Courses

Be it solar panels or biofuels, everybody has their own favorite solutions for fixing the climate which are invariably based on new technologies that are "almost here". But greenhouse emissions need to be reduced substantially now! How can we get the quickest and biggest bang for our buck in reducing emissions? With new “supply-side” technologies to provide more energy, or by targeting grimy… Continue Reading – Climate Crisis: Shiny Toys to the Rescue?

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 Mother. In all cases, the interactions are positive, and enable the memoirist to gain insight and motivation.  For Small and Spiegelman the interactions are part of a large set of interactions.… Continue Reading – Graphic Novels & Psychoanalysis: Alison Bechdel & D. W. Winnicott

What are human languages? How many languages are there in the world? How did languages originate? What are their functions? How different are human languages from animal or technological communication systems? Who are the speakers of all those languages? How are languages classified? What are language families? What is a language and what is a dialect? How do people study languages? What theories… Continue Reading – World Languages: History and Theory

We’ve all experienced pain in our lifetime. For the lucky among us, this pain has been short lasting, while for others pain can be a debilitating chronic condition. Historically, much of the research on pain has focused on peripheral signals between the body and the spinal cord, and we’re only recently becoming aware of the many ways in which acute and chronic pain come to affect our brain and our… Continue Reading – Your Brain on Pain: An Exploration of How Pain Contributes to Mental Illness

This seminar explores the intertwined histories of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in medieval Spain. It examines the emergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, initial encounters and shifting relationships between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Spain, cultural cross-influence and religious conversion between these groups, and the expulsions of Jews and… Continue Reading – Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain

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 defense of women’s rights from long before her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. We will analyze her important contributions to Rutgers’ Law School, where she began her legal career, at the ACLU… Continue Reading – The Notorious RBG

“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 Davenport writes, in the December 7, 2018 edition of The New York Times, according to which “avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has ‘no documented historic… Continue Reading – Making the Climate Greta Again: Changing Everything, Everywhere, Beginning at Rutgers

The course provides an overview of the world writing systems with a focus on their linguistic properties, evolutionary developments, and mental processing. The first half of the course will be devoted to developing a typology of writing systems and exploring distinct types of writing attested in human history. The second half will be devoted to the history of writing systems and their decipherment… Continue Reading – From Oracle Bones to the Internet: Writing Systems of the World

The course will examine the social and political development of Northern Ireland in the modern era. It will focus in particular on Plantation, the United Irishmen revolt of 1798, the Partition of Ireland (1920), Sectarianism, the 'Troubles' and the peace process in Northern Ireland. We’ll consider poetry, folk songs, speeches, and, in particular, plays, using them as starting points from which to… Continue Reading – The Troubles: Partition, Sectarianism, Peace and Reconciliation in N. Ireland

Africa is more than a continent, it is the origin of our evolutionary forbearers, populations of skilled labor that built America and Europe’s wealth, flora, fauna and minerals of great value, and of course cultural forms from music and sculpture to food and cloth.  This course celebrates the complex contributions of the continent to the world in which we live today.  It begins by… Continue Reading – Global Africa

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. The focus is especially on Mussolini’s casting about in the past to shape his public image, first as Julius Caesar but… Continue Reading – Mussolini’s Rome: Italian Fascism and the Politics of Knowledge

This seminar will focus on the role of religion in 21st-century right-wing movements in Europe and the Americas. For each case study, we will spend one week learning the basic history and contours of the case and one week reading and discussing material that analyzes and attempts to explain the case. Categories and explanatory models covered in these more analytical weeks will include religious nationalism, secularism and laicism,… Continue Reading – Religion & 21st-Century Right Wing Movements

The search for other intelligent life in the universe and the question of how humans would manage first contact with such life poses many scholarly questions. These include: Does such life exist or is it likely to exist? Is contact possible? Why have we not had such contact? If we encounter such life, how should we respond and what might we expect? How could we possibly even begin to understand alien intelligence? These questions demand an… Continue Reading – Xenoanthropology

The act of artistic creation is one of the profound mysteries of human existence. While thousands of artists and composers have endeavored over the centuries to make works of lasting value, only a select few have had the “creative spark”—the flash of brilliance that resulted in a masterpiece that transcended its time and place. Precisely how these artists and composers have attained this goal is… Continue Reading – The Creative Spark: The Making of Masterpieces in Music and Art

This course will explore the intersection of art, science, and technology as represented in the visual arts of the 20th century, primarily but not exclusively, in the USA, Western, and Eastern Europe. It will be organized thematically around shifts in technology that brought these areas of human creativity into close contact. Each theme addresses the impact changes in the urban environment, the… Continue Reading – International Avant-Gardes: Modernist Art of the Machine Age

Societies responded to epidemics in many different ways based on their understanding of the nature and causes of specific diseases and structures of belief about the body, health, medicine, disease, religion, race, class, and gender. For centuries, the city has been a place of freedom from tradition and custom where people could blend into a crowd and construct new identities. In some parts of… Continue Reading – Ten Plagues: A History of Cities and Pandemics

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 so unbearable that they threaten reason’s ability to go on,” as Susan Neiman has aptly described it, as when, to one degree or another, bad things happen to good people, and… Continue Reading – The Problem of Evil in Philosophy and Popular Culture

Sport is one of the most visible and influential aspects of modern popular culture. This course will explore the cultural aspects of sport, focusing on basketball, soccer, American football, and track using literature, film, journalism, memoirs, and secondary material from a variety of scholarly fields. The course’s basic question will be how should we think about sports as a social, cultural, and… Continue Reading – The Culture of Sport

Once upon a time a young lady called Beauty found a man asleep: he was so beautiful that she kissed him a hundred times to wake him up... Rewritten and altered, this tale became Disney’s famous production Beauty and the Beast, a movie designed for children that makes the Stockholm syndrome look fancy and trivializes domestic violence. This rewriting also prepares young minds to find… Continue Reading – #HerToo: When Women Reclaim Fairy Tales

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-founding of the… Continue Reading – Anti-Apartheid & Civil Rights Movements: King and Mandela, Lessons in Leadership

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… Continue Reading – One Mind. Two Languages.

This course examines histories, theories and practices of photography, a medium that has transformed significantly since the daguerrotypes of the mid 19th century.  In 1839, Daguerre’s invention was presented as “a free gift to the world.”  This course will look at how that gift has been put to use in photographic cultures around the world in contexts as diverse as portrait studios in Yogyakarta,… Continue Reading – Photography: Theories and Practices of an International Medium

An examination of current slavery reparations debates in the US, the course seeks to situate these initiatives in a broader international context. We will thus study the Jewish material claims against Germany brought in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the history of Indigenous children in Canada, the "Stolen Generation" in Australia, and the children torn from their parents in the Belgian Congo.… Continue Reading – Reparations: An International Perspective

Be it solar panels or biofuels, everybody has their own favorite solutions for fixing the climate which are invariably based on new technologies that are "almost here". But greenhouse emissions need to be reduced substantially now! How can we get the quickest and biggest bang for our buck in reducing emissions? With new “supply-side” technologies to provide more energy, or by targeting grimy fossil-fuel power plants which run our society?… Continue Reading – Climate Crisis: Shiny Toys to the Rescue?

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 exploring, commenting on, or surveying sources on animals, ranging from Al-Jahiz, Al-Qazwini, Ibn Qutayba, and Ikhwan al-Safa to Al-Damiri. More specifically, pre-Islamic and oral poetry’s zoopoetics embody… Continue Reading – HumAnimals in Middle Eastern Literature

Building on the momentum of the Arab Spring and European Squares Movements, Occupy Wall Street burst on to the scene in the Fall of 2011 and quickly took the world by storm. Arguably the most important social movement the United States had seen since the 1970s, Occupy reshaped the American political landscape over the next decade and beyond, influencing Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ movements, the Fight for 15, and the Bernie Sanders campaign.… Continue Reading – Occupy Wall Street

In this course, we will focus our attention on two book-length essays by Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.

Why focus on two short books? Woolf’s essays are works of art and ideas; they are best savored. In addition, we learn to read critically not by reading, but by re-reading. And yet, you could scan university syllabi the world over and you would find few, if any, courses where… Continue Reading – Reading in Slow Motion: Virginia Woolf’s Essays

“Secrets of the Quantum Universe” 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 matter physics”… Continue Reading – Secrets of the Quantum Universe

Many of the most enduring social divisions, political conflicts, and policy debates in the United States revolve around the issue of race, and to a lesser extent ethnicity. This course will examine the role of race in American politics and its contemporary significance. It will focus on the experiences and activities of different groups in America through an examination of social policies. The course will examine social policies related to… Continue Reading – The Politics and Power of Race in American Social Policies

STUDY ABROAD APPLICATION REQUIRED

This embedded study abroad course is a 1-credit, 10-day long trip conducted after the end of the Spring 2023 semester. Students will participate in a semester-long, 3-credit honors seminar that will introduce topics and themes to be addressed during the trip.
Students will learn about how pilgrimages… Continue Reading – To Be a Pilgrim

Does civilization make us happy or unhappy? What do we owe each other? What does civil society contend with conflict and resistance? Culture has given us many texts dealing with these questions, none that provide easy resolutions but all of which allow for thoughtful reflection on the issues at stake. In this course, students will explore influential works of philosophy and literature that address fundamental questions about the relationships… Continue Reading – Civilization and Its Discontents

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 of the political aspects of imperialism, we… Continue Reading – Empires: Ancient and Modern

The world is a conundrum. The bulk of the energy we use deliberately – fossil fuels – causes harm at every scale from the neighborhood to the planet. Almost harmless forms of energy – sun, wind, waves, and other renewables – lie all around us, virtually untapped. Many politicians and activists recognize the need to switch from the former to the latter. But, by and large, we are not switching. Why? The answers have to do with political and… Continue Reading – Energy, Culture, and Justice

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, serial television—with… Continue Reading – Fictions of Artificial Intelligence

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 memoir/autobiography becomes intensely connected to the work of D. W. Winnicott, who is not her therapist but an influential English… Continue Reading – Graphic Novels & Psychoanalysis

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

The course examines the life of Congressman John Lewis of Georgia (1940-2020) as a lens onto the struggle for racial equality in the postwar era. One of ten children born to poor farmers in rural Alabama, Lewis went to college in Nashville and became one of the leaders of the budding student movement. He was a central part of almost all of the civil rights movement’s main achievements in the 1960s, including the sit-ins to desegregate lunch… Continue Reading – John Lewis and the Civil Rights Movement

All languages show variation over time and space. From the moment we are exposed to our first language, we begin to take note of who says what and how they say it. A fundamental tenet of our nation is that discrimination on the grounds of skin color, ethnicity, gender, or age is unacceptable. Yet, it seems we do not apply this same principle to language. On the contrary, it is commonplace for individuals and groups of people to be judged on… Continue Reading – Language and Discrimination in the United States