence, was repeatedly raised and explored by the Ancient Greeks, bearing to this day on our complex understanding of ourselves and our agency. This course offers an exploration of these ancient myths and their storytelling – from the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh… Continue Reading – Why’d You Do It? Exploring the Human Psyche and its Motivations, From Ancient Mythology to Modern Science
01:090:295:H5
Professor Brendon Votipka, Creative Writing, Department of English
Friday, 12:10 PM - 3:10 PM
College Avenue, Honors College,E-128
How do dramatists create compelling representations of LGBTQ+ people on stage? Writers will read play and musical texts by contemporary LGBTQ+ playwrights, as well as foundational framing texts in queer studies, dramaturgy, and playwriting. In addition to scholarly analysis of LGBTQ+ characterization and in assigned readings, the class prioritizes creative application of strategies we've analyzed in the pursuit of original playwriting. The… Continue Reading – Writing Queer Drama [An LGBTQ+ Learning Collaborative Cooperative Seminar]
01:090:297: H1
Professor Hana Shepherd, Department of Sociology
Tuesday, 8:30 AM - 11:30 AM
College Avenue, Honors College, E-128
Local government is an intriguing site for understanding possibilities for power and change. Historically and currently, local governments can be key players in resistance movements against their own central governments. Local government, in contrast to central forms of government, can be more connected to the people it governs and more able to hear and enact creative, innovative policies that have the potential for real change. That is, it… Continue Reading – The Powers of Local Government
01:090:296: H4
Professor Nuria Sagarra, Spanish and Portuguese
Monday, 12:10 PM - 3:10 PM
College Avenue, Academic Building West, ABW-5190
How do bilinguals handle having multiple languages in a single mind? Why do adults have difficulty achieving native-like competence in a foreign language? Why do some people learn foreign languages more easily than others? In this course, students will learn about a myriad of topics related to the bilingual mind. These include neural underpinnings of bilingual processing, biological, linguistic and cognitive effects on adults’ difficulty… Continue Reading – One Mind. Two Languages.
01:090:292: H4
Professor Kathryn Narramore
Tuesday & Thursday, 3:50 PM - 5:10 PM
College Avenue, Scott Hall, SC-121
This interdisciplinary honors seminar investigates the fundamental relationship between human cognition, literary expression, and the technologies we invent to facilitate them. Moving beyond contemporary debates on digital distraction, this course frames writing, memory, reading, and printing not just as tools, but as technologies of expression and knowledge-making that profoundly restructure human thought. The core question is: How do… Continue Reading – From Distraction to Mind Wandering: Practicing Human Technologies of Expression in an AI World
01:090:296:H3
Professor Nicholas Rennie, German & Comparative Literature
Monday, 3:50 PM - 6:50 PM
College Avenue, BRT-155
The “wise fool” is a paradoxical figure that has fascinated Western writers at least since the Middle Ages. The fool stands outside of social convention and society’s normal hierarchies, and as such serves to highlight problems and contradictions in society itself. His or her folly veils a deeper wisdom. To speak as a fool, however, is also to contend with various forms of explicit or hidden censorship, to find ways to defy and circumvent… Continue Reading – Wise Fools
01:090:293: H2
Professor Lisa L. Miller, Department of Political Science
Thursday, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Cook/Douglass Campus, Ruth Adams Building, RAB-209A
We will explore common, civics education versions of the American constitutional system as well as critical scholarship that seeks to assess how this system shapes politics, particularly with respect to who has access to power, and what governments do (and for whom).  We will also revisit earlier periods of American history when Americans mobilized to democratize and to demand more political responsiveness to public need. The… Continue Reading – How Democratic is the US Constitution?
01:090:296:H1
Professor Eric Gawiser, Department of Physics & Astronomy
Wednesday, 10:20 AM - 1:20 PM
College Avenue, Honors College, E-128
As our society becomes ever more dependent upon technology, it sometimes seems like everything from science fiction is becoming reality. However, our imagination has created fascinating scenarios such as time travel and human teleportation that appear to be forbidden by physics, chemistry, and biology. Hence science fiction provides an intellectually stimulating way to talk about science, from what we know and how we know it to whether we… Continue Reading – The Science of Science Fiction
01:090:295:H4
Professor Elizabeth Decker & Carla Caponegro
Friday, 12:10 PM - 3:10 PM
College Avenue, Academic Building West, 2100
Rutgers Students are invited to consider “Where R We” by partaking in place-based writing across multiple locations on our Rutgers-New Brunswick campus. Foundational readings of the course will encourage students to consider the role of identity formation alongside physical communities of belonging. As we explore different places and their interdisciplinary connections, students will begin their own research process using primary and… Continue Reading – Where R We? Place-Based Writing to Explore Identity and Community Formation
01:090:295:H1 
Professor David Kurnick
Tuesday, 12:10 PM - 3:10 PM
College Avenue, BRT-155
This course responds to the increasingly unignorable sense that attention is a resource under threat. We’ll be thinking about the historical and cultural reasons we all find it hard to focus and using the classroom as a laboratory for working on our own attention, as we read together a major text of world literature. The course will have three main goals: 1) to familiarize students with some of the historical and theoretical work on… Continue Reading – Center Your Attention: Moby-Dick
01:090:292: H1
Professor Gerald Goldin
Wednesday, 3:50 PM - 6:50 PM
College Avenue, Honors College, S-124
This seminar explores diverse processes through which knowledge is acquired in the physical sciences, in mathematics, and in the study of human psychology. We consider fundamental epistemological questions that arise in these disciplines: Can knowledge ever be objective? Is it fundamentally an individual construct, or a social construct? How do different human cultures develop it? Is it possible to distinguish among beliefs, warranted… Continue Reading – Beliefs, culture, and the search for truth: Paths to knowledge in science, mathematics, and human psychology
01:090:294:H1
Professor Dominik Zechner, German
Monday, 3:50 PM - 6:50 PM
College Avenue, Honors College, E-128
This Interdisciplinary Honors Seminar explores the genre of the campus novel as a privileged site where modern institutions of knowledge production and education narrate, critique, and reinvent themselves. From the mid-century American tradition—John Williams’s Stoner, Nabokov’s Pnin, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, David Lodge’s comic “campus trilogy,” Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, and Randall… Continue Reading – The Campus Novel
01:090:293:H4
Professor Jennifer M. Jones, History Department
Monday, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
College Avenue, Academic Building East, 3200
How did New York City emerge over the course of the 20th century as a major capital of fashion? For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Paris was the epicenter of fashion and haute couture. Although the garment trades flourished in 19th- and early 20th-century New York City, the city carried none of the cultural weight of Paris in setting trends or glamor in creating the fantasies that stand at the heart of marketing… Continue Reading – New York City, Capital of Fashion
01:090:292: H2
Professor Daniel Maggio, Department of Economics
Thursday, 10:20 AM - 1:20 PM
College Avenue, BRT-155
The course will begin focusing on low-income countries, where these markets often fail. It will begin with a survey of the consequences of a lack of access to credit and the costs that households undertake to cope with the large number of uninsured risks they face. Beginning in low-income settings is useful because their financial markets are much simpler than the complex markets we participate in in the United States, and so they offer an… Continue Reading – Why is my insurance so expensive? Frictions and Failures in Financial Markets
01:090:294:H5 
Professor Robert Scott, Anthropology
Monday/Wednesday, 2:00 PM - 3:20 PM
College Avenue, Rutgers Academic Building, 003
This course will focus both on a thoughtful exploration of a possible first contact with alien life and use the opportunity to hold up a mirror to ourselves and think about the meaning of being human. To do this, you will read first contact stories as well as scholarly anthropological literature that considers first contact and understanding the other. In particular, reading will include science fiction first contact stories written by… Continue Reading – Xenoanthropology
01:090:295:H3
Professor George B. Stauffer and Jeff Friedman
Tuesday, 8:30-11:30 am
College Avenue, BRT-155
The act of artistic creation is one of the profound mysteries of human existence. While thousands of music composers and dance choreographers have endeavored over the centuries to make works of lasting value, only a select few have had the “divine spark”—the flash of brilliance that resulted in a masterpiece that transcended its time and place. Precisely how these artists attained this goal is the topic of the proposed Honors Seminar. … Continue Reading – The Divine Spark: Making of Masterpieces in Music and Dance