Seminars

Upcoming Seminars

Fall 2026

Honors College Seminars

First Year Forum, XPL
Dr. Lee Ann Westman
50:525:101
Tuesday & Thursday, 2:00 p.m. - 3:20 p. 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

Contagion: How Plagues, Pandemics, and Death Infected Art, HAC, AAI
Professor Gabriel Molina
50:525:251, 50:525:252 
Wednesday, 12:30 p.m. - 2:50 p.m.

This historical survey course examines how societies have visualized, interpreted, and memorialized disease from antiquity to the present. Focusing on plagues and pandemics, students will analyze artworks produced during moments of crisis as well as retrospective images that shape cultural memory. Topics include the Black Death, smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, influenza, Ebola, and COVID‑19. The course emphasizes how art negotiates fear, faith, blame, care, power, inequality, and resilience.

Students look at, discuss, analyze, and reflect on works, such as paintings, prints, sculpture, architecture, material culture, photography, film, digital media, memorials, and activist art. Selected readings draw from art history, medical humanities, social history, and critical theory. The course is primarily participatory and discussion-based, with a key feature being a self-guided tour of relevant works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Assessments include a visual analysis and curatorial re-write, and a collaborative pandemic art project. This is an introductory art history course; artistic skills or prior experience is not needed.

Criminal Plagues and Pandemics GCM, USW
Dr. Criag Agule
50:525:253, 50:525:254
Tuesday & Thursday 9:35 a.m. - 10:55 a.m.

This course looks at the conceptual, literal, and metaphorical intersections between criminal law, crime, and infection.

Course Outline

• Law as society’s immune system – Michel Foucault

• Broken windows policing (disorder as infectious) – James Wilson & George Kelling, Bernard Harcourt

• Criminal law as public health – Mark Moore, Ian Hacking

• Punishment as quarantine – R. A. Duff, Gregg Caruso

• The criminalization of disease transmission (with NJ’s sexually transmitted disease statute as an example) - Leslie Pickering Francis & John G. Francis

• Defenses of disease (addiction, affluenza) – Stephen Morse 

• Criminal law during epidemics (Black Death criminal provisions, 1918 Flu mask provisions) – Jeremy Davis

Human Trafficking GCM
Dr. Jeanann Coppola
50:525:253
Friday, 8:00 a.m. - 10:50 a.m.

This course provides an in-depth examination of the complex and multifaceted issue of human trafficking, exploring its global prevalence, underlying causes, impact on individuals and societies, legal frameworks, and intervention strategies. Through a multidisciplinary approach, students will delve into the socio-economic, political, and ethical dimensions of human trafficking, developing a comprehensive understanding of this grave violation of human rights. By the end of this course, students will gain a nuanced understanding of the complexities surrounding human trafficking and be equipped with the knowledge and critical thinking skills necessary to contribute meaningfully to the global efforts aimed at combating this heinous crime.

Seminar on Professional Nursing
57:705:102:H1
Tuesday, 8:00 a.m. - 10:50 a.m.

This introductory nonclinical course in nursing is designed to provide the student with a foundation in nursing knowledge that will provide the basis for ensuing theory and clinical nursing courses. Major foci will be the discipline and profession of nursing, its history, its conceptual and theoretical structures, and the patterns of knowledge needed for developing the science and practice of nursing. It requires the integration of previously acquired knowledge in the sciences, arts, and humanities and introduces basic concepts in epidemiology, demographics, and cultural competencies, as well as the knowledge necessary for a beginning understanding of the research process, and for development of interpersonal and interdisciplinary communication skills. The ethics and values of the profession as well as the scope of practice and other legal and regulatory aspects will be introduced. Current issues in nursing and the many roles of the baccalaureate-prepared professional nurse will be examined and discussed as the student is socialized to become a self-reflective, accountable, lifelong learner given to self-appraisal as she or he navigates the route to achieving the terminal objectives of the curriculum.