Seminars
Upcoming Seminars
Spring 2026
First Year Forum, XPL
Dr. Lee Ann Westman
50:525:101:01
Monday & Wednesday, 9:35 a.m. to 10:55 a.m.
The Honors College First-Year Forum is a 3-credit course organized around the theme "What is a Just Community?" This course is required of all first-year Honors College students in their first or second semester at Rutgers-Camden. Faculty from across campus and stakeholders from the community will meet with us to discuss how they approach the question of "What is a Just Community." This class includes a robust engaged civic learning requirement as well: students will work with Honors College Teaching Assistants and each other on semester-long projects to produce a change-making product, service, or initiative.
Upper Division Honors Courses
(De)Humanizing the Other: Multilingualism and Linguistic Minorities in the United States HAC, GCM, USW
Professor Sylvia Perez-Cortes
50:525:251, 50:525:253:01; 50:525:254:01
Monday & Wednesday, 12:30 p.m. to 1:50 p.m.
This course is designed to provide students with the tools to analyze how immigration has shaped the cultural and linguistic landscape of the United States through time, and to reflect upon the ideologies that foster (or deter) inequalities rooted in social and linguistic discrimination. To do so, students will be presented with a critical overview about the presence –and influence– of multicultural and multilinguistic minorities in the US, placing a particular emphasis on Latino, Asian and African American communities. In our sessions, we will focus on understanding the
characteristics and evolution of the languages and dialects spoken by these groups (i.e. Spanglish, Latino and African American English, Creoles…) as well as the impact of standardized linguistic ideologies on their acceptance and perception
Monsters and Other Weirdos in Folklore and Fiction AAI
Professor Sean Lovitt
50:525:252:01
Monday & Wednesday, 2:05 p.m. to 3:25 p.m.
This class is rooted in folk tales as the expressions of traditional and changing beliefs about our humanity. We will look at how these classic stories define humanity in relationship to its inhuman others, both natural and the supernatural. We will track the beliefs and definitions of the inhuman across genres to modern iterations in the oral culture of cryptids and literary inventions of Weird Tales. A close reading of these stories reveals the troublesome ways we construct our idea of the human, of civilization and even reality through exclusions of “beastly,” “unreal,” and “weird” beings. For example, we will critically examine the role that storytelling played in constructing a modern industrial culture that devalued our relationships to animals and our environment. More broadly, we will investigate what fictional animals and monsters tell us about humans who were historically excluded from spheres of social life and, in some cases, humanness. While studying these stories, we will consider questions of gender, race, and sexuality. In what ways do these stories reinforce the exclusive boundaries of what counts as human and in what
other ways do they expose its porousness?
Slavery and Freedom from Ancient Rome to Rutgers HAC, USW
Professor Evan Jewell
50:525:251:01, 50:525:254:02
Tuesday & Thursday, 11:10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
The history of slave systems in the Roman and Atlantic worlds has seen a surge of interest in recent years, not least because comparative histories of slavery have also become a topic of scholarly interest. Yet the subsequent histories of freedom for the (formerly) enslaved peoples studied are usually disconnected from one another, and are rarely put into comparative perspective. This course seeks to remedy this by examining both the history of slavery and freedom—including its transitional, more nebulous states—and the constituent experiences of enslavement and freed life in the Roman and Black Atlantic worlds in a comparative framework, stretching from the moment of abduction to the acts of resistance, rebellion, flight and emancipation, and finally to the experience of “limited freedom” which freed people in both societies were/are subjected to, not least in the forms of citizenship conferred on, or withheld from, them.
Restorative/Transformative Justice USW, EAV
Professor Josh Staub
50:525:254:03, 50:525:255:01
Tuesday & Thursday, 9:35 a.m. to 10:55 a.m.
This course is designed to teach students about the history and practices of Transformative/Restorative Justice-Practices (TRJP), providing insight into how TRJP can be integrated into systems, making them restorative, how TRJP can impact and inform policy creating opportunity for innovations leading to an increased quality of life for all people, regardless of their identifying factors, and teaches hands-on skills like restorative conversations and four unique forms of circle practices equipping students with skills that will aid them in navigating their various career choices.