Previous Courses

Artificial Intelligence: A Cultural History

01:090:293:04 Index# 11991
Professor Emrah Efe Khayyat, SAS - Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures
MW 4:30-5:50P
Honors College Rm E128
College Ave Campus

Bilingualism: How It Shapes Our Minds

01:090:295:02 Index# 11087
Professor Liliana Sanchez, SAS - Spanish & Portuguese
M 01:10P - 02:30P
W 01:10P - 02:30P
Honors College, Rm S120
College Ave Campus

Botanic Sociality: People, Plants, & Words

01:090:296:01 Index# 13384
Professor Becky Schulthies, SAS - Anthropology
T 02:15P - 03:35P
TH 02:15P - 03:35P
Hickman Hall, Rm 218
Douglass/Cook Campus

Children in Danger: Abduction, Abandonment, Adoption in Global Perspective

01:090:295:03 Index# 186629
Professor Judith Surkis, SAS - History
T 09:50A - 12:50P
Honors College, Rm E128
College Ave Campus

Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century

01:090:295:01 Index# 15409
Professor Premala Chandra, SAS - Physics & Astronomy
M 01:40P - 04:40P
Tillet Hall, Rm 204
Livingston Campus

Colors in Literature from Poe to the Present

01:090:296:03 Index# 12062
Professor Nicholas Gaskill, SAS - English
T 01:10P - 02:30P
TH 01:10P - 02:30P
Honors College, Rm S124
College Ave Campus

Communication and the Construction of Family

01:090:292:01 Index# 10523
Professor Jenny Mandelbaum, SC&I - Communication
M 2:50-5:50P
BRT Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

Cultures of American Adolescence

01:090:294:02 Index# 10527
Professor Leslie Fishbein, SAS - American Studies
M 9:15A-12:15P
Ruth Adams Building Rm 18
Douglass Campus

Digital Technology and Disruptive Change

01:090:296:04 Index# 13385
Professor Mary Chayko, School of Communication and Information
TH 11:30A - 02:30P
Honors College, Rm E128
College Ave Campus

Evolution, Cognition, and Belief

01:090:293:01 Index# 12057
Professor Lee Cronk, SAS - Anthropology
W 12:35P - 3:35P
Hickman Hall, Rm 132
Douglass/Cook Campus

Fall 2007 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

How Sex Changed: Biomedical Sex Research in the 20th Century
Nation Building: American Involvement in Remaking Foreign Countries Since 1898
The Science and Life of Albert Einstein
The World of Post-Colonial Caribbean "Theater"
Jung for the 21st Century
The Puzzle Novel
Physics and Photography
Evolutionary Approach to Social and Economic Behavior
Disaster, Culture, and Society
The Breath of Kings: Shakespeare and the Production of History
Romances of the Jungle: Lost Worlds and Last Frontiers
Rethinking American Architecture
How Should I Live?
Race Matters
French: Culture and Community; or Civilization: What's the Use?
Communications and Human Values

How Sex Changed: Biomedical Sex Research in the 20th Century
01:090:250:33284
James Reed, Department of History
W 4:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Brett Hall Seminar Room (CAC)

All participants in the seminar will be expected to make a presentation about a researcher, novel, autobiography, journal, or website that is relevant to our story but not included in the assigned reading. There will be two short written assignments (5 pages) and a longer essay that will serve as a final exam.

JAMES W. REED is a professor of history who teaches the survey course in U.S. history as well as courses in the history of medicine, disease, healthcare and other topics in social history, such as The IQ Controversy and Sport in History. He served as Dean of Rutgers College from 1985-1994, is the author of The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue, and is currently working on a history of biomedical sex research.

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Nation Building: American Involvement in Remaking Foreign Countries Since 1898
01:090:251:33285
David Foglesong, Department of History
M 9:50 AM - 12:50 PM
Brett Hall Seminar Room (CAC)

Since the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States has occupied and attempted to reshape many foreign countries, including the Philippines, Haiti, Nicaragua, Japan, Germany, and Iraq. Those efforts have involved American economic advisers, missionaries, educators, and Peace Corps volunteers, as well as soldiers and diplomats. In this seminar we will examine the diverse American experience with transforming or reconstructing foreign nations. We will explore the origins and motives for American involvement in the various undertakings, investigate how successful the efforts have been, analyze the mistakes that have been made, and consider the responses of foreign peoples.

Each student will make one brief (five-minute) oral presentation to open discussion of the assigned reading for that week. Each student will write four short (five to seven page) essays that will develop critical responses to the interpretations presented in the assigned reading. Students will have the option to write a longer (twelve to fifteen page) research paper on a topic to be developed in consultation with the professor, in place of two of the shorter essays.

The assigned reading will include books and articles by journalists and political scientists, as well as historians, such as:

Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule
William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American
Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Born and raised in northern California, DAVID FOGLESONG has been teaching in the History Department at Rutgers since 1991. He has written two books: America's Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920 (1995), and The American Mission and the "Evil Empire": The Crusade for a "Free Russia" (2007). He has also published articles on different aspects of American-Russian relations in scholarly journals such as Religion, State and Society(1997), The International History Review (1999), and Problems of Post Communism (2002) His current research focuses on American involvement in remaking foreign countries since 1898, with an emphasis on how Americans have thought about and remembered such "nation building" ventures.

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The Science and Life of Albert Einstein
01:090:252:33286
John Hughes, Department of Physics & Astronomy
MW 2:50PM - 4:10 PM
Brett Hall Seminar Room (CAC)

In this seminar, we will explore the development of 20th century physics and astronomy through the contributions of Albert Einstein. Students will gain an understanding of special and general relativity, the development of modern physics through the 20th century, and the crucial role of Einstein's theories in modern astronomy and cosmology.

We begin with an examination of the state of physics at the turn of the 20th century and the so-called myth of the "end of physics." We contrast the fields of physics and astronomy at this time based on a set of popular level lectures given in the 1920's. Newton's definition of absolute space and time, taken from the Principia, sets the stage for an in-depth review of Special and General Relativity, following Einstein's popular book from 1915. We will explore the consequences of these theories, and will look at some of the detailed tests, including the famous eclipse expedition of 1919 that established these theories as among the most important laws of physics.

In the latter part of the seminar, we fast forward to the modern era and reveal why Einstein's theories are at the forefront of astronomy and cosmology. We will cover gravitational lensing, the big bang theory, evidence for cosmic acceleration and other topics according to the tastes of the class.

Throughout the seminar, we will look at Einstein as an icon in the world at large. He was a notorious pacifist, yet he encouraged Roosevelt to develop the atomic bomb. He was also deeply religious, but not in a traditional sense.

The seminar will entail weekly readings and written assignments that are expected to form the basis for extensive class discussion. One or two longer papers will be assigned for credit as well.

This seminar is for non-science majors, although some background in physics and mathematics will be helpful.

JOHN P. HUGHES grew up in NYC and attended Columbia University. He was a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory until 1996 when he moved to Rutgers, where he is currently a Professor of Physics and Astronomy. Dr. Hughes uses both space- and ground-based astronomical observatories to research various topics in astrophysics and cosmology. (For more information visit his web site http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~jackph/)

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The World of Post-Colonial Caribbean "Theater"
01:090:253:33616
Camilla Stevens, Department of Spanish & Portuguese
MW 1:10 PM - 2:30 PM
Brett Hall Seminar Room (CAC)

Numerous historical and cultural processes have made the Caribbean a distinctive and complex world area: the cultural legacy of slavery; the insular and maritime condition of its geography; the region’s multiplicity of races, cultures, and languages; and its proximity to the United States. Cultural histories of the Caribbean identify the importance of literature in constructing and defining post-colonial collective identities, but the role of theater and performance in the cultural politics of representing the nation has been less rigorously investigated. In this seminar, we will read plays from a variety of Caribbean theater traditions and examine performance as a human endeavor that helps imagine communities, and the theater as a space for creating and preserving cultural memory. Some of the topics that will organize our discussions will include:

Storytelling and the Oral Tradition
Re-Playing European Classics
Ritual and Carnival
The Performance of Race and Gender
Tourism and Migration
Requirements: Readings (most of which will be available on a sakai.rutgers.edu site for the seminar) will include contemporary plays by authors from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, as well as texts on history and culture and some post-colonial and theater theory. All readings will be in English. To familiarize ourselves with the history and culture of the Caribbean region, we will view numerous videos and listen to music and students will report on select islands and playwrights. Students will also work in groups and present a reading of a scene of one of the plays we study (no acting talent required!). If there is sufficient class interest, we may go to New York City to see a play. Other coursework includes brief analytical homework assignments and an 8-10 page final paper.

CAMILLA STEVENS teaches in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her main research areas include Latin American theater and Caribbean literature. Her book, Family and Identity in Contemporary Cuban and Puerto Rican Drama (University Press of Florida, 2004) analyzes family as a metaphor for national community in Cuban and Puerto Rican theater from the 1950s to the present. She is currently working on a Pan-Caribbean project that focuses on the theatrical representation of race. Professor Stevens attributes her interest in the Caribbean partly to her chilly childhood in Minnesota.

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Jung for the 21st Century
01:090:254:33287
Steven Walker, Department of Asian Languanges and Cultures
T 9:50 AM - 12:50 PM
Brett Hall Seminar Room (CAC)

This seminar will introduce students to a system of psychology that, after having been overshadowed by Freudian psychology in the 20th century, is coming into its own in the 21st. The seminar will present basic principles and paradigms, and will engage students in a number of practical applications in the areas of the psychology of everyday life: the role of mythology in dreams and social life, religion, the analysis of films and literary texts, and self-analysis. No special preparation is needed, but students should come with an attitude of openness towards what may seem at first to be somewhat uncanny and even disturbing aspects of the unconscious mind.

In the area of the psychology of everyday life, Jungian psychology makes its greatest contribution through its dynamic presentation and analysis of the shadow (the unconscious and repressed personality), the anima and animus (the repressed contrasexual personality), and typology (categories of psychological functioning). Students in this seminar should be ready for some creative self-analysis! We will also deal with the disturbing issue of psychopathy/sociopathy as presented by Guggenbuhl-Craig, one of Jung's most original followers.

Jungian psychology also values the creative arts, and sees them as performing a remarkable role in the psychic life of the individual and society. Accordingly, we will analyze several narrative and film texts from a Jungian perspective: Toni Morrison's Sula, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jane Campion's The Piano, and other texts chosen as the occasion arises.

The textbook will be my own recent presentation of the Jungian system and its later developments, Jung and the Jungians on Myth: an Introduction (2002). We will also study Guggenbuhl-Craig's The Emptied Soul and Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

STEVEN F. WALKER, Professor of Comparative Literature, holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin (B.A. in classical Greek) and Harvard (M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature). He teaches in both the graduate and undergraduate programs in Comparative Literature, and he is a direct descendent (really!) of Henry Rutgers. He has been reading Jung voraciously since his undergraduate days.

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The Puzzle Novel
01:090:255:33288
Maurice Charney, Department of English
Th 2:50 - 5:50 PM
Brett Hall Seminar Room (CAC)

This seminar will consider the puzzle novel in contemporary fiction. We will concentrate of esoteric, ambiguous, highly ironic fictions by such writers as Borges, Calvino, Kafka, Barnes, Nabokov, and Perec. The seminar focuses on literature that students are unlikely to have read before that is difficult, provocative, and original. The aim of the seminar is to get students to write stories or essays related to the writers we are reading. Two volumes of collected essays and stories have been published by the class with the help of the Honors Program. In the past, students have completed non-verbal projects involving art, music, dance, or performance.

Required texts:
Borges, J. L., Labyrinths (ISBN: 0811200124)
Barnes, J., Flaubert's Parrot (ISBN: 0679731369)
Calvino, I., If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (ISBN: 0156439611)
Carroll, A. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (ISBN: 0393099776)
Kafka, F., Complete Stories (ISBN: 0805210555)
Pavic, M., Dictionary of the Khazars (ISBN: 0679724613)

MAURICE CHARNEY is Professor Emeritus of English and began teaching at Rutgers in 1956. He has written widely on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (1961) and Shakespeare on Love and Lust (2001) and two books on Hamlet: Style in "Hamlet" (1969) and Hamlet's Fictions (1988). He has two comprehensive books offering an approach to Shakespeare: How to Read Shakespeare (1971, 1992) and All of Shakespeare (1993). Besides a number of editions of Shakespeare's plays and collections of essays, he has written Joe Orton (1984), Sexual Fiction (1981), and an approach to comedy, Comedy High and Low (1978, 1988).

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Physics and Photography
01:090:256:33289
Terry Matilsky, Department of Physics & Astronomy
W 11:30 AM - 2:30 PM
CSB 334 (DNB)

Many fundamental aspects of physical theory concern themselves with the interaction and interrelationship of space and time, the infrastructure of our universe. Yet surprisingly, in a totally different context, these constituents can be observed in many aspects of art as well. In this seminar, we will explore how the photographic image depends on the control of space and time by the photographer.

We will study physical and geometric optics first, with emphasis on image formation, depth of field, resolution, magnification, and perspective. These investigations will enable us to visualize the world around us, and to begin to control the visual impact of the final print. At the same time, we will see how the development of the negative affects other aspects of the process, such as contrast. Extensive darkroom work is contemplated. While we study the physical processes involved, we will also discuss the Masters in the field. Each week you will critique a well-known photograph, and attempt to incorporate various ideas into your own work.

Homework will be assigned dealing with both the scientific and artistic content of photography. Of course, you will be taking pictures (indeed, we will be taking field trips - yay!! - to further stimulate our imagination), and artistic and technical critiques will be done collectively, so students at all levels can participate in the process. I hope to have rank beginners as well as already serious photographers in the class. Even advanced students can benefit from a "beginner's mind."

There are no prerequisites for the seminar, but you must have a desire to learn about the scientific as well as the artistic aspects of the photographic process. You must also have a focusing film camera in which shutter speeds and f-stops can be adjusted manually. Automatic and digital cameras are not acceptable! If you are contemplating buying a camera for the seminar, see me and I can make some recommendations. Note: All students who enroll will be required to pay a materials fee of $25.00 to help defray the costs of film, photographic paper, and chemicals.

TERRY MATILSKY is a professor in the Department of Physics. His specialty is in astrophysics. He served as Director of the Rutgers College Honors Program from 1989 to 1996. He has taken pictures from rockets from 100 miles in space (no, he hasn't been in them), but enjoys ground-based landscapes (preferably wilderness areas like Yosemite and Yellowstone) best. He has sold some of his least favorite photographs to ad agencies on Madison Avenue, just to see whether it could be done, but remains almost totally undiscovered as a true artist.

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Evolutionary Approach to Social and Economic Behavior
01:090:257:33290
Tomas Sjostrom, Department of Economics
TTh 6:10 PM - 7:30 PM
Murray 112 (CAC)

Economists study competitive and cooperative interactions in small-scale face-to-face groups, as well as interactions in anonymous large-scale markets. The traditional assumption is that people behave rationally, as profit- or utility-maximizers -- that is, people are assumed to act in their own (typically narrowly-defined) best interest.1 But if we look at the real world, individuals often act in ways that economists find hard to explain. Why do tourists leave tips in foreign restaurants to which they will never return? Why do people get angry and do things that hurt themselves more than they hurt anyone else? Why do CEOs, who already earn more money than they can spend in a lifetime, risk everything by engaging in illegal accounting practices? Evolutionary psychology and game theory provide some answers.

Game theory is a framework for analyzing strategic interaction. It is a branch of applied mathematics, so it requires serious thinking (but no particular math background). Evolutionary psychology applies “Darwinian” logic to human behavior. Of course, humans aren’t robots who have been programmed by evolution to leave tips in restaurants. (Anyway, there weren’t any restaurants on the savanna where our ancestors lived.) Behavior is influenced by the social environment, norms, culture, education and many other things. That’s why behavior is different in different parts of the world. But why are we so easily influenced? And there are similarities as well as differences? Ultimately, we are trying to understand the nature of humankind.

The grade will be based on seminar participation (including attendance, discussion, and term paper presentation), several quizzes, and a 10-15 page term paper on any topic discussed in the course. The required readings include research articles, class handouts, and the following three books: The Survival Game: How Game Theory Explains the Biology of Cooperation and Competition by David P. Barash, Evolutionary Psychology: A Beginner's Guide by Robin Dunbar and Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives by David Sloan Wilson. A recommended (but not required) reading is A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar.

TOMAS SJOSTROM is a game theorist interested in topics such as arms races, the Grameen Bank, and the internal organization of firms. His most recent paper reports on game theory experiments done in Japan and the US.

1. A hypothetical conversation between two economists: “My cell phone is the best.” “How do you know it is the best one?” “It must be true because if there had been a better one, I wouldn’t have bought this one.”

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Disaster, Culture, and Society
01:090:258:33291
Lee Clarke, Department of Sociology
Th 9:50 AM - 12:50 PM
Brett Hall Seminar Room (CAC)

Katrina was a bell-weather event for American society. Along with 9/11, it threw into bold relief just how vulnerable we can be. Such events are intellectual opportunities, chances to look at how society works, and fails to work. There will be more big disasters, and the consequences from them will continue to be severe. But the main reasons for these trends is not, as some have claimed, global warming, nor, as others have said, because nature or God are somehow punishing us. The main reasons have to do with how society is organized.

We usually think disasters are special but they are prosaic, part of, rather than discontinuous with, “normal” reality. In normal reality we must make sense of things. We excel at that, applying familiar categories to organize events, motives, and histories. Generically, disasters are not different from other events that need ordering. It is easy to imagine all kinds of non-disastrous things or times that must be confronted with, “How shall I make sense of this?” Big disasters, like Katrina, just do that in a big way.

This seminar will be case-based, which means that I’ll organize the materials around particular events. Examples are accidents (Bhopal, Titanic, Challenger, Columbia), “natural” disasters (Katrina, the threat from near earth objects), and epidemics (1918 flu). The focus will be on the interplay between culture, social institutions, and calamity. We will use video and internet resources throughout.

I will also construct exercises for students to participate in. An example might be giving groups of students a potential disaster scenario and then making them “advisors” to the President: What will you do? What do you recommend? What will be the consequences if you follow one path rather than another? We will run these exercises at key points in the semester, as knowledge about disaster accumulates.

Students will write one-page “reaction memos” to readings. I will provide examples of what these should look like, but basically they are critical reflections on the readings. Students will email these memos to everyone in the class and we will use them to drive seminar discussions. Students will very actively participate in the seminar, as we weave into and out of key ideas concerning culture and disaster.

LEE CLARKE is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology. His areas of expertise include leadership, culture, disaster, and organizational and technological failures. He has written about the Y2K problem, risk communication, panic, civil defense, evacuation, community response to disaster, organizational failure, and near earth objects; his most recent book, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Professor Clarke was awarded the Rutgers Graduate School Award for Excellence in Teaching and Graduate Research, 1996-1997, and Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools' 1998 Graduate Mentoring Award. In August 2005 he was honored with the Fred Buttel Distinguished Scholarship Award by the Environment and Technology section of the American Sociological Association. He has most recently appeared on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, ABC World News Tonight, and National Public Radio's affiliate in Irvine, CA, KUCI. Visit www.leeclarke.com for more information about the professor.

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The Breath of Kings: Shakespeare and the Production of History
01:090:260:33293
Emily Bartels, Department of English
TTh 1:10 PM - 2:30 PM
Brett Hall Seminar Room (CAC)

To produce "history," whether on the page or on the stage, is indeed to make it. When William Shakespeare brings Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, and Henry V imaginatively back to life in the early modern theater, or when Raphael Holinshed chronicles the reigns of these remarkable (in some cases outrageous) kings, they - the playwright and historian alike - are not simply recording a "real" past; they are shaping a vision of that never quite recoverable "reality." They are also setting their own terms for what history is and does - for what counts as an historical subject, an historical way of representing, and an historical agenda. Early modern English playwrights and chroniclers were, in fact, deeply engaged with not only the matter but also the question of "history." For them, to represent the past was to potently politicize the present, to shape the state as well as the stage, to interrogate the all important fault-line between fact and fiction, and to create brave new texts, brave new politics, and brave new worlds. "Such is the breath of kings," as Shakespeare writes in Richard II.

This seminar will take as its subject the ways in "history" was being produced, on the stage by the indomitable William Shakespeare, and off the stage by chroniclers such as Raphael Holinshed and Richard Hakluyt. In looking at the intersection of dramatic and non-dramatic writers in a period 400 years before our own, our aim will be to "historicize" the notion of what history is and does, to think seriously about how "history" evolves within a particular historical moment, and to understand how the form of an historical story defines its content. We will learn how to ask questions of dramatic and non-dramatic historically loaded texts, how to account for historical differences, how to read an historical moment through textual lenses, and how to read texts in their history moment.

Our primary readings will include: a selection of Shakespeare's plays (likely among them Richard III, Julius Caesar, Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2, Henry V, The Tempest) as well as plays (John Ford, Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, Bertolt Brecht, Edward II, Aime Cesaire, A Tempest) that provide useful temporal and generic contrasts; and selections from William Warner, Albion's England, Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, John Stowe, Summary of English Chronicles, and Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations of the English Nation.

Students will work on one extensive research project of their own design through the term and will keep a reflective critical journal summarizing and analyzing their readings-in-progress.

EMILY BARTELS (BA Yale 1979; PhD Harvard 1987) is an associate professor in the English department and a specialist on early modern literature and culture. Her publications include: Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe, an edited collection of essays on Christopher Marlowe, and a number of essays on Shakespeare and questions of race, gender, and cross-cultural contact. She is currently completing a book, Staging the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello.

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Romances of the Jungle: Lost Worlds and Last Frontiers
01:090:261:33295
Jorge Marcone, Department of Spanish & Portuguese
MW 7:40 PM - 9:00 PM
Brett Hall Seminar Room (CAC)

In the genre of the ‘Romance of the Jungle’ along the twentieth century, the main protagonist, disappointed with the cosmopolitan city for fulfilling his expectations of emancipation and self-realization, attempts a "return to nature" in the wilderness of the tropical forests of the Amazon or the Orinoco basins. Paradoxically, this "return" reveals itself as a search for an alternative modern life style (freedom, artistic authenticity, overcoming alienation from self and others, and the renewal of gender and ethnic identity). This search usually ends in failure, or death, as the environmental, anthropological and historical peculiarities of the jungle shatters previous expectations and assumptions of the protagonist. For the reader, the ultimate consequences of this crisis are not as disappointing. On the one hand, in following the characters’ experience of wilderness, the reader realizes that such experience is interdependent with the social conditions that made it possible. On the other hand, the reader witnesses the process through which the characters reach an awareness of their own embodiment, and embedment into the environment as a condition of personal and social being. In the end, a literary genre that could be used to illustrate the problematic radical split between city and wilderness, carries an awareness regarding the interaction of society and nature that resonates with current notions of political ecology, social “metabolism,” environmental complexity, and sustainability.

Focusing on a combination of Latin American fiction in translation from Spanish and texts originally written in English, this seminar will explore, first, the variations to the basic narrative outlined above in the past century. Secondly, we will focus on the many ways in which these fictions elaborate on the interaction between the human and the non-human, such as: specific environmental crises and/or conflicts, insertion into unsustainable political ecologies, landscape and border-crossing, the impact of the non-human in the process of self-understanding, the influence of environmental awareness in the way in which literature and art are understood, etc.

Seminar requirements: a 15-20 page research paper to be developed along the semester through short written responses to primary readings, research on secondary sources, an oral presentation, and class participation.
Primary readings:

Green Mansions (1904) by William Henry Hudson (Argentina, 1841-England, 1922).
Short stories by Horacio Quiroga (Uruguay, 1878-1937).
"Los mensú" (1914, "The Contract Laborers," Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte, 1918).
"Juan Darién" (1920, El desierto, 1924).
"El hombre muerto" (1920, "The Dead Man," Los desterrados, 1926).
"Anaconda" (1921, Anaconda, 1921).
"El desierto" (1923, "The Wilderness," El desierto, 1924).
"El regreso de Anaconda" (1925, "The Return of Anaconda," Los desterrados, 1926)
Los pasos perdidos (1953, The Lost Steps) by Alejo Carpentier (Cuba, 1904-1979).
Keep the River on Your Right (1969) by Tobias Schneebaum (U.S.A., 1922-2005)
The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History (1969) by V. S. Naipaul. (Trinidad, 1932-).
El hablador (1987, The Storyteller) by Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru, 1936- ).
JORGE MARCONE is an Associate Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and a Core Faculty in the Comparative Literature Program. His teaching and research interests are focused on the study of ecological/environmental ideas in literatures and cultures from Latin America and incorporates such diverse fields as political ecology, environmental history, anthropology and philosophy. It also requires an understanding of the texts as responses to specific environmental conditions and changes as much as to the flow of ideas, peoples, goods, and capital across the Americas and the Atlantic. In recent years, Professor Marcone has either directed or developed the Rutgers Summer Study Abroad Programs in Spain and Peru. Additionally, Professor Marcone regularly teaches Introduction to Hispanic Literature, and Advanced Grammar and Composition.

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Rethinking American Architecture
01:090:262:33296
Carla Yanni, Department of Art History
W 9:50 AM - 12:50 PM
Brett Hall Seminar Room (CAC)

This seminar will focus attention on the architectural history of American buildings of the latter half of the 19th century. Architectural history is here broadly conceived to include the entire built environment--individual buildings, city plans, parks, houses, public institutions, and infrastructure. We will first learn the standard history of the period, and we will then rethink that standard history by conducting original research on local buildings.

For much of the twentieth century, historians considered the second half of the nineteenth century to be a debased period, marked by stylistic confusion and rampant copying of European fashions. By studying local buildings in their own historical contexts, by setting aside the Great Man approach to history, students will be able to create a more nuanced and accurate history of the period. Nineteenth-century journals (many of which are available on-line) tell a rich and complicated story about the second half of the nineteenth century.

Requirements: discussion of assigned readings; short papers; a journal comprised of observations of the built environment; oral presentation; and 10 to 15 page term paper on a single building or landscape. The seminar will include at least one field trip, probably to New York City.

CARLA YANNI is Associate Professor of Art History and Assistant Vice President for Undergraduate Academic Affairs. Her area of scholarly expertise is nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture; by architectural history, she refers not to the study of great monuments and architects, but rather to the intellectual, social, and cultural meanings of buildings. She promotes the study of architectural history as a way of understanding a society’s values. In 2000, Johns Hopkins University Press published her first book, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display. Her second book, titled The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States, was published by University of Minnesota Press in spring 2007. During the academic year 2002-2003 she was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. In 1994 she earned the doctorate in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1987. She grew up in Rochester, New York.

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How Should I Live?
01:090:263:33297
Ruth Chang, Department of Philosophy
T 4:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Scott 105 (CAC)

Ethical theories attempt to answer the question, How should I live? Although philosophers have offered many different types of ethical theory, the history of ethics has in large part been a debate between two main contenders, consequentialism and Kantian ethics. In his recent book manuscript, Climbing the Mountain, Derek Parfit argues that this debate, which has occupied philosophers for over two millennia, is misguided; rather than offering radically distinct views about how we should live, consequentialists and Kantians are climbing different sides of the same mountain.

This course examines Parfit’s argument via study of parts of his book manuscript, still in preparation for publication. The course begins with a nuts-and-bolts explanation of consequentialism and Kantian ethics. We will then turn to the questions central to Parfit’s argument: What is the nature of a practical reason? What is it to have a reason to do something? Do your reasons to do ‘this’ rather than ‘that’ derive from your wanting to do ‘this’ rather than ‘that’? Or do your reasons derive from the value of what you want? With a view about practical reasons in place, we explore how best to understand Kantian ethics and examine how the best interpretation of Kantian ethics might lead us to a form of consequentialist theory.

Since the material for this course will be distributed via email attachment, there are no materials that students need purchase. Students enrolled in this seminar must have reliable and frequent access to their email and to printing facilities.

Requirements for the course include one term paper (between 20-25 double-spaced pages), one class presentation, and active class participation. The term paper will count for 50% of the final grade, the presentation and class participation will each count for 25% of the final grade. If you take this course, you should be prepared to participate in class discussion. The aim of this course is not only to learn some great philosophy but to develop certain skills of communication, in particular, how to make cogent and relevant remarks in a general discussion of difficult material.

Professor RUTH CHANG has a B.A. from Dartmouth College, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a Ph.D. from Oxford University. She has taught at Rutgers since 1997. Before coming to Rutgers she taught at Harvard, Oxford, UCLA, and the University of Chicago Law school. Since coming to Rutgers, she has been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Princeton Center for Human Values, a Fellow in Ethics at the Harvard Safra Center for Ethics, and a Charles Ryskamp Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. She is author of Making Comparisons Count, editor of Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason, and various articles in ethics and metaethics.

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Race Matters
01:090:264:33298
Leslie Fishbein, Department of American Studies
M 9:15 AM - 12:15 PM
RAB 018 (DC)

This seminar will examine the ways in which issues of race arising originally from our society’s vexed relationship with slavery have shaped subsequent social and cultural developments with respect to ethnic and racial identity, social mobility, popular culture and sexuality. The seminar will explore these issues as they arise during the colonial era of settlement and tease out their implications through the establishment of the republic, our nation’s experience with slavery and emancipation, and during the post-Reconstruction Era in which ethnic minorities among immigrant groups also took on racialized identities. Texts may include the following books and book excerpts, essays, and films:

Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812

Eric Lott, Love and Theft

George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914

Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925

Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of "Race" in Twentieth-Century America.” Journal of American History 83.1 (June 1996): 44-69

Langston Hughes, “Passing” in The Ways of White Folks. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. Pp. 49-53.

Nella Larsen, Passing

The Jazz Singer (1927): the Al Jolson talkie employing blackface

Ethnic Notions (1986): Marlon Riggs’s documentary film on racial stereotypes

Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004): Ken Burns’ documentary film on the history of the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion

Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

J. Guglielmo, Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America

Renee Romano, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America

An American Love Story (1999): PBS documentary film on interracial couple

Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (fictionalized memoir of lesbian daughter of Caribbean immigrants growing up in the shadow of the McCarthy Era in the 1950s)

Cornel West, Race Matters

Spike Lee, Jungle Fever (1991): film about love affair between black architect and his working-class Italian secretary

Students will be expected to write an analytical research paper and shorter written work and to participate actively in seminar discussion.

LESLIE FISHBEIN is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Jewish Studies, a member of the graduate faculty of the History Department, and an affiliate faculty member of Women’s and Gender Studies, Urban Planning and Public Policy, and Cinema Studies. Her book Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911-1917, a study of rebels and bohemians in Greenwich Village in the Teens, won the New York State Historical Association Manuscript Award. She currently is working on a book entitled Memoirs of the Sex Trade: A Cultural History of Prostitution, which examines the self-representation of American prostitutes and madams.

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French: Culture and Community; or Civilization: What's the Use?
01:090:265:33299 (crosslisted with 01:420:317)
Mary Shaw, Department of French
TTh 2:15 PM - 5:15 PM
RAB 109A (DC)

Enrollment in this seminar is by special permission only. Please contact Professor Shaw at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for permission to register.

Developed through the university-wide CASE program, this seminar combines a study of the evolving themes of community and education in French literature with service in a particular community -- in this case, students teaching French language and culture to children at the Lord Sterling Elementary School in New Brunswick. Readings reflect a wide range of historical periods and genres, including such authors as Rabelais, Montaigne, La Fontaine, Perrault, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and folktales from Haiti. Participants also gain familiarity with various aspects of French and francophone popular culture through their participation in puppet theater, and in musical, artistic, and other projects around which the curriculum is planned.

REQUIRED READINGS (selections to be purchased in xerox packets)
Comhaire-Sylvain, Le Roman de Bouqui

La Fontaine, Fables
Montaigne, De l'institution des enfants
Rabelais, Gargantua
Rousseau, Du contra! Social, L'Emile
Perrault, Contes
Tessonneau, ed., Conies créoles d'Haiti
Tocqueville, De la democracie en Amerique
Barber, Benjamin R., The Civic Mission of the University
Bloustein, Edward J., Community Service
Clinton, William J., Address on National Service. March 1, 1993
Dewey, John, The Democratic Conception in Education
King Martin Luther, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
Stimpson, C.R. Meno's Boy. Hearing his Story-and his Sister's
Principal Assignments

Student-teachers will meet with me during the Tuesday and Thursday class sessions to discuss required readings and to plan our collective cultural projects to be done with 4th-5th-grade students from Lord Stirling's After School Program French Club on Tuesdays from 3:15:-4:15. From our regular class sessions will also be drawn the French Language Lessons to be delivered by student-¬teachers in regular teaching sessions (Tuesdays and Thursdays 2:45 - 3:15) in fifth-grade classes at Lord Stirling School. Our first teaching session will be on Tuesday, September 18.

Our first Afterschool Program session will also be on Tuesday, September 18. By the end of the second week of class (September 8), each student--teacher will submit a plan (1 -2 page proposal) for a collective project (literary, theatrical, artistic, musical, scientific, culinary, geographical etc.) to be implemented during the term. The projects proposed will form the basis of your term papers, (approx. 10 pages) which will constitute the major written assignment for the class. The term papers must in some way connect your cultural project (a description of what you did, how you did it, and why) with your teaching experiences, and with ideas from the required readings. They must also include some independent research.

There will also be a midterm focused on the required readings.

Professor MARY SHAW focuses most of her research on 19th- and 20th-Century French poetry, particularly Mallarmé, but her work explores poetry's relations with other genres (theater and various types of fictional and non-fictional prose) and with disparate art forms (music, dance, and the visual arts). She often works across centuries as well. Much of her teaching has revolved around the Zimmerli Art Museum's fin-de-siècle illustrated book and journal collection, and she has been especially invested in the French Department's CASE program, which involves undergraduates in teaching French language and culture to children through puppet theater and other means. In recent years, she has also published poetry and a bilingual children's book. You will also find her teaching some of the beginning French literature courses.

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Communications and Human Values
01:090:287:33300
Richard Heffner, Department of Communication
T 9:50 AM - 12:50 PM
SC 201 (CAC)

This seminar is open only to first-year and sophomore students.

This seminar assumes that much of what it means to be an American at the dawn of the 21st Century derives from the power of the mass media, with particular emphasis on their socializing and value-legitimating content. To deal effectively with such power, to be sure, is now a major task before organized society, and students will first be asked to identify their own respective approaches to the proper relationship between the individual and the State through discussions based on such readings as Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, Robert Merton's Mass Persuasion, J.S. Mill's On Liberty, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, as well as a variety of relevant articles and speeches.

Seminar emphasis will then be placed on such value-laden contemporary media issues as a Fairness Doctrine (the real or imagined "chilling effect" of a requirement for media fairness and balance); cameras in the courts (do televised trials enhance justice, or instead create a "mobocracy," with trial by a new jury of public opinion?); and media self-regulation (can there in fact be meaningful voluntary self-discipline in a free market, free speech, mass media-driven society?).

Professor RICHARD D. HEFFNER is University Professor of Communications and Public Policy at Rutgers, where he began to teach History and Political Science in 1948. He was Founding General Manager of New York’s Public Television Channel 13 in the early 1960’s, served as chairman of the motion picture industry’s voluntary film ratings board from 1974 to 1994, and continues, after nearly 50 years, to produce and moderate “The Open Mind,” the longest-running conversation program in public television. He recently published A Conversational History of Modern America (retitled As They Saw It in its paperback edition), which brings together interviews he has conducted over the years with Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Robert Redford, Bill Moyers, Malcolm X, Donald Rumsfeld, B.F. Skinner and hundreds of others. Rutgers Magazine describes reading A Conversational History of Modern America “like being invited to the dinner party of the century.” Professor Heffner’s A Documentary History of the United States and his edition of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America are classics of their kind.

Fall 2008 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

How Sex Changed: Biomedical Sex Research in the 20th Century
Identity and Culture in an Age of Uncertainty
Communication and Ethnicity: Asian Americans
Globalization in Historical Perspective
Heroism
Global Warming: Policy without Politics?
Sickle Cell Anemia- The Intersection of Genetics, Biochemistry, Medicine, History, Evolution and Politics
The Social Psychology of Gender
That's Not Fair! Inequality and Opportunity in America
Extraterrestrial Life
The Invention of Romantic Love in Medieval France
Gender, Power and the Development of Black Politics and Thought
Imagining Self/ Imagining Other: The Politics and Poetics of Hollywood Film
Evolution and the Human Language Faculty
Telling Stories: Oral History and Performance
Complementarity in Physics, Biology and Philosophy
Infertility in Contemporary American Society
Neuroscience & Stem Cell Research: The Known, The Unknown, and The Process of Discovery
History, Material Culture and the Rutgers University Collections
Shakespeare and His World
Communication and Human Values

How Sex Changed: Biomedical Sex Research in the 20th Century
01:090:250:10982
James Reed, Department of History
W 6:10 PM - 9:00 PM
Brett Hall Seminar Room (CAC)

This is a seminar about the relationship between scientists and human sexuality. We will examine some of the most important efforts to understand and to control sexual behavior. Who studied sex? How did they define it? What methods did they use? Why did they do it? Who paid for the work? What is the relationship between this science, gender systems, and other salient aspects of U.S. society? What can we learn from the immense disseminar constructed by sex researchers?

We will begin with the "crisis in civilized sexual morality" and Freud's visit to the U.S. in 1900, and end with the emergence of the intersexed and transsexuals as self-conscious minorities successfully struggling for civil rights. We will have an Alfred Kinsey film festival, and will devote several weeks to the career John Money, the Johns Hopkins University clinical psychologist who championed the cause of surgical sex reassignment. Assigned readings will include: Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality; Deborah Rudacille, The Riddle of Gender; John Coalpinto; and other materials provided by the instructor. All participants in the class will be expected to make a presentation (15 minutes maximum) about a researcher, novel, autobiography, journal, or website that is relevant to our story.   There will be two short written assignments (5 pages) and a longer essay (minimum 10 pages) that will serve as a final exam.

JAMES REED has professed History at Rutgers since 1975. He got his B.A. at Louisiana State University and his A.M. and Ph.D. at Harvard. Among historians he is best known for a book titled From Private Vice to Public Virtue, which is a history of birth control in the U.S. He has also written on intelligence tests, penitentiaries, and biomedical sex research.   His current writing project is a history of biomedical sex research, working title—Sex Research in America: From Social Hygiene to Sexology.    Among students he is best known as the instructor in Development of the U.S. I & II, as well as more specialized courses such as Health and the Environment in the U.S., Sport in History, The IQ Controversy, and an honors seminar on “How Sex Changed.” He served as Dean of Rutgers College from 1985 to 1994.
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Identity and Culture in an Age of Uncertainty
01:090:251 Index #10983
Arlene Stein, Department of Sociology
M 05:00-08:00pm LSH A215
Livingston Campus

“Identity” signifies both individuality and community. It suggests a connection between our subjective understandings of the world and the cultural and historical settings in which we find ourselves. To have an “identity” is to possess a sense of oneself as relatively stable over time, even as the world around us is constantly in motion. This seminar explores the relationship between identities and social/cultural change. We will explore some of the challenges facing us in a world where risk, uncertainty, and flux are an indelible part of life.

As individuals, we are products of our time, and of the events that shape our worlds. Yet we are not prisoners of time or of the culture and society in which we live. As C. Wright Mills once said, a central task for sociology is to imagine how three dimensions—history, biography, and social structure—combine to create social reality. This is one of our primary tasks this semester. Toward this end, we will ask: what is identity - is there even such a thing? How are identities socially constructed, maintained, and transformed? Is identity a life story, a narrative? If so, how do we tell the story of a life? How has identity evolved across time and space? How does it become transformed across the life span, and through the activities of social movements, and in response to war and social unrest?

In the second part of the seminar, we will discuss the ways in which traumatic events such as rape and war can challenge the integrity of the self, and call one’s identity into question. We will try to understand how traumas shape individual and collective memories, how different groups have tried to commemorate past traumatic episodes, and how/with what consequence traumatic images circulate through mass media, affecting us all. Finally, we will consider the ways that globalization, as a cultural and economic process, leads to greater opportunities for some while introducing a new set of risks, and bringing new inequalities. How is globalization shaping identities today? How and why have some ethnic and religious groups responded to globalization, and the uncertainties it introduces, by turning to religious/ethnic fundamentalisms? What are the prospects of moving beyond such defensive forms of identification?

ARLENE STEIN teaches courses on the sociology of gender, sexuality, culture, religion, and identities. She is the author of three books and the editor of two collections of essays. Among them is The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community’s Battle Over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights (Beacon), an ethnographic study of a conservative campaign against gay/lesbian rights and its impact upon one community. The book won the American Anthropological Association’s Ruth Benedict Award and an Honor Award from the American Library Association. Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation (University of California), an earlier work, examines the impact of feminism on women’s sexual identities. A collection of her essays, Shameless: Sexual Dissidence in American Culture (NYU), was published in 2006. She received the Simon and Gagnon Award for career contributions to the study of sexualities, given by the American Sociological Association. She has two current research projects: the first is a study of trauma and family memories; the second concerns religious expression in public schools. She serves on the graduate faculty of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Rutgers, and previously taught at the University of Oregon and the University of Essex.
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Communication and Ethnicity: Asian Americans
01:090:252 Index #10984
Hui-Min Kuo, Department of Communication
T 01:10-04:10pm Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

This seminar will introduce the theories, approaches, and processes involved in communicating with individuals of different cultural backgrounds, specifically, Asian Americans, while examining potential challenges and issues relevant to this context. This seminar aims to help advance the understanding of Asian and Asian American communication in a multicultural society and global world by focusing on how the concepts of ethnicity and culture can influence everyday communication behavior and outcomes. The seminar will explore (a) the theoretical assumptions of Asian and Asian American culture and communication, (b) the role of ethnicity and communication in Asian and Asian American cultures, (c) the perspectives and development of ethnic and cultural identities, (d) the communication patterns and styles of Asians and Asian Americans studied in the literature, and (e) the practical implications for communication and interaction with Asians and Asian Americans.

In this seminar, students will explore fundamental theories of Asian American cultural communication; critically assess the theoretical construct and application of various concepts relevant to Asian American cultural communication; critically compare and contrast applications of the approaches studied in interpersonal, family, or organizational settings; identify potential challenges and perceptual similarities and differences relating to Asian American communication and cultures; and complete a research project by participating in the processes of literature review, research methods, discussion and results, and writing research reports. Besides research, students will engage in discussion of assigned readings, small group projects based on contemporary films, and exposure to cultural events.

HUI-MIN KUO is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Communication. Her teaching and research interests are in organizational culture and intercultural communication. As a first-generation Asian American, she is particularly interested in studying communication norms and behaviors of Asian Americans when they interact with others. She earned her PhD in Communication from Rutgers. With diverse professional experience in instruction, administration, and services to students and faculty, she is interested in connecting communication theories to everyday practices. Through teaching and research, her goal is to integrate theory and practice to enrich student learning and the communication discipline.
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Globalization in Historical Perspective
01:090:253 Index #11152
Michael Bordo, Department of Economics
TH 09:50a-12:50p Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

In the past two decades, globalization -- defined as the integration of goods, labor and financial markets -- has been a powerful force in the global economy. It has led to heated controversy. Debate has been engaged between proponents who see the benefits of globalization as a better global allocation of resources, more rapid economic growth, and the opening up of parts of the world that have previously been left behind. Opponents view globalization as disruptive of the existing economic and social order and as transferring resources from the losers in the globalization game to the winners. This debate has played vociferously into the political arena at the International Institutions and at the domestic political level across the world. In the US and EU, concern has mounted over the loss of jobs to the emerging countries. In the emerging countries there is concern over financial instability and financial crises consequent upon capital flow reversals.

The recent era of globalization is not unique. The world saw a similar phenomenon a century ago, in the period 1870 to 1914. Evidence on migration, trade flows, and capital flows suggests that integration was in some dimensions as extensive or more so than in the present. However, just as in the current era, capital flows were fickle, leading to waves of financial crises in the emerging countries of the day.

The earlier era of globalization was also rife with debate and political controversy. Indeed a backlash by labor in the new world countries of the US, Canada, Australia, and Argentina against the massive flows of labor from Europe led to very restrictive legislation against immigration in all these countries. In the old world land owners objected to the decline in their rents in the face of cheap new world agricultural products. This led to a rise in tariffs in the 1890s. These forces some have argued contributed to the rise of nationalism leading to World War I and the end of the first era of globalization.

Students will write papers and give presentations on the facts of globalization then and now; the costs and benefits of integration; the political debates in both eras ; and the policies taken and not taken. Finally it would discuss the present debate and the challenges for the future.
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Heroism
01:090:254 Index #10985
Steven Walker, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures/ Comp Lit
T 09:50a-12:50p Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

A critical investigation into the phenomenon of heroism in both men and women, as represented in complex ways in literary texts and mythology, and also as occurring in real life events both contemporary and historic. The seminar will examine various older narratives involving heroes and heroines in order to consider (in cultural context but also in terms of universal human potential) these and other questions:

1. What motivates people to risk their lives and welfare in order to engage willingly in some form of heroic action? Is there a hero archetype?

2. Is there a dark side to heroism?

3. Can one extend the idea of heroism to include intellectual heroism (Socrates, Oedipus, Faust) or psychological and spiritual heroism (Inanna, Odysseus, Nachiketa)?

4. Does heroism present a gendered dimension in some cultures? To what extent can one distinguish male and female forms of heroism?

Texts (to be read and discussed, or on occasion to be presented by the professor) will include most of the following: Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the Tyrant (along with Jean-Joseph Goux’ Oedipus, Philosopher); Plato’s Apology and its presentation of the figure of Socrates; the Sumerian myth of The Descent of Inanna; Odysseus’ journey to the Land of the Dead in the Odyssey; the Katha Upanishad’s story of Nachiketa and Yama the god of Death; the Iliad’s portrayal of Achilles; the Bhagavad Gita’s presentation of Arjuna’s dilemma; Joan of Arc and her myth; Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage; Aristotle’s anatomy of the virtue of courage in the Nicomachean Ethics; the thematically parallel stories of Alcestis (in Euripides’ serio-comic play) and Savitri (in the Mahabharata); Joseph Campbell’s anatomy of the heroic quest; figures from Robert Segal’s anthology of hero myths.

The second part of the seminar will dedicated to the presentation of individual student projects, the goal of which will be to discover and discuss in a complex fashion (using the theoretical perspectives established earlier in the seminar) heroic actions in real life, whether contemporary or in the past.

STEVEN F. WALKER is Professor of Comparative Literature, and has taught frequently in the Rutgers Honors Program. After majoring in Greek at the University of Wisconsin, and receiving a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (French, Greek and Sanskrit) from Harvard University, he went on to teach at Rutgers, where he has been ever since. His professional interests range from the discovery of significant but covert subtexts (some of them classical) in modern literature to the Jungian study of mythology, as manifested most recently in a book Jung and the Jungians on Myth (Routledge, 2002) and in articles on Proust and the Mass, the hypothesis of the Greek invention of world theater, and the Faustian subtext of Nabokov’s Lolita. His other interests include classical piano music, the 1920s jazz of Bix Beiderbecke, spending time in France, Jungian psychology and Hindu mysticism.
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Global Warming: Policy without Politics?
01:090:255 Index #10986
Sunil Somalwar, Department of Physics and Astronomy
MW 01:40p-03:00p HLL Rm 009
Busch Campus

Everybody is concerned about energy and global warming these days. Politicians and entrepreneurs are pushing their favorite solutions, many of which are not sensible. In the meanwhile, the United States continues to use enough energy to bring the entire Lake Erie to a boil within a couple of years. Is energy consumption on such enormous scale necessary to maintain our living standards? Is it possible that reducing our energy consumption via increased efficiency will in fact increase our technology base and living standards? What are the European and Japanese experiences and how do they compare to ours?

In this class, we will examine the usage of energy in modern society that has resulted in the dramatic increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, learn the basics of the greenhouse effect and global warming, and discuss the consequences. We will explore how individual actions (such as commuting, housing choices, etc) impact global warming. From a public policy standpoint, we will evaluate the relative merits of various approaches and discuss the political implications. This area is fraught with “unintended consequences”, so instead of proposing pat answers, we will learn how to evaluate proposed solutions critically. For example, are solar panels cost effective? Does the electric car make sense?

This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to exploring energy and climate change policy, and should be of interest to both science and non-science majors.

SUNIL SOMALWAR smashes very high energy particles at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago and the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The protons he studies collide head on while travelling at about 99.999999% of the speed of light. These collisions create conditions that existed in our universe soon after the Big Bang and help us answer fundamental questions such as how the universe came about, what it is made of, why things attract or repel each other and where all the antimatter has gone. Professor Somalwar is also very concerned about how we humans are smashing the natural world, which is partly why he teaches classes on energy and global warming. He also runs a nonprofit to save the world's remaining few wild tigers (yes, really!) and is a volunteer activist with New Jersey's Sierra Club.
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Sickle Cell Anemia-
The Intersection of Genetics, Biochemistry, Medicine, History, Evolution and Politics
01:090:256 Index#10987
Professor Abram Gabriel, Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
W 03:20-06:20P CABM Rm 308
Busch Campus

As our society becomes more and more specialized, the gaps in knowledge and perspectives separating scientists, physicians, politicians, and consumers from one another, become wider and the consequences more serious. Although half the American public does not believe in the theory of evolution, advances in molecular biology, genetics and genomics, all with an evolutionary underpinning, are transforming our concepts of health and individual disease risks, with implications for insurance coverage, diagnostic decisions and treatment options.

This seminar will concentrate on examining medical, biochemical, genetic, evolutionary, as well as historic, political, and sociological aspects of sickle cell anemia (SCA), the most common Mendelian genetic disorder of African-Americans. SCA has been at the forefront of biomedical research, in terms of understanding its molecular basis and designing diagnostic tests and treatments. The relationship between SCA and malaria resistance is one of clearest examples of natural selection, while the prevalence of SCA in the U.S. (>80,000 affected individuals) is the direct result of the importation of slaves from West Africa. Diagnosis, treatment and ongoing management of patients with SCA varies among states and countries, and reflect political and cultural priorities.

The class will consist of lectures, guest lectures, as well as class discussions and student presentations. Students will be assigned readings from journal articles and books. Early in the semester, students will decide on a research topic of mutual instructor/student interest related to some aspect of SCA or another genetic disorder. During the semester, students will present their findings to the class. At the end of the semester, students will submit a term paper on their topic, utilizing primary literature, policy reviews, and/or personal interviews.

This course is designed for students interested in majoring or already majoring in Biology, Biochemistry, Genetics, History, Africana Studies, Evolution and Ecology, Anthropology, as well as for students with career interests in medicine, public health, molecular biology, biotechnology, sociology, or the history of medicine. There are no pre-requisites.

ABRAM GABRIEL is an associate professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and Graduate Director of the Joint Program in Biochemistry. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his M.D. and M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University. His research centers on mechanisms and consequences of transposable genetic elements. This is his first SAS honors seminar, and is based on his interest in making molecular genetics more widely understandable to non-scientists and making the societal repercussions of genetics better appreciated by those planning careers in biomedical science.
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The Social Psychology of Gender
01:090:257 Index #10988
Laurie Rudman, Department of Psychology
MW 01:40-03:00p LSH A215
Livingston Campus

From birth onward, female and male individuals are perceived to be fundamentally different -- so much so that whether a newborn is a boy or girl is usually the first question people ask. Further, young boys and girls largely segregate themselves and develop very different styles of interaction. Yet, adult men and women typically seek an intimate partner of the other sex and, increasingly, work together in a variety of occupational settings. This seminar will emphasize the challenges that women face as they strive toward gender equality, and that both sexes face as they strive toward harmonious relations. We will address fundamental questions about how people think about and behave toward others because of gender categories. How and why are women and men conceived to be different, and to what degree are these beliefs a matter of explicit ideologies versus implicit (nonconscious) beliefs? What are the social consequences of these perceived gender differences? What happens to people who deviate from gender stereotypes and roles – when is this tolerated versus punished? How do men and women negotiate the complexity and contradictions of gender relations in heterosexual romance and at work?

This seminar will assign primary readings to accompany a book on gender that was written by the instructor (with Peter Glick; see reference below) and was conceived in the spirit of a new look at gender. The materials will emphasize how two basic aspects of gender relations – male dominance and intimate interdependence – combine to foster a complex relationship between and attitudes toward men and women. These basic structural facts can be used to make sense of many otherwise puzzling and seemingly contradictory aspects of gender conceptions and relations.

Course requirements will include weekly written assignments based on the readings, a final term paper, and thoughtful and informed class participation.

Rudman, L. A., & Glick, P. (2008). The social psychology of gender: How power and intimacy shape gender relations. New York: Guilford.

LAURIE A. RUDMAN is a Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her research interests are inter-group relations and implicit social cognition. The author of over 40 professional publications, she is currently Associate Editor of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Her honors and awards include a National Science Foundation Fellowship, National Research Service Award (National Institutes of Health), and winner (with Eugene Borgida) of the Gordon Allport Prize for the best paper on inter-group relations, given annually by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Dr. Rudman is an honorary fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, for which she currently serves on the Executive Committee. She also serves on the Advisory Council for the National Science Foundation and is a representative on the board of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological, and Cognitive Sciences.
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That's Not Fair! Inequality and Opportunity in America
01:090:258 Index #10989
Patricia Roos, Department of Sociology
M 01:10-04:10p Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Avenue Campus

Issues of inequality are central to the research that many social scientists do. Sociologists have long studied how inequality gets produced and reproduced, and how ascriptive inequalities shape our access to a wide range of opportunities. These core issues will be the focus of this seminar.

We begin with an overview of why class still matters in contemporary American society. In a general way, we’ll assess how important class remains in defining our life chances, and our opportunity to pursue the American Dream. More specifically, with respect to the workplace we'll see how people come to work in the jobs they do and what factors affect the promotions and salaries they earn. We will examine how inequality has been rising in recent years, and the effects rising inequality has on that quintessential group, the American middle class. We’ll focus on categorical (i.e., group) inequalities, especially the "big three" (race, class, and gender), but address other forms of inequality (such as immigrant status) as well.

As more overt forms of discrimination have declined, researchers have begun to examine the more subtle ways in which inequality is reproduced, especially in the workplace. We'll talk about these more subtle mechanisms of inequity, and discuss the ways they are often embedded in interactions among people and in the policies and procedures of our societal institutions.

There are no prerequisites for this seminar. Although many of the readings come from a variety of disciplines, an important goal of this seminar is to introduce you to the sociological perspective and imagination.

Students are required to attend each class session. Because this course is a "seminar" and not a "lecture" course, there will be less lecturing, and more discussion. The success of the seminar depends on active participation, and the small class size should facilitate this goal. Assigned readings should be completed prior to class meetings, and you should come to class prepared to ask questions.

PATRICIA ROOS is a Professor of Sociology. She received her BA and MA in sociology from the University of California, Davis, and her Ph.D. in sociology from UCLA. She teaches courses on work; inequalities; work, family, and politics; gender and work; and research methods. She won both the President’s and Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching while at SUNY Stony Brook. Professor Roos has published widely in gender and work, the feminization of traditionally male occupations, and work and family. Three projects are currently front and center on her research agenda: (1) gender equity in higher education, (2) race, class, and gender differences in work/family behavior and attitudes, and (3) a collaborative project with Rutgers colleagues on how to move toward real gender equality among women and men.
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~roos/
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Extraterrestrial Life
01:090:259 Index #13320
Andrew Baker, Department of Physics & Astronomy
MW 04:30-05:50p Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

For centuries, humans have looked at the night sky and wondered whether we are alone or whether we share the universe with advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. In recent years, this question has begun to move from the realm of speculation to the arena of scientific inquiry, thanks to new discoveries about planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, about potential habitats for life in our solar system, and about the possible development of life in extreme environments on Earth. This seminar, intended for students from all academic majors, will examine the prospects for the emergence of extraterrestrial life (intelligent or otherwise) and our detection of it from a scientific perspective. A familiarity with basic mathematical and scientific concepts will be assumed; moderately sophisticated mathematics (e.g., calculus and Fourier analysis) will be discussed but not assigned for homework. Course meetings will be principally devoted to discussions -- led by students (selected at random at the beginning of each class) and guided by the instructor -- of weekly reading assignments. Background material from a single textbook will be supplemented by popular books and articles, as well as selected papers from the research literature. Grades will be based on leadership of and participation in discussions, short weekly writing assignments, a mid-term research mini-project, and an end-of-term paper.

ANDREW BAKER is an observational astrophysicist working in several areas of extragalactic astronomy at optical, infrared, and radio wavelengths. His principal interests center on the formation and evolution of galaxies in the nearby and distant universe: how they form stars, how they grow in mass, and how they coevolve with their central black holes. Professor Baker expects to make extensive use of the new South African Large Telescope, in which Rutgers is a major participant. Before coming to Rutgers, he was a Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the University of Maryland, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics outside Munich, and a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology.
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The Invention of Romantic Love in Medieval France
01:090:261 Index #10991
Mary Speer, Department of French
T 03:55-06:55p RAB- Rm 207
Douglass Campus

Around the middle of the 12th century, French aristocrats learned how to “fall in love” and how to express their love--a completely secular, (mostly) heterosexual love--in words, deeds, and images. This revolutionary concept, sometimes called “courtly love,” represents a major cultural transformation that continues to influence the way we think and talk about being “in love” today. Crucial to teaching the new languages of courtly love and the remapped gender identities it produced were popular literary works performed at courts throughout Western Europe, before audiences of men and women eager for the latest entertainment and for instruction in the refined manners that confirmed their elite social status.

In this seminar we will look first at two important pre-courtly conceptions of love: feudal male relationships celebrated in the well-known Song of Roland; and the church-sanctioned rejection of earthly loves exemplified in early saints’ lives. Then we will explore major literary models that shaped the new discourses on love: intricate troubadour songs in which skill with words and music demonstrates prowess in both loving and singing of love; other lyric genres that exploit the tensions between idealized poetic love and real sexual desire, as well as class differences between aristocrat and commoner; the Tristan legend of tragic adulterous passion; Arthurian romances in which knights seek out perilous adventures to prove themselves worthy of love; and the internalization of the love quest through allegory.

All works will be read in English translation.

Readings:
The Song of Roland
The Song of Saint Foy (packet)
Troubadour songs (selection: packet)
Beroul, The Romance of Tristan
Chrétien de Troyes: The Knight with the Lion (Yvain), The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot)
Guillaume de Lorris, The Romance of the Rose

Requirements:
Regular attendance, preparation of readings, and participation in discussions
3 oral presentations based on written reports (1-2 pp.) of assigned readings
1 research paper (12 pp.) and oral presentation based on research
1 museum trip

MARY B. SPEER (BA Duke, PhD Princeton) is a Professor in the French Department. In her 31 years at Rutgers she has taught courses on medieval French and comparative literature at many levels, including undergraduate seminars for Honors and Medieval Studies students. Her research focuses on medieval narrative and lyric works of the 12th and 13th centuries, recently with an emphasis on literary constructions of gendered identities. She is also particularly interested in the ways medieval texts are transformed both by the inevitable alterations introduced by scribal copyists and by conscious reworkings for new audiences, including modern readers who use printed and electronic editions
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Gender, Power and the Development of Black Politics and Thought
01:090:262 Index #10992
Nikol Alexander-Floyd, Department of Women's & Gender Studies
T 09:15a-12:15p Voorhees Chapel Rm 005
Douglass Campus

This seminar offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Black politics, focusing on the central role of gender power in the development of contemporary Black thought and politics. Students in this course will assess the gendered norms and practices animating key social and political movements, as well as various modes of popular cultural production. While previous exposure to feminist theory may be helpful, it is not essential.

Upon completion of this course, students should:
(1) be familiar with recent revisionist interpretations of the civil rights and Black power movements and the role, scope, and participation of the women therein;
(2) be able to define gender and explain how gender power has operated within and affected these various movements;
(3) be conversant with the dominant perspectives and debates on Black female sexual assault in the U.S. and in international conflicts;
(4) be positioned to critically interpret narrative practices in film and media in terms of their race, gender, class, and sexual politics.

NIKOL G. ALEXANDER-FLOYD, an interdisciplinary scholar whose work and teaching integrate the study of politics, law, women's studies, and Black studies, joined the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers in Fall 2007. Holding both the JD and Ph.D., Dr. Alexander-Floyd teaches courses on race, gender, and the law, Black women in the U.S., and feminist theory. Her current research explores the gender politics of contemporary Black nationalism, and has appeared in such journals as Frontiers, the International Journal of Africana Studies, and Meridians. She is Co-Founder, along with Rose Harris, of the Association for the Study of Black Women in Politics. Her first book, Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007.
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Imagining Self/ Imagining Other: The Politics and Poetics of Hollywood Film
01:090:263 Index #10993
Fran Mascia-Lees, Department of Anthropology
W 02:15-05:15p Voorhees Chapel Rm 005
Douglass Campus

King Kong, Tarzan, Bird of Paradise, Lawrence of Arabia, Aladdin, Dances with Wolves, the Piano, The Gods Must be Crazy, The Constant Gardener: these are just a few of the Hollywood films that draw on “the West’s” long-standing fascination with non-Western peoples. Yet such films are not, as is often claimed, just innocent forms of entertainment. With the rise of the Hollywood studio system at the beginning of the twentieth century, film assumed the role of mediator of cultural difference helping to shape the very notion of a Western “self” and non-Western “other.” This course focuses on the representation of non-Western cultures in the genre of Hollywood film, placing it within the context of the larger “primitivist project.” This project helped fashion a mythological past for “the West”—a past imagined as, at once, savage and repulsive, pastoral and erotic. We will explore how this imagined past has acted not only to fashion a distinct identity for “the West,” but also to guide and justify its economic, social, and political aspirations. The distinctive role film has played in the construction of a “Western imagination” will be illuminated by placing Hollywood films within historical context and comparing them to other forms of cultural representation (e.g., literature, painting, opera, world’s fairs, museums, and “freak” shows). We will draw on work in anthropology, history, cultural studies, feminist studies, film studies, and post-colonial studies to analyze filmic representations of the exotic/erotic, primitive, savage, diseased, ethnic, and romanticized “other.” Our effort will be to read Hollywood films as cultural documents to uncover the role of film in the construction of culture.

There are no prerequisites for this seminar. Students are required to attend each class session, which will be run as a seminar, as well as special screening sessions. Students can expect to watch 1-2 films per week and to write short, weekly film critiques. Students should come to class prepared to present their analyses and listen carefully to others’ ideas.

FRAN MASCIA-LEES is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology. She has written widely on the body, consumer culture, and the relationship of cultural representation (in ethnography, film, literature, and museums) to forms of cultural encounters (e.g., colonialism, tourism, anthropology). Mascia-Lees was Editor-in-Chief of the American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) from 2001-06. She has won several national awards, including AAA’s President’s Award (2005) and the AAA/Mayfield Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Anthropology (1998). She has conducted fieldwork at multiple sites in the United States, and has researched tourism and cultural representation in the British Virgin Islands and Mexico. She has just finished a book on gender and difference in a globalizing world, and is beginning one on the anthropological study of the body.
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Evolution and the Human Language Faculty
01:090:264 Index #10994
Ken Safir, Department of Linguistics
MW 04:30-05:50p 35 College Avenue Rm 302
College Ave Campus

The goal of this seminar is to expose students to current reasoning and knowledge about the emergence of the human language faculty (HLF) as part of human evolution. Although many animals have the potential to communicate with others of their species, no animal communication system remotely approaches the expressiveness and complexity of human language. Indeed, the universal core of any natural grammar is so complex that there is substantial evidence that its essential properties cannot be learned - rather they must be inborn.

The question that we will explore in this seminar is how this complex inborn capacity could have evolved. Darwin’s theory of natural selection is an interesting theory precisely because it purports to explain, on the basis of simple and consistent principles, how complex biological structures could arise from small advantages accumulating in populations adapting to environments over long periods of time. Having a human grammar is a great adaptive advantage, but there is no plausible reason to believe that subject-verb agreement phenomena arose because people who could make the verb agree were more successful at reproduction. If HLF did not develop from selective pressure alone, or if it is possible that it did not arise from selective pressure at all, how then can we explain why the human language faculty has the particular complex properties that it does? Put more succinctly, how can this form of biologically based mental complexity be a product of evolution without the pressure exerted by natural selection?

Interesting answers to this question are only just beginning to emerge, because evolutionary biology and genetic studies have only recently and spottily taken into account what is actually known about the structure of HLF. Moreover, much more sophisticated, fine-grained accounts of other human capacities, and the capacities of other primates, have led to a reassessment of what it is that humans have and other species do not. The connection between the latter factors and the design of the language faculty are currently quite speculative, but some interesting hypotheses have emerged that we will begin to explore in this seminar.

This inquiry cannot be solved without an interdisciplinary approach. If we are to understand what the modern HLF is, we must first understand the fundamental organization plan of HLF grammars, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics as well as general knowledge of the course of language acquisition and language diversity. We also need to understand evolutionary reasoning about how complexity arises by natural selection. The first part of the course addresses these issues, but then interdisciplinary questions have to be addressed that will broaden our discussion. Then the class will break up into working groups that will each focus on a different part of the problem and the contributions to the debates that come from that perspective.

Ken Safir received his Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT in 1982 after many detours from academic life. He has been teaching at Rutgers since 1984. He is best known for his work on language typology, syntactic theory, and the syntactician’s view of the syntax/semantics interface, but his work has also touched on questions of language acquisition and the philosophy of language. He has linguistic expertise in Romance, Germanic and African languages, and he is currently editing a website for the study of African languages supported by the National Science Foundation. His most recent work touches on evolutionary questions with respect to the origin of the human language faculty and more specifically, to the origin of human syntax. He is also interested in exploring the relation between linguistic semantic distinctions embedded in grammar and the semantic distinctions more typically discussed in psychological and philosophical accounts of the theory of mind.
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Telling Stories: Oral History and Performance
01:090:265 Index #10995
Jeff Friedman, Department of Dance
M 3:55-6:55pm Corwin Lodge Seminar Room
Douglass Campus

For thousands of years, human beings have been dancing, making music, and putting on plays. It could be said that the purpose of these endeavors has been to tell the stories of our lives. Artists such as Anna Deavere, in theater, and Steve Reich, in music, currently serve as models for approaches to this effort. These methods of presenting “oral history” are fascinating to view and to examine, and that is what we will do in this seminar.

This Honors Seminar will combine experiences in the classroom and in the studio, using a variety of activities. In the classroom, students will view, via video/cd and live, several performance works based on oral history in a variety of genres; read and report on theoretical articles, method-oriented books, and performances scripts. In the studio, students will work on projects incorporating dance, music, theater, and video/media.

Students will develop skills in qualitative methods of research inquiry with an emphasis on the performing arts. Further, students will acquire oral history interviewing skills, including a solid foundation in human subjects-based research ethics and practices, and will apply that primary research data to the creation of several performance works in a variety of genres.

JEFF FRIEDMAN is a dancer and choreographer who has been based in San Francisco from 1979 to 2003. He received a professional degree in architecture from the University of Oregon and specializes in the creation of multidisciplinary site-specific performance events. He holds a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside where he was Jacob K. Javits United States Department of Education Fellow. His research areas include oral history theory and methodology, narrative theory, phenomenological approaches in philosophy and Futurist photography. A certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst, Jeff's current research is a qualitative study of oral history interviews with former members of the Twyla Tharp Dance Company. His work extends cognitive science theories of language production through metaphor toward a more sophisticated apprehension of embodied channels of communication. His research has been published in Sounds and Gestures of Recollection: Performing the Art of Memory (Cándida Smith, Routledge); The Oral History Research Handbook (Baylor University, AltaMira Press); Historia, Antropologia y Fuentes Orales (University of Barcelona) and The Oral History Review.
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Complementarity in Physics, Biology and Philosophy
01:090:266 Index #14456
*Pre-Requisite: A college-level introductory course, or AP credits, in Biology, Chemistry or Physics*
Sungchul Ji, Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology
TTH 4:30-05:50p Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Avenue Campus

Recent developments in molecular and cell biology indicate that Bohr’s complementarity may play as fundamental a role in living processes as in quantum mechanics. Complementarity-like concepts also occur in psychology, philosophy, semiotics (the study of signs), critical theories [A. Plotnitsky, Complementarity, Duke University Press, 1994], and world religions. The universality of Bohr’s complementarity may be traced to the complementary neuroelectrophysiological functions of the human brain, including the dichotomy of the left and right hemispheres. These findings motivated the formulation, in the early 1990’s, of a new philosophical framework known as complementarism, the essential content of which being that the ultimate reality perceived and communicated by the human brain is a complementary union of irreconcilable opposites [S. Ji, “Complementarism: A Biology-Based Philosophical Framework to Integrate Western Science and Eastern Tao,” in Psychotherapy East and West: Integration of Psychotherapies, The Korean Academy of Psychotherapists, Seoul, Korea, 1995, pp. 518-548].

In the latter half of the 1990’s, it was uncovered that living cells use a language (called cell language) whose design principles are very similar to those of human language [S. Ji, BioSystems 44: 17-39 (1997)]. This finding strengthens the link between biology and philosophy, in agreement with the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-1961) and Spinoza (1632-1677). Thus, complementarism, which embodies both modern biological science and modern philosophical traditions, may provide a powerful new philosophical basis for integrating not only science and philosophy on the one hand but also seemingly irreconcilable philosophies and religions of the world on the other.

During the first half of the semester, students will be introduced to the essentials of complementarism and their physical and metaphysical supports derived from physics, chemistry, biology, linguistics, philosophy, and semiotics. The second half of the semester will be devoted to students’ presentations, each 30-minute long, on topics related to some aspects of complementarism or to its application to solving practical problems in contemporary life.

The final grade will be based on classroom participation, including short talks (20%), presentation (30%), and a written version of the presentation (15 – 20 pages, single spaced, including figures, tables and references; 50%) due one week after the oral presentation. Pre-requisite: a college level introductory course (or AP credits) in biology, chemistry, or physics.

SUNGCHUL JI received a BA degree in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1965 and a Ph.D. degree in physical organic chemistry in 1970 from the State University of New York at Albany. After a series of postdoctoral research and teaching experiences in enzymology (University of Wisconsin, Madison), biophysics (University of Pennsylvania), systems physiology (Max Planck Institute, Dortmund, West Germany), and toxicology (University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill), Dr. Ji began teaching pharmacology and toxicology at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Rutgers University in 1982. Dr. Ji founded the Theoretical Aspects of Pharmacology course in 2000 at the Ernest Mario School and has been teaching it ever since. He recently completed a book manuscript entitled “Molecular Theory of the Living Cell: Conceptual Foundations, Molecular Mechanisms and Applications”.
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Infertility in Contemporary American Society
01:090:267 Index #15116
Helane Rosenberg, Department of Graduate School of Education
TH 1:40-4:40p ARC Rm 212
Busch Campus

This seminar will focus on the social, psychological, medical, legal, and ethical issues involved with infertility and its resolution in contemporary American society. Students will learn about the causes of infertility, the prevalence of infertility, and the choices faced by infertile individuals and couples.

Students will learn abut the biological mechanisms involved in infertility, and about treatment options including basal body temperature monitoring, the use of ovulation predictor kids, “natural” remedies, medicated and non-medicated insemination, and assisted reproductive technology. Students will also learn about third party options: sperm donation, egg donation, traditional surrogacy, gestational carrier pregnancies, and embryo adoption. Students will learn about adoption and so-called “child-free” living options. Students will learn about motives for wanting children and emotional reactions when one is unable to conceive, and about counseling strategies used to assist infertile persons. They will explore the difficult decision that infertile persons must make, and consider the legal, financial, emotional, medical, and ethical concerns they must deal with in attempting to resolve the infertility. Guest speakers will include a reproductive endocrinologist, an attorney who specializes in third party pregnancy legal issues, an egg donor, and an adoptive parent.
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Neuroscience & Stem Cell Research:
The Known, The Unknown, and The Process of Discovery
01:090:268 Index #15361
**Open to Sophomores, By Application**
Patricia Morton, Wise Young, Martin Grumet, Department of W. M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience
T TH 5:00-6:20p Nelson Labs D251
Busch Campus

Enrollment is limited, and open only to SAS Honors Program Sophomores. Students who are interested in enrolling in this seminar should contact the SAS Honors Program at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to request an application.

The W. M. Keck Center holds an upper level seminar entitled Topics in Cellular Biology and Neuroscience (146:464) taught by Dr. Martin Grumet, Director of the W. M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience, and Dr. Wise Young, Founding Director. Five top-rated sophomores specifically interested in neuroscience and/or stem cell research will attend these lectures and do the required readings. However, while the juniors and seniors give a final PowerPoint presentation, the Honors Seminar students will write a paper. In addition to working with top-rated faculty, these high-quality sophomores will benefit significantly from interacting with upper class students and seeing the quality of their final presentations. The Honors Seminar students will work with Dr. Patricia Morton during the course and on their final papers.

This course will focus on topics and concepts of early vertebrate development that are essential to understand functions and potential therapeutic applications of stem cells. Discussions will include embryonic stem cells and their restriction into various kinds of precursors, methods and criteria for identifying stem cells and assessing their fate, and properties of neural stem cells and their applications in the nervous system. The first half of the course (6-7 lectures) will involve textbook-based material and original research articles. Students will be taught how to read and critically evaluate papers. Political, social, and ethical questions will be raised and discussed.

PATRICIA MORTON is Director of Planning and Development for The Spinal Cord Injury Project, W. M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience, Dr. Morton has extensive contact with people with spinal cord injuries and their families, and works in collaboration with the major spinal cord injury research institutions and organizations in the United States and internationally. Dr. Morton has planned and organized seminars, symposia, and major meetings, has developed programs to bring injured persons and their families into partnership with scientists, and is coordinating Quest for the Cure, a state-by-state movement to pass legislation to increase funding for spinal cord injury research. She is responsible for corporate and governmental relations, corporate sponsorships and fund-raising activities, and the building of cooperative efforts between various organizations involved in spinal cord injury research. She serves as a founding member of the New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research.

WISE YOUNG, M.D., Ph.D. is the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience. Before coming to Rutgers, Young was director of neurosurgery research at New York University and part of the team that discovered and established high-dose methylprednisolone as the first effective therapy for spinal cord injuries. That 1990 work upended conventional wisdom that such injuries led to permanent damage, refocused research, and opened new vistas of hope for the quarter-million Americans paralyzed by an injury to the spinal cord. At the W.M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Young has assembled a team of researchers who collaborate with more than 100 laboratories worldwide in the search for cures to spinal cord and brain injuries and disorders. He recently embarked on an initiative to set up a clinical network of more than a dozen spinal-trauma centers in China capable of performing state-of-the-art clinical trials.

MARTIN GRUMET, Ph.D. is Director of the W.M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience and a professor at Rutgers, is acknowledged to be one of the leading researchers in spinal cord and brain injury repair. Dr. Grumet obtained a BS degree in Physics from the Cooper Union and a doctorate in Biophysics from The Johns Hopkins University. In 1999, he was appointed Professor of Cell Biology and Neuroscience at Rutgers University and joined the W.M. Keck Center as its Associate Director. In 2002, he became Director of the W.M. Keck Center of Collaborative Neuroscience. Dr. Grumet’s work has applied expertise in cell adhesion to problems in brain tumor biology and, more recently, in spinal cord injury research. He isolated the first cell line with radial-like properties and has demonstrated the feasibility of implanting such cells into the central nervous system to improve recovery following injury. These results provided the catalyst for his recruitment to the W.M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience to focus his research on repairing the injured spinal cord.
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History, Material Culture and the Rutgers University Collections
01:090:269 Index # 15386
Virginia Yans, Department of History
W 1:10-4:10 PM
Case Room, Alexander Library, College Avenue Campus

The Special Collections and University Archives of the Rutgers University Libraries contain rich archives of maps, photographs, broadsides, coins, Rutgers memorabilia, oddities (a cat mummy, for example) and many other material culture artifacts. Historians, who routinely consult written documents, also use material culture artifacts like these to narrate the past. Researchers in several other disciplines including geography, cartography, archaeology, earth science, architecture, jazz studies, race and ethnicity studies also draw upon material culture remnants of the past.

This Honors Seminar will explore the challenges presented to researchers seeking to interpret these artifacts. The course offers students an opportunity to engage "hands-on" with these material culture artifacts under the guidance of experts who regularly interpret, classify, and preserve them. Professor Yans, an American historian, documentary film maker and museum exhibit consultant will be joined by Special Collections staff and other experts within the Rutgers community who oversee these materials. Thomas Frusciano, University Archivist; Fernanda Perrone, Curator of the William E. Griffis Collection; Bonita Grant, New Jersey Bibliographer; and Paul Israel of the Edison papers are among these experts. While the Library's Special Collections emphasizes New Jersey artifacts (many of them of local and national significance), students will also have the option of exploring material artifacts in other university collections. The Thomas Edison papers, for example, document Edison's extraordinary technological innovations and the artifacts they produced. The campus Geological Museum contains in addition to its geological materials, artifacts relating to New Jersey dinosaurs and mines. Newark's Institute for Jazz Studies may be of interest to class participants interested in sound technology and reproduction. We welcome students from across the disciplines including history, geology, photography, architecture, jazz studies, urban planning, geography, engineering, technology and communications. The direct contact with the past that material culture artifacts offer will assist in bringing a new dimension of understanding to their studies.

VIRGINIA YANS is Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History. Her research focuses on United States cultural history, women's history, and the history of immigration. She is currently working on a biographical study of the anthropologist Margaret Mead. Her documentary on Mead aired as a PBS Special. She is actively involved in a number of public history projects including the Ellis Island National Museum, the Women's History Museum and Leadership Center planned for lower Manhattan, and the International Women's Museum in San Francisco. Newer interests include the history of gender and technology and the history of collecting. Along with Professor Rudolph Bell, she conducted two one-year research projects at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis in 2004-05, one on single women and another on the gendering of children.
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Shakespeare and His World
01:090:270   Index #15407
*Open to 1st Year and Sophomores
Professor Maurice Lee, Department of History
TH 09:15a-12:15p    Voorhees Chapel 005
Douglass Campus

This seminar, Shakespeare and His World, deals with Elizabethan and Jacobean England as Shakespeare saw it during the two decades of his active career as a playwright, from approximately 1592 to 1611. The approach will be historical rather than literary. Shakespeare wrote about two things: love and marriage (the private sphere), and power, kingship, and war (the public sphere), and sometimes about both at once. We will read ten plays, four about politics and war, four comedies of love and marriage, and two which deal with both. We will read the plays for the most part in the order in which Shadespeare wrote them.

You will be asked to get two books, a copy of the plays, and L.B. Smith, This Realm of England, for the necessary historical background. There will be three papers, two shorter ones during the semester and longer one at the end.

MAURICE LEE is a Margaret Judson Professor of History Emeritus. He taught at Rutgers for thirty years before retiring. He is a specialist in the history of early modern Britain, and has written a total of ten books on the period.
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The course described below is cross-listed with the Communication Department as 04:189:441:01. The total stop point for the two “versions” of the course is 15, with 10 spaces available in the SAS Honors Program version of the course, and 5 available in the Communication version of the course.

Communication and Human Values
01:090:271 Index#15408
Professor Richard Heffner
T 9:50a-12:50p   Scott 201
College Avenue Campus

Honors Program students who are interested in enrolling in this seminar should contact Dean Lord at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with a short statement of their interest.

This seminar is not a practicum, not a "how-to" course about film and television, or about the media in America generally. Rather, it is a fact-based intellectual venture in the development of communications public policy. Its purpose is to analyze how much of our sense of what it means to be an American early in the 21st century has been molded by the media -- first print and now increasingly electronic -- with particular reference to their socializing and value-legitimating content. To learn then to deal appropriately and reasonably with such media power, students are asked first to identify their own respective approaches to the role of the state and its proper relationship to the individual through discussion both of such readings as Walter Lippmann's */Public Opinion/*, Robert Merton's */Mass Persuasion/*, J. S. Mill's */On Liberty/*, Herman Melville's */Billy Budd/*, and Neil Postman's */Amusing Ourselves to Death/*, and of such films as "Birth of A Nation," "12 Angry Men," "Hearts and Minds," "JFK," and "Fahrenheit 9/11".

Emphasis will be placed on analyzing and resolving such contemporary media issues as a Fairness Doctrine (the real or imagined "chilling effect" of a requirement for media fairness and balance); cameras in the courts (do televised trials enhance justice, or instead create a "mobocracy", with trial by a new jury of public opinion?); and media self-regulation (can there in fact be meaningful voluntary self-discipline in a free market, free speech, mass media-driven society?).

RICHARD D. HEFFNER is University Professor of Communications and Public Policy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where he began to teach in 1948. Trained as an American historian, Mr. Heffner is the author of A Documentary History of the United States and the editor of Alexis de Tocqueville's classic Democracy In America. His most recent book, a collaboration entitled Conversations With Elie Wiesel, derives from The Open Mind, the prize winning television program which he began in 1956 and which he still produces and moderates each week on public broadcasting stations around the country. In 1961, after serving on-the-air and as an executive at CBS, ABC and NBC, Professor Heffner played a leading role in the acquisition and activation of Channel 13 in New York, becoming its Founding General Manager. For twenty years (1974 to 1994), he also commuted to Hollywood, serving as Chairman of the Board of the motion picture industry's voluntary film classification and rating system. Professor Heffner and his wife, Dr. Elaine Heffner, live in New York City. They have two sons -- Daniel, a filmmaker; and Andrew, an Assistant New York State Attorney General -- and four grandchildren.

Fall 2009 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

How Sex Changed: Sex Research in the 20th Century
Imperial Nations and Their Fictions
Communication and Ethnicity: Asian Americans
Disaster, Culture, and Society
Trauma and Social Memory
Global Warming: Policy withouth Politics
The Science and Life of Albert Einstein
Crime and the Big City
Enduring Questions: What is the Human?
Freedom
Introduction to Systems Thinking
American Regionalism
Energy Materials and the Environment
Complementarity in Physics, Life Sciences, and Philosophy
Physics and Photography
The Origins of Western Morality
Communications and Human Values

How Sex Changed: Sex Research in the 20th Century

01:090:250 Index #30034
Professor James Reed, SAS - History
W 04:30-07:30P   Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Avenue Campus

This is a seminar about the relationship between scientists and human sexuality. We will examine some of the most important efforts to understand and to control sexual behavior. Who studied sex? How did they define it? What methods did they use? Why did they do it? Who paid for the work? What is the relationship between this science, gender systems, and other salient aspects of U.S. society? What can we learn from the immense discourse constructed by sex researchers?

We will begin with the "crisis in civilized sexual morality" and Freud's visit to the U.S. in 1909, and end with the emergence of the intersexed and transsexuals as self-conscious minorities successfully struggling for civil rights. We will have an Alfred Kinsey film festival, and will devote several weeks to the career of John Money, the Johns Hopkins University clinical psychologist who championed the cause of surgical sex reassignment. Assigned readings will include: Susan Stryker, Transgender History; Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality; Deborah Rudacille, The Riddle of Gender; John Coalpinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl; and other materials provided by the instructor. All participants in the class will be expected to make a presentation (15 minutes maximum) about a researcher, novel, autobiography, journal, or website that is relevant to our story. There will be two short written assignments (5 pages) and a longer essay (minimum 10 pages) that will serve as a final exam.

JAMES REED has professed History at Rutgers since 1975. He got his B.A. at Louisiana State University and his A.M. and Ph.D. at Harvard. Among historians he is best known for From Private Vice to Public Virtue, a history of birth control in the United States He has also written on intelligence tests, penitentiaries, and biomedical sex research. His current writing project is a history of biomedical sex research, with the working title Sex Research in America: From Social Hygiene to Sexology. Among Rutgers students he is best known as the instructor in Development of the U.S. I & II, as well as more specialized courses such as Health and the Environment in the U.S., Sport in History, and The IQ Controversy.” He served as Dean of Rutgers College from 1985 to 1994. NEXT

Imperial Nations and Their Fictions
01:090:251 Index #30035
Professor Edyta Bojanowska, SAS - Dept of Germanic Russian and East European L&L
TH 09:50A-12:50P   Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Avenue Campus

Nations and empires are in many ways antithetical. Nations coalesce around the idea of sameness – constructed upon the notion of a community’s shared ethnic, cultural, political, or historical heritage – and are located in a specific, delimited territory. Empires, by contrast, demand an allegiance that transcends such similarities, and have an endless appetite for expansion. And yet both nation and empire thrived in symbiotic unions throughout much of the last two centuries. Some of the most dynamic nationalisms produced the “fittest” empires: Britain, Russia, the Unites States.

This seminar will examine the twin energies of nationalism and imperialism in an art form that was most effective in both disseminating and questioning these ideologies: the narrative. We will focus on the fiction of nineteenth-century British, Russian, and American authors: Austen, Kingsley, Kipling, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Twain, Cooper, and Chekhov. Most fundamentally, we will ask how the experience of empire shaped the national identities of imperializing countries themselves, as reflected in these fictions. We will examine these texts’ “imagined communities” and fictional geographies, asking how they combine the concerns of nationalism with the “civilizing” mission of imperialism. We will study how these works construct identities and stereotypes and will investigate the moral, political, and narrative implications of imperial encounters. Secondary texts will include key theoretical texts on nationalism, imperial history, and cultural criticism

EDYTA BOJANOWSKA is an Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at the Department of Germanic, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures and at the Program in Comparative Literature. She studied English and Russian at Barnard College and received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. She published "Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism" (Harvard UP, 2007) and is working on a book on empire and nation in the Russian literature of the 1850s-1910s (Dostoevsky, Leskov, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bely)

Communication and Ethnicity: Asian Americans01:090:252 Index #30036
Professor Hui-Min Kuo, SCILS - Communication
T 01:10-04:10P   Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Avenue Campus

This seminar will introduce the theories, approaches, and processes involved in communicating with individuals of different cultural backgrounds, specifically, Asian American, while examining potential challenges and issues relevant to this context. The purpose of this seminar is to advance the understanding of Asian and Asian American communication in a globalized world by focusing on how the concepts of ethnicity and culture can influence everyday communication. The seminar will explore (a) the theoretical assumptions of Asian and Asian American culture and communication, (b) the role of ethnicity and communication in Asian and Asian American cultures, (c) the perspectives and development of ethnic and cultural identities, (d) the communication patterns and styles of Asians and Asian Americans, and (e) the practical implications for interactions with Asians and Asian Americans.

Students will learn fundamental theories of Asian American cultural communication; critically assess the theoretical construct and application of various concepts relevant to Asian American cultural communication; critically compare and contrast applications of the approaches studied in interpersonal, family, or organizational settings; identify potential challenges and perceptual similarities and differences relating to Asian American communication and cultures; and complete research assignments by participating in the processes of literature review, research methods, discussion and results, and writing research reports. Besides research, students will discuss the assigned readings, present small group projects based on contemporary films, and attend cultural events.

HUI-MIN KUO is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Communication. Her teaching and research interests are in intercultural communication, organizational culture, and instructional communication. She earned her PhD in Communication from Rutgers. With diverse professional experiences in instruction, administration, and services to students and faculty, she is interested in connecting communication perspectives to everyday practices. As a first-generation Asian American, she is particularly fascinated by studying the development of communication norms and representations of Asian Americans in a multicultural society. Through integrating theory and application, her goal is to enrich the learning processes of undergraduate students. NEXT

Disaster, Culture, and Society01:090:253 Index #30159
Professor Lee Clarke, SAS - Sociology
TH 01:10-04:10P   Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Avenue Campus

Katrina was a bell-weather event for American society. Along with 9/11 it threw into bold relief just how vulnerable we can be. Such events are intellectual opportunities, chances to look into how society works and fails to work. There will be more big disasters, and the consequences from them will continue to be severe. But the main reasons for these trends is not, as some have claimed, global warming, nor, as others have said, because nature or God are somehow punishing us. The main reasons have to do with how society is organized.

We usually think disasters are special but they are prosaic, part of rather than discontinuous with “normal” reality. In normal reality we must make sense of things. We excel at that, applying familiar categories to organize events, motives, and histories. Generically, disasters are not different from other events that need ordering. It is easy to imagine all kinds of non-disastrous things or times that must be confronted with, “How shall I make sense of this?” Big disasters, like Katrina, just do that in a big way.

This seminar will mainly be case-based, which means that I’ll organize the materials around particular events. Examples are accidents (Bhopal, Titanic, Challenger, Columbia) natural” disasters (Katrina, the threat from near earth objects) and epidemics (1918 flu). The focus will be on the interplay between culture, social institutions, and calamity. We will use video and internet resources throughout.

I will also construct exercises for students to participate in. An example might be giving groups of students a potential disaster scenario and then making them “advisors” to the President: what will you do? What do you recommend? What will be the consequences if you follow one path rather than another? We will run these exercises at key points in the semester, as knowledge about disaster accumulates.

I will ask students to write one-page “reaction memos” to readings. Examples of what these should look like will be provided, but basically they are critical reflections on what has been read. Students will email these memos to everyone in the class and we will use them to drive the seminar discussion on any particular day. Students will participate very actively in the seminar, as we weave into and out of key ideas concerning culture and disaster

LEE CLARKE is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology. His areas of expertise include leadership, culture, disaster, and organizational and technological failures. Clarke has won two awards for his teaching and enjoys interacting with motivated and interested students. He has written or edited 6 books and over 50 articles. He has written about the Y2K problem, risk communication, panic, civil defense, evacuation, community response to disaster, organizational failure, and near earth objects; his most recent book, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In August 2005 he was honored with the Fred Buttel Distinguished Scholarship Award by the Environment and Technology section of the American Sociological Association. He has most recently appeared on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, ABC World News Tonight, and National Public Radio's affiliate in Irvine, CA, KUCI. Visit www.leeclarke.com for more information.

Trauma and Social Memory01:090:254 Index #30037
Professor Judith Gerson, SAS - Women's and Gender Studies
M 10:55A-01:55P   VC 005
Douglass Campus

"Trauma" and "memory" have become key words across several fields of inquiry. The burgeoning scholarship on genocide, (Darfur and the Holocaust in particular), natural disaster (Katrina), narratives of survivors and perpetrators, the politics of commemoration, and programs of reconciliation and forgiveness all indicate a growing interest in trauma and social or collective memory. This seminar begins with questions about what constitutes trauma, which remains a complex and vexed subject among scholars, survivors, perpetrators and bystanders, and various public audiences. Memory is never automatic nor a direct or an exact recollection of the past. In the case of trauma, this effect is further complicated because those who experience trauma are often unable or unwilling to acknowledge or speak it, even years after the catastrophe has presumably ended. Since people remember as members of groups, their social relationships shape the ways they experience, recall, forget and deny trauma. For example, various groups of women and men may have different memories because they often live their lives in distinct ways. Memories of trauma, moreover, are located in time and place, and here we will consider various legacies of trauma for the second generation. Institutional forms of memory also exist. We will pay particular attention to the public expressions and uses of traumatic memory, looking at memorial sites, museums, and commemorative ceremonies. Finally we consider various programs of forgiveness, reconciliation, restitution and reparations.

The goal of the seminar is to introduce students to a range of scholarly approaches to studying trauma and social memory rather than concentrate on the empirical specifics of any particular trauma, its aftermath and recollection. Our seminar relies on an interdisciplinary, comparative historical approach, which understands particular cases as rooted in larger transnational circuits. Several visual presentations and possibly a tour of memorial sites in New York City will supplement the readings, which form the core of the seminar. Seminar requirements include short weekly response papers to the assigned readings, an in-class oral presentation, and an original research paper.

JUDITH GERSON is on the faculty in the Departments of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies and an affiliate faculty in the Department of Jewish Studies. Her research and teaching interests center on diaspora, collective memory, gender, and epistemology. She is co-editor of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories, Identities and Diasporas (Duke University Press, 2007) and is completing a book manuscript on German Jewish forced emigration during the Nazi era. She was a recipient of a residential research fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Global Warming: Policy withouth Politics01:090:255 Index #30038
Professor Sunil Somalwar, SAS - Physics & Astronomy
MW 01:40-03:00P HLL Rm 009
Busch Campus

Everybody is concerned about energy and global warming these days. Politicians and entrepreneurs are pushing their favorite solutions, many of which are not sensible. In the meanwhile, the United States continues to use enough energy to bring the entire Lake Erie to a boil within a couple of years. Is energy consumption on such enormous scale necessary to maintain our living standards? Is it possible that reducing our energy consumption via increased efficiency will in fact increase our technology base and living standards? What are the European and Japanese experiences and how do they compare to ours?

In this class, we will examine the use of energy in modern society that has resulted in the dramatic increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, learn the basics of the greenhouse effect and global warming, and discuss the consequences. We will explore how individual actions (such as commuting, housing choices, etc.) impact global warming. We will evaluate the relative merits of various approaches, and discuss the political and public policy implications. There are many “unintended consequences” here, so instead of proposing pat answers, we will learn how to evaluate proposed solutions critically. For example, are solar panels cost effective? Does the electric car make sense?

This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to exploring energy and climate change policy, and should be of interest to both science and non-science majors.

PROFESSOR SUNIL SOMALWAR smashes very high energy particles at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago and the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The protons he studies collide head on while travelling at about 99.999999% of the speed of light. These collisions create conditions that existed in our universe soon after the Big Bang and help us answer fundamental questions such as how the universe came about, what it is made of, why things attract or repel each other and where all the antimatter has gone. Professor Somalwar is also very concerned about how we humans are smashing the natural world, which is partly why he teaches classes on energy and global warming. He also runs a nonprofit to save the world's remaining few wild tigers (yes, really!) and is a volunteer activist with New Jersey's Sierra Club.

The Science and Life of Albert Einstein01:090:257 Index #30040
Professor John Hughes, SAS - Physics & Astronomy
MW 02:50-04:10P Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Avenue Campus

In this seminar we will explore the development of physics and astronomy over the past century through the contributions of Albert Einstein. Students will gain an understanding of special and general relativity, the development of physics through the 20th century, and the crucial role of Einstein's theories in modern astronomy and cosmology.

We will begin with the state of physics at the turn of the 20th century and the so-called myth of the "end of physics." We will contrast the fields of physics and astronomy at this time based on a set of popular level lectures given in the 1920's. Newton's definition of absolute space and time taken from the Principia sets the stage for an in-depth review of Special and General Relativity following Einstein's popular level book from 1915. The consequences of these theories will be explored, and we will look at some of the detailed tests, including the famous eclipse expedition of 1919, that established these theories as among the most important laws of physics.

In the latter part of the seminar we fast forward to the current day and reveal why Einstein's theories are at the forefront of astronomy and cosmology. We will cover gravitational lensing, the big bang theory evidence for cosmic acceleration, and other topics according to the interests of the class.

Throughout the seminar we will look at Einstein as a philosopher, humanist, and icon in the world at large. He was a notorious pacifist, yet he encouraged Roosevelt to develop the atomic bomb. He was deeply religious, but not in a traditional sense.

The seminar will entail weekly readings and written assignments that are expected to form the basis for extensive class discussion. Two longer papers -- one on Einstein's life and one on his science -- will be required as well.

While some background in mathematics and physics will be helpful, this seminar is designed for non-science majors.

JOHN P. HUGHES grew up in NYC and attended Columbia University. He was a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory until 1996 when he moved to Rutgers, where he is currently a Professor of Physics and Astronomy. Dr. Hughes uses both space- and ground-based astronomical observatories to research various topics in astrophysics and cosmology. (For more information visit his web site http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~jackph/)

Crime and the Big City01:090:258 Index #30041 (cross listed with 01:202:388:01 Index# 36709)
Professor Patrick Carr, SAS - Sociology, Criminal Justice
MTH 11:30-12:50P 35 College Avenue Rm 302
College Avenue Campus

Why is crime, especially violent crime, predominantly a big city problem? And why, even within big cities, is crime concentrated only in certain areas? As homicide rates in some big cities declined in the 1990s, other similar places experienced an alarming increase in violent crime. Why is there such a disparity between places, and what can we learn from case studies to better combat rising rates of violent crime?

This seminar will explore the phenomenon of big city violent crime by examining the experience of Philadelphia over the past two decades. The course will combine readings, discussion, and field immersion as we get to see first hand what drives crime in a major city, and what is being done to try to reduce it. Students will have the opportunity to visit a level one trauma center, to speak with homicide detectives and DAs, and to see firsthand some of the on-the-ground efforts to reduce violence.

In this course, students will investigate in-depth one of society's most persistent and least publicized problems. Some of the issues we will discuss are the proximate and underlying causes of serious crime, the primary big city responses to violent crime, the Stop Snitching Movement, and the programs aimed at reducing crime that have been tried in the past two decades. Over the course of the semester students will come to appreciate the complexities of the big city crime problem and the real difficulties in crafting a response that will actually reduce crime.

PATRICK CARR is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, and is an Associate Member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on the Transitions to Adulthood and Public Policy. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago, and his research interests include communities and crime, informal social control, youth violence, and transitions to adulthood. He is a currently a fellow at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University. He is the author of Clean Streets: Controlling Crime, Maintaining Order and Building Community Activism (2005, NYU Press), and with Maria J. Kefalas of the forthcoming Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America (Beacon Press, 2009). His work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Criminology and Sociological Forum. He is currently working and on a multi-city study of the Stop Snitching Movement.
Enduring Questions: What is the Human?
01:090:259 Index #31447
Professor Henry Turner, SAS - English
MTH 09:50-11:10A Murray Hall Rm 003
College Avenue Campus

From the studia humanitatis of the medieval and Renaissance periods to the modern university of our own day, the definition of the “human” has lain at the center of the “humanities” as a collection of disciplines, providing the conceptual foundation for these disciplines and acting as their primary justifying principle. Why do we study literature, or philosophy, or history, or art, or music, or political theory? We do so in order to understand what is “human” about ourselves and to test our intuitions against the arguments of previous centuries. And yet we immerse ourselves so quickly in the specialized questions that define our fields that we rarely stop to consider what it means to be “human” in the first place: the notion persists as a comfortable bundle of assumptions, assumptions that allow us to launch an inquiry but that we forget to submit to scrutiny. Arguably this task of scrutiny falls uniquely to the humanities: to Philosophy, defined as the art of asking questions, from Socrates forward; to Literature, which uses the resources of language and of fiction to explore the most difficult questions that living humans face; to History, which examines how attitudes toward the “human” have emerged over time and shows us how differently other cultures have often defined it.

Today the task of defining the “human” has become more complex than ever: advances in biotechnology have outstripped familiar systems of classification, producing chimeric substances that Darwin would never recognize. Human populations have swollen, placing unprecedented demands on natural resources, while political conflicts have posed the question of human rights with new urgency.

This seminar will invite students to contemplate what defines the human by participating in the process of creating definitions, and it will do so by focusing on a problem central to the humanities: what is the value of asking questions in the first place? What is an effective mode of questioning? And what forms have effective questions taken?

Using the question of the “human” as an exercise in intellectual biography—a biography that is our own, as well as a biography of our disciplines, majors, and universities—the seminar will explore several forms for raising “enduring questions,” from philosophical dialogue to scientific hypothesis, from drama to novel, from historical writing to memoir and personal reflection.

The seminar will have four sections:

Making and Imagining: The Human Discovers
Thinking and Remembering: The Human Learns
Grouping and Classifying: The Human Defines
Socializing and Assembling: Humans Together

The seminar will include a trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York, and at least one evening film screening and discussion.

HENRY TURNER is Associate Professor English at Rutgers University. He specializes in Renaissance literature, with a particular emphasis on the history of drama, literary criticism, and the history of science. He is also interested in contemporary science and in the relationship between the arts and the sciences at the modern university and in everyday life. Among other publications, he has written a short book entitled Shakespeare’s Double Helix (Continuum, 2007), which compares the nature of “life” and the “human” in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with modern definitions of these ideas in biotechnology. For more information, go to: http://rci.rutgers.edu/~hsturner/

Freedom
01:090:260 Index #34181
Pofessor Andrew Murphy, SAS - Political Science
MTH 02:50-04:10p 35 College Avenue Rm 302
College Avenue Campus

The language of freedom permeates American society, from the earliest colonial enterprises to yesterday’s news. But we rarely seem to stop and contemplate what this notion is all about, and what sorts of tradeoffs or drawbacks our national obsession with freedom might entail. This seminar aims to broaden and deepen students’ understandings of this important concept, and to help them explore and refine their own views of freedom. I pursue this objective by organizing the seminar around a few basic questions.

Should we consider freedom primarily a negative notion (removing obstacles to doing what we want), or does it necessarily involve some sort of overarching moral, ethical, or even religious dimension?

What sorts of social or political institutions follow from different understandings of freedom?

How can the insights of a variety of disciplines and media – political thought, philosophy, literature, history, economics, film – illuminate our exploration of the many aspects of freedom?

Although my own training is in political theory and the history of political thought, the seminar is richly interdisciplinary, and I have taught it successfully several times in the interdisciplinary honors college at Valparaiso University, where it appealed to students from a variety of majors. The seminar integrates works from across the disciplines, all of which attempt to confront students with the complexity inherent in the concept of freedom, and to think through its implications for their own lives, as well as their social and political commitments.

ANDREW MURPHY received his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina, and his M. A. and Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before joining the faculty at Rutgers, he taught at Villanova University, the University of Chicago, and Valparaiso University. His interests focus on the intersections between religious and political thought and practice, focusing especially on the Anglo-American tradition, in both historical and contemporary contexts. He is the author of *Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America* (Penn State, 2001), and *Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9-11* (Oxford, 2008). He has edited *The Political Writings of William Penn* (Liberty Fund, 2002); *Religion, Politics, and American Identity: New Directions, New Controversies*, with David S. Gutterman (Lexington, 2006); and *The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence* (forthcoming). He is currently working on the life and thought of William Penn.

Introduction to Systems Thinking
01:090:261 Index #30042
Professor George Nieswand, Cook - Ecology Evolution and Natural Resources
W 02:15-05:15P   VC 005
Douglass Campus

This seminar provides an introduction to the philosophy and conceptual underpinnings of systems thinking and the systems approach, their use in developing comprehensive understandings of complex problem situations, and alternatives for their improvement. Emphasis is placed on the qualitative, rather than quantitative, aspects of systems thinking. Application to a broad range of problems involving environmental and human activity systems will be explored.

A singularly important goal for this seminar experience is that it have a profound impact on the manner in which you observe, question, reflect on, understand, and approach the complexity in the world of which you are a part, and particularly in terms of your introduction to the use of systems thinking and a systems approach in exploring alternatives for the improvement of complex problem situations.

My intent is that we treat this seminar experience as a journey of exploration, discovery, and learning. I will be your tour guide, as well as a fellow traveler. While there are a number of destinations that I definitely want to visit with you, I will try to maintain some flexibility in our itinerary to accommodate a few side trips that may not have been anticipated. Along the way I will expect you to pay close attention to what you see and hear, and to spend a considerable amount of time thinking about your experiences so that you can record your thoughts, participate in discussions, and ask some good questions. Though I have been on this trip many times as a guide, I find that there is always something new to be discovered, as well as things to be learned from those whom I am guiding. I am looking forward to the trip and trust that you will find it worthwhile.

You will be expected to come to class having thought about the seminar materials and their application, and prepared therefore to ask questions, to add your thoughts to class discussion, and to demonstrate your understanding of systems concepts and their application.

The first portion of each of our class meetings will generally be spent discussing your thoughts and mine about the place we last visited. The second portion will generally be spent at a new location.

GEORGE NIESWAND has taught at Rutgers since 1965, during which time he pioneered the development of both undergraduate and graduate offerings in the field of systems thinking and the systems approach. He has also directed and participated in numerous multidisciplinary research projects and administrative assignments that have drawn on his experience with the application of systems thinking and a systems approach to a wide variety of problems. His approach to the subject matter of systems thinking is eclectic, drawing ideas freely from diverse sources which may not appear relevant at first blush to the casual observer. He also likes to challenge the established way of viewing a situation by approaching it from a number of different and often unusual perspectives. NEXT

American Regionalism
01:090:264 Index #30045 (cross-listed with 10:762:495:01 Index#34533)
Professor Frank Popper, Bloustein School
M 03:55-06:55P   VC 005
Douglass Campus

This seminar will explore the history, planning, and prospects of five large American regions: central Appalachia, the Corn Belt, the Great Plains, northern New England, and the Upper Midwest. The instructor is now co-writing a short book on the subject tentatively titled "Great American Expectations: Why Regional Decline Can Mean National Opportunity." Hehas been writing about the Great Plains for the last generation, and has decisively influenced national opinion about it.

The seminar will begin by exploring the concepts of regions and regionalism in American life. We will then analyze the experiences of the five regions, and move on to comparisons between them, links among them, and the implications for other parts of the country and the nation as a whole. The seminar will also look at the experiences of cities and metropolitan areas in the regions to see how they relate to those of the regions as a whole. If time permits, the seminar will make cross-national comparisons, particularly with Europe and East Asia. The seminar should draw students interested in history, planning, economics, politics, geography, literature, and American studies. The instructor intends to make the seminar maximally interdisciplinary.

FRANK J. POPPER teaches in the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, where he also participates in the American Studies, Geography, Human Ecology and Political Science Departments. He teaches regularly as a visiting professor in the Environmental Studies Program at Princeton University. He is author of The President's Commissions (1970) and The Politics of Land-Use Reform (1981), coauthor of Urban Nongrowth: City Planning for People (1976) and coeditor of Land Reform, American Style (1984). His article "The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust" (Planning, December 1987), written with his wife, Deborah Popper, a geographer at the City University of New York, put forward the controversial Buffalo Commons idea that touched off a national debate on the future of the depopulating rural parts of the Great Plains region. The Poppers are now at work on a series of articles and a book extending the Buffalo Commons concept and related approaches to other depopulating rural regions (for instance, Appalachia, the Lower Mississippi Delta and northern New England), large and mid-sized shrinking cities (Detroit, St. Louis, Birmingham [Alabama] and Camden [New Jersey]) and comparable places abroad (central Spain, eastern France and the former East Germany).

Energy Materials and the Environment
01:090:265 Index #30046
Professor Gabriel Kotliar, SAS - Physics & Astronomy
M 11:30-02:30P   Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Avenue Campus

Will we run out of energy in the next century? How will nations deal with the increasing competition for scarce natural resources? As the world standard of living and the energy consumption per capita increases, can we avoid destroying our own habitat? Is there a technologically viable solution to the current energy crisis, or is the survival of our human species dependent on technological breakthroughs that have not yet taken place? We do not know the full answers to these pressing questions, but we can learn elementary physical ideas connected to the field of energy, and discuss the constraints imposed by the laws of physics when addressing these questions.

In this seminar, then, we will look at these questions from the perspective of a physicist. The seminar will start by asking what energy is. We will then describe the different forms that energy can take such as nuclear, solar, chemical, electrical, chemical, and mechanical. We will discuss the issue of conversion between the different forms of energy, how efficient this energy conversion can be, and the effects that energy conversion has on the environment.

The physics that relate to these topics will be presented at an elementary level, and should be suitable for a motivated non-science major with a good high school science education. The goal of the seminar is to learn about energy, and to elicit discussions about the current options that we as a society have in facing the current energy and climate crisis.

GABRIEL KOTLIAR is a theoretical physicist with interests in materials science. He got his Ph.D in Princeton and is currently a Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University. Kotliar received the 2006 Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize for his work on strongly correlated electron materials. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Sloan fellowship, and a Lady Davis fellowship. He was a recipient of the 2005 Blaise Pascal Chair and has been a frequent visitor at the Physics Departments of Ecole Normale Superieure, Ecole Polytechnique, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His research interests are in the theory of materials, and his goal is to speed up the discovery of materials with useful properties For this purpose he uses quantum field theory methods, algorithms, and computer simulations. He believes that education and scientific research are the key investments that society needs to make to ensure a better future.

Complementarity in Physics, Life Sciences, and Philosophy
01:090:266 Index #32244
Professor Sungchul Ji, Pharm - Pharmacology & Toxicology
TTH 04:30-05:50P   Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Avenue Campus

Recent developments in molecular and cell biology indicate that Bohr’s complementarity may play a fundamental role in living processes. Complementarity-like concepts also occur in psychology, philosophy, semiotics (the study of signs), critical theories [A. Plotnitsky, Complementarity, Duke University Press, 1994], and world religions. The universality of Bohr’s complementarity may be traced to the complementary neuro-electrophysiological functions of the human brain, including the dichotomy of the left and right hemispheres. These findings motivated the formulation of a new philosophical framework known as complementarism in the early 1990’s, the essential content of which is that the ultimate reality perceived and communicated by the human brain is a complementary union of irreconcilable opposites [S. Ji, “Complementarism: A Biology-Based Philosophical Framework to Integrate Western Science and Eastern Tao,” in Psychotherapy East and West: Integration of Psychotherapies, The Korean Academy of Psychotherapists, Seoul, Korea, 1995, pp. 518-548].

In the latter half of the 1990’s, it was uncovered that living cells use a language (called cell language) whose design principles are very similar to those of human language [S. Ji, BioSystems 44: 17-39 (1997)]. This finding further strengthens the link between biology and philosophy, in agreement with the philosophies of Aristotle (384-322 BC), Spinoza (1632-1677), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-1961). Thus, complementarism, which embodies both modern biological sciences and classical and modern philosophical systems, may provide a powerful new philosophical basis for integrating not only science and philosophy, but also seemingly irreconcilable philosophies and religions of the world.

During the first half of the semester, students will be introduced to the essentials of complementarism, and their physical and metaphysical supports derived from physics, chemistry, biology, linguistics, philosophy, and semiotics. The second half of the semester will be devoted to students’ presentation, each 30-minute long, on topics related to some aspects of complementarism or to its application to solving practical problems in contemporary life. The final grade will be based on classroom participation, including short talks (20%, at least one per student before the final class meeting), presentation (30%), and a written version of the presentation (15–20 pages, single spaced, including figures, tables, and references; 50%) due one week after the oral presentation.

Pre-requisite: A college-level introductory course (or equivalents) in biology, chemistry, or physics.

DR. SUNGCHUL JI received a BA degree in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1965 and a Ph.D. degree in physical organic chemistry in 1970 from the State University of New York at Albany. After a series of postdoctoral research and teaching experiences in enzymology (University of Wisconsin, Madison), biophysics (University of Pennsylvania), systems physiology (Max Planck Institute, Dortmund, West Germany), and toxicology (University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill), Dr. Ji began teaching pharmacology and toxicology at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Rutgers University in 1982. Dr. Ji founded the Theoretical Aspects of Pharmacology course in 2000 at Rutgers and has been teaching it ever since. He recently completed a book manuscript entitled “Molecular Theory of the Living Cell: Conceptual Foundations, Molecular Mechanisms and Applications” due to be published by Springer, New York, in 2010. NEXT

Physics and Photography01:090:267 Index #32529
Professor Terry Matilsky, SAS - Physics & Astronomy
W 11:30A-02:30P   Civic Square Rm 334
Downtown New Brunswick Campus
Note: All students will be required to pay a materials fee of $25.00 to help defray the costs of film, photographic paper, and chemicals

Many fundamental aspects of physical theory concern themselves with the interaction and interrelationship of space and time, the infrastructure of our universe. Yet surprisingly, in a totally different context, these constituents can be observed in many aspects of art as well. In this seminar, we will explore how the photographic image depends on the control of space and time by the photographer.

We will study physical and geometric optics first, with emphasis on image formation, depth of field, resolution, magnification, and perspective. These investigations will enable us to visualize the world around us, and to begin to control the visual impact of the final print. At the same time, we will see how the development of the negative affects other aspects of the process, such as contrast. Extensive darkroom work is contemplated. While we study the physical processes involved, we will also discuss the Masters in the field. Each week you will critique a well-known photograph, and attempt to incorporate various ideas into your own work.

Homework will be assigned dealing with both the scientific and artistic content of photography. Of course, you will be taking pictures (indeed, we will be taking field trips - yay!! - to further stimulate our imagination), and artistic and technical critiques will be done collectively, so students at all levels can participate in the process. I hope to have rank beginners as well as already serious photographers in the class. Even advanced students can benefit from a "beginner's mind."

There are no prerequisites for the seminar, but you must have a desire to learn about the scientific as well as the artistic aspects of the photographic process. You must also have a focusing camera in which shutter speeds and f-stops can be adjusted manually. Automatic cameras are not acceptable! If you are contemplating buying a camera for the seminar, see me and I can make some recommendations.

TERRY MATILSKY is a professor in the Department of Physics. His specialty is in astrophysics. He served as Director of the Rutgers College Honors Program from 1989 to 1996. He has taken pictures from rockets from 100 miles in space (no, he hasn't been in them), but enjoys ground-based landscapes -- preferably wilderness areas like Yosemite and Yellowstone -- best. He has sold some of his least favorite photographs to ad agencies on Madison Avenue, just to see whether it could be done, but remains almost totally undiscovered as a true artist.

The Origins of Western Morality
01:090:268 Index #32714
Professor Emma Wasserman, SAS - Religion
TTH 12:35-01:55P   Loree Hall Rm 131
Douglass Campus

The seminar treats the ways that early Christian groups appropriated Jewish and Hellenistic moral traditions and reshaped them according to their developing preoccupations. These preoccupations came to shape the moral language, laws, politics, social codes, and sociality of Christian Europe and America. The seminar will pay particular attention to the roles of Hellenistic philosophy, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the letters of Paul, the teachings attributed to Jesus in writings from the end of the first century C. E., and the development of ascetic practices and ideology. This approach holds that “morals” are involved in the organization of sociality, power, economic production, distribution and consumption; cultural production, distribution and consumption. Issues of importance to the seminar include the variety of ancient options available for thinking about ethical psychology, the concept of porneia (harlotry) and the attack on traditional Mediterranean religion, the family/household and opposition to it, wealth/poverty, usury/the market, slavery, sexual ethics and gender norms.

Communications and Human Values

01:090:271 Index #32744 Index #31671 (cross-listed with 04:189:441:01)
**Interview Required, By Special Permission.
Professor Richard Heffner, SCILS – Communication
T 09:50A-12:50P   Scott Hall Rm 201
College Avenue Campus

**Please contact Prof. Heffner at 212-799-7979 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Prof. Heffner will hold interviews with students on Wednesday, April 15, and Friday, April 17, roughly from 10 AM to 3 PM, Room 236 Scott Hall, College Avenue Campus.

This seminar is an intellectual inquiry into the development of American public policy as it relates to mass communications. It is not a practicum, not a "how-to" seminar about film and television, or not about the media generally.

The seminar's purpose is to analyze how much of our sense of what it means to be an American early in the 21st century has been molded by the media -- first print and now increasingly electronic -- with particular reference to their socializing and value-legitimating content. To learn then to deal appropriately and reasonably with such media power, students are asked first to identify their own respective approaches to the role of the state and its proper relationship to the individual through class discussion of such readings as Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, Robert Merton's Mass Persuasion, J. S. Mill's On Liberty, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death; of such films as Hearts and Minds, JFK, and Fahrenheit 9/11; and of the increasingly unfair and unbalanced rants and raves of America's newer communications outlets.

Finally, class emphasis is placed on analyzing and resolving such contemporary media issues as a Fairness Doctrine (the real or imagined "chilling effect" of a requirement for media fairness and balance); cameras in the courts (do televised trials enhance justice, or instead create a "mobocracy", with trial by a new jury of public opinion?); the importance of journalistic "privilege"; and media self-regulation (can there in fact be meaningful voluntary self-discipline in a free market, free speech, mass media-driven society?).

RICHARD D. HEFFNER is University Professor of Communications and Public Policy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where he began to teach in 1948. Trained as an American historian, Mr. Heffner is the author of A Documentary History of the United States and the editor of Alexis de Tocqueville's classic Democracy In America. His most recent book, a collaboration entitled Conversations With Elie Wiesel, derives from The Open Mind, the prize winning television program which he began in 1956 and which he still produces and moderates each week on public broadcasting stations around the country. In 1961, after serving on-the-air and as an executive at CBS, ABC and NBC, Professor Heffner played a leading role in the acquisition and activation of Channel 13 in New York, becoming its Founding General Manager. For twenty years (1974 to 1994), he also commuted to Hollywood, serving as Chairman of the Board of the motion picture industry's voluntary film classification and rating system. Professor Heffner and his wife, Dr. Elaine Heffner, live in New York City. They have two sons -- Daniel, a filmmaker; and Andrew, an Assistant New York State Attorney General -- and four grandchildren.

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Fall 2010 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

**NO SPECIAL PERMISSION NUMBERS WILL BE GIVEN OUT DURING PRE-REGISTRATION FOR CLOSED SECTIONS. PLEASE CONTINUE TO CHECK THE SCHEDULE OF CLASSES FROM NOW UNTIL ADD/DROP PERIOD IN THE FALL SEMESTER.**

How Sex Changed: Biomedical Sex Research in the 20th Century
War, Literature and the Arts in the Twentieth Century
No Permanent Waves; Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism
American Culture in the 1930s
The Life and Times of Ida B. Wells: A Cultural History
Identity in Ancient Greece: Belonging and Otherness
Apocalypse Now? Religious Movements and the End of Time
Financial Crises in Historical Perspective
Evolution of the Language Faculty
Globalization and Social Movements
Medical Ethics and the Law
Anti Apartheid and Civil Rights Movements: King and Mandela - Lessons In Leadership
Never Heard of Her: Women Writers, Artists and Intellectuals from the 11th to the 18th Centuries *CANCELLED
American Regions and Regionalism: Growth and Decline
Origin of Writing and Civilization
Creating Art and Discovering Science Through Visualization in Polynomiography
Cosmology from Ancient Greece to the Modern Era
Complementarity in Physics, Biology, and Philosophy
Science on the Nanoscale
The Philosophy of Socrates
Bodies in Social Interaction
Communications and Human Values

How Sex Changed: Biomedical Sex Research in the 20th Century
01:090:250 Index #09294
Professor James Reed - SAS - History
T 01:10-04:10P
Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

We will begin with the "crisis in civilized sexual morality" and Freud's visit to the U.S. in 1909, and end with the emergence of the intersexed and transsexuals as self-conscious minorities successfully struggling for civil rights. We will have an Alfred Kinsey film festival, and will devote several weeks to the career of John Money, the Johns Hopkins University clinical psychologist who championed the cause of surgical sex reassignment. Assigned readings will include: Susan Stryker, Transgender History; Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality; Deborah Rudacille, The Riddle of Gender; John Coalpinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl; and other materials provided by the instructor. All participants in the class will be expected to make a presentation (15 minutes maximum) about a researcher, novel, autobiography, journal, or website that is relevant to our story. There will be two short written assignments (5 pages) and a longer essay (minimum 10 pages) that will serve as a final exam.

JAMES REED has professed History at Rutgers since 1975. He got his B.A. at Louisiana State University and his A.M. and Ph.D. at Harvard. Among historians he is best known for From Private Vice to Public Virtue, a history of birth control in the United States He has also written on intelligence tests, penitentiaries, and biomedical sex research. His current writing project is a history of biomedical sex research, with the working title Sex Research in America: From Social Hygiene to Sexology. Among Rutgers students he is best known as the instructor in Development of the U.S. I & II, as well as more specialized courses such as Health and the Environment in the U.S., Sport in History, and The IQ Controversy.” He served as Dean of Rutgers College from 1985 to 1994.

War, Literature and the Arts in the Twentieth Century
01:090:251 Index #09295
Professor Michael Adas - SAS - History
M 01:10-04:10P
35 College Avenue Rm 302
College Ave Campus

This seminar will focus on the critical and varied influences that modern, mechanized warfare has exerted on various modes of artistic expression over the course of the twentieth century. The early weeks of the seminar will be devoted to group discussions of readings on representation through various art forms, stressing those favored by actual combatants and other contemporary observers of wars that my research and writing over the past two or three decades suggests have had the greatest influence on the arts and often affected the broader course of twentieth-century history. In the early meetings of the seminar, for example, we will collectively consider First World War poetry, which was one of the one of the most powerful and resonate ways in which participants expressed the trauma and disillusionment brought on by the unprecedented slaughter in the trenches. We will also consider novels that proved to be seminal modes of capturing the experience of World War II and the Vietnam conflict. Subsequent discussion sessions will be devoted to other artistic mediums, including trench art and its impact on key, twentieth-century artistic movements ranging from Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, and Surrealism. We will also look at the art of propaganda during and after the war, with special emphasis on the grandiose productions of works linked to the Mexican and Russian revolutions as well as the rise of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. We will also consider segments from classic films and theatrical productions dealing with war and the major contributions of war photographers, such as Robert Capa, which often extended beyond combat conditions to the devastation unleashed on the civilian population by modern warfare.

The second half of the seminar will be focused on individual research projects that students will design and undertake based on consultations through the early weeks of the semester. Each of these would be focused on major examples of artistic representation in media and relating to the conflicts. Students will both present their findings and write a major essay based on their research. Most of the readings for the early discussion sessions of common themes will be placed on electronic reserve.

MICHAEL ADAS is the Abraham E. Voorhees Professor and Board of Governor’s Chair at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. His early work focused on the comparative history of European colonialism, particularly patterns of economic and social change and peasant protest in South and Southeast Asia. Over the past two decades his teaching and research have been centered on the impact of Western science and technology on European and American colonization and post-colonial interventions in Asia and Africa. His Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (1989-1992) received the Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology and the NJ-NEH Annual Book Award. In recent years, his research, writing and teaching have been increasingly concentrated on the history of America’s rise to global hegemony and its ambivalent participation in the process of globalization. In addition to several articles on these themes, Adas’s most recent book, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission, was published by the Harvard University Press in 2006 (pbk. ed, 2009). He is

currently researching and writing several books, including a comparative study of the combat experience of British soldiers on the Western Front in World War I and America GIs in Vietnam as well as a global history of the Great War.

No Permanent Waves; Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism
01:090:252 Index #09296
Professor Nancy Hewitt - SAS - History
W 12:35-03:35P
Voorhees Chapel Rm 005
Douglass Campus

This seminar will analyze feminist movements in the United States from the 1830s to the present, exploring diverse participants, strategies, ideologies and agendas. The dominant narrative of U.S. feminism focuses on three distinct waves—1848-1920, 1960s-1970s, and 1980s to now—each one building on but also moving beyond its predecessor. Yet this concept of oceanic waves flattens both the differences and contestations within any one period of feminist activism and the connections and echoes across periods. In this course we will explore diverse feminist campaigns and debates that challenge the three-wave model even as we examine the breadth and multiplicity of movements within these periods. We will focus particular attention on the ways that race, class, nationality, and sexuality shaped distinct feminist visions and priorities; the relation of U.S. movements to international and transnational feminist campaigns; and the importance of changing technologies (including media) to activist efforts. The readings for this course include primary sources as well as analyses by historians, sociologists, political scientists, literary and women’s and gender studies scholars. Students will be assigned weekly readings, primary document and web projects, two short response papers, and a final research paper.

NANCY A. HEWITT is Professor II of History and Women’s and Gender Studies. She has taught American history, women’s history and women’s studies at the University of South Florida, Duke University and the University of Cambridge as well as Rutgers. Her research focuses on myriad forms of women’s activism, including abolition, woman’s rights, religious reform, labor organizing, civil rights, feminism, peace, and contemporary social justice and human rights issues. She has generally focused on the ways that class, race and ethnicity shape competing organizations, movements and agendas in particular times and places. Her books include Women’s Activism and Social Change in Rochester, New York, 1822-1872; Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s; and most recently, No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism, an edited collection ranging across the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. This last book inspired the current course. She is currently co-authoring an American History textbook and writing a biography of an early woman’s rights, abolitionist and spiritualist named Amy Post. She has won a variety of awards and fellowships related to her teaching as well as her scholarship.

American Culture in the 1930s
01:090:253 Index #09394
Professor Ann Fabian - SAS - American Studies
TH 04:30-07:30P
Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

Why study the culture of the United States in the 1930s—a depressing decade that gave us FDR and Mickey Mouse, Superman, Babe Ruth, Amelia Earhart, the Empire State Building, and Groucho Marx? What part have memories of the 1930s played in the reporting on our most recent financial crisis?

This was the decade of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the New Deal. The shocking crash of the U.S. economy in 1929 triggered a series of related crises for many Americans – crises that made them question their values, their sense of community, their ideas about family life, and their sense of the social contract between citizens and their government. Responding to these crises, Americans across the country used politics, strikes, movies, photography, art, music, radio, theater, jokes and all sorts of creative forms to express ideas about what had happened and to try to imagine a new “America” from the ruins of the old.

In this seminar we will explore the enormous cultural and political creativity of this period that meant economic ruin for so many. We will begin with “The Crash” and end with a world pulled into war, but along the way we will read some great books, watch some wonderful movies, and listen to some fine music.

The Life and Times of Ida B. Wells: A Cultural History
01:090:254 Index #09297
Professor Evie Shockley - SAS - English
T 04:30-07:30P
Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

In 2008, historian Paula Giddings published Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, the long-awaited biography of one of the most fascinating and important African American women of her time. Ida B. Wells was born just before the system of slavery was abolished in the U.S., and went on to become: a teacher; a journalist; the co-owner of a newspaper; an anti-segregation activist; a wife; a mother; and a leading figure in—in many ways, an initiator of—the struggle to end the practice of lynching. White supremacists used these brutal, typically unpunished murders to terrify the African American population and discourage them from exercising their hard-won civil rights (e.g., voting) or from taking advantage of opportunities for economic advancement, for example. In newspaper editorials and on the speakers’ circuit, Wells battled against the forces that perpetuated this barbaric practice, which involved hundreds of lynchings every year during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As an outspoken, independent woman making a name for herself in the public—and political—arena, she also had to contend with white and black men who saw her as overstepping the boundaries of feminine propriety.

We will read this rich, deeply contextualized biography together over the course of the semester. As we move through Wells’ life, we will pause regularly to read other literary and historical texts that are from or about the period in which she lived, the people with whom she interacted, and the issues and events that shaped her experience. The novels, poems, stories, and autobiographical narratives we engage will bring alive the culture of which Wells was a part; at the same time, the historical documents we explore will clarify what is at stake in the personal and imaginative narratives.

EVIE SHOCKLEY, Assistant Professor of English, is the author of two collections of poetry: a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006) and the new black (Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming 2011). Her current research focuses on poetry as well and has culminated in a manuscript titled “Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry.” She has also published articles exploring the phenomenon she calls “gothic homelessness” in African American literature and culture. She teaches courses in African American literature and creative writing. Her interest in teaching this seminar comes from a few diverse sources: her graduate school research on the ideology of domesticity and its implications for African Americans; her engagement with Constitutional law and issues of civil rights during her years in law school; and her fascination with biographies of strong, unusual people.

Identity in Ancient Greece: Belonging and Otherness
01:090:255 Index #09298
Professor Thomas Figueira - SAS - Classics
W 09:50A-12:50P
Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

A naive and erroneous view of ancient Greek civilization would describe it as the work of “dead white European males”. This not only misstates the nature of diversity in ancient civilizations but also implies a false conception of the nature of socialization and acculturation in ancient western society. In our seminar, we are going to explore the interaction of ancient Greek political classes with others who have been rightly or wrongly considered to be marginal to such societies, including women, slaves, individuals from different ethnic or racial groups, and those who varied in their sexual behaviors. It is my hope not only to impart a reasonable amount of information and interpretation about the nature of ancient Greek social institutions, but also to explore social identities in a cultural setting that is arguably ancestral to our own.

THOMAS J. FIGUEIRA was born on Broadway in Manhattan in 1948 and educated in the public schools of New York City and Poughkeepsie, New York. He received his B.A. in Liberal Arts from Bensalem College of Fordham University in 1970 and his Ph.D. in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. He is a Professor (II) of Classics and of Ancient History at Rutgers, where he teaches courses in ancient history, Greek, Latin, and classical civilization in the departments of History and Classics and in interdisciplinary programs. He has taught over fifty different courses. He is the author of Aegina (1981), Athens and Aigina in the Age of Imperial Colonization (1991), Excursions in Epichoric History (1993), The Power of Money: Coinage and Politics in the Athenian Empire (1998), co-author of Wisdom from the Ancients (2001); editor of Spartan Society (2004) and co-editor of Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis (1985). In his areas of interest in Greek history and literature, he has written numerous articles, chapters, contributions, and reviews, that number around one hundred in their totalality. In recent years, Figueira has begun to produce scholarship in Comparative Studies in collaboration with his sister, the noted Comparatist, D.M. Figueira. For details, see classics.rutgers.edu/tjf.

Apocalypse Now? Religious Movements and the End of Time
01:090:256 Index #15067
Professor Emma Wasserman - SAS - Religion
TTH 02:15–3:35P
Loree Hall Rm 131
Douglass Campus

From the book of Revelation to recent whispers about the year 2012, many leaders and texts speak about a coming time of apocalyptic violence, upheaval, and judgment. The seminar treats ancient, Medieval, and contemporary apocalyptic movements comparatively. Case studies will include the Jewish apocalyptic movement associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls and Pauline Christianity, Medieval apocalypticism surrounding Joachim of Fiore and the Crusades, and more contemporary movements such as Jonestown, Heaven’s gate, and the Left Behind series of Christian thrillers. One goal will be to test certain theories of apocalypticism and millenarianism in these different cases; another will be to situate these movement within relevant historical, social, and literary contexts. Peter Worsley’s classic study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia will serve as a foundational social-scientific approach to millenarianism but students will be encouraged to pursue a variety of methodological approaches including those critical of Worsley.

The first part of the seminar treats theories of millenarianism, focusing especially on Worsley’s The Trumpet Shall Sound and subsequent critiques of and alternatives to it, while also introducing contemporary examples drawn from films such as Hal Lindsey’s ‘The Late Great Planet Earth’. The course then turns to the ancient apocalyptic movements focusing on the Dead Sea Scrolls community and earliest Christianity where the focus will be on Pauline Christianity, the gospel of Mark, and Revelation. Part three turns to medieval apocalyptic or millenarian texts and movements, focusing especially on Joachim of Fiore and the relation between apocalyptic thought and violence in the Crusades. Part four turns back again to more contemporary movements such as Heavens Gate, Waco, and Jonestown with David Chidester’s study Salvation and Suicide, providing for a rich contextualization of Jonestown. Central aims of the final part of the course will be to consider new religious movements and millenarian thought, the relationship between millenarianism, violence, and terrorism, and the possibility of identifying apocalyptic thought in modern secular movements.

EMMA WASSERMAN is an assistant professor of religion whose work focuses on Christian origins. She is currently working on a book about apocalyptic beliefs and expectations in the earliest period of Christianity and has previously published on the Christian appropriation of Platonic philosophy. She received her BA from Brown University, her PhD from Yale University, and before coming to Rutgers in 2008 she taught at Brown University and Reed College.

Financial Crises in Historical Perspective
01:090:257 Index #09299
Professor Michael Bordo - SAS - Economics
M 09:50-12:50A
Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

The world has just emerged from a financial crisis and a deep recession. This is not the first time. Indeed financial crises can be traced back to early modern times. This seminar will focus on the issue of financial crises from an historical perspective. It will survey the history of banking and currency crises across the world for the past century and a half, but focus primarily on the experience in the US and UK.

It will also examine the empirical evidence on crisis incidences, crisis severity and international crisis transmissions. Finally the seminar considers the issue of policy in dealing with crises, with focus on the lender of last resort.

Evolution of the Language Faculty
01:090:258 Index #09300
Professor Kenneth Safir - SAS - Linguistics
TTH 11:30A-12:50P
35 College Avenue Rm 102
College Ave Campus

It is often pointed out by linguists that human languages have properties and functions that no other animal communication systems seem to have in anything like the same range of complexity and flexibility. What is it that humans have in their head that permits them to have such complex linguistic interaction and how did humans come by it? In accounting for how such complexity could arise in humans, what sort of processes of evolution must be appealed to? How does the design of the mental objects we have evidence for (i.e., grammars) reflect the sorts of evolutionary processes that must have given rise to them?

It is no longer seriously controversial that human beings have an inborn linguistic ability that permits any normal child to acquire a human language as long as he or she is exposed to the language of the community in which he or she is raised. There is quite a bit of controversy, however, as to how much of this inborn linguistic ability arises from language-specific mental faculties, and how much of it arises simply from a more complex interaction of faculties of the sort that exist in other kinds of animals, primates particularly. However, if certain linguistic abilities are indeed peculiar to humans, what might be the role of evolutionary processes in shaping grammatical form?

The seminar will be designed to expose students to the reasoning and mechanisms that the theory of evolution has given rise to, on the one hand, and the special challenges that the application of these principles to human grammar poses, on the other. Very rudimentary formal training in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics will be offered as general background. Readings will include works on evolutionary theory, human paleontology, genetics, non-linguistic human cognition, comparative animal cognition, brain anatomy, language acquisition, modern linguistic theory, as well as some of the new literature that has sought to explain the emergence of linguistic faculties in evolutionary terms.

KEN SAFIR received his Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT in 1982 after many detours from academic life. He has been teaching at Rutgers since 1984. He is best known for his work on language typology, syntactic theory, and the syntactician’s view of the syntax/semantics interface, but his work has also touched on questions of language acquisition and the philosophy of language. He has linguistic expertise in Romance, Germanic and African languages and he is currently the principal investigator for a research project and website dedicated to the study of African languages (supported a National Science Foundation grant). His most recent work touches on evolutionary questions with respect to the origin of the human language faculty and more specifically, to the origin of human syntax. He is also interested in exploring the relation between linguistic semantic distinctions embedded in grammar to the semantic distinctions more typically discussed in psychological and philosophical accounts of the theory of mind.

Globalization and Social Movements
01:090:259 Index #10408
Professor Zakia Salime - SAS - Sociology
M 12:35-03:35P
Hickman Rm 132
Douglass Campus

Globalization has shaped new patterns of collective behavior. This seminar explores the impact of globalizations on aspects of collective mobilization by transnational actors. The purpose of this seminar is first to help recognize how global trends have shaped contemporary social movements; second to understand how these movements have become globalizing forces in their own rights. We will explore these connections by looking at patterns of mobilization discourses and politics of major contemporary social movements. We will focus on three types of movements: social justice and human rights women’s rights peace movements and the religious right. We will see how they respond to the ‘opportunities’ and ‘threats’ brought by globalization to (1) global justice and human welfare (2) group identity (3) global security.

This seminar will draw on a broad and interdisciplinary theoretical framework in the social science in order to meet the various interests of students and enable them to connect these interests to academic debates in fields as diverse as media and cultural studies anthropology sociology political theory feminist economics and theory environmental and global studies.

ZAKIA SALIME is an Assistant Professor in Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies. She teaches courses in comparative feminism(s), gender, globalization, social movements, international inequalities and postcoloniality. Her research interests include, race, empire, the political economy of the "war on terror", development policies, Islamic societies and movements, Middle East and US relations. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the interactions among the feminist and the Islamist women's movements in Morocco.

Medical Ethics and the Law
01:090:260 Index #11899
Professor Stanley Vitello - GSE - Education Psychology
TH 09:50A-12:50P
Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

This seminar will consider the justifications for overriding the individual choice of mentally competent people who want physician assistance in terminating their lives; or who want access to drugs that have not been approved by federal agencies as the Food and Drug Administration; or who want treatment notwithstanding their physicians' data-based judgment that such treatment would be "futile"; or who want to participate in medical experiments deemed "excessively risky" by state and federal regulators; or who want to donate or sell their organs for transplantation.

The seminar will also evaluate the ways that the individual choice norm has been extended to or withheld form individuals who have lost competence or who (because of mental impairment) had never been or (because they were infants or fetuses) had not yet become competent to decide for themselves.

STANLEY VITELLO teaches courses on disability law and policy in the Graduate School of Education. He is affiliated with the Center on Bio-ethics at Yale University where he received a law degree. Professor Vitello's scholarship address quality of life issues confronting persons with intellectual disabilities across the life span.

Anti Apartheid and Civil Rights Movements: King and Mandela - Lessons In Leadership
01:090:261 Index #09301
Professor Ronald Quincy - School of Social Work
TTH 04:30-05:50P
390 George Street Room 515
Downtown New Brunswick

This seminar will examine the strategic ways in which leaders have sought to institutionalize their activism and public dissent. We 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 Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Nelson Mandela and his leadership role in the African National Congress (ANC).

Students will explore a combination of readings of great social movement thinkers such as David Thoreau and draw from original case studies to provide comparative and contrasting ideas of King and Mandela, along with other influencers. The important role of interracial and interfaith groups during these time periods will be explored along with issues pertaining to self-sacrifice and the ethics of Movement leadership will also be addressed.

Utilizing real world interactions with historical ANC and civil rights activists, the instructor will facilitate student led electronic interviews of selected leaders. Students will form in class role-play debate teams. In lieu of a final examination, students may develop a comprehensive annotated leadership chronology and leadership decision analysis matrix for a selected historical figure.

Students will prepare mock contemporary conversations between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela as they reflect on one another’s political and social change “best practices” and leadership lessons learned.

RONALD l. QUINCY, PhD (Michigan State University) is currently Director, Center for Nonprofit Management and Governance, and Lecturer (Professor), School of Social Work, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Dr. Quincy teaches courses in the nonprofit and management concentration. His research interests are organizational leadership, governance, community empowerment, and diversity in the human services sector. Dr. Quincy is formerly an associate vice president at Harvard University, where he also served as assistant to the president of Harvard. Dr. Quincy has served two governors as a state cabinet officer in Michigan, Special Assistant to the Secretary, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Executive Director, Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, President of the White House Fellows Foundation, Executive Director/President Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Foreign Affairs Advisor, US State Department, and Director of the Office of Human Resource Policy, State of Michigan. Ron has served on special advisory boards for a number of institutions including MIT, Harvard, and Michigan State. He also served on the governing board of Egleston Children's Hospital (Emory University), Michigan Criminal Justice Commission, Governor's Task Force on School Violence and Vandalism, among others public service agencies. Earlier in his career, Dr. Quincy served as a White House Fellow.

* CANCELLED* Never Heard of Her: Women Writers, Artists and Intellectuals from the 11th to the 18th Centuries
01:090:262 Index #14754
Professor Joseph Consoli - Research & Instructional Svcs-Libraries
M 02:50-05:50P
Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

While many women accomplished in the arts have been recognized from the late twentieth century to the present, before that it was rare to find a woman included in the ranks of great minds. They were usually the object rather than the creator of art. And, in fact, when they did appear, it was often because their accomplishments were just too difficult to deny or ignore. Still, there was always "a little something" which made one believe that she had obtained such notoriety by some special, unique, odd, even aberrant means. Some cut their hair, suggesting they were modeling themselves after men, others took men's names, many were reported to have loose morals, still others only excelled because their fathers or husbands taught them their artistic trades. In this course we will look at women, many women, who have excelled in the humanistic fields from the medieval ages through the 18th centuries. Women whose names should be common place in their disciplines and in academe, but who still have not achieved the prominence they deserve.

American Regions and Regionalism: Growth and Decline
01:090:263 Index #15071 (cross- listed with 10:762:495:01 Index#12149)
Professor Frank Popper - Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy
W 01:10-04:10P
Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

This seminar explores the American history, planning and prospects of large rural regions (e.g., the Upper Midwest) and large metropolitan areas that amount to urban regions (Philadelphia). The course analyzes the ideas of regions and regionalism in American life, explores the ideas' artistic, environmental and policy consequences, compares the regions' experiences and projects them into the future. The course will make cross-national comparisons, especially with Europe and East Asia. The course should draw students interested in American studies, economics, geography, history, literature, planning or politics. The instructor tries to make the course as interdisciplinary as possible.

FRANK J. POPPER, a professor at Rutgers' Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and Princeton's Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, has degrees from Haverford and Harvard. His research has explored the Great Plains, Midwest and Lower Mississippi Delta, the politics of land-use planning, Locally Unwanted Land Uses (or LULUs, an idea he invented), the emergence of shrinking cities, the return of the American frontier and the effects of concentrated landownership. He works frequently with his wife, Deborah Popper, a geographer at the College of Staten Island/City University of New York and Princeton. He chairs the board of the Great Plains Restoration Council, is on the board of the National Center for Frontier Communities and helped found both.

Origin of Writing and Civilization
01:090:264 Index #09302
Professor Kuang Yu Chen - SAS - Chemistry & Chemical Biology
M 05:00-08:00P
Wright Rieman Building Rm A202
Busch Campus

This seminar will focus on two related topics: origin of writing and origin of civilization. The four original writings, namely, Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese oracle bone inscriptions, and Mayan hieroglyphics, will be introduced, including decipherment and epigraphy. Students will learn the basics on reading these inscriptions. We will then examine the culture landscape of these ancient lands and analyze the driving forces that led to the invention of these four writings. As the genesis of civilization was tightly coupled to writing, we will discuss the role of writing in this process. The key features of these four primordial civilizations will be examined and compared. Finally, the controversy of the Harappan writing and civilization will also be discussed.

KUANG YU CHEN, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, is working in the area of chemical biology and cancer biology, particularly on the biochemistry and function of polyamines, eIF5A, and hypusine formation in cancer cell growth and death. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers. In the humanity area, his interest is on Early China (1600 -1000 BCE), particularly the Shang history and oracle bone inscriptions. He is writing a book on the reading of oracle bone inscriptions. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of Columbia University Early China Seminar and a Board Member of Confucius Institute at Rutgers. He holds B.S. degree from National Taiwan University (1967) and Ph.D. from Yale University (1972).

Creating Art and Discovering Science Through Visualization in Polynomiography
01:090:265 Index #09303
Professor Bahman Kalantari - SAS - Computer Science
TH 03:20-06:20P
Lucy Stone Hall Rm A215
Livingston Campus

This seminar will introduce a novel and interdisciplinary field, polynomiography, the fine art and science of visualizing a polynomial equation through computer-generated images. Students will learn the basics of the underlying mathematical and algorithmic foundation of polynomiography aimed at solving a polynomial equation, a task present in every branch of science and mathematics. However, through polynomiography and its software students will also learn to create art and design by turning the polynomial root-finding problem upside down. While polynomiography allows virtual painting using the computer screen as its canvas, it also inspires new artistic styles and actual paintings, whether originated directly from polynomiography software, or indirectly from its concepts.

In this seminar, students will be introduced to a range of possible course projects to be carried out either individually or in small groups. Sample projects consist of: 2D or 3D art- work using polynomiography software, e.g. as prints or video productions; visualizations or animations, as art or as means in conveying a mathematical property or concept; comparison of polynomioraphic images and traditional human art and design. Students may also propose their own creative projects.

The mathematical prerequisite for the course includes Calculus, and interest to explore.

BAHMAN KALANTARI is a professor of computer science and the inventor of the U.S. patented technology of Polynomiography. His research interests lie in theory, algorithms, and applications in a wide range of topics that include mathematical programming; discrete and combinatorial optimization; polynomial root-finding and approximation theory; and Polynomiography, a mathematically inspired medium for art, math, education, and science. Kalantari's Polynomiography has received national and international media recognition that include the Star-Ledger, New Jersey Savvy Living Magazine, Science News, DISCOVER Magazine, Tiede (popular science magazine of Finland), Muy Interesante (popular science magazine of Spain) and more. His artworks have been exhibited in such venues as a traveling art-math exhibition in France, SIGGRAPH Art Gallery in LA, as well as at Rutgers and around New Jersey. His artworks have also appeared on the cover of publications such as Computer Graphics Quarterly, Princeton University Press book, art-math conference proceedings, and in science magazines and high school math books. He has delivered numerous lectures, including invited presentations in USA, France, Austria, Italy, Canada, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Poland, Denmark, as well as in middle and high schools in New Jersey, and K-12 teacher conferences. He hopes to internationalize Polynomiography as a medium for art, math, science, and education, and at many different levels. He has also authored a book, ``Polynomial Root-Finding and Polynomiography,’’ December 2008. www.polynomiography.com

Cosmology from Ancient Greece to the Modern Era
01:090:266 Index #10888
Professor Jeremy Sellwood - SAS - Physics & Astronomy
MW 03:20-04:40P
SEC 204
Busch Campus

For centuries, mankind has attempted to understand the universe in which we find ourselves. The motions of the Sun, Moon and planets have intrigued some of the most powerful minds throughout history. The astronomical foundations laid by Aristarchus, Aristotle, Ptolemy and

others contained both surprising insights and profound misconceptions. Most errors were dispelled in the Renaissance by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. The true scale of the universe was not grasped until the work of Einstein and Hubble in the early the 20th century and our understanding of the universe is still developing today.

The seminar will trace this history, focusing both on the scientific concepts and the characters behind them. We will review the observational data that demand explanation and the development of the scientific process. We will conclude with an assessment of our current picture and ask in what ways it may still be wrong. Students will not need any college level math or science, but competence in high school math, including geometry and science will be assumed.

JERRY SELLWOOD completed his PhD in Astronomy at Manchester University, England in 1977. He has held positions at the European Southern Observatory, Groningen University (The Netherlands), Cambridge University (England), and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He has been on the Faculty at Rutgers University since 1991.

He is a member of the International Astronomical Union and of the American Astronomical Society. He is also a Life Member of Clare Hall Cambridge and recipient of the 1999 Graduate Teaching Award from Rutgers Graduate School. His main interests are structure and evolution of galaxies, their formation and their dark matter content. He is an expert on disk dynamics, bars and spirals in galaxies, and uses state-of-the-art N-body simulations to learn about these systems. He has published over 100 papers, edited three volumes of conference proceedings, and delivered more than 40 invited lectures at international conferences.

Complementarity in Physics Biology and Philosophy
01:090:267 Index #11043
Professor Sungchul Ji - Pharm - Pharmacology & Toxicology
TTH 01:40-03:00P
ARC 207
Busch Campus

Recent developments in molecular and cell biology indicate that Bohr’s principle of complementarity originally derived from quantum physics may play a fundamental role in living processes in the form of information-energy complementarity. Complementarity-like concepts also occur in psychology, philosophy, semiotics (the study of signs), and world religions. The universality of Bohr’s complementarity may be traced to the complementary neuro-electrophysiological functions of the human brain, including the dichotomy of the left and right hemispheres. These findings motivated the formulation of a new philosophical framework known as complementarism in the early 1990’s, the essential content of which being that the ultimate reality perceived and communicated by the human brain is a complementary union of irreconcilable opposites [S. Ji, “Complementarism: A Biology-Based Philosophical Framework to Integrate Western Science and Eastern Tao,” in Psychotherapy East and West: Integration of Psychotherapies, The Korean Academy of Psychotherapists, Seoul, Korea, 1995, pp. 518-548].

In the latter half of the 1990’s, it was found that living cells use a language (called cell language) whose design principles are very similar to those of human language [S. Ji, BioSystems 44: 17-39 (1997)]. This finding further strengthens the link between biology and philosophy, in agreement with the philosophies of Aristotle (384-322 BC), Spinoza (1632-1677), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907-1961). Thus, complementarism, which is rooted in both modern biological sciences and classical and modern philosophical systems, may provide a powerful new philosophical framework for integrating not only science and philosophy on the one hand, but also apparently irreconcilable philosophies and religions of the world on the other.

During the first half of the semester, students will be introduced to the essentials of complementarism, and their physical and metaphysical supports derived from physics, chemistry, biology, linguistics, philosophy, and semiotics. The second half of the semester will be devoted to students’ presentations consisting of short talks (10-minute long) and final seminars (30-minute long) on topics related to some aspects of complementarism or to its application to solving practical problems in contemporary life. The final grade will be based on classroom participation, including short talks (30%, two short talks per student), final seminar (30%), and a written version of the final seminar (10–15 pages, single spaced, including figures, tables, and references; 40%) due one week after the oral presentation.

Pre-requisite: A college-level introductory course (or equivalents) in biology, chemistry, or physics.

DR. SUNGCHUL JI received a BA degree in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1965 and a Ph.D. degree in physical organic chemistry in 1970 from the State University of New York at Albany. After a series of postdoctoral research and teaching experiences in enzymology (University of Wisconsin, Madison), biophysics (University of Pennsylvania), systems physiology (Max Planck Institute, Dortmund, West Germany), and toxicology (University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill), Dr. Ji has been teaching pharmacology, toxicology, and computational/theoretical cell biology at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Rutgers University since 1982. Dr. Ji founded the Theoretical Aspects of Pharmacology course in 2000 at Rutgers and is the author of Molecular Theory of the Living Cell: Conceptual Foundations, Molecular Mechanisms and Applications, to be published by Springer, New York, in 2010.

Science on the Nanoscale
01:090:268 Index #11142
Professor Frederic Cosandey - Engn - Materials Science and Engineering
W 08:40 – 11:40A
SEC-204
Busch Campus

The word “nano” has now entered our every-day life and has been used to describe small objects from electronic devices to very, very small entities like viruses or a small group of atoms forming clusters. These nano-objects are all around us; they affect properties of materials such as color and are used in a large variety of technological applications like TV screens or phones as well as in biology and medicine for application like drug delivery or cancer treatments. Such nano-objects are invisible to the naked eye but can be visualized using electron microscopes.

What is an electron microscope? Is it just a scientific instrument or can it provide images with some aesthetic value? What is the 3D structure of viruses and carbon nanotubes? Can we see atoms and the atomic structure of materials? How are material properties, processes and science affected by the nanoscale? These are questions that will be addressed in this seminar. Discussions will include the historical development of microscopes to the design of modern instruments with practical examples in materials science, physics and biology. There will be laboratory visits where the students will experienced first-hand the operation of an electron microscope and yes, see directly the atomic structure of materials.

The goal of the seminar is to introduce students to various science topics which are controlled by the nanoscale and to show with examples and direct observation what our nano-world is made off. There will be assignments where the students will review a particular topic describing the science and visualization of the nano-world as observed by electron microscopy.

There are no pre-requisites for this seminar but some high school level background in physics, chemistry or biology will be helpful.

FREDERIC COSANDEY received his MS and PhD degree in Materials Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He spent three years at Columbia University as a post-doctoral fellow before joining Rutgers University in 1982. He is currently Professor of Materials Science in the School of Engineering and is head of the electron microscopy facility. His teaching and research interests are centered on understanding structure –property relationship in materials and the determination of material chemistry and structure at the nanoscale. He is currently studying new nano-materials for Li-Ion batteries.

The Philosophy of Socrates
01:090:269 Index #17294
Professor Alan Code - SAS - Philosophy
W 04:30-07:30P
Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

Although he left no philosophical writings at all, Socrates was a pivotal thinker in ancient Greek culture in general and philosophy in particular. Using a short question and answer method of dialectical inquiry he would examine the ethical beliefs of anybody who claimed to have knowledge, and typically would undermine such claims by showing how the internal inconsistency of his respondent's moral beliefs.

Plato wrote a number of fairly short dialogues that represent Socrates carrying about his characteristic activity, and from them we can learn the key features of Socratic method. Socrates was the first to turn his attention to the problem of giving general definitions of moral concepts with an eye to using them as a basis for knowledge, and yet famously he professed ignorance. In addition these dialogues introduce us to some of the fundamental themes of ancient Greek moral psychology, including the idea that virtue (or excellence of character) always contributes to happiness and the Socratic paradoxes that virtue is knowledge, that all wronging is involuntary, and that human virtue is so unified that it is impossible to possess one virtue with possessing them all.

In this seminar we will read most of the so-called 'Socratic' dialogues of Plato (Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Hippias Minor, Charmides and Lysis) as well as some of the current secondary literature on the above topics. As new topics are introduced we will have short presentations by students followed by in depth examinations of the accompanying philosophy. In consultation with the instructor each student will pick a seminar topic. Towards the end of the seminar each student will give a brief presentation to the class on their topic, and will then write a final version to submit at the end of the course. Possible seminar topics include: The unity of virtue, the possibility of knowing the better and doing the worse, no one errs willingly, Socratic dialectic (the unexamined life is not worth living), civil disobedience, the definition and moral knowledge, objective standards and moral relativism.

No previous knowledge of philosophy or ancient Greek culture will be presupposed. This course should serve both as an introduction to ancient Greek ethics and to some of the perennial issues in moral philosophy.

ALAN CODE received his Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is a Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy. He specializes on ancient Greek philosophy, and his recent research has concentrated on issues in Aristotle's metaphysics and logic, and related topics in his natural philosophy and biology. Most of his publications pertain to general issues about the role of logic in metaphysical inquiry, connections between epistemology and metaphysics, and various aspects of his philosophy of nature (including the definition of color and the explanation of weight). Part of his current research is on the way in which Socrates, and Socratic method, played a key role in the development of ancient Greek dialectic and scientific method, and had a formative role in the origin of Plato and Aristotle's metaphysical doctrines.

Bodies in Social Interaction
01:090:270 Index #14755
Professor Galina Bolden - SC&I - Communication
TH 01:10-04:10P
Course Meets in Records Hall Alcove
College Ave Campus

Our bodies play a central role in how we construct meaning and actions through social interaction with each other in the diverse settings that make up a society’s social worlds. In this seminar, we will analyze embodied behaviors not as an isolated, self-contained code but in relation to language, processes of human interaction, and the rich settings where people conduct their lives. We will examine the role of different kinds of embodied behaviors (i.e., body orientation and posture, eye gaze, gestures, laughter, prosody, etc.) in carrying out fundamental human activities in talk-in-interaction, including establishing joint foci of attention, coordinating turn-taking, repairing interactional problems, negotiating meaning, and constructing and negotiating interpersonal relationships. We will also consider embodied communicative behaviors in a variety of professional settings, such as courtrooms, archeological sites, doctors’ offices, and public speaking arenas. This seminar is interdisciplinary and will incorporate materials from the fields of communication, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology.

Videotapes of actual, everyday interactions will be used as a primary source of data, and ordinary face-to-face interactions will be treated as a prime site for studying embodied communicative conduct. We will inspect videotaped recordings of interactions to discover how people assemble the actions that make up ordinary social life and will produce empirically-based analyses of some of those practices.

Students will be engaged in a guided semester-long research project that will involve video recording, transcribing, and analyzing a naturalistic face-to-face interaction. The goals of the project are to develop technical and analytic skills for conducting empirical research on social interaction and to produce a detailed, original analysis of an embodied interactional phenomenon.

GALINA BOLDEN received her BA in Linguistics from the University of Minnesota, and her MA and PhD in Applied Linguistics from University of California, Los Angeles. Her research examines naturally occurring, video/audio-recorded social interactions in a variety of settings: ordinary conversations between family and friends, doctor-patient interactions conducted with the help of language interpreters, and conversations among co-workers at workplaces. She has conducted research on talk in Russian and English languages, as well as bilingual Russian-English conversations. Her current project focuses on communication in Russian immigrant families in the US.

Communications and Human Values
01:090:271 Index #11155 (cross- listed with 04:189:441:01 Index#10537)
**Interview Required, By Special Permission.
Professor Richard Heffner - SC&I - Communication
T 09:50A-12:50P
Scott Hall Rm 201
College Ave Campus

**To setup an appointment, please contact Prof. Heffner at 212-799-7979 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Prof. Heffner will hold interviews with students on Wednesday, April 7, and Thursday, April 8, from 8:30am-12:30pm and 2:00-5:00pm in Room 236 Scott Hall, College Avenue Campus.

This seminar is an intellectual inquiry into the development of American public policy as it relates to mass communications. It is not a practicum, not a "how-to" seminar about film and television, or not about the media generally.

The seminar's purpose is to analyze how much of our sense of what it means to be an American early in the 21st century has been molded by the media -- first print and now increasingly electronic -- with particular reference to their socializing and value-legitimating content. To learn then to deal appropriately and reasonably with such media power, students are asked first to identify their own respective approaches to the role of the state and its proper relationship to the individual through class discussion of such readings as Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, Robert Merton's Mass Persuasion, J. S. Mill's On Liberty, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death; of such films as Hearts and Minds, JFK, and Fahrenheit 9/11; and of the increasingly unfair and unbalanced rants and raves of America's newer communications outlets.

Finally, class emphasis is placed on analyzing and resolving such contemporary media issues as a Fairness Doctrine (the real or imagined "chilling effect" of a requirement for media fairness and balance); cameras in the courts (do televised trials enhance justice, or instead create a "mobocracy", with trial by a new jury of public opinion?); the importance of journalistic "privilege"; and media self-regulation (can there in fact be meaningful voluntary self-discipline in a free market, free speech, mass media-driven society?).

RICHARD D. HEFFNER is University Professor of Communications and Public Policy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where he began to teach in 1948. Trained as an American historian, Mr. Heffner is the author of A Documentary History of the United States and the editor of Alexis de Tocqueville's classic Democracy In America. His most recent book, a collaboration entitled Conversations With Elie Wiesel, derives from The Open Mind, the prize winning television program which he began in 1956 and which he still produces and moderates each week on public broadcasting stations around the country. In 1961, after serving on-the-air and as an executive at CBS, ABC and NBC, Professor Heffner played a leading role in the acquisition and activation of Channel 13 in New York, becoming its Founding General Manager. For twenty years (1974 to 1994), he also commuted to Hollywood, serving as Chairman of the Board of the motion picture industry's voluntary film classification and rating system. Professor Heffner and his wife, Dr. Elaine Heffner, live in New York City. They have two sons -- Daniel, a filmmaker; and Andrew, an Assistant New York State Attorney General -- and four grandchildren.

Fall 2011 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

NO SPECIAL PERMISSION NUMBERS WILL BE GIVEN OUT DURING PRE-REGISTRATION FOR CLOSED SECTIONS. PLEASE CONTINUE TO CHECK THE SCHEDULE OF CLASSES FROM NOW UNTIL ADD/DROP PERIOD IN THE FALL SEMESTER.

How Sex Changed: Biomedical Sex Research in the Twentieth Century
The United States and the Middle East in Revolution, 1945 to 2011 and Beyond
What is Sophistication?
Visible Writings: Cultures Forms Readings
Civilization and Its Discontents
Jewish Museums
Extraterrestrial Life
Religion in a Secular Society
Victorian Popular Culture: As Seen Through Musical Theater
Medical Ethics and the Law
Climate Change Impacts Vulnerability and Adaptation
Anti Apartheid and Civil Rights Movements: King and Mandela - Lessons In Leadership
Polynomials are Too Beautiful to be Limited to Math
Complementarity in Physics Biology and Philosophy
Social Media and Participatory Culture
Communications and Human Values

Fall 2012 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

NO SPECIAL PERMISSION NUMBERS WILL BE GIVEN OUT DURING PRE-REGISTRATION FOR CLOSED SECTIONS. PLEASE CONTINUE TO CHECK THE SCHEDULE OF CLASSES FROM NOW UNTIL ADD/DROP PERIOD IN THE FALL SEMESTER.

Law Race and LiteratureWar on Terror in a Post-9/11 World
The Evolution of the Global Energy System: From Earth's Deep Past to Civilization's Future
Entitlement Reform; What Is It and What Does It Mean for Grandma?
21st Century Myth: the Alien Among Us
Atrocity Crimes and Legal Response
The Maya Apocalypse of 2012 and the Western Imagination
Quantum Reality
Philosophy of Literature
The Science and Life of Albert Einstein
Homer's Odyssey: Mythology Psychology and Politics
Anti Apartheid and Civil Rights Movements: King and Mandela - Lessons In Leadership
Probability Quantum Mechanics Space and Time
The Biological Basis of Cancer
Meaning & Morality: Questions About Who We Are How People Act And What We Should Believe About Good And Evil
Jane Austen and her World
The 2012 Presidential Election
Bodies in Social Interaction
Communications and Human Values

Fall 2013 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Grasping American Freedom
Chemistry in Art and Archeology
The Question of the Animal
The Poetry of Slavery
New Jersey's Greatest Natural Disaster(s)
The Last Days of Mankind: Modernism in the Interwar Period
Genocide in Comparative Historical Perspective
The Formation of Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes in the Double-Dark Universe
How to Do Things with Stories: Narratives in Everyday Conversation
Communications and Human Values
Anti Apartheid and Civil Rights Movements: King and Mandela - Lessons In Leadership
Complementarity in Physics, Biology and Philosophy
Philosophy of Cosmology

Fall 2014 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Genocide in Comparative Historical Perspective
Stories of the Self
Homer's Odyssey: Myth, Psychology and Politics
Meaning & Morality: Questions About Who We Are How People Act And What We Should Believe About Good And Evil
Writing Italian Women's Lives
One Mind, Two Languages
European Languages: History and Theory
Immigrants in the Americas
Gender, Sexuality, and Narrative Theory
Can Grandma Survive Entitlement Reform? How Will Changes in Social Security, Medicare and Other Programs Affect You and Your Family?
Art, Archeology, and Chemistry
Paradoxes of Zionism
Migration, Globalization, and Education
Anti-Apartheid and Civil Rights Movements: King and Mandela, Lessons in Leadership Seminar
Understanding War: Will the Second Horseman Ride Forever?
The Cartographic Impulse
Does Anything Matter?
What About Love? Marriage and Family in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Fall 2015 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Genocide In Comparative Historical Perspective
The Formation of Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes in the Double-Dark Universe
Jung for the 21st Century
Tolstoy's War and Peace
Why We Play: Play in Children, Animals, and Adults
The Bilingual Mind
Philosophy of Cosmology
Animals, Poets, Philosophers
The Wonderful World of Opera
Reading Redder: Color in Literature, from Poe to Comics
Jewish Museums
A(t) Home in the World
Who Makes our Stuff? Work and Labor in the Global Economy
Stories of the Self
Brazilian Culture: Conquest to Contemporary
The First Three Minutes After The Big Bang
The First World War: Causes, Consequences, and Controversies
Civil Society, Social Entrepreneurs and the New Economy: New forms of Organizing for a More Just and Sustainable World?
Mapping the Brain
Existentialism in Philosophy, Literature, and Film
Anti-Apartheid and Civil Rights Movements: King and Mandela, Lessons in Leadership Seminar
Communication and the Construction of Family
The "God Debate"
Collecting the World: From Ancient Relics and Cabinets of Curiosity to the Modern Art Museum
Literature and Maps: The Cartographic Impulse
Doctor/Lawyer, Artist/Technologist, Programmer/ Poet: How Do We Learn From Each Other?
The Problem of Evil in Philosophy and Popular Culture
Sacrifice, Sorcery, and Society

Fall 2016 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

pdf Political Representation (179 KB)

01:090:292:01 Index# 13335
Professor Mona LenaKrook, SAS - Political Science
T 09:15A-12:15P
Hickman Hall Rm 117
Douglass Campus

pdf Quantitative Research: A Hands-On Preparation (180 KB)

pdf Syllabus (524 KB)

01:090:292:02 Index#13339
Professor Nuria Sagarra, SAS- Spanish & Portuguese
M 11:30A-2:30P
Academic Building Rm 5190
College Avenue Campus

pdf Homer's Odyssey: Mythology, Psychology and Politics (185 KB)

pdf Syllabus (301 KB)

01:090:292:03 Index# 13342
Professor Steven Walker, SAS- Asian Language & Cultures
T 09:50A-12:50P
Honors College Rm S120
College Ave Campus

pdf America as a Celebrity Culture (267 KB)
01:090:292:04 Index# 15082
Professor Michael Rockland, SAS - American Studies
T 10:55A-1:55P
Ruth Adams Building Rm 018
Douglass Campus

pdf Migration, Globalization, Education (264 KB)
01:090:292:05 Index# 16134
Professor Thea Abu El-Haj, GSE-Edu Theory, Policy & Admin
T 9:50A-12:50P
Honors College Room E128
College Ave Campus

pdf Protest and Progress (156 KB)

pdf Syllabus (241 KB)

01:090:292:06 Index# 20835
Professor William Field, SAS - Political Science
W 09:50A-12:50P
Honors College Rm HC S126
College Avenue Campus

pdf Rethinking the Global Wealth Divide (187 KB)

pdf Syllabus (181 KB)

01:090:293:01 Index# 13336
Professor Angelique Haugerud, SAS - Anthropology
T 1:10-4:10P
Honors College Rm E128
College Ave Campus

pdf The Political Economy of Piracy
(266 KB) 01:090:293:02
Professor Johan Mathew, SAS - History
TF 9:50-11:10A
Honors College Rm S124
College Avenue Campus

pdf Sociologists Go To College (180 KB)

01:090:293:03 Index# 15084
Professor D. Randall Smith, SAS - Sociology
TF 12:00-1:20P
Lucy Stone Hall A215
Livingston Campus

pdf Truth, Fiction, and Inequality (264 KB)

pdf Syllabus (250 KB)

01:090:293:04 Index# 18643
Professor Bradley Evans, SAS - English
TTH 1:10-2:30P
Honors College Rm S120
College Ave Campus

pdf Sharing Space in the City: The Spatial Politics of Urban Divisions (188 KB)

pdf Syllabus (138 KB)

01:090:293:05 Index# 18519
Professor Anita Bakshi, SEBS - Landscape Architecture
MW 2:15-3:35P
Blake Hall Rm 128
Cook Campus

pdf Language, Thought, and Identity (182 KB)
01:090:293:06 Index# 18518
Professor Eviatar Zerubavel, SAS - Sociology
TTH 2:15-3:35P
Hickman Hall Rm 206
Douglass Campus

pdf The Arts of Resistance: Underground Media and Political Subversion from the English Revolution to the Age of Wikileaks (262 KB)
01:090:294:01 Index# 13337
Professor Alastair Bellany, SAS - History
M 11:30A-2:30P
Honors College Rm S124
College Ave Campus

pdf The 2016 Presidential Election (180 KB)
01:090:294:02 Index# 15085
Professor David Greenberg, History
M 11:30A-2:30P
Honors College Rm S120
College Ave Campus

pdf Exploring Happiness
(63 KB) 01:090:294:03 Index #13347
Professor Sarah Rosenfield
W 2:15-5:15P
Hickman Hall Rm 209
Douglass Campus

pdf The Politics of Art and Poetry (263 KB)
01:090:294:04 Index# 13377
Professor Paul Blaney, SAS - English, SASHP
Dean Julio Nazario, SASHP
W 2:50-5:50P
Brett Hall Seminar Room
College Ave Campus

pdf Theories in Human Adaptation (178 KB)
01:090:294:05 Index# 15086
Professor Susan Cachel, SAS - Anthropology
MW 3:55-5:15P
Hickman Hall Rm 131
Douglass Campus

pdf Contestation of Values in Classical Chinese Thought (267 KB)
01:090:295:01 Index# 18516
Professor Tao Jiang, SAS - Religion
T 9:50a-12:50p
Honors College Rm N106
College Ave Campus

pdf Bodies in Social Interaction (182 KB)

pdf Syllabus (234 KB)

01:090:295:02 Index# 12172
Professor Galina Bolden, SC&I - Communication
T 11:30A-2:30P
Alcove Computing Lounge- Records Hall
College Ave Campus

pdf Politics and Existentialism (266 KB)
01:090:296:01 Index# 15087
Professor Stephen Bronner, SAS - Political Science
TH 1:10-4:10P
Honors College Rm S124
College Ave Campus

pdf Philosophy of Language: What is Meaning? (176 KB)
01:090:296:02 Index# 13340
Professor Elisabeth Camp, SAS - Philosophy
TH 11:30A-2:30P
RU Academic Building Rm 3450
College Avenue Campus

pdf Anti-Apartheid and Civil Rights Movements: King and Mandela, Lessons in Leadership Seminar (185 KB)
01:090:296:03 Index# 13341
Professor Ronald Quincy, School of Social Work
TH 04:30-07:30P
Honors College Rm E128
College Ave Campus

pdf Jews and Medicine (175 KB)
01:090:296:04 Index#
Professor Hilit Surowitz, SAS - Religion/Jewish Studies
M 2:50-5:50P
Miller Hall Room 116
College Ave Campus

pdf The Problem of Evil in Philosophy and Popular Culture (186 KB)
01:090:297:01 Index# 13338
Professor Edward McCrossin, SAS - Philosophy
TH 9:50A-12:50P
Honors College Rm S120
College Ave Campus

Fall 2017 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Jung for the 21st Century
01:090:292:01 Index# 12056
Professor Stephen Walker
T 0950 A - 1250
HC S120
College Ave

Wise Fools
01:090:292:02 Index# 12060
Professor Nicholas Rennie
TH 0950 A - 1250
AB 4050
College Ave

Visual Culture and Crisis
01:090:292:03 Index# 12063
Professor Rhiannon Welch
T 0950 A - 1250
HC S124
College Ave

Politics of Reproduction
01:090:292:04 Index# 13380
Professor Cynthia Daniels
T 1055 A - 0155
HCK 127
Cook/Douglass

Evolution, Cognition, and Belief
01:090:293:01 Index# 12057
Professor Lee Cronki
W 1235 P - 0335
HCK 132
Cook/Douglass

Guests, Neighbors, Enemies: Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and the Other in Europe Today
01:090:293:02 Index# 12064
Professor Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi
M-Th 1235 P - 0155
HCK 129
Cook/Douglass

Michelangelo
01:090:293:04 Index# 15508
Professor Sarah McHam
T 0950 A - 1250
HC N106
College Ave

Anti-Apartheid and Civil Rights Movement: King and Mandela Lessons in Leadership Seminar
01:090:293:05 Index# 15411
Professor Ronald Quincy
W 0950 A - 1250
BRT SEM
College Ave

Hard Choices
01:090:294:03 Index# 12065
Professor Ruth Chang
F 1130 A - 0230
HC S120
College Ave

Philosophy of Cosmology
01:090:294:04 Index# 12091
Professor Barry Loewer
TH 0950 A - 1250
HC S126
College Ave

How Governments, Businesses, and Non-Profits Change Behavior
01:090:294:05 Index# 13383
Professor Hana Shepherd
M-Th 1055 A - 1215
HCK 131
Cook/Douglass

Personal Identity in Philosophy and Popular Culture
01:090:294:06 Index# 21864
Professor Trip McCrossin
TH 1130 A - 0230
BRT SEM
College Ave

Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century
01:090:295:01 Index# 15409
Professor Premala Chandra
M 0140 P - 0440
TIL 204
Livingston

Bilingualism: How It Shapes Our Minds
01:090:295:02 Index# 11087
Professor Liliana Sanchez
M-W 0110 P - 0230
HC S120
College Ave

Children in Danger: Abduction, Abandonment, Adoption in Global Perspective
01:090:295:03 Index# 18629
Professor Judith Surkis
T 0950 A - 1250
HC E128
College Ave

Botanic Sociality: People, Plants, & Words
01:090:296:01 Index# 13384
Professor Becky Schulthies
T-Th 0215 P - 0335
HCK 218
Cook/Douglass

Roman Empresses
01:090:296:02 Index# 12061
Professor Corey Brennan
T-Th 0250 P - 0410
HC S124
College Ave

Colors in Literature from Poe to the Present
01:090:296:03 Index# 12062
Professor Nicholas Gaskill
T-Th 0110 P - 0230
HC S124
College Ave

Digital Technology and Disruptive Change
01:090:296:04 Index# 13385
Professor Mary Chayko
TH 1130 A - 0230
CI 203
College Ave

Race, Intimacies & Border-Crossing
01:090:296:06 Index# 19986
Professor Louisa Schein
T 0215 P - 0515
RAB 209A
Cook/Douglass

Food-Energy-Water Nexus in the Anthropocene
01:090:297:H1 Index# 18403
Professor Nirav Patel
W 1130 A – 1250
AB 4400
F 0950 A - 1110
F 0110 P – 0230
AB 1100
College Ave

Fall 2020 Department-Based Honors Courses

Fall 2020 Department-Based Honors Courses

Please note: These courses have been scheduled by the individual departments. They may cancel or reschedule them at their discretion. The SAS Honors Program does not monitor departmental course cancellations.

Students may also complete up to one of their honors course requirements by pursuing an honors contract course. With the prior approval of the course instructor, students may petition to take up to one section of a traditional course with an honors contract to perform additional assignments—research, independent study, and more. Students are advised to speak with their Honors Dean for more information.

Accounting

Anthropology

Biological Sciences

Business Analytics & Information Technology (BAIT)

French

Calculus I Math/Physics (4)
01:640:151:H1 Index #06564
01:640:151:H2 Index #06565
01:640:151:H3 Index #06566

Calculus II Math/Physics (4)
01:640:152:H1 Index #06596
01:640:152:H2 Index #06597
01:640:152:H3 Index #06598
By Permission: Department Staff
Prereqs: 01:640:135 or 01:640:137 or 01:640:143 or 01:640:151 or 01:640:153 or 01:640:191 or 62:640:135 or 21:640:135

Multivariable Calculus (4)
01:640:251:H1 Index #06658
01:640:251:H2 Index #06659
01:640:251:H3 Index #06660
01:640:251:H4 Index #06661
01:640:251:H5 Index #06662
01:640:251:H6 Index #06663
By Permission: Department Staff
Prereqs: 01:640:192 or 01:640:152 or 01:640:154 or 21:640:136 or 50:640:122 or 62:640:136

Honors Calculus III (4)
01:640:291:H1 Index #06668
01:640:291:H2 Index #06669
By Permission: Department Staff
Prereqs: 01:640:192 or Special Permission

Introduction to Math Reasoning (3)
01:640:300:H1 Index #06678
01:640:300:H2 Index #06679

Introduction to Real Analysis I (4)
01:640:311:H1 Index #06685
By Permission: Department Staff
Prereqs: 01:640:244 or 01:640:252 or 01:640:292 and 01:640:300

Linear Algebra (3)
01:640:350:H1 Index #06694
By Permission: Department Staff
Prereqs: (01:640:250 and 01:640:250 and 01:640:300 and 01:640:244) or (01:640:250 and 01:640:250 and 01:640:300 and 01:640:252) or (01:640:250 and 01:640:250 and 01:640:300 and 01:640:292)

Molecular Biology and Biochemistry

Introduction to Molecular Biology Research (4)
01:694:215:H1 Index #06741 Class Level: First Year Students
Professor Vershon
By special permission
See online schedule for prereqs

Introduction to Molecular Biology, Biochemistry and Genetics Research (4)
01:694:316:H1 Index #06741 Class Level: MBB or Genetics Second or Third Year Students
Professor Vershon
By special permission
See online schedule for prereqs

Physics

Analytical Physics I (2)
01:750:123:H1 Index #06889
01:750:123:H2 Index #06890
01:750:123:H3 Index #06891
01:750:123:H4 Index #06892
01:750:123:H6 Index #06893
01:750:123:H7 Index #06894
Professor Halkiades

Analytical Physics II (3)
01:750:227:H1 Index #07039
01:750:227:H2 Index #07040
01:750:227:H3 Index #07041
01:750:227:H4 Index #07042
Professor Rabe

Honors Physics I (3)
01:750:271:H3 Index #07065
Professor Kiryukhin
Prereq: 01:640:112

Honors Physics III (3)
01:750:273:H1 Index #07066
Professor Chou

Classical Physics Lab I (2)
01:750:275:H1 Index #07067
01:750:275:H4 Index #07068
Professor Lee

Political Science

Psychology

Spanish

Food-Energy-Water Nexus in the Anthropocene

01:090:296:01 Index# 11988
T 8:10A - 9:30A, Academic Building, Rm. 1100
W 08:10A - 9:30A, Academic Building, Rm. 1100
Professor Nirav Patel, Honors College
College Ave Campus

01:090:296:02 Index# 10532
T 8:10A - 9:30A, Academic Building, Rm. 1100
W 09:50A - 11:10A, Academic Building, Rm. 1100
Professor Nirav Patel, Honors College
College Ave Campus

Genes and Evolution

01:090:294:01 Index# 10526
Professor Frank Deis, SAS - Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
MW 1:40-3P
Allison Road Classroom Rm 203
Busch Campus

Guests, Neighbors, Enemies: Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and the Other in Europe Today

01:090:293:02 Index# 12064
Professor Parvis Ghassem-Fachan, SAS - Anthropology
M 12:35P - 01:55P
TH 12:35P - 01:55P
Hickman Hall, Rm. 129
Douglass Campus

Hard Choices

01:090:294:03 Index# 12065
Professor Ruth Chang, SAS - Philosophy
F 11:30A - 02:30P
Honors College, Rm S120
College Ave Campus

Historical Archaeology of Slavery

01:090:295:06 Index# 14330
Professor Carmel Schrire, SAS - Anthropology
W 2:15-5:15P
Biological Sciences Building, Room 206
Douglass Campus

How Do We Know This

01:090:295:03 Index# 10753
Professor Gary Rendsburg, SAS - Jewish Studies & History
T-Th 2:50PM-4:10PM
Honors College S-120
College Ave Campus

How Governments, Businesses, and Non-Profits Change Behavior

01:090:294:05 Index# 13383
Professor Hana Shepherd, SAS - Sociology
M 10:55A - 12:15P
TH 10:55A - 12:15P
Hickman Hall, Rm. 131
Douglass/Cook Campus

Inequality and Opportunity in America

01:090:296:03 Index# 10533
Professor Patricia Roos, SAS - Sociology
T 9:15A-12:15P
Hickman Hall Rm 132
Douglass Campus

Jung for the 21st Century

01:090:292:01 Index# 12056
Professor Steven Walker, SAS - Asian Languages and Cultures
T 09:50A - 12:50P
Honors College, Rm S120
College Ave Campus

Medieval Cluny, Christendom & Islam

01:090:297:02 Index #10530
Professor Stephen Reinert
Th 11:30 – 2:30 PM
Honors College Rm E128
College Avenue Campus

Michelangelo

01:090:293:04 Index# 15508
Professor Sarah McHam, SAS - Art History
T 09:50A - 12:50P
Honors College, Rm. N-106
College Avenue Campus

Molecular View of Human Anatomy: Molecular Mechanisms of Antibiotics Action and Resistance

01:090:297:03 Index# 10531
Shuchismita Dutta, SAS - Chemistry and Chemical Biology - Protein Database

Stephen K Burley, SAS - Chemistry and Chemical Biology
M10:20A-01:20P
Proteomics Building Room 126
Busch Campus

Personal Identity in Philosophy and Popular Culture

01:090:294:06
Professor Tripp McCrossin, SAS - Philosophy
TH 8:10A - 11:10A
Honors College Room S124
College Avenue Campus

Philosophy of Cosmology

01:090:294:04 Index# 12091
Professor Barry Loewer, SAS - Philosophy
TH 09:50A - 12:50P
Honors College, Rm S126
College Ave Campus

Politics of Reproduction

01:090:292:04 Index# 13380
Professor Cynthia R. Daniels, SAS - Political Science
T 10:50A - 1:55P
Hickman Hall 127
Cook/Douglass Campus

Race, Intimacies & Border-Crossing

01:090:296:06 Index# 19986
Professor Louisa Schein, SAS - Anthropology
T 02:15P - 05:15P
Ruth Adams Building, Rm 209A
Douglass/Cook Campus

Reading in Slow Motion

01:090:294:04 Index# 13266
Professor Richard Miller, SAS - English
MW 1:10-2:30PM
Academic Building, Room 1100
College Ave Campus

Roman Empresses

01:090:296:02 Index# 12061
Professor T. Corey Brennan, SAS - Classics
T 02:50P - 04:10P
Honors College, Rm S124
College Ave Campus

BUSCH CAMPUS
Nelson Biological Labs
Room A-110
P 848-445-3912

COLLEGE AVENUE CAMPUS
Milledoler Hall
Room 12
P 848-932-1406

DOUGLASS CAMPUS
Ruth Adams Building
Suite 108
P 848-932-2011

LIVINGSTON CAMPUS
Lucy Stone Hall
Room A-201
P 848-445-3206

RUTGERS BUSINESS SCHOOL
100 Rockafeller Rd
Rm. 1031
P 848-445-3206

COLLEGE AVENUE CAMPUS
MAIN OFFICE
35 College Avenue
848-932-7964

Honors Program

Honors Program

Previous Courses

Artificial Intelligence: A Cultural History

Bilingualism: How It Shapes Our Minds

Botanic Sociality: People, Plants, & Words

Children in Danger: Abduction, Abandonment, Adoption in Global Perspective

Climate Change and Energy in the 21st Century

Colors in Literature from Poe to the Present

Communication and the Construction of Family

Cultures of American Adolescence

Digital Technology and Disruptive Change

Evolution, Cognition, and Belief

Fall 2007 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Fall 2008 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Fall 2009 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Fall 2010 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Fall 2011 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Fall 2012 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Fall 2013 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Fall 2014 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Fall 2015 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Fall 2016 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Fall 2017 Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars

Fall 2020 Department-Based Honors Courses

Food-Energy-Water Nexus in the Anthropocene

Genes and Evolution

Guests, Neighbors, Enemies: Xenophobia, Xenophilia, and the Other in Europe Today

Hard Choices

Historical Archaeology of Slavery

How Do We Know This

How Governments, Businesses, and Non-Profits Change Behavior

Inequality and Opportunity in America

Jung for the 21st Century

Medieval Cluny, Christendom & Islam

Michelangelo

Molecular View of Human Anatomy: Molecular Mechanisms of Antibiotics Action and Resistance

Personal Identity in Philosophy and Popular Culture

Philosophy of Cosmology

Politics of Reproduction

Race, Intimacies & Border-Crossing

Reading in Slow Motion

Roman Empresses

Academics

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