Seminars Archive

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.

Biodesign in Your Backyard AAI, PLS
Professor Freeman
50:525:252, 50:525:257
Monday & Wednesday 9:35am-10:55am

Biodesign is an interdisciplinary field at the cross section of art, design, and biology. This course builds on the international Biodesign Challenge curriculum, considering ways that makers and inventors can collaborate with living mediums to solve real-world problems. As this field involves creating for and with plants, animals and microbes, a primary consideration is how to engage in a respectful way. The course will look at the history of environmental art and design projects, considering how students can apply existing strategies to public space in Camden.

A major focus of this course will be collaborating with our partner organization, RETI Center in Brooklyn, on expanding their floating garden project to Camden. These garden islands provide habitat for migrating birds and improve the health of the water through phytoremediation.

Please see: https://www.reticenter.org/floating-gardens

Students also have the opportunity to present a speculative or realized project at the Biodesign Challenge Summit in New York City, hosted by Parsons and the Museum of Modern Art annually in June. For more information on the Biodesign Challenge curriculum and community see: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/

This course consists of lectures, readings, research reports, creative projects, data collection, and work on-site.

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.

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.

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.