Offered Courses

Survey of the major monuments and trends in the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture in the western world from prehistory to 1400.

Survey of the major monuments and trends in the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture in the western world from 1400 to the present.

The market system and alternative mechanisms for determining prices and allocating resources. Economic analysis of monopoly, cartels, wage and price controls, pollution, and other contemporary problems. The role of government in promoting economic efficiency. Only open to students who have completed or are currently enrolled in precalculus.

Determinants of aggregate employment and national income; evaluation of government policies to alleviate inflation and unemployment. Money, banking, and monetary policy. International trade and finance, and the prospects for world economic development. Only open to students who have completed or are currently enrolled in precalculus.

Historical, philosophical, and scientific foundations of the discipline.

The Ebola virus outbreak in western Africa, hurricane Sandy in New Jersey, and droughts and fires in California are a few examples of recent, high-profile events that demonstrate fundamental connections and interdependencies between human and natural systems. Human choices and actions fundamentally transform, and are transformed by, environmental processes, with critical implications for ecosystem and human health, prospects for maintaining secure livelihoods, the equitable distribution of resources, and long-term sustainability. In this introductory environmental studies course, students will gain a foundation in the constitutive fields of environmental studies through a review of biophysical, social science, and humanities-based understandings of the environment.

Earth's physical environment, its atmosphere, landscapes, water resources, and geology change from place to place. With this comes environment affects on people's everyday lives. Yet people also influence their surrounding environments. Dry, wet, warm or cold regions present different challenges for the human population. How do the earth's physical landscapes develop and evolve? Why does New Jersey’s climate vary from season to season and year to year, and why is it changing? How does this differ from deserts in the southwestern US, the Florida Everglades, and the Alaskan tundra? Why does the landscape change from the Rocky Mountains to the New Jersey barrier islands? How do water, ice and wind sculpt these landscapes? Where do humans fit into these “equations”? This course uses a systems approach to delve into linkage amongst these aspects of the physical environment, in particular exploring their geographic dimensions.

This introductory geography course explores how human activities and natural systems interact with each other to profoundly transform the environment. Environmental geography begins with recognition that what we call “natural resources” is socially constructed. In other words, something may become a resource if humans make it so through a variety of economic, cultural, and technological filters. It is not possible to understand environmental problems Without understanding the demographic, cultural, political, and economic processes that lead to increased resource consumption and waste generation. Students will uncover that environmental transformations occur at individual, community, regional, national, and global scales. In this course we will examine aspects of the Earth’s physical geography such as biomes, climate systems, renewable energy, and air quality, as well as components of our human geography such as urban environmental footprints, sustainability, food resources, and population change.

This introductory geography course explores human geography, a discipline that studies people and places. Specifically, students will learn how people organize space and society, how we interact with each other in places and across space, and how we make sense of others and ourselves in our local areas, regions, and the world. In this course we will cover a range of topics such as language, religion, development, migration, and the unequal distribution of power. We will pay particular attention to key geographic approaches to contemporary globalization, specifically, how global processes are unevenly distributed and differently manifested across the world.

Introductory geology for the non-science major, designed to give a broad, basic understanding of the planet on which we reside, its age and origin, composition and evolution, interrelationships of Earth's major physical systems, scientific revolutions in Earth Science, and the role the physical Earth plays in global politics and economics. Online and in-class sections.

U.S. history emphasizing the cold war, McCarthyism, and the major political, social, and economic trends of the 1960s and 1970s.

This course will deepen students’ global awareness by introducing them to an interdisciplinary approach to international and global studies, and drawing on real-world examples from diverse cultural regions to illustrate 21st Century trends and challenges. Using analytical tools from a variety of social sciences and humanities traditions, students will learn about our increasingly interconnected world, with a particular focus on the transnational flows of people, goods and ideas associated with economic, political and cultural globalization. This course is particularly well suited for students who plan on pursuing majors or minors in international and global studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, area studies, economics, political science, public policy, and women's and gender studies.

Development of skills in reasoning. Consideration of what an argument is, how arguments go wrong, what makes an argument valid. Application of techniques for clarifying meaning, evaluating, and constructing arguments.

Examination of fundamental philosophical issues such as the meaning and basis of moral judgments, free will and determinism, theism and atheism, knowledge and skepticism, consciousness and the brain.

Exploration of basic issues in ethical theory and metaethics. Topics may include consequentialism, deontology, virtue theory, constructivism, value relativism, the objectivity of values, value skepticism, free will, and the nature of the values and practical reasons.

Introduction to formal logic, covering truth functional propositional logic and quantification theory. Emphasis on developing symbolic techniques for representing and evaluating arguments.

“The Nature of Politics” is a foundational course for political science majors as well as those interested in the study of politics more generally. It introduces students to fundamental issues in political theory as it has developed from ancient Greece to the present day; in other words, we’ll encounter questions that are both historical and conceptual. We will ask, for example, how concepts like “the market” or “the social contract” come to connote political freedoms in contemporary politics, whether and to what extent “politics” is separate from other social realms such as the family or the economy, and why so many contemporary social movements see antiracism as a key political goal in the twenty-first century.

This course is designed to introduce students to the theories, concepts, and ideas used in social science efforts to understand international politics. As such, it stresses theory and inference and uses historical examples and contemporary events only as illustrations to illuminate behavior in larger classes of events. We will begin the overview with the dominant theoretical paradigms in international relations and study the causes and consequences of military conflict and war. We will then explore major issues in international political economy. We will conclude the semester with a discussion of contemporary issues, including human security, environmental issues, and border politics.

Comparative politics is sometimes seen as an amorphous area of study within political science. American politics, as the adjective "American" clearly indicates, answers questions about political science in the American context. In contrast, deciphering what, for political scientists, the adjective "comparative" means is a less straightforward task. Saying that comparative politics scholars compare things may be the painfully obvious answer but it still leaves unanswered just what is meant when we say "comparative politics." This course is designed as an introduction to the key topics and debates within comparative politics.

This course explores the structure and interplay of the various institutions and sub-institutions of the American federal government, providing a cursory introduction to the ideas and institutions that shape politics in contemporary America. Our lectures will focus on three thematic areas: the Constitution: reach, scope, and interpretation, Modern American institutions, and the political behavior of a presumably engaged citizenry. We will study the strategies, roles, and limitations of both governmental elites and ordinary citizens, with particular emphasis on how they communicate and interact within the constitutional to shape the achievement of the “common good”. To a lesser extent, we will examine documents from America’s formative period and discuss insights from the modern discipline of political science. This will allow us to examine important social and political phenomena from a variety of perspectives. Ultimately, the goal of this course is to help each student arrive at a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of the forces that shape American government and politics, so that they may be both a more discerning student and critic of the system and a more informed and reflective participant in it.