Fall 2026 Byrne Seminars

Instructor: Kriston O'Brassill-Kulfan

Description: This seminar will explore how the formation of the US as a democratic republic in the late eighteenth century has been commemorated over the past 250 years. Together, we will ask what we are learning about 1776, and about 2026, from the commemorations taking place this year. We’ll explore public historical interpretations of the nation’s founding at specific reflective moments, including the 1876 Centennial and 1976 Bicentennial, and how Americans have understood the histories, sources, truths, myths, and cultural developments they represent. Public history is a discipline and series of methods that aims to democratize access to historical sources and analytical interpretations of the past for diverse publics, not just a select few inside an ivory tower. But the discipline itself has often chosen positivist celebratory narratives over the complexity and nuance that evidence-based historical understanding requires. How are public historians wrestling with the challenges of telling the story of the creation of a notional participatory democracy in a climate of unequal access to the full benefits of citizenship and civic engagement? Can learning about the nation’s past galvanize individuals and communities in their own democratic praxis? This seminar will explore these questions through academic readings, popular media, site visits, and guest lectures from active practitioners in the field. It will be rooted in the NJ Historical Commission’s Semiquincentennial Interpretative Framework, based on recent scholarship about the founding era as well as community engagement around how we all make meaning out of this history in a year of revolutionary commemoration.

Course Number: 01:090:101:55

Instructors: Charles R. Senteio and Tawfiq Ammari

Description: This seminar offers first-year students an opportunity to explore how individuals and communities participate and shape in democracy, even when they are not formally represented within it. Across the course, students will examine how movements toward racial equity often provoke resistance, backlash, and retrenchment, while also exploring how people influence democratic processes outside of formal participation such as voting. Drawing on a current, community-engaged research project in New Brunswick—Invisible Voters, Visible Democracy—students will engage with real-world civic questions and local partnerships, including collaboration with Lazos América Unida. This course is offered in collaboration with the Rutgers Democracy Lab (RDL), which operates as a “Think and Do Tank” connecting students, faculty, and community partners to address real-world challenges and strengthen democratic engagement. As part of this collaboration, students will attend two RDL events (selected based on their schedules and interests) and complete a public-facing reflection (e.g., blog post, short video, or podcast-style piece) that connects course concepts to lived civic experiences. With student permission, selected work may be shared through RDL programming.

Course Number: 01:090:101:65
 

Instructor: Jonah Siegel (English)

Description: “I plead the Fifth,” “my First Amendment rights,” “the Second Amendment.” We know or think we know what these words mean because the Constitution has shaped national debates for centuries. Our fundamental understanding of what our freedoms are is bound up in concepts that document enshrines. And yet, recent events have shaken longstanding confidence in the words that have governed us since the founding of our nation, that have defined the limits of government power in relation to the public. The controversies bound to arise in the relationship between the power of the government and the rights of individuals always come down at some point to debates about language. This course will have as its goal a careful reading of the two founding documents of our democracy, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It will look at a few anticipations of those documents in the philosophical and political debates of the day, and include reading of some later works on the way language and politics interact that offer lessons for today, including George Orwell’s 1984.

Course Number: 01:090:101:05

Instructor: Joseph Heckman

Description: Food policy should be based on science and “the will of the people”. This seminar examines the history of dairy farming since the time of the American Revolution. Imported livestock transformed the social ecology of the new nation. The War of 1812 and the British blockade of rum from the Caribbean was pivotal in changing dairy farming. Distillery waste fed to cows degraded milk quality in NY City. The philanthropy of Nathan Strass attempted to correct the “milk problem” by promoting pasteurization. Alternatively, Dr. Henry Coit, founded the American Association of Medical Milk Commissions for producing clean and healthy “Certified Milk”. Pasteurized and unprocessed Certified Milk coexisted as some states began mandating pasteurization. In New Jersey, the famous Walker Gordon Dairy operated as a model Certified Milk dairy up until 1971. Since 1999, the Real Milk Campaign has attempted to legalize raw milk in all 50 states. Increasingly states are reversing mandates and permitting food choice. The Raw Milk Revolution and Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Food Rights by journalist David Gumpert documents the social dynamics. The Raw Milk Institute in 2011 set high standards of safety for producers. Growing numbers of pasture-based raw milk dairies and customers are creating a new national dairy policy. A modern concept of a “Raw Milk Ordinance” has been proposed to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Secretary of HHS. In 2026, the USDA dietary guidelines were revised to recommend eating unprocessed foods. School lunch programs now include whole milk.

Course Number: 11:090:101:04

Instructor: Hongyoung Kim

Description: Sport and Democracy in Practice looks at how democratic values (e.g., responsibility and accessibility) are negotiated through sport. In recognition of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, students will explore how rules and sport organizations historically shaped who gets access to participation, whose voices count in decision-making, and how risk is distributed across sport. Concepts covered in the seminar will blend sport management and exercise science by pairing questions of sport governance (e.g., policies, leadership, and ethics) with evidence on the body (e.g., injury prevention, concussion, heat safety, training load, and recovery). Through hands-on, discussion-based learning, students will analyze real cases and data from collegiate, professional, recreational, and youth sport. The goal is to empower students with critical thinking on sport as a civic institution and to propose evidence-based solutions that promote fairness and wellbeing.

Course Number: 01:090:101:24

Instructor: Min Kwon (Music)

Description: This seminar invites students to explore American identity through music, culture, and history using the national song America the Beautiful as a starting point. Led by concert pianist and Rutgers professor Min Kwon, students will examine how artists, composers, and communities reinterpret national identity through creative expression. Through listening, discussion, short writing reflections, and creative projects, students will encounter newly commissioned piano works written by living American composers as part of the America/Beautiful national commissioning project. The seminar will also explore the historical and literary origins of the song, including poet Katharine Lee Bates and composer Samuel Ward. Students will investigate how art reflects social values, cultural diversity, and civic ideals while gaining insight into how large-scale artistic projects are conceived and realized. No musical training required.

Course Number: 01:090:101:59

Instructor: Elif Sendur

Description: What does American democracy promise, and who has historically been included in those promises, and who has been left out? This seminar examines democracy both as a political system and as a visual and cultural practice shaped by law, media, protest, and everyday life. Using American cinema as our primary lens, where American myth is constantly written and rewritten, we will explore how different groups have been represented as “the people,” and how others have been rendered invisible, marginal, or expendable. Beginning with foundational cinematic myths of law and legitimacy via the early life of Abraham Lincoln in  Young Mr. Lincoln, the seminar moves through films that depict democratic deliberation (12 Angry Men), structural exclusion (Killer of Sheep), counter-publics and community-based politics (Black Panthers), protest and dissent (Hair), democratic breakdown (Taxi Driver), and queer political visibility (Milk). Moving across courtroom dramas, documentaries, musicals, and urban cinema, we will examine how images shape public understandings of citizenship, belonging, and political participation in the United States, while attending to the historical, social, and political conditions that gave rise to them. You will engage with film clips, archival materials, newsreels, and contemporary media in order to develop critical tools for evaluating how American democratic ideals are represented, challenged, and mobilized in public life. A museum visit (the Museum of American Revolution /the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia ) will invite you to reflect on how democratic histories are preserved, narrated, and contested within cultural institutions. The course ends in a student-designed project that encourages you to translate historical and cinematic analysis into forms of civic imagination, asking how democratic participation, responsibility, and collective life might be practiced in the present through a public-facing short visual essay or written work.

Course Number: 01:090:101:60