Courses

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—that it emerged the first time a group of humans or pre-humans came together in response to a problem or concern and, after sitting around for a bit, someone decided to start taking action. Those who have been recognized as leaders have a… Continue Reading – Leadership: Past Leaders Speak to Us About Shaping Our Future

This course explores, through primary and secondary texts, the literature created during four periods of social suppression and political tyranny: the anti-Catholic persecutions in England at the end of the 16th century, the socialist dictatorship in Mongolia between 1921 and 1990, the National Socialist period in Germany (1933-1945), and the ongoing dictatorship in the Democtratic People’s Republic of Korea.

In addition to thinking… Continue Reading – Literature Under Tyranny

“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 precedent’.” Unless we change in altogether… Continue Reading – Making Climate Greta Again: Changing Everything, Everywhere, Beginning at Rutgers

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-dimensional "theory of everything"?

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 Spring Semester 2023Molecular View of Human Anatomy course will be to understand the structures and functions of proteins that play key roles in Cancer Biology. Student learning and… Continue Reading – Molecular View of Human Anatomy: Understanding and Treating Human Cancers

This class examines the history, science, and cultures of pain, focusing on the complex relationship between bodies and environment in the modern age. Human bodies are inescapably tied to their surroundings, and recent scholars have argued that pain acts as a tether between ourselves and the environments we inhabit. Pain is central to the human condition, but its nature—at once social, cultural, and biological—can be elusive. In recent years… Continue Reading – Pain and Nature: From Hot Springs to Pills

This course is an introduction to issues in the philosophy of cosmology. Cosmology is the scientific study of the nature and history of the universe as a whole. In the last hundred years there have been astonishing developments in cosmology. Chief among these are Einstein’s general theory of relativity which provides the theoretical background to cosmology and the discoveries that 13.72 billion years ago the universe was very small, dense,… Continue Reading – Philosophy and Cosmology

Application Required

Will Count Towards SAS - English Major and Minor

In this course, we will focus our attention on Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.

Why only one book? We learn how 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 courses where students are given the time necessary to… Continue Reading – Reading in Slow Motion

This embedded study abroad course is a 1-credit, 7-day long trip conducted during the spring break. Students will participate in a semester-long, 3-credit honors seminar that will introduce topics and themes to be addressed during the trip.

This seminar will examine the scientific and cultural knowledge about volcanic processes and how it shapes the society in Costa Rica. It will also explore and discuss the risks and benefits (i.e.… Continue Reading – Talking Science in Costa Rica

What does it mean to describe a work of art? To write something inspired by it? To place it in—or remove it from—its cultural context? In this class we will explore, and practice, multiple approaches to writing about visual art. With a primary focus on the nineteenth century to the present, we will read some short fiction and enjoy a great deal of ekphrastic poetry (that is, poems describing and responding to art objects). At the same time,… Continue Reading – The Art of Writing About Art

New York’s Lower East Side may be the most studied and storied neighborhood in America. Since its emergence as the city’s most densely populated immigrant neighborhood in the mid-19thcentury, the Lower East Side has been the subject of extensive scrutiny by journalists, reformers, photographers, urban planners, and of creative engagements by poets, novelists, visual artists, and filmmakers. Over more than two centuries, the neighborhood has… Continue Reading – The Lower East Side: Then and Now

Corporations, capital, and money play a central role in contemporary politics, both domestic and international. While firms have always been influential political actors, the scope and power of money in politics has exponentially grown in recent years. The politics of capital thus play an increasingly central part in driving relations between countries, as well as political and policy outcomes domestically. This course will examine the… Continue Reading – The Politics of Capital

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

Some of the leading scandals to strike the corporate world during the last 25years were because of unethical behavior. The Wells Fargo and the fraudulent applications scandal, West Point and their class of cheaters, Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal, Marble Ridge Capital LP, Nikola, Enron, Arthur Andersen, and the Financial Crisis of 2008 are some names synonymous with unethical behavior. Occurrences of unethical behavior are not limited to a… Continue Reading – Unethical Behavior: A Key Business Risk to Higher Education

In the famous and perplexing first sentence of Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy claimed that “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In this course, we accept Tolstoy’s challenge to explore the question of happiness—and stories about happiness—through a wide range of short fiction, films, and other artworks, with occasional supplemental readings from philosophy and psychology. We’ll engage with visions of… Continue Reading – What Is Happiness?: Fictional Explorations

This course contextualizes the current crisis of climate change in histories of global change, exchange, and environmental and social exploitation. Among the topics covered are colonialism, resource extraction, cultural domination, industrialization and development, and the unequal impacts of climate change today. This course will also delve into the unequal abilities of different social groups to generate and implement solutions,… Continue Reading – From Colonialism to Climate Change

In this course students will read, discuss, and write about relations between the United States and Ukraine from the creation of a Ukrainian republic in 1917 to the Russian-Ukrainian war that began in February 2022. Students will learn the historical background to the contemporary crisis. They will examine the tensions between ideals and interests in US policies toward Ukraine and Russia/the Soviet Union. In addition, they will analyze the… Continue Reading – The United States and Ukraine in War, Famine, and Peace

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

This course will focus on the novels, essays, and short stories of Virginia Woolf, and through them we will explore new forms of writing being developed in early twentieth-century modernism; a new awareness of relations between gender, genre, and war; and the consideration of the role of sexuality in human identity. Even Virginia Woolf’s work by itself could be considered “interdisciplinary.”

But the “Bloomsbury” part of this course… Continue Reading – Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury

This class uses the life of John Lewis as a way 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—one of the events that kicked off a decade of activism and progress toward racial equality. Lewis was a central participant in many other events, including the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the Selma… Continue Reading – John Lewis and the Civil Rights Movement

Digital stories are powerful instructional tools that allow students to communicate complex concepts and emotions through both linguistic and nonlinguistic modes. A digital story is a 3-6 minute multimodal video through which students can engage in critical reflection about their experiences, participate actively in the learning process, and give voice to their identities.

This course will lay a foundation for understanding how… Continue Reading – Authoring Identities: Digital Stories of Critical Narratives

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 – Alison Bechdel and Psychoanalysis

As a popular art form that is inherently social, Shakespearean comedy invites its audiences to look at how, by whom, and for whom society and its systems of justice are structured. This seminar will focus on three comedies – Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, and Cymbeline – that raise important questions about the meting out of law and order, privilege and punishment. As we zero in closely on each play, we will interrogate the… Continue Reading – Staging Social Justice: Shakespearean Comedy and Theatrical Practice

How do we know anything about the ancient world? How did the Bible reach us? How did Homer reach us? How are we able to read Babylonian cuneiform? How are we able to read Egyptian hieroglyphics? Or, put simply, how do we know this?!?!

This seminar will focus on ancient Israel, ancient Greece, and the ancient Near East, with special attention to Egypt and Babylonia. For ancient Israel, including both Jewish and Christian origins, and… Continue Reading – How Do We Know This

In the 21st century, disease seems to belong to the clean, well-lighted place of fact and biology. And yet, illness and medical treatment take place in culture and are complicated by language, history, economics, and politics. We’ll read a range of 20th-and 21st-century fiction and nonfiction: stories that ponder the limits of language; nonfiction about how different cultures define health, illness, and even death; texts that raise questions… Continue Reading – Introduction to Health, Medicine, and Literature

Will Count Towards SAS – Philosophy MAJOR

Will Count Towards SAS – Philosophy MINOR

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… Continue Reading – The Problem of Evil in Philosophy and Popular Culture

Novelas ejemplares (1613) was published between El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, part I (1605) and its second part in 1615. Don Quijote enters the literary scene as a text that questions the traditional parameters of reading and writing. Yet with Novelas ejemplares Cervantes throws himself into the literary arena with a collection of stories in which delinquents, marginalized and eccentric men (and women) disturb the legal,… Continue Reading – Entre el ejemplo y la delincuencia: textualidades cervantinas

“The Old Country.” “A terrible country.” “They’re Russian. Well, not really Russian, they’re from the former Soviet Union.” Casual conversations among your peers at Rutgers often bring up lines likes this, because for over a hundred years, wave after wave of Russian Imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet émigrés have ended up in North America, Europe and Israel. Throughout the twentieth century, these communities have counted in the millions. They… Continue Reading – Refuge from Empire: Global Russophone Émigré Culture

Study Abroad Application Required

In 1867 Kusakabe Tarō (1844-1870), a samurai from Fukui, left Japan to study at Rutgers. He was followed by dozens of Japanese students who studied at Rutgers College and Rutgers Grammar School during the late nineteenth century. Meanwhile, in 1870, Kusakabe’s mentor and friend, William E. Griffis, a Rutgers alum, was invited to teach Western-style education in Kusakabe’s hometown, Fukui. He was the… Continue Reading – Rutgers Meets Japan: Revisiting Early U.S.-Japan Encounters

Everywhere we look, government officials and policy makers, non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations, philanthropists, business organizations, and social scientists are engaged in deliberate projects to change the behavior of groups and populations. As opposed to attempts to influence individuals to do something once, or initiatives that only incidentally have an impact on behavior, in this class we will examine intentional… Continue Reading – How Government and Business Try to Change What We Do

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 Southern Christian… Continue Reading – Anti-Apartheid & Civil Rights Movements: King & 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 and cognitive effects on adults’ difficulty… Continue Reading – One Mind. Two Languages

This interdisciplinary honors seminar examines how racial-ethnic categories are reproduced and reflected in U.S. sports and in transnational contexts. With both celebratory and critical themes, we will examine how sports offer key insights into social structure, individual agency, and state-corporate hegemony, and the relevance of sports for understanding racial-ethnic subjectivity.

While the curricular focus draws significantly from… Continue Reading – Latinos, Sports, and Society

Will Count Towards SAS - English Major and Minor

Please note: admission to this course is by permission only. Interested students should fill out the application form, which may be found here. Applications will be read in the order received. Admitted students will receive a special permission number.

In this course, we will focus our attention on Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Why only one book? We learn how to read… Continue Reading – Reading in Slow Motion

This course will explore recent scandals in literary translation. A translator attacks in print the author whose novel she has translated. Bilingual readers discover that a translator’s version of a novel includes thousands of words that don’t appear in the original. A translator decides to omit the final chapter of a novel without informing either the author or the publisher. A translator reorders the chapters of a novel in order to bring to… Continue Reading – Lost in Translation -- or Tossed?

Recent events in national contexts as different as the United States and Iran have evidenced that women continue to be second-class citizens in many parts of the globe. Yet ever since the origins of cinema, and often against all odds, women filmmakers have succeeded in marshaling the power of this mass medium to interrogate women’s position in their societies and mobilize them for political activism, while celebrating their accomplishments… Continue Reading – Moving Images: The Artivism of Global Women Filmmakers

The seminar addresses the representation of walking in different media. 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… Continue Reading – Walking in the City

 “A landmark report from the United Nations’ [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 oC, dated October 8, 2018,] 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… Continue Reading – The Climate Crisis in Philosophy and Popular Culture

This seminar will focus on a variety of creative Irish texts—fictional and non-fiction, essays and documentaries, poetry, songs, plays, and films. Key questions addressed will include: how does a text re-cast or re-present a historical period or event? What does a knowledge of Irish history, politics, or culture add to our appreciation of a text? 
 
Principal texts we investigate will include: Making History & Translations… Continue Reading – Irish History through the Lens of Literary Culture

In this course, we will explore how inequalities and spatial conflicts based on racial and ethnic identities have played a significant role in shaping the society and cities of the United States. We will also examine how communities of color have built neighborhoods, mutual aid, and institutions based on racial justice principles as forms of resistance to displacement, impoverishment, and state-led violence.

We will raise… Continue Reading – Geography of Race and Ethnicity in The United States