Courses

Index#: 07577

Will Count Towards Philosophy MAJOR

Will Count Towards Philosophy MINOR

“A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought,” Coral… Continue Reading – Making the Climate Greta Again: Changing Everything, Everywhere, Beginning at Rutgers

Index#: 07580

Will  Count Towards History MAJOR

Will (?) Count Towards History MINOR

SYNOPSIS

About Professor McCormick

Richard L. McCormick is president emeritus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He served as the… Continue Reading – The Roosevelts of Twentieth-Century America: What We Can Learn from Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor about the Presidency, Democracy, War, and Race

Index#: 07582

Will Count Towards English MAJOR

Will Count Towards English MINOR

In the Iliad, perhaps the greatest war story ever told, Homer writes: “How can I picture it all? It would take a god to tell the tale.” War is profoundly difficult to convey. It reconfigures nations,… Continue Reading – Telling Stories of War—From Trench Letters and Diaries to Video Games and Films

Index#: 07578

Will Count Towards English MAJOR

Will Count Towards English MINOR

This interdisciplinary seminar, which crosses the boundaries of literary criticism, history, and philosophy, will examine Shakespeare’s role in the “Renaissance cult of friendship,” a nearly obsessive… Continue Reading – Shakespeare and the Philosophy of Friendship

Index#: 07587

Will Count Towards English MAJOR

Will Count Towards English MINOR

Unsurprisingly, in several recent graphic memoirs, the memoirist includes episodes of going to a psychotherapist—e.g., David Small’s Stitches, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Alison Bechdel’s Are You My… Continue Reading – Graphic Novels & Psychoanalysis

Index#: 07581  

Will Count Towards Political Science MAJOR

Will Count Towards Political Science MINOR

For the last century or so most economic systems around the world have called themselves capitalist or socialist, while most political systems have called themselves democratic.  The number of democracies rose… Continue Reading – Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

Index#: 07590

Will Count Towards Psychology MAJOR

Will NOT Count Towards Psychology MINOR

Throughout history, and certainly during the history of the United States and Rutgers University, progress has been synonymous with leadership. The contemporary understanding of leadership is evolutionary—… Continue Reading – Past Leaders Speak to Us About Shaping Our Future

Index#: 07579

Will NOT Count Towards Chemistry MAJOR

Will Count Towards Chemistry MINOR

The proposed SAS Honors seminar will cover a broad swath of subject material from the 20th century physics developments that led to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb, the military and… Continue Reading – Existential Threats to Humanity: Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and Connections Between Them

Index#: 07574

Will NOT Count Towards Physics MAJOR

Will Count Towards Physics MINOR

This course  is  primarily  directed  at  non-physics  majors.… Continue Reading – Essentials of Quantum Mechanics

Index#: 07584

Will Count Towards Japanese MAJOR

Will Count Towards Japanese MINOR

In this Honors seminar, we will be reading and discussing primary sources such as eyewitness accounts, short fiction, poetry, a novel, and feature-length films by and about survivors of the 1945 U.S.… Continue Reading – Hiroshima & Nagasaki: Learning from the Atomic Bombings of Japan

Index#: 07576

Will Count Towards Political Science MAJOR

Will Count Towards Political Science MINOR

This seminar will focus on the life and legal cases of U.S. Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg. The “Notorious RBG,” as she is known, has been critical to the… Continue Reading – The Notorious RBG

Index#: 07593

Will NOT Count Towards Biology MAJOR

Will NOT Count Towards Biology MINOR

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… Continue Reading – Molecular View of Human Anatomy: Mechanisms of Drug Action in the Central Nervous System

Index#: 07575

Will Count Towards Sociology MAJOR

Will Count Towards Sociology MINOR

Fukushima and Sandy are bell-weather events for modern society. Climate change will continue to be a point of political and… Continue Reading – Disaster, Culture and Society

Course description

This class, an introductory honors seminar on some of the most influential and most debated texts in Western culture, is based on the sense that it is still urgent for us to reflect together on forms of human expression that have shaped culture for centuries, whether drawn from the canons of philosophy, tragedy, religion, political theory, or political debate.

From the wars of ancient Greece to ongoing… Continue Reading – Civilization and its Discontents

The socialist state of China has risen spectacularly as the world’s second economic and political superpower in the past several decade. Yet much of the news about China in the rest of the world is about religion: state suppression of the Tibetan Buddhist culture, the Uighur Islamic faith, and the Falungong meditative practice in pursuit of healing, health and spirituality. Meanwhile, we are baffled as to how and why Chinese… Continue Reading – Religion and Society in Modern China

The term 'gendercide' highlights a range of distinct forms of violence reserved for human beings based on their own gender self-identification as well as patriarchal assumptions about their gender. In the patriarchal contexts that dominate cultures globally, this violence overwhelmingly compromises the security of human beings who identify and are identified as women, girl-children, and not gender non-conforming… Continue Reading – Gender-Based Violence And Gendercide

This course will introduce students to the major issues in the field of material culture studies by tying material culture theory to urgent contemporary debates, such as: What should replace the many Confederate monuments that have been removed from public spaces? How should museums reckon with legacies of racism? Why do things matter in an era that is increasingly online? As material culture is an interdisciplinary field, the… Continue Reading – Material Things In The Digital Age

Women have been fighting for gender equality in many religious traditions for decades. What strategies and discourses have been used to preclude women from religious leadership and to marginalize women within public religious spaces? How have women gained access and claimed religious authority within religious institutions? How do these strategies differ across religious communities? What kinds of resistance have women… Continue Reading – Women And Religious Authority

Music is far more than entertainment. Since the beginning of time it has been used to express deeply held emotions and beliefs. It is inextricably intertwined with human existence, used globally in dance, religious rites, public celebrations, private moments of contemplation and rejoicing, concerts, films, advertisements, and countless other activities. Life without music is unthinkable. Can one celebrate one’s… Continue Reading – Music And The Brain

“Secrets of Quantum Matter” will be an interdisciplinary honors seminar, open to science and non-science students, without any requirement of prior science or math achievement, that will introduce students to the history and the current frontiers of research into quantum matter. The  course will introduce quantum mechanics in every-day materials: everything from the atom up. This topic, known as “quantum condensed… Continue Reading – Secrets Of The Quantum Universe

Despite global attempts to establish “green” initiatives by governmental forces, these “solutions” offer little hope for averting the emergency, while often obstructing on-the-ground activist movements pushing for systemic transformation and radical sustainability. As the crisis in capitalist globalization spirals out of control, spawning neofascist movements in its wake, the impediments to solving this… Continue Reading – Narrating Planet: Crisis & Sustainability

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… Continue Reading – One mind. Two languages.

Will Count Towards SAS - English Major and Minor

Application required click here to apply.

In this course, we will focus… Continue Reading – Reading In Slow Motion

In the dead of night, it is not uncommon for the most ordinary individuals to fly, revisit childhood haunts, or explore underwater cities. In antiquity, dreams were typically understood as forms of divination or prophetic visions giving the dreamer access to an ordinarily invisible realm of spirits and deities.  In modernity, dreams have been seen as psychological phenomena, internal to the mind of… Continue Reading – Dreaming By The Book

Will NOT Count Towards African, Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Literatures MAJOR or MINOR

Animals populate the Arabic canonical tradition. The word hayawan, ‘animal’, invokes a number of classical Arabic texts and treaties. One may argue that Arabic letters encompass an encyclopaedic genre that is devoted to… Continue Reading – Humanimals In Middle Eastern Literature

Will Count Towards SAS – Anthropology MAJOR
Will NOT Count Towards SAS – Anthropology MINOR

This course examines histories, theories and practices of photography, a medium that has transformed significantly since the daguerreotypes of the mid-… Continue Reading – Photography: International Medium

For the last several years, following on a number of significant “machine learning” breakthroughs, talk of “artificial intelligence” (AI) has made a comeback. Especially strong in business and technology circles, discussion of an AI-powered fourth industrial revolution now ripples through the popular imagination. Fictions of Artificial Intelligence, which blends narrative fiction in several media—literature, film,… Continue Reading – Fictions Of Artificial Intelligence

Although nominally aiming to introduce students to the idea of the Anthropocene, this course has a deeper objective which will become clear as the semester progresses. I wish for students to leave this seminar understanding that humans have always been actively shaping the global environment and climate. The idea of a ‘start date’ obscures a deeper, more complex reality of humanity’s relationship with nature, and our… Continue Reading – Searching For The Anthropocene

Earthquakes occupy a special place among natural calamities that impact the human civilization. Sudden, short in duration, extremely but selectively destructive, and (as of this writing) not predictable, earthquakes have the capacity to change the course of human history, While most human cultures have traditional beliefs associated with earthquakes, the rigorous science of earthquakes is just over a century old.… Continue Reading – When Foundations Are Shaken

Einstein was the first celebrity scientist and as an icon, his views on religion, his Jewish heritage, freedom, race relations, politics, war, and humanity are well documented and offer valuable insights for us today. Through the seminar, we will read and discuss … Continue Reading – Science And Life Of Albert Einstein

In physical terms, energy circulates everywhere. In economic and political terms, energy repeatedly runs scarce.  This course will adjudicate that thorny contradiction between nature and culture – between the abundance of the sun and the scarcity of fuel.  The disjuncture persists because of the way in which certain societies – including our own – construct energy as a cultural meaning.  At other times… Continue Reading – Energy And Culture

This seminar will examine the strategic ways in which leaders have sought to institutionalize their activism and public dissent.  The class will utilize an interactive discussion format. On a macro-level, the focus will include founders of civil and human rights organizations and other social change pressure groups.  On a micro-level, we will contrast leadership roles of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his co… Continue Reading – Anti-Apartheid & Civil Rights Movements

From its ancient origins in the Book of Job, or farther back even in the Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, through the early decades of the Enlightenment, the problem of evil — the perniciously difficult to satisfy “need to find order within those appearances … Continue Reading – Problem Of Evil: Philosophy & Pop cult

 “Unruly Bodies in Literature and Media” _offers a close examination of the discourses surrounding those bodies that are considered abnormal, monstrous, unfitting and weird in the Western modern material and visual culture. We will move broadly in time and space within philosophical, literary, and cinematic traditions to concentrate on those moments where the body becomes a site of tangible… Continue Reading – Unruly Bodies In Literature And Media

“Most of the world lives in cities,” scholars say, explaining why urban studies are important across anthropology, sociology, history, critical geography, political science, and literature. But what about the lives not yet lived in cities? What can we learn by approaching the city through its futures? How can the future help us to understand the pasts, presents, and possibilities of urban life? In this course, these questions will guide us as… Continue Reading – Urban Futures

Application Required – click here

The years 1968-1971 changed the world, and so have the years 2018-2021. In honor of these two generations, the Class of 1970 is supporting an oral… Continue Reading – Generations of Change Four Years on the Banks, Fifty Years Apart: 1968-71 and 2018-2021