Advising & Registration for New Students

Eating in East Asia

How have the production and consumption of food such as rice and ramen shaped national, personal and gender identities? How did tea culture reflect East Asian aesthetics and religion and lead to wars between China and the United Kingdom? Why does traditional Chinese medicine believe that food is nature and harmony with nature leads to healthy and balanced lives? Why are French or Japanese restaurants so expensive, while Thai, Chinese or Korean restaurants much more affordable even if they are located in the same city/region? In this course, we will explore these questions and discuss various social and historical aspects of food culture in China, Japan, and Korea. We will also provide our own food for thought by presenting our pick of topics surrounding an East Asian dish and sharing our own experiences of researching and making it. Join us for delicious intellectual adventures.

Why Identity Matters

Course description: What an optimum time for college freshmen to study the importance of identity formation and development as they transition from adolescence to young adulthood. The seminar creates a laboratory for questioning and evaluating the complexity of their multiple identities through the lenses of culture, gender, social media, and race. Assigned readings, group exercises, classroom experiences, discussion forums, and self-reflections provide students with opportunities to examine the importance of identity to their way of being, understanding, and relating to the world. Additionally, the seminar integrates community engagement opportunities and RWU campus resources to support students in exploring identity issues and challenges and to take actionable steps to address them.

Monsters in Fiction, Film, Myth, and Fact: what do they do for us?

Beazley Kanost, MFA, PhD, encourages students to develop their own thinking by making connections between diverse yet related written and visual texts. Her research focused on Coolness, a stillness in someone's behavior that observers find surprising, has led her to make connections between avant-garde films, fiction, and poetry from the 1950s and 1960s. She loves science fiction, from Asimov to William Gibson, from The Matrix to The Expanse, from Philip K. Dick to Octavia Butler and she loves making books out of junk. Her teaching focuses on Literature, Film Studies, and Writing Studies (creative, academic, and professional), often with History and Philosophy mixed in.

Mama, I made it (to college)! What now?

Congratulations! You made it to Roger Williams University! Now what? This First-Year Seminar is a space to reflect on how college can transform your life. Together, we’ll explore how education, environment, and identity shape our futures. Using personal narrative, interviews, readings, and media, students will dive into the question: How does college shape one’s life trajectory—and what role do *you* play in that journey? This course is especially meaningful for first-generation college students. We will create a classroom community grounded in mutual respect, reflection, and honesty. We’ll celebrate the resilience that brought us here and explore how to thrive in and beyond college.

Language and the Good Life

What can I do to become happier? How can I get along better with other people? Can I ever find the Good Life? This course examines these questions and many more as related to various aspects of language use – because words can destroy lives and save lives; words can hurt, and words can heal. One factor consistently associated with a happy and meaningful life is healthy inter-personal relationships. This course offers ways for people to improve their inter-personal relationships, thereby enriching not only their own lives but also that of others – through more thoughtful and empathetic use of language. Through readings/viewings, discussions, team presentations, and writing assignments, students will learn and share complex ideas and feelings about language use. Topics include body language, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), ethical living, language disorders, leadership, mental/emotional health, professional communication, romantic relationships, self-identity, social media, and more.

Living the Common Good

**description coming soon**

Guns, Robots, Sex in America

How many days can you go without hearing about another gun shooting? Will you find work when you graduate in 2030, or will robots take your job? If we live in a time of sexual freedom, why are young people fleeing relationships? In this seminar, we will examine three complex issues in contemporary America: gun violence, artificial intelligence, and sex. We will ask questions such as: Is gun ownership a basic American freedom protected by the Constitution? Is AI bringing progress or making people poorer, unhappier, and worse off? Why are Gen Z-ers having less sex and feeling more isolated in our age of social media and unprecedented sexual equality? By exploring these three big questions together, we will become more informed, engaged citizens and advocates in our shared and personal lives.

Visual Thinking - Style & Substance

How do artists navigate their practice? Visual Thinking - Style & Substance aims to offer an introductory approach to the ways artists work. Through a combination of lectures, workshops, discussions, site visits, and studio-based projects, students will be encouraged to engage in an arts practice grounded in individual expression, experimentation, innovation, and material exploration.

Animals on Screen

Why do we cry when Bambi's mom dies? Why do villains stroke cats? Why do we cast animals in our human dramas? This course examines the roles animals play in film and media-from The Black Stallion to BoJack Horseman. Through a mix of video analysis, group discussions, and creative application, students will unpack how our portrayals of animals reflect our own anxieties, ethics, and identities.

Eating Humans

If you would like to explore human diet beyond the biological necessity of eating and the popular logic of nutritional science, to get a glimpse of our primordial, ethical, symbolic, and aesthetic natures, then we will ALL benefit from your involvement in this course. Anthropological in essence, this course is an historical, multi-disciplinary, as well as cross cultural examination of such “banal” practices as planting, shopping, gleaning, cooking, sharing, hoarding, storing, tasting, wasting, plating, binging, and fasting from food. We critique the evolution, diversity, as well as the devolution of our species' phenomenal adaptive subsistence capabilities, from collective hunting to in-vitro meat production and back. We challenge the simplistic notions that you eat what tastes good or is good for you. In other words, yes, we grill vegans as well as cannibals to expose the meat of the matter.

Personal Finance

**description coming soon**

Can You Dig It? Exploring New England's Past

Want to combine forensic science and time travel? Archaeology today is like having a modern Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson living in the real world and applying today's scientific methods, technologies, and deductive powers to decipher long-faded layers of times past. Join our research team as we peel back and explore the fascinating subject of New England Archaeology. Archaeology is the scientific study of the past. Artifacts, sites, and communities result from and reflect human cultures in time. This class will explore 13,000 years of New England's peoples, places, and things, focusing on Indigenous “First Peoples”. This course will be temporally far-reaching. Using archaeological and anthropological data, we’ll span between the initial peopling of the continent and the efforts of today’s indigenous peoples to preserve and protect their histories and heritage.

Echoes of Africa

Have you ever thought about the origins of Western civilization and the diverse cultural influences that shaped it? In this course, students explore the African influence on Western Civilization. This course focuses on the lives and works of key African thinkers who left an indelible mark on the Roman Empire and Western intellectual tradition. Lectures focus on three remarkable figures: Augustine, the theologian and philosopher whose ideas about God and morality continue to inspire scholars and thinkers today; Terence, the African playwright whose comedies have inspired writers for centuries including Shakespeare; and Apuleius whose novel “The Metamorphoses" contains the first fairy tale ever written and remains a classic of ancient literature. Students will engage with primary sources, including art and archaeological evidence, and participate in discussions that offer a deeper understanding of the complex cultural interactions of the ancient world.

Revealing Power, Privilege, and Supremacy

Society seems to be unsettled by culture wars, political polarization, and social upheaval. Are you? How do we understand this environment? Overall, this First Year Seminar (FYS) informs students about issues related to race relations, social justice, power, and privilege. We will investigate the historical roots of how we arrived at this flashpoint, examines the present indicators, and explores ideas about what we can do now and going forward. To accomplish this exploration, we will consult a wide range of sources including historical and contemporary case studies, cartoons, documentaries, commercials, film, music, and other visual arts. It is an active learning course rather than lecture, with presentations, projects, and short writing assignments rather than exams.

Climate Change and Future of RWU Campus

Would you like to determine the impact of sea level rise and climate change on the future of your RWU campus? We will examine the consequences to the RWU coastline, invite guest speakers, and attend field trips to local environmental organizations. We will explore the possible physical, economic, and social impacts of a 1 to 4-foot sea level rise through hands-on classroom and campus wide activities. In addition, we will canvass the attitudes of RWU students toward this issue and research the misinformation of climate change in the media and the general public. By the end of the class, we will be able to predict which areas of campus will be affected and possibly make recommendations about future RWU construction sites.

The Italian American Experience

The course examines literary, cinematic, and critical works on the experience of Italian Americans in order to investigate the many facets of their identity. The first part of the course includes readings on theories of race, ethnicity, and identity formation in the United States. The second part explores novels, films, and popular culture as evidence of the many forms of Italian-American cultural expression and their representation. Particular attention is given to the construction of internal and external stereotypes, interethnic relations between Italians and other minorities in the US, and religious, family, and gender identity.

Capturing History

Have you ever wondered why some images stay with you and some do not? The phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" is never more true than in the current social media age. This class will look closely at images to examine and discover: what they can and cannot tell us; if they are true to historical facts; why a different image of the same event or time can change how we understand history; and whether we need to change habits as we scroll through images. There is a wide range of images to choose from, not just from the usual sources, for example, posters, political cartoons, news cycles, art, portraits, and documentaries. Each class will decide the theme and collection to examine together, then dig deeper into the background, purpose, and accuracy of images. We will debate and write our findings.

Is There a Right Way? Does AI Know?

Can AI help us personally, and human society in general, to know right from wrong? Can AI help us with our decision-making, problem-solving, to fix the problems we create when we make the wrong choice? This seminar takes a multi-leveled dive into these ageless and elemental human questions. Our goals are to emerge more aware of the origins and influences on our personal values and behavioral principles, more aware of the relationship between our personal principles and local and global societal behavioral norms, and more confident in exploring, confirming or changing our answers. Participants will design your own original collaborative thought experiments to test the value of AI in assisting human decision-making, and work in teams in collaboration with ChatGPT AI to develop solutions to significant current problems.