Courses and Descriptions
BHP 100 Honors Seminar: Great Ideas I 3 Credits
Traces the impact of great ideas on society, politics, economics, science, and the arts. This writing-intensive course substitutes for CMP 120 Expository Writing. Freshmen only.
BHP 150 Honors Seminar: Great Ideas II 3 Credits
A continuation of Great Ideas I, the introductory Freshman Baccalaureate Honors Seminar. Great ideas are studied in their cultural and historical contexts and from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students are guided in writing an effective research paper. This writing-intensive course substitutes for CMP 125 Research Writing. Freshmen only.
Prerequisites: BHP 100 with a minimum grade of C or CMP 120 with a minimum grade of C or BHP100 with a score of WV.
BHP 201 Age of Shakespeare: A Study in Cultural History 3 Credits
Studies the cultural history of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and of its visual and literary arts. More specifically, the course will investigate the peculiarly English synthesis of the old and new, Medieval and Renaissance, Continental and English in the arts and ideas of the Age of Shakespeare.
BHP 203 Nineteen Eighty-Four in Context: George Orwell’s Enduring Legacy 3 Credits
“Big Brother is watching you.” “Some animals are more equal than others.” Contemporary discussions of politics, journalism, and social issues regularly reflect the influence of George Orwell’s classic novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The term “Orwellian” routinely appears in modern speech and writings. Published in the aftermath of World War II, Orwell’s dystopian projections, along with other provocative writing by this courageous thinker and writer, reflect the turbulent world experienced by Orwell from the waning of British colonialism to the rise of the Cold War. To contextualize the composition and importance of his most influential works, this course will explore a wide range of Orwell’s writings; the historical and cultural contexts that shaped him; and the use of his work and ideas by his contemporaries and by subsequent artists, critics, and social analysts.
BHP 205 Under the Influence: Drugs, Deviance, and Culture 3 Credits
This course explores the powerful influence the varied substances we call drugs have had on our institutions and on our culture. Drawing from the social sciences and the study of literature and media, we ask how drug policies and practices within institutions and social systems intersect with representations of drugs and drug use in literature and other forms of art and media.
BHP 206 Honors Seminar:Politics/Literacy 3 Credits
Students will analyze literary texts in the context of selected political periods and ideologies, going beyond literary content to understand how language, genre, and structure mirror, otherwise represent, or criticize the political order within which the author writes.
BHP 208 The Fantastic in Literature, Art, and Media 3 Credits
This interdisciplinary course explores the varieties of the fantastic in literature, film, painting, and music, featuring alternate realities, monsters, shapeshifters, fairies, vampires, witches, doppelgangers, and mysterious animals. Authors include Poe, Le Fanu, Hoffman, Daphne du Maurier, Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce, T. H. White, Shirley Jackson, Donald Barthelme, Aimee Bender, and Margaret Atwood. Filmmakers include Carl Theodor Dryer, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Jacques Tourneur, and Luis Buñuel. Opera, piano, and orchestral selections are by Weber, Mussorgsky, Berlioz, Crumb, Debussy, and Arnold Schönberg. We will examine aesthetic and cultural aspects, but also dive into psychological issues involving projection, wish-fulfillment, identity, and gender, supplemented by Freud’s “The Uncanny.”.
BHP 212 Children and the Media 3 Credits
This course examines how children and adolescents use and understand media and analyzes the role of media in their social and cognitive development. After studying the socializing presence of the media, students will analyze how exposure to television programs, movies, magazines and the Internet shapes children’s socio-emotional development and their understanding of cultural norms. This course will also explore the effects that media use has on children’s health, aggressiveness, and academic performance.This course counts towards the fulfillment of the Disciplinary Perspectives element of the CLAS general education curriculum.
BHP 213 Honors Seminar: Text and Context 3 Credits
Studies the major themes of a period of cultural change as they are expressed in important social, scientific, literary, and artistic works. Students will immerse themselves in a single major literary work and will interpret it in light of a number of coordinate texts and works from the social sciences, from contemporary comment, and from the arts.
BHP 217 Music and Literature 3 Credits
Developing music literacy can help us become better readers, and, on the other hand, literary methodologies can help us become better listeners. In this class we will study music and literary terminology in order to recognize and analyze patterns and forms in both sonic and linguistic artworks. We will investigate these works in their social and political context in order to gain an understanding of the art informed by interdisciplinary practice.
BHP 222 Honors Seminar: Existentialism in Literature 3 Credits
Introduces students to Existentialism as a 20th-century movement with roots going back to the 19th century and as a philosophy that has special relevance and importance for understanding today’s world. Reading and discussion are based on topics of special concern to Existentialist philosophers: lying and the nature of reality, faith and reason, revaluation of values, and the meaninglessness of life. Readings will comprise a variety of fiction and non-fiction genres. Authors may include Dostoevsky, Unamuno, Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Brecht, Kafka, Pirandello, Weil, and Beckett.
BHP 227 Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Age of Empire 3 Credits
This course examines the history and literature of British and American imperialism from 1890 to the present, focusing on the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The course will cover themes of national identity, representations of colonized peoples, and imperialism as a cultural project. The history of imperialism as understood through literary and cultural analyses will focus on the functioning of gender, sexuality, and race in the ideologies and strategies of imperialism and anti-imperialism and in the psychological impact of colonial rule. Overall, we will consider how such analyses can inform a (re)defining of the colonial project.
BHP 240 Chemistry and Conflict 3 Credits
Chemistry and other sciences have radically changed the conduct of war and mechanisms of
human conflict. Using case studies from the Chemical Revolution to present day, this course
examines how knowledge of matter altered warfare – in terms of its scale, its boundaries, and its
meaning. To this end, we study Antoine Lavoisier’s work with gunpowder in the 18 th century
alongside a more famous case of wartime chemistry: Fritz Haber’s development of chemical
weapons during World War I. We also study the Manhattan Project, which produced the world’s
first atomic bomb in the final days of World War II. Secondly, this course investigates the many
legacies of these new weapons. We follow the development of the military-industrial complex,
the use of war chemicals as pesticides, and the deployment of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Finally,
we examine more recent uses of chemical weapons, including in Japan, Iraq, and Syria.
Throughout the course, students will bring knowledge of chemistry to bear on these historical
episodes. They will demonstrate how knowledge of key chemical principles – such as atomic
structure, bonding, and reactivity – help to contextualize the development of modern war.
BHP 251 Idea to Innovation 3 Credits
The pharmaceutical industry comprises an incredibly diverse team of thinkers, including accountants and biochemists, who are all on a quest to improve human health. The development of medical treatments relies on pivotal insights from the scientific laboratory, but turning these ideas into practical medical innovations requires the solving of many problems outside of the scientific field. Through the examination of historical and contemporary case studies, this course will investigate the nature of science as it is practiced in the real world. How are problems identified and ideas generated and refined? What political and sociological challenges does the industry encounter? Who pays for all of this? By exploring growth in the pharmaceutical industry from the inside, students in this class will gain a deeper understanding of both science and business and how these disciplines interact in order to enhance and extend human life.
BHP 252 Creativity and Design Thinking 3 Credits
Creative, interdisciplinary, and collaborative work is being recognized as increasingly important for innovation and solving global problems of the 21st century. This course will introduce students to a much-needed framework for dealing with unstructured problems for creative problem solving, and a process for innovation. The course consists of two related parts: the psychology of creativity provides a foundational basis of knowledge and discussion, and the design thinking framework serves as an example of a powerful creative thinking strategy that an increasing number of individuals and organizations have used successfully over the past decade.
Prerequisite(s): BHP 100 or CMP 120; non-BHP students POI only.
BHP 253 A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Play 3 Credits
This course examines how children from two different countries – the United States and Japan – play, and analyzes the influences of factors such as parents, environment, school, and culture. If travel is permitted, students will directly observe children at play in several different locations in each country – including (but not limited to) playgrounds, schools, play therapist’s offices, museums, indoor play places, zoos, and theme parks. Interviews with parents, teachers, therapists, and potentially children themselves will help to clarify how play is viewed and practiced in each culture. Readings on the evolution of play, the benefits of play, the practical applications of play (e.g., in education and in therapy), and cultural differences in play will be used to support and help to inform the data students will collect through the interviews and observations.
BHP 259 Honors Seminar: The Environment: a Conflict of Interest 3 Credits
Examines critical environmental issues such as global warming; food, water and energy resources; population trends; and global industrialization. Topics for context will include the origin of the elements, the origin of solar systems, and the origin of life as well as the basic principles of the current biotechnical revolution. Scientific understanding will be combined with knowledge about strategies for raising community awareness in order to (re)formulate public policy. In teams, students will be asked to define the problems; research available and prospective solutions; identify the technical, social, political, and economic constraints; and finally propose a workable strategy for making progress toward solutions.
BHP 261 The Online Explosion: Radical Changes in Business and Communication 3 Credits
Compared to a world just one generation ago when business people composed memos on typewriters and communicated with fax machines, the online explosion has brought forward a flood of new communication tools and social media platforms. It has created new types of businesses that would have been unimaginable just a short time ago and has revolutionized the way people communicate, socialize, and shop. The explosion of the web has also led to work environments in which employees are always “connected,” and has raised concerns about personal privacy. We will guide students through a critical evaluation of these radical changes, with an eye on their benefits as well as potential negative consequences.
BHP 270 Interdisciplinary Studies 3 Credits
Exploration of interdisciplinary topics and themes in honors courses team-taught by instructors representing different disciplinary specialities.
BHP 271 Special Topics in Interdisciplinary Studies 3 Credits
Exploration of interdisciplinary topics and themes in honors courses team-taught by instructors representing different disciplinary specialities.
BHP 281 The Rhetoric of Science 3 Credits
This course will examine the rhetoric of science in an effort to see how science has used language and various text types to answer questions, resolve disputes, and legitimize the knowledge contained within its disciplinary borders, and conversely how language and communication have guided scientific discovery throughout history. Reading texts from ancient and contemporary scientists, philosophers, historians, and literary authors, we will identify the key linguistic and rhetorical traits employed within the discourse communities of modern science, and consider consequences of—and the scientific developments enabled by—such language and textual practices. These concepts will be emphasized and elucidated vis-à-vis some of the most significant scientific and medical discoveries impacting the modern world.
BHP 290 Shakespeare: Page, Stage & Screen 3 Credits
This course aims to explore, in depth, the translation of Shakespeare’s texts into performance by combining theatre history, cinematic adaptation, and textual analysis with a strong emphasis on practical, creative, and collaborative work. We will study 5 plays over the course of the semester and consider each as a performance piece as well as a literary artifact. Each play will be examined from multiple perspectives that are theatrical/performative/cinematic (staging, costume, sets, dramaturgy, camera, editing) as well as literary (historicist, psychoanalytic, gender and sexuality focused, Marxist, eco-critical, post-colonial), thereby bridging the artificial divide between Shakespeare as literature and Shakespeare as performance.
BHP 301 The Law and Racial Progress 3 Credits
This course is designed to enhance knowledge of the ways in which racial progress intersects with the law. Different areas of the law are emphasized, as well as the criminal justice system, with an emphasis on understanding the role and behavior of different stakeholders and participants in these areas. Ethical issues are discussed throughout the semester in order to sensitize students to the ethical considerations integral to bringing legal disputes to closure. The course will focus on three primary fields to illustrate the complicated relationship between the law and racial progress: 1) The Workplace, 2) The Police, and 3) Higher Education.
BHP 302 Mirrors of the Mind: The Interplay of Literature and Psychology 3 Credits
In exploring the longstanding and evolving partnership between literature and psychology, this course addresses the following questions: How does understanding of psychological theory enhance our reading of literature? How does reading of literature affect our judgements and our responses to real-world situations? How can literary texts aid psychologists in refining theories explaining human behavior? Readings include classics, as well selections by recent writers and theorists representing both disciplines. Among the themes typically discussed are struggles in achieving stage-salient goals in life (separation from parents during adolescence and beginning the assumption of adult roles, etc.); complexities in social interactions (familial, romantic, etc.); the development of empathy; perceptions of self and other; loss and grief, morality; and the influence of culture on personality and behavior.
Prerequisite(s): Completion of BHP 100 or CMP 120 and minimum GPA 3.3; or POI.
BHP 305 Inclusive Education and Representations of Disability 3 Credits
This course explores how literature, film, television, and other media (i.e., podcasts, blogs, etc.) portray disability in ways that contribute to –or challenge– clinical concepts. This course particularly attends to the representation of the education of students with disabilities, and to how literary and cultural texts aim to educate their readers and viewers about disability.
BHP 307 Presence of Mind — Artificial Intelligence and Human Creativity 3 Credits
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? In what ways can computers “think”? How is their “thinking” similar to and different from that of humans? Through readings, lectures, discussions, and creative projects, students will investigate evidence of intelligence and creativity in various disciplines including music composition, art, and human and non-human systems. We will examine historical precedents and ponder likely developments in this area in the twenty-first century. No prior experience with computers or music is required.
BHP 315 Honors Seminar: 20th Century European Ideologies 3 Credits
Covers the origins and development of 20th-century European ideologies in a comparative perspective. Topics include the condition of European political culture at the turn of both centuries (i.e., 1900 and 2000), methods of spreading Nationalism and national culture, the First World War and the emergence of Fascism and Communism, the origins and consequences of the Cold War, the development and fate of the Socialist and Capitalist systems, and the ideology of Conservatism/Liberalism. We will also reflect upon the condition of European political culture in our day.
BHP 333 Music and Social Justice 3 Credits
From Folk to Rock & Roll, music plays a vital role in shaping social justice on a global scale. The Music & Social Justice course is designed for students interested in learning how music can engage and advocate for those on the margins of society. Music can provoke and impact social justice movements, which address moral and social problems and allow society to be more equitable, responsive, and inclusive. In other ways, music can also be a response to the current climate, allowing those impacted by social justice movements to express how they think and feel. This course will examine different periods in history, on both a US and global scale, and the impact of music on social movements, specifically including its influence on African Americans in the US, feminism, and global social issues.
BHP 340 Nature and Nurture 3 Credits
Nature and Nurture explores questions of innate and environmental influences on who we are. The history of the false Nature v Nurture debate as well as our current understanding of how innate and environmental factors influence human characteristics are explored via discussion of current scholarly articles from the social and life sciences.
BHP 351 Genocide, Human Rights & Literature 3 Credits
This course is designed to introduce students to one of the most troublesome and unnerving aspects of the modern world: the systematic cleansing and killing of populations defined by ethnicity, nationality, or race. Genocide is a contested term, and we will explore its various meanings. The course will concentrate on genocides and crimes against humanity in the 20th century. We will discuss the meaning of key terms like human rights, humanitarianism, and genocide, and investigate particular cases of mass atrocities, starting with the Holocaust and a number of historic cases of genocide, e.g., the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and focus on contemporary atrocities in Rwanda, ex-Yugoslavia, and Darfur. We will also explore the historical process of establishing human rights standards, and examine critically some of the recent efforts at redress, justice, and memory through criminal tribunals, truth and reconciliation commissions, and restitution. A central question runs through the course: how are these two polar opposites, human rights and genocide, related? Do modern forms of thinking about politics and the diversity of human society enable and encourage both phenomena? We will also examine literary and cinematic representations of genocides and mass atrocities. Readings include a variety of literary and cinematic works: novels, poems, graphic novels, memoirs, and film. How have literary and cinematic writers responded to and represented these “unspeakable” events?.
BHP 360 Moral Psychology 3 Credits
This course will cover moral philosophy and moral psychology and where they intersect. What are moral development and moral injury? What does our taste in aesthetics say about our morality? Topics covered will include character, responsibility, naturalism and psychological science, ethics, and aesthetics are covered.
BHP 490 Independent Study: Research and Creative Expression 1-4 Credits
Independent Research and Study allows juniors and seniors in good academic standing to investigate topics of interest under faculty supervision no later than the third week of the semester in which the project is to be conducted. Only one project can be scheduled in a semester, and for no more than four semester hours.
BHP 499 Baccalaureate Honors Thesis 3 Credits
Students completing the Baccalaureate Honors Program undertake a capstone project, which may be research-based and/or creative. Minimum 3 credits in total, which may be completed in fall or spring of senior year or distributed across both semesters. For details, see the BHP web page: https://www.rider.edu/academics/additional-programs/honors-programs/baccalaureate/planning-thesis.