Courses

Course Credits (3)

Empires have been an enduring phenomenon for more than 4,000 years, from the rise of Akkad in Mesopotamia to the American invasion of modern Iraq. How and why do empires emerge? How do empires work? Why do empires endure (or collapse)? This class will study the origins, structures and consequences of imperialism, by comparing ancient and modern empires from all over the world. In addition to a study… Continue Reading – Empires: Ancient and Modern

Course Credits (3)

Students will write creative short fiction based on ethnographic research conducted through field work around the New Brunswick area, learning to define and describe what it means to be and belong, create and construct, and imagine and desire a place. Why place? Because places are sometimes so familiar that they are difficult to see and easy to ignore. Yet in life, real or imagined, a place is what we… Continue Reading – Place: The Making of Meaning in Everyday Landscapes

Course Credits (3)

This course uses theatrical practices to explore issues of social justice in Shakespeare’s tragedies, where the idea of individual voice is developing explosively, around issues of social justice and injustice.  Looking at four of Shakespeare’s devastatingly powerful tragedies – Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and  King Lear – we will explore the ways tragic expression builds self from and against… Continue Reading – Staging Social Justice: Shakespearean Tragedy and Theatrical Practice

Course Credits (3)

Focused on how the "Troubles" began, played out over thirty years, and were ended, as well as then considering the past thirty years of efforts to reconstruct a just society in the wake of the Good Friday Agreements, this class will examine the overall impact on Ireland and Northern Ireland, their peoples, and their identities. This course includes an "embedded" travel-study program of nine-days in… Continue Reading – Sunday, Bloody Sunday: Ireland's Troubles in Past and Present

Course Credits (3)

This seminar examines Fascist appropriation and misappropriation of Roman history, art, literature, architecture, and archaeology, especially in the city of Rome, but throughout the Italian peninsula and the short-lived Italian empire, with the focus on the years 1922-1943. A principal theme is Mussolini’s exploitation of the past to shape his public image, first as Julius Caesar but eventually as the… Continue Reading – Mussolini’s Rome: Italian Fascism and the Politics of Knowledge

Course Credits (3)

Course Credits (3)

From Native Americans, to colonists, to the immigrant communities of yesterday and today, the United States has never spoken just one language. This course offers an exploration of this dynamic tapestry, tracing the history and ever-evolving demographics of languages spoken across the nation. Though addressing topics such as language policy, bilingual education, language contact and revitalization,… Continue Reading – The Multilingual United States

Course Credits (3)

This class uses the life of John Lewis to study the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis, who died in 2020, was a 19-year-old seminary student when he became involved in the 1960 sit-ins in Nashville, which kicked off a decade of activism toward racial equality. Lewis was a key participant in other central episodes of the movement including the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom… Continue Reading – John Lewis and the Civil Rights Movement

Course Credits (3)

This course explores how fantasy, the fantastic, and the supernatural function as a site of cultural and aesthetic critique in German literature and thought from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century. Readings include immensely creative and influential masterpieces of world literature, read in tandem with selections from philosophy and aesthetic theory. Emphasis placed on developing… Continue Reading – Enchanted Worlds

Course Credits (3)

Never has so much information been available so quickly to so many. In just a few decades, broadband infrastructures, advances in data processing, and smartphones have come to connect people, ideas, institutions, and things at unprecedented speed and scale. This condition that sociologist Rogers Brubaker has “hyperconnectivity” will only intensify in the years to come, as firms compete for generative… Continue Reading – “Everything Everywhere All at Once”: Hyperconnectivity in Theory and Fact

Course Credits (3)

Animals: We encounter them in the wild, in our homes, and on our plates. They appear in our oldest cave paintings and sacred texts, inspiring awe and disgust, love and fear. Some are reviled or disregarded as pests or vermin. Increasingly, human activities threaten other species, even as we farm and exploit animals at massive scales for research and industrial agriculture. As wildlife, we compete with… Continue Reading – Animals, Society, and Sustainability

Course Credits (3)

This interdisciplinary course explores the political lives, intellectual contributions, and resistance strategies of Black women across the Americas and the broader African diaspora. With a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, students will engage with the works of Black feminist thinkers, activists, and theorists whose work spans political science, sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies, and… Continue Reading – The Gender Politics of the Black Diaspora

Course Credits (3)

The practice of slavery goes back deep into Antiquity and is still found in some regions today. It reached its height between 1450-1850 AD in the Age of Mercantile Capitalism, but its legacy continues down to the present day.  Colonial era slavery involved the translocation of millions of people and its enormity has been compared with the European invasion of the Americas and the European… Continue Reading – Historical Archaeology of Slavery

Course Credits (3)

A century ago in the United States, the Buddha and his teachings barely registered.  Today millions of people practice mindfulness, but others have discovered in Buddhism something more than a calmer mind: a new and expansive reality that brings together East and West, and the ancient with the postmodern. This “new reality,” as we will learn, has transformed the lives of the philosophers, poets,… Continue Reading – Buddhism in American Culture

Course Credits (3)

This course explores the intersections of religion, spirituality, and the paranormal in American culture, examining historical, sociological, and artistic perspectives. Throughout the course, we will consider phenomena such as ghosts, hauntings, psychic experiences, UFOs, New Age spirituality, and Spiritualism, alongside the ways these beliefs are expressed in visual art, literature, and media. The… Continue Reading – Religion and the Paranormal in America

Course Credits (3)

Islands populate our contemporary imagination through survivalist and reproductive reality shows, Caribbean and Mediterranean tourist escapism, maximum security prisons old and new, and recurring scandals of offshore banking and tax havens. While it might at first appear as an exceptional, rarefied, and fragmentary geography, the island is in reality central to literary and spatial production in… Continue Reading – Island as Method: Empire and Translation in the Geographic Imagination

Course Credits (3)

Imagine the universe consisted only of beads of different size and color on a single string, with some rules about how they would interact, combine, separate from, or bounce off one another. How would familiar notions of classical physics such as gravity or electromagnetism look like in such a universe? What about quantum phenomena? How far can one go on this quest? Is it feasible to look for a one-… Continue Reading – Mathematical Adventures in One-Dimensional Physics

Course Credits (3)

This seminar explores the history and modern legacies of medieval coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Spain. It examines the emergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, initial encounters and shifting relationships between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, cultural cross-influence and religious conversion, the impact of the Spanish Inquisition,… Continue Reading – Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain

Course Credits (3)

What makes us human? What distinguishes us from animals? And what constitutes a human identity? These are questions that writers grappled with throughout antiquity (and still continue to ask today). In Homer’s Odyssey, humans are often in danger of being transformed into animals, and Plato’s Socrates famously questions whether or not he is a savage or gentle beast in the opening of the dialogue,… Continue Reading – Beauties and Beasts: Tales of Transformation and Conversion from Antiquity to the Present

Course Credits (3)

A look at interdisciplinary offerings in the current program suggests that seminars  with biological content are sparse. I would like to introduce a biological perspective on the evolutionary continuity between non-human and human animals. Although shared brain mechanisms would be described, I would not emphasize the detailed neurobiology for this kind of seminar. This course might appeal to… Continue Reading – Animal Minds: How do We Know what They Know?

Course Credits (3)

This course explores a pivotal chapter in the early relationship between the United States and Japan, focusing on the first Japanese students who studied at Rutgers in the late nineteenth century and the Rutgers graduates who traveled to Japan as educators, advisors, and missionaries. Through the close examination of primary, secondary, and visual sources, as well as community engagement and… Continue Reading – Rutgers Meets Japan: Early Encounters

Course Credits (3)

The particular power of the word, and by extension literature, in forming and transforming people’s worldview has been widely used by governments focused on ideology to describe to those whom they control the kinds of social and political character they desire for their society. This course explores, through primary and occasional secondary texts, the literature created during three periods of social… Continue Reading – Literature Under Tyranny

Course Credits (3)

This seminar discusses the emerging field of climate intervention, focusing on the scientific, ethical, and societal implications of different strategies of climate intervention. As climate change intensifies, scientists are exploring ways to mitigate its effects, and climate intervention or geoengineering is the most discussed one. This course invites students to critically engage with these methods… Continue Reading – Climate Intervention: Where Science Meets Ethics