In this seminar students of all backgrounds are invited to participate in visiting some of the pioneers and innovators of Afrofuturist thought and literature and performance as well as becoming familiar with emerging technology like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).

Module 1 — The Past Future Elders + Ancestors

In this module we will gain a critical analysis of the System of Racial Inequity and learn about pioneers and innovators of Afrofuturist thought, literature technology whose works seek to offer alternative imaginings of how the black body might exist in a future free from its current state of oppression. Looking closely at the plot line and themes of Octavia E. Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, and Sun Ra’s Prophetika. Students will be introduced to the practical component of the seminar as the class crafts their own “New Frontier Manifesto”. This document will serve as a set of community agreements or guiding principles that will inform the performance that the students will ultimately present at the end of the semester.

Module 2 — The Present Future Artivist Activities

Students will be introduced to the works of performing artists working in the realm of live arts. These practitioners evoke Afrofuturist aesthetics in the creation of their on-stage personas. This module will pay particular attention to artists whose work lies at the intersection of art and social justice. Students will be introduced to the work of radical feminist, Shasta from Shasta Geaux Pop. From Athi Patra Ruga’s alter ego Future White Woman of Azania students will learn about performing queer black masculinity in post-apartheid South Africa. Students will learn about Brobot Johnson the title character in a sci-fi hip-hop transmedia piece.

Module 3 — The Future Future Android Awakening

Students will learn about virtual reality film and meet with leaders in the field of digital content creation. Students will also meet Joe Brewster and Michèle Stevenson, an award-winning documentary filmmaking duo and leaders of Rada Film Group, a company committed to ‘…create[ing] compelling visual stories that provoke thought about the complex multicultural world we exist in.’ Joe and Michèle will discuss their latest project, The Untitled Racial Justice Project, a virtual reality experience which enables users to travel to the Jim Crow South. I will share the prototype of my own virtual reality project Atomu which places users at the center of a Kikuyu tribal myth.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

What does artistic production look like during a time of cultural unrest?  How did America’s poets help shape the political landscape of the American 60s and 70s, two decades that saw the rise of the Black Panthers, “Flower Power,” psychedelia, and Vietnam War protests?  Through reading poetry, studying films like Easy Rider, and engaging with the music of the times (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors) we will think about art’s ability to move the cultural needle and not merely reflect the times but pose important questions about race, gender, class, sexuality, and identity at large.  We will think of poetry as a tool with which to interact with the world, looking at it critically on the basis of language and aesthetics, but also as a countercultural product that has the ability to occupy both cult and mainstream status.

The poets we will study include Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, and others.  We will talk about The Beats, The San Francisco Renaissance, The New York School poets, and the Black Mountain poets as well.  There will be creative and exploratory exercises including writing poems, making videos and collages, in addition to writing critical essays and partaking in visual analysis.  Often we will consider how the time period we’re studying compares with the grunge phenomenon of the 90s, the rise of hip hop, the Occupy movement of 2011, Black Lives Matter, and today’s #resist collective.  Modes in which artists and the public have organized resistance, whether person to person, on college campuses, or today, via social media, will be additional subjects to consider, as well as contemporary poets carrying the torch and rallying cry of the 1960s into 2019.  The commodification of art as protest and capitalism’s ability to absorb all critiques of itself will be posed as challenges to all the texts and poets we study.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Natural Law theory has a rich and varied history extending back to the classical period. Although in recent decades it has often been associated with religious thinkers, especially Catholic ones, it also has non-Catholic, and even non-religious adherents. This theory offers a first-personal account of practical reason that acknowledges diverse basic values as fundamental aspects of living a fulfilled life, along with criteria for pursuing those goods reasonably.

For some, contemporary natural law theory offers a compelling alternative to deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics—or can even be incorporated into the latter. For others, it offers a stimulating sparring partner that helps philosophers of different perspectives refine their own argument. In any event, it is a doctrine embraced by thinkers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther King, Jr., and current U.S. Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. For that reason, it is worthwhile to understand it and to be able to respond to it, even if one does not ultimately agree with it.

Each week, students will volunteer to summarize the readings and be prepared to answer questions about them. This will facilitate critical discussion in which students are encouraged to defend, critique, or simply play the role of devil’s advocate. Two papers and a midterm exam will give students an opportunity to delve deeper into the issues discussed in class.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

These words, etched at the base of the Statue of Liberty, represent the promise of America, a land of opportunity and hope for so many around the world.  Immigrants have arrived on these shores, to struggle and settle, to flourish and prosper.  Yet recent political events and their corollary activism have vociferously challenged this narrative.  America, so the argument goes, is built on systemic oppression and its very founding is called into question.  This challenge is broadly conceived as “social justice,” an umbrella term that includes a range of social movements from Black Lives Matter to gender identity activism.  Our seminar critically examines the meaning of “justice” in social justice by assessing the core tenets of these movements alongside the ideas and values long undergirding American institutions, and against which these movements define themselves.  The seminar encourages students to reflect on what it means to live in America in this particular cultural moment.  Conservative, liberal, progressive, radical—are these ideas, identities, or what?  Such questions are intertwined with deeper questions about our moral and social existence.

Our course material will draw on a variety of sources and intellectual traditions.  We will start with Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic, Democracy in America.  We will then consider the seminal texts in the debates shaping contemporary American society, especially in relation to race, religion, class, gender, and sexuality.  Thinkers include Martin Luther King, Cornel West, Robert P. George, Elizabeth Warren, Christopher Lasch, Howard Zinn, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Malcolm X. The seminar will provide the broader context in which to understand these texts, and will give students wide experience in a range of disciplinary traditions and methodologies across the social sciences and the humanities. We will have prominent guest speakers who have grappled with the questions that students will now ponder as they begin their academic and professional journeys.

So, which is it? Is America a country predicated on systemic oppression or a land of opportunity where anybody can make it?  From constitutionalists to internationalists, natural law philosophers to critical race theorists, the goal of the seminar is to inform students on how to think about some of the most pressing issues of our times.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

In common parlance, the word has three meanings: 1) lacking financial means, 2) of shoddy quality, and 3) unfortunate or pitiful.

In this seminar we will seek to understand the ways that urbanization under racial capitalism exacerbated the tendency to treat poverty as not merely a material condition but also as a moral failing. Geographically our focus will be on New York City, where, beginning in the late 19th century, the most extreme wealth and the direst poverty developed as two sides of the same coin. Stretching from the spontaneous strike wave of 1877 to the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020, we will chart the persistence of a peculiar narrative: one that heaps blame on the individual worker who earns too little to live, but defends as just the economic system predicated on paying poverty wages.

Probing this paradox we will encounter a lively array of characters and contexts: Journalist Jacob Riis, prowling the notorious Five Points district where he captured images of newly-arrived Italians to feed the curiosity of the city’s upper classes; the elite vestrymen of Trinity Church (Astors and Vanderbilts among them) who fought in court to avoid bringing church-owned tenements into compliance with building codes; city dwellers and public health officials navigating the flu of 1918 and later polio outbreaks; a generations-long collaboration among various MAdMen, New York Times editors, and members of the elite charity circuit to spirit hordes of slum children out of the “concrete jungle” for short-term stays in rural, then suburban, homes; and an overlooked chapter in the life of Jack “Jackie” Roosevelt Robinson, who, after integrating the national pastime, ignited a firestorm that would erode the Dark Destroyer’s faith in multiracial democracy.

Encounters with film, memoirs, novels, children’s literature, journalism, and archival material as well as legal records, academic literature, and two off-site excursions will inform and guide our inquiry.

When whole swaths of a nation buy into the idea that poverty is neither first nor foremost a problem of money, what are the consequences – and what do we do about it?

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Princeton students are naturally focused, if not actually fixated, on success – in the classroom, on the field and for their emerging careers. But success has a much less well-understood sibling, which is often a precursor and even prerequisite for that success, whether in business, science, athletics or the arts: Failure.

Although we usually treat failure as a regrettable event or even a taboo, it has the potential to become a strategic resource, invaluable in its ability to show us - sometimes painfully and often uncomfortably - what we don’t yet know, but need to, in order to succeed.

Failure’s like gravity – a subtle, pervasive but invaluable fact and force of life. The Wright Brothers used gravity to fly; the ancient Romans to deliver fresh water to 1.5 million residents; and Nobel prizewinners to make profound discoveries in their labs – not to mention entrepreneurs, artists, authors, architects and athletes who’ve used the lessons of failure to achieve impressive success. In short, as much as we might prefer to deny or defy it, failure will be a likely companion in much of what we do, and our attitudes and skill in dealing with it can shape our own trajectory of accomplishment.

This course offers incoming freshmen a unique interdisciplinary window into this “other ‘f’ wor[l]d” of failure, with an opportunity to see firsthand how valuable it can be in pursuing their success. In addition to utilizing my own book on this topic (The Other ‘F’ Word: How Leaders, Teams and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work, John Wiley & Sons, 2015), we will explore additional readings and other resources from history, technology, behavioral economics, art, psychology and even philosophy to anchor our class [see sample readings list].

This seminar is not for the faint-hearted. We’ll explore some discomforting territory, but it should be a fascinating odyssey through unfamiliar and very familiar terrain. Curiosity, creativity, a spirit of open-minded inquiry and perhaps a dose of humility and humor will be the prerequisites for admission. [And although it would be especially apt in this case, this will not be a “pass/fail” seminar.]

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, a number of brilliant artists and storytellers transformed a popular form of American entertainment, the comic book, into a new literary and artistic form that demanded serious attention from readers and scholars, the graphic novel.  In this seminar, we will explore some of the masterpieces of graphic narrative, paying particular attention to how specific works combine language and visual imagery in ways that enlarge the possibilities of narrative form. We will develop strategies for interpreting and evaluating the cultural significance and aesthetic quality of narratives based on sequential art. 

Our exploration will begin with Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Will Eisner’s To the Heart of the Storm – three recognized masterpieces of graphic narrative that will enable us to define the specific characteristics of the form and its capacity to make us visualize the diversity and complexity of multi-ethnic American life. We move on to the intricate experimentation with autobiographical form confronting political repression that shapes Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and both parts of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. The second half of the course focuses on exemplars of the vitality and variety of graphic narrative in the 21st century.  Craig Thompson’s Blankets vividly portrays an adolescent’s confrontation with love and religion in the midwestern United States. The superhero story receives transformative treatment in the widely acclaimed Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The “funny animal” comic moves into existential territory when the Norwegian artist Jason presents Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Pound as cartoon dogs who try to commit a robbery in The Left Bank Gang.  Mira Jacob’s transformation of the graphic memoir, Good Talk, offers a new way of confronting the political realities of a multi-racial household in the Trump years.  Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass provides a moving portrait of the difficult life of a South Korean comfort woman.  We end with the postmodern comedy of Daniel Clowes’s brilliant Ice Haven. These texts provide new ways of looking at race, class, sexuality, gender, and the whole process of growing up and growing older in the United States. By the end of the class, students should discover some new and amazing books and, more importantly, discover new ways of reading the graphic narrative and the culture it both depicts and critiques.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”  The United States Declaration of Independence announces that “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But all human beings do not enjoy equal rights to life, liberty, and pursuits of happiness, let alone equal dignity.  More than 700 million people live on less than $1.90 a day (more precisely, on less than the basket of goods and services that US$1.90 would buy them were they living in the United States).  A child born in Spain today can expect to live to 83 years; a child born in Sierra Leone or Nigeria has a life expectancy of less than 55 years. 

Some of the causes of global poverty might fall into the category of bad luck—some regions have poor soil and are more susceptible to natural disasters.  But there is no doubt that official policies, as well as the actions of individuals, private firms, and others, contribute.  Currently, over 95% of the world’s Covid vaccines are being administered in just ten countries.  Tax havens that rich countries create and enforce cost governments more than $500 billion in revenues, resources that could otherwise be spent on health care, education, and anti-poverty programs.  Climate change, largely the result of historical carbon emissions on the part of early industrializing countries, is projected to increase the number of people living in poverty by as many as 130 million by the year 2030.  Rich countries spend $250 billion per year subsidizing their own farming industry, lowering prices for and impoverishing developing country farmers.

This course addresses responsibility for global poverty.  The first section draws on the work of practically engaged moral and political philosophers to examine global poverty from the perspective of justice and ethics.  The second section examines some of the policy choices that tilt the economic playing field in favor of rich countries and against poor countries.  Finally, we examine the psychological factors that lead rich country citizens to disregard or underweight global poverty, and ask what we can do.

The course will consist of seminars, student presentations, lectures from the instructor, and a series of guest lectures from professionals, activists, and academics working to fight global poverty.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

With the frenzied pace of life, it might feel as if there is little time to contemplate the question of what makes for a meaningful life. How does one find deeper meaning? What is the purpose of my life? What is the relationship of the meaning of my life to a larger purpose? How do our lives fit into the world around us? Writers, thinkers, religious thinkers, ordinary folks – a neighbor, one’s parents & grandparents – have grappled with these questions. The course explores, from many perspectives, some responses to the “big questions” of life. Readings & films are taken from different cultures, times, & spheres of human endeavor & experience.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

This course explores the role music played before and during the Holocaust, as well as the part it continues to play in commemorating and reflecting upon a historic tragedy that refuses closure. We begin with an overview of music in the first years after Hitler’s rise to power. This includes the Nazi-sponsored Jewish Cultural Association, which highlighted the painful dichotomies of German-Jewish cultural assimilation. We then examine the first concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald, in which music was both an instrument of coercion and a means of political resistance. Our focus then shifts to music during the Holocaust with particular attention to the “model camp” Theresienstadt/Terezín and the work and extermination camp in Auschwitz. What significance could music have in such environments and how did music enable the survival of a select few? After 1945, works written in direct response to the Holocaust, whether for the concert hall or film, attempted to bear witness and provoke contemporaries to confront the horrors of genocide. As witnesses die and the Holocaust recedes in memory, how do artists strike a balance between fidelity to the historical record and creative interpretations that address present day concerns? 

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Horror haunts our world. We associate it with manmade and natural catastrophes. But horror is also a genre. And haven’t we all experienced something horrible? In this class, we take up the task of understanding what horror means, why it fascinates us, and to what extent it belongs to our lives in an epoch of climate emergencies, global pandemics, geopolitical tensions, and mental health crises.

We study canonical horror authors like H.P. Lovecraft, but also draw from more experimental works, such as Junji Ito’s mangas, as well as those that do not belong to the horror genre, like a reportage of the living conditions in Naples’ housing projects.

The course’s first unit lays the foundations of our understanding of horror. Here, we debate whether supernatural elements are necessary to horror; whether the description of a disease is more disturbing than Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction; and how entering into a garden, given a certain state of mind, can be as horrifying as descending into Dante’s Inferno. We will soon realize that despite horror’s standard and recurring motifs, horror is not the same for everyone. With our second unit we consider how embodied traits, such as gender or race, can radically affect our perspective concerning what is horrifying. And yet, there are places that seem to be created specifically to horrify. Their depiction is the focus of the third unit, which analyzes horrifying places both in fiction, such as a haunted dance school, and in reality, such as the concentration camp of Auschwitz, pinpointing their underlying characteristics. Our fourth unit shows that a shared sense of horror can be caused even by what was not maliciously conceived: spanning from Frankenstein to nuclear warfare, we here focus on the horrifying consequences of plans gone wrong, particularly in the sciences. But what if even thinking of free will is a foolish hope? What if we were only puppets of overpowering forces which we neither comprehend nor control? These are some of the philosophical questions that cosmic horror compels us to consider in our fifth unit.

Participants of this reading-and-writing intensive seminar will sharpen their scholarly skills via in-class presentations, close readings, and critical and creative assignments. As a whole, rather than taking it as a lowbrow form of entertainment, this course will demand that we confront horror as a topic that raises questions (often uncomfortable ones) about ourselves and our societies.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Would you like to see a 19th-century pastel, a tour de force of Chinese calligraphy, or a Kara Walker up close and out of the frame? Do you want to participate in discussions about the Museum’s planning for a new building, scheduled to open in 2024? Participants in this seminar will go behind the scenes of a major university art museum with a collection of more than 100,000 objects from ancient to contemporary art. Sessions will focus on close looking and discussions of museum best practices and the role of the museum in the 21st century with a special emphasis on collecting with opportunities to study masterpieces of Asian, Ancient American, European, and modern and contemporary art. Students will study in-depth Princeton University’s collecting practices and consider the politics of presentation through discussions of installations, exhibitions, and conservation. Course readings will introduce students to some of the most compelling practical, theoretical, and ethical issues confronting museums.

A team of curators, the conservator, the director, and other members of the professional staff of the Princeton University Art Museum will help lead some seminar sessions. Students are expected to discuss critically issues in acquisitions, conservation, education, and interpretation based on readings and outside projects.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Global warming is emerging as one of the major issues of our times. It affects people all over the globe, as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, precipitation patterns shift, and extreme weather results in droughts and floods, wild fires, hurricanes and tornadoes.

Yet, in our era of conspiracy theories and “fake news”, global warming has been highly polarizing, morphing from a scientific question to a political issue.

Skeptical responses to global warming range from: 1- temperatures are not really increasing; 2- temperatures are increasing but this increase is not related to increasing atmospheric CO2, 3- temperatures are increasing, and humans are responsible, but it is not possible/too expensive to stop it. Searching the internet on most questions related to global warming yields conflicting and often confusing answers.

In this Freshman seminar, we will study climate change through the lens of common questions raised by climate skeptics. We will research for each issue the “canonical” (i.e, the product of “mainstream science”) and the “contrarian” versions, assessing their relative values. Some of the questions we will address include: “changes in the sun activity are causing global warming”, “the Earth climate has always changed, so what’s the big deal?”, and “cow farts are destroying the planet”. As we do so, we will explore our inherent biases and how our political opinions affect our choice of news sources. In our search for “truth”, we will become budding scientists, doing field work and acquiring our own data to evaluate the claim that protecting and growing forests is essential to achieving a carbon neutral future.

For our final project, we will examine our personal responsibility in the climate problem and the feasibility of buying offsets to erase our carbon footprint.

The course is intended for both science and non-science majors.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

This course explores the fundamentals of drawing through process-based mark making on paper and fabric, building images through repetitive actions, line by line, color by color. A range of techniques such as hand and machine sewing, embroidery, and resist dyeing techniques such as stamping, stitching and batik will be explored to build a drawing vocabulary through accumulation. Weekly journal assignments will build confidence in each student's personal vision and will focus on light and shadow, surface texture, and perspective. Through readings, class discussions and project assignments, we will cover the context and history of these techniques, as well as how they are used today. We will explore the work of artists such as Anni Albers, Pacita Abad, Elizabeth Angrnaqquaq, Anna Maria Maiolino, Faith Ringold, Tilleke Schwarz, Fred Sandback, Tschabalala Self, Jessica So Ren Tang, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Sophie Tauber Arp and Zadie Xa.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Art has shaped societal views on technology and even impacted research in the sciences since at least the age of Leonardo’s study of human anatomical structure.  Alexander Fleming was a painter—though his medium was not paint, but rather live bacteria.  One of his living art pieces fortuitously grew Penicillium fungus leading to the discovery of one of the most efficient life-saving drugs in history.  Intuition honed by an artistic eye was critical in this finding—the ability to look for the unfamiliar and extraordinary.

This course will explore the fruits of inspiration in scientific and artistic works that embody the crossover collaborative of bioengineering and art.  We will also review a cross-disciplinary survey of significant occurrences of biological themes in art.

Students will familiarize themselves with emerging life science technologies that have the potential to change the face of therapeutics.  The course will then consider the use of these tools to not only improve health care but also as an art medium examining the influence of life science applications on our culture.  The course material will expose students to organisms manipulated in an imaginative context and consider how these artistic ventures may affect public perception of emerging biomedical technologies.  The course material will touch on how imagery communicates to society and how art can support the interpretation of the ethics around biotechnology’s involvement in the evolution of living beings.

There will be hands-on laboratory experiences in the field of Bioengineering x Art.  Students will use biological media and data to create stimulating and generative art utilizing a range of biopolymeric materials (agar, cellulose, gelatin) and fabrication methods utilized in bioengineering applications.

Blending engineering and art can promote expansive thinking and making to solve and ponder problems and create to comprehend.  Further, examining how art articulates the progression of bioengineering will generate discourse on the possibilities and concerns posed by advancement in this field.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Researchers use the power of observation to generate questions that have led to some of the most fascinating discoveries in nature. In this seminar, we will explore the process of scientific inquiry by investigating the many ways in which field biologists observe and study organisms both in their natural environment and in the lab. Throughout the semester, we will discuss a variety of methodologies and technologies that researchers use to design thoughtful experiments and collect meaningful data. Each class will typically begin with a mini-lecture introducing key themes, concepts, and ideas pertaining to the topic being covered that week. Further exploration of the topic will take place in the form of student-led discussions of assigned readings and hands-on learning experiences in the lab and field. We will combine technology, problem-solving skills, and creativity to collect and interpret behavioral, morphological, physiological, and sensory data in living and non-living organisms. Techniques and skills learned in the beginning of the semester will be used to generate unique questions that will be addressed using appropriate experimental methods later in the semester. Following data collection, analysis, and interpretation, this research project will culminate in the form of an oral presentation and formal paper. Please note that this seminar includes coordinated trips during class time to local sites in the Princeton area.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

In this seminar, we will investigate the sizes of and distances to planets, stars, and galaxies far far away. We will start with familiar objects having sizes we can readily grasp and carefully work our way up to the largest most distant objects in the observable universe. We will describe how these sizes and distances were first measured by scientists/philosophers as our understanding of the universe we live in evolved and matured over the years. But, more than that, we will learn, and in some cases demonstrate, how many of these measurements can be done with fairly modest equipment in our modern age. For example, we will see (i) how one can measure the diameter of the Earth from a single picture of a sunset, (ii) how one can measure the distance to the Sun by analyzing pictures of nearby asteroids taken through a small telescope over the course of a few nights, and (iii) how one can measure the distance to nearby stars using a few pictures taken over the course a year or two again through a small telescope. Depending on weather and available resources, we hope to demonstrate with actual nighttime observations some of these fundamental measurements as part of the class.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

The human mind is vast. Our minds can think a seemingly infinite array of thoughts; we can feel rich, chaotic emotions; we can perceive, believe, wonder, doubt, hope and fear. What is the mind, and how do we come to know both our own mind and the minds of those around us?

Some questions about the mind are easy. What are you thinking right now? Does your best friend like you? Others are hard. What do you want to do in the next five years? What do your parents want you to do? And still other questions may seem easy, but turn out to be hard. What is the difference between the hard and the easy? How do we manage to know, even in the easy cases? And what is it that we know, when we know ourselves or others?

Grounded in work from psychology and philosophy, this course explores questions about the nature of the mind, and how a mind comes to know itself and others.  In addition to reading works from a number of disciplines and traditions, students will use “thought experiments”—sometimes performing psychological experiments on themselves, sometimes engaging in philosophical science fiction—to gain a deeper understanding of these questions.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Before Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton caught fire, HBO’s 2008 miniseries John Adams enthralled viewers and won awards. Both productions blossomed from prize-winning and popular histories.  Walk into any bookstore and you’ll find these books (by Ron Chernow and David McCullough, respectively) as well scores of others treating Adams, Hamilton, as well as Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and more.  The American public, it seems, can’t get enough of the “founders.”

This seminar will equip students to engage with this phenomenon.  It will do so by digging deeply into American history during the early national period, a crucial timespan in which the ideals of the recent Revolution met the realities of statecraft, when the social institutions of British America were strained through a new national American idiom, and when many of the issues that would prove vital to subsequent American history first cropped up.  It will also do so by allowing students to engage as historians with the materials by which these books, and others, are written. 

Our investigations will stream through readings and discussions about “the founders” and will deploy records left by and about these figures to get at the dynamism of the period.  But, crucially, we will also use those records as jumping off places to get at the lives and ideas of less prominent people.  Similarly, while we will steep ourselves in the politics of the period, we will also think deeply about cultural and intellectual developments.  By making these moves, and, crucially, by thinking about how we make them, the course will teeter constantly between its express content and larger lessons about historical methodology and practice.

Over the term, we will visit numerous repositories on and around campus, to include the Rare Books room, the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, the Digital Humanities Center, and Morven Museum.  These visits (and the use of Firestone’s database subscriptions) will facilitate a series of weekly short research assignments. The course will culminate with a trip to see Miranda’s Hamilton, which the class will attend, discuss, and analyze.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

In this reading- and writing intensive seminar, we will critically examine some of the fundamental ideas and central themes of modern political conservatism. Each week, we will read and discuss a seminal paper or book excerpt from a leading conservative theorist. We will attempt to better understand conservative thought, and develop a framework for assessing its strengths and weaknesses, with respect to a number of representative topics, including the following: distributive justice, the role of the free market, and the apparent tension between liberty and equality; immigration policy; the nature of crime and criminal justice policy; and social conservatism and the role of religion in society. We will also explore some broader conservative themes that appear repeatedly in the discussion of these and other topics, including conservative critiques of “good intentions,” “political correctness,” and the political and cultural influence of intellectual and cultural elites. Some attention will be paid to the diversity of, and tensions between, the varieties of conservatism: what, if anything, do libertarian or economic conservatives have in common with social or religious conservatives, or conservatives who advocate a “law and order” approach to crime, such that it makes sense to consider them all “conservatives”? Our readings will be drawn from a variety of sources, including philosophers, economists, social scientists, and legal theorists.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Driverless cars have become an exciting topic in recent years. How soon will they be available to general consumers on public roads? What needs to be done to prepare for their grand entry into the world? Addressing these questions, this seminar focuses on what it will take for driverless cars to work effectively as well as their impact on everyday life and society at large.

 A paradigm shift is occurring in everything from cars, trucks or vans driven by licensed drivers, to the very act of driving a vehicle. Examining this paradigm shift, the seminar will address the following:

• The design and technologies that enable a vehicle to be driverless;
• The infrastructure needed for the proper functioning of driverless cars;
• Safety regulations for driverless cars, including National Highway Safety Administration requirements;
• The benefits and challenges of driverless cars;
• The effects of driverless cars on the environment, including, but not limited to factors such as reduction in total vehicle volume and parking space needs due to car sharing;
• The impact of driverless cars on multiple related industries and employment;
• The impact of driverless cars on consumer purchase and usage behaviors;
• Customer privacy and data security concerns in the global driverless vehicle market, in which laws and standards are set by individual countries;
• Current status of driverless cars at various companies; the pros and cons of these products in a fiercely competitive global market.

 This seminar will be of interest to students interested in the topic of driverless cars and their social impact. It is also meant to help students see the changing globalized world through the lens of driverless cars.

There are no prerequisites for the class.  Students are expected to actively participate in class discussions of course readings and are encouraged to bring in case studies germane to our topics. Twice in the semester, students form teams and choose topics related to driverless cars for further independent research. Teams will work on group presentations, on the basis of which individual team members can write their own midterm and final papers. These activities will engage students to ask questions and develop critical thinking skills in assessing the readiness of driverless cars and seeing the linkage between products and society in a new light.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

At a time when national politics seems frayed at best, local government meetings remain sites of direct democracy and creative protest. Is Politics a Performance? looks at how we perform in these meetings, and who gets to play which roles. Drawing on the tools of sociology, philosophy, civics and theater, we will analyze meetings in Princeton and Trenton, and class member hometowns. Through a layered, practical and fun approach to decision-making, citizenship and dramaturgy, this class is ideal for students considering work in public policy, education, social sciences and performing arts.

Guiding questions for this course include:

• How do we understand the rules – both explicit and implicit – by which our democracy functions (or doesn’t)?

• What does it mean to study citizenship?

• Why are local government meetings structured the way they are?

• How do we know who is qualified to lead?

• How can the tools of theater inform our understanding of political process?

• What are the opportunities and challenges to the new era of digital democracy and online government meetings, brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, with regard to equity and access?

The course includes readings from Plato to contemporary philosophers, from influential sociologist Erving Goffman to modern-day theater artists and activists. We will visit city council meetings in Trenton, Princeton and other major cities; we’ll also hear from local elected officials, staffers and activists. As a final class project, we will pull together the most interesting and illustrative moments from the meetings we see into a short script and invite classmates and colleagues to perform that script with us, in a virtual embodiment of democratic process. Our goal is that at the end of the course we have a sense of how to activate civic engagement through collaboration and participation.

Is Politics a Performance? is drawn from a participatory theatrical project called City Council Meeting, which was presented in five US cities, and a forthcoming book based on the project. In that work, we saw that young people who had a chance to try out different roles and texts within the familiar, uncomfortable and often boring structure of a local government meeting were able to empathize more easily with people very different from them. The course offers a chance to learn how to ignite the fire of citizenship in young people now, and how to build a dialogue with peers about what makes democracy and liberation possible for us all.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Jerusalem is considered a holy city to three faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  In this course, students will learn the history of Jerusalem from its founding in pre-biblical times until the present.  Over the course of the semester, we will ask: What makes space sacred and how does a city become holy?  What has been at stake—religiously, theologically, politically, nationally—in the many battles over Jerusalem?  What is the relationship between Jerusalem as it was and Jerusalem as it was and is imagined?

Through engagement with a wide range of sources—including biblical lamentations, archeological excavations, qur’anic passages, medieval pilgrim itineraries, modern poetry, and international political resolutions—students will develop the historiographical tools and theoretical frameworks to study the history of one of the world’s most enduringly important and bitterly contested cities.  Together, we will reconstruct Jerusalem’s past and understand it from the perspectives of Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  Students will also encounter persistent themes central to the identity of Jerusalem: geography and topography; exile, diaspora, and return; destruction and trauma; religious violence and war; pilgrimage; social diversity; missionizing; the rise of nationalism; and peace efforts.  By the end of the course, students will have a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of why the issue of Jerusalem plays such a pivotal role in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

In this seminar we will study moments of change at seven crucial stages in the life cycle (childhood, adolescence, courtship and marriage, work, maturity and death) in order to discover the conflicts and contradictions, the emotional truth, and the possibilities that such moments hold for us. Our medium will be the short story. Great short stories show us convincingly how change comes about, each one unique and yet ultimately universal. How do moments of revelation occur? What are these changes each of us must discover in a unique way? What pushes us? What show us the way? Or does it result from within?

Each class will begin with a discussion of an illustrative short story, followed by a writing exercise inspired by it, and then discussed in small groups. We will gather again to share what has been written by those who wish to. Each student will be encouraged to produce and thus discover, the imaginative and regenerative potential residing in her/his imagination. The writing submitted will be both shared with the class and discussed in one on one sessions with the professor. In a final paper each student will put their pieces together to reflect the whole. Guest speakers will be invited, both psychiatrists and authors. Dr. William Tucker will talk about Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development. A collection of most of the short stories we will read is available in How People Change: the Short Story as Case History, by William Tucker and all will be found online.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Despite the slew of high-profile scandals exposed over the past two decades, examples of ethical transgressions in financial markets continue to abound.  The global financial crisis arguably highlighted the extent to which we seem to have made little progress in stamping out unethical behavior in markets.  The pandemic presents an opportunity for the finance industry to re-assert its credentials as a force for good in society. 

This seminar will explore ethics in the finance industry using a case-based method.  Our approach will be grounded in an understanding of the role of a financial system in an economy and society.  We will address the seminar’s topic from various angles, drawing on moral philosophy, financial theory and concepts of behavioral ethics, corporate governance, economic development, and public policy.

A few themes will be emphasized through-out the semester:

• A discussion of the underlying assumptions of finance theory, their impact on the practice of finance and on the role of morality in the industry, and the applicability of Kantian, Utilitarian, and Virtue Ethics philosophies to finance.
• An attempt to distinguish ethical issues that are systemic in nature from those that relate to individual decision-making and character. 
• For the systemic issues, an overview of how the largest financial firms on Wall Street have evolved over the past several decades from private partnerships to publicly listed companies, creating new conflicts of interests.
• A comparison of corporate governance across national financial markets, with particular emphasis on the US, China, Japan, and India, and how typical conflicts of interest encountered in each of these countries are linked to the nature of their financial systems.
• Case studies to illustrate various patterns observed in markets, from outright deceit, fraud, and manipulation to more nuanced mishandling of conflicts of interest.  For the latter, we will pay particular attention to the concept of “bounded ethicality” and the grey areas in which financial actors have to balance a complex web of duties and incentives. 
• A discussion of the promise and challenges of fintech, crypto-currencies, and, more broadly, innovative finance.
• A discussion of role models – finance professionals that pursue their self-interest in a responsible manner, in ways that seek to benefit society rather than extract value from it.  Some of these role models will participate in the seminar. 
• An exploration of the economic and social value of investments and which types of investments might create most positive impact beyond financial returns.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Society’s failure to tend to caretaking and caretakers, made especially visible by the pandemic, is both harmful and unsustainable. This seminar explores a counterexample—from the Middle Ages. 

This freshman seminar explores the creative output of one of the most exceptional figures in European history: Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179). Composer, dramatist, poet, seer, mystic, healer, theologian—Hildegard’s influence and originality was so profound and wide-ranging that she is difficult to pin down with any traditional label. Part of this is because her creative enterprise was turned so wholly toward the physical care and spiritual cultivation of the community of women with whom she was in fellowship. Hildegard thus offers a fascinating case of an intellect whose creative powers flowed to and from a culture of care, the maintenance of which was her highest aim. And nearly a millennium after her death, Hildegard’s creative force is still on the increase; contemporary composers, artists, and dramaturges still draw inspiration from her searingly bright vision of humankind’s connectedness—with nature, with one another, and with the cosmos. 

Seminar activities shuttle between medieval and modern, historical and hands-on. On a trip to the Cloisters Museum in New York City, students tour a medieval garden containing many of the curative plants that formed the basis of Hildegard’s reputation as a healer. This firsthand work with historical gardening practices shapes our engagement with Hildegard’s poetry and music, and its saturation in horticultural imagery. We consider Hildegard's refreshingly open invocation of the female body in her theological writings, and its spectacular expression in the paintings produced by her community. We explore her ideas about food’s relationship to the spirit by baking her “cookies of joy,” meant to banish melancholy. In November, students have a unique opportunity to work with one of the leading interpreters of Hildegard’s music, the vocal trio ModernMedieval; the ensemble will lead a workshop on singing Hildegard’s music directly from twelfth-century manuscripts, and will give a concert that programs Hildegard’s music alongside modern compositions inspired by her thought.  We explore how her work speaks to contemporary concerns about the work of caretaking and its relegation to a subordinate domain of femininity. Later in the semester—and in the spirit of collective intellectual, psychical, and corporeal endeavor that was at the heart of Hildegard’s community—students produce a collection of essays that use Hildegard as a jumping off point for imagining and practicing care-based creativity in the 21st century. Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

This seminar aims to study the applications of mathematics to astronomy throughout human history. Astronomy has often been the main motivation for mathematical developments starting from the basic study of geometry all the way to calculus and differential geometry. We will survey the major achievements in these two fields.

Scientific interest in astronomy goes back to the birth of civilization. For this reason, astronomy serves as an excellent lens for examining mathematical development. The main questions this seminar will set out to answer are: How was mathematical thought influenced by civilizations’ interests in astronomical phenomena? What were the main drivers and impediments to the development of these two fields? How did the culture and beliefs of each civilization affect the study of mathematics and astronomy?

The mathematics required for understanding many of the astronomical phenomena that can be observed with a simple telescope are no more complicated than what is learned in a high school course. For this reason, it is very appealing to carefully see what simple tools can be used to understand complicated problems. We will be able to calculate the circumference of the Earth, the distance of the moon and the sun to the Earth, the velocity of planetary orbits and many other similar issues. Some of these discoveries rely on clever observations and simple computations while others involve many observations and rigorous scientific study. We will be able to see the development of scientific thought throughout History.

The course will begin with the astronomy and mathematics of the ancient Babylonians. It will then proceed through the classical Greek astronomers ending with Ptolemy, who popularized the geocentric view of the solar system. We will then study the Islamic astronomers who modernized the way we think about mathematics. After this we will cover the main astronomers of the heliocentric theory, including Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. We will then discuss the Newtonian model of the solar system and end with Einstein’s theory of General Relativity.

All students are welcome; the course requires no more than high-school levels of math. The course will have weekly readings, in class quizzes and problem sets. The aim of the readings will be to understand the specific topic being discussed in a given week. The problem sets will give a hands-on approach of how to use mathematics to make astronomical predictions. The quizzes will be short mathematical quizzes on topics covered in the previous week.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Diamonds and gemstones have been objects of fascination and desire since the dawn of humankind.  From amber beads found in the oldest gravesites to large, nearly perfect crystals incorporated into all kinds of modern technology, the use of gemstones has evolved over time but has always been important. As crystalline objects, diamonds and gemstones can be used to explore the fundamentals of symmetry and its role in science and art.  As geological materials, gemstones provide a means to study and understand overarching geological phenomena such as deep time, plate tectonics, evolution, and the vast interior of our planet.  As technological materials, diamonds and gemstones provide an entry into fundamental concepts of materials science including crystal structures, mechanical behavior, and all kinds of optical phenomena.  The development of advanced analytical techniques has revolutionized the study of gemstones in recent decades, enabling a deeper understanding of the cultural and historical significance of gemstones including reconstructing ancient trade networks that moved gemstones all around the globe.  Modern technology is also dramatically altering the role of gemstones through new applications in areas such as lasers, electronics, and scientific instruments.

This course will provide an overview of the modern scientific study of gemstones, introducing students to the fundamentals of crystallography and mineralogy, and selected applications to geology, materials science, and cultural history.  The course will make use of Princeton’s collection of cut and rough gemstones providing students with hands-on demonstrations and activities to explore crystalline form and symmetry as well as optical and other properties that give gemstones their special status. Students will also gain exposure to analytical equipment including spectroscopic and chemical analysis tools for advanced yet non-destructive characterization of gemstones.  The course will also include a field trip to the American Museum of Natural History.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

In this Seminar you will combine satellite remote sensing and geological and geophysical field observations with modeling, interpretation, and reporting, to answer questions on the impact of climate, topography, and geography on agricultural crop production. How is the energy of Earth and the Sun harnessed in its various forms? What is the impact of agriculture and resource extraction on landscapes—and how do climate and topography influence what can be grown, what can be mined, where humans settle? How have civilizations through the ages reconciled opportunity and threat: of fertile volcanoes, powerful rivers, burning forests? In the classroom, around campus, and on the required field trip to rural Italy, you will gain practical experience collecting data in geographic context, using both instruments and your own senses. You will analyze these data using statistical techniques such as regression and geospatial analysis, while learning the programming language MATLAB. You will write a research paper and typeset it in LaTeX.

The classroom component of the course will have graded (bi)weekly assignments built around on-campus data collection, data preparation or analysis, and scientific programming. A significant part of your assessment comes from writing assignments that teach you to communicate your scientific results, and culminate in an original research paper and an oral presentation for an audience of peers, Freshman Seminar alumni, and invited guests from the university community.

This seminar is about natural science and technology, and has a laboratory component to it: students should come prepared with an aptitude for, and a willingness to learn, the quantitative aspects of scientific inquiry and numerical modeling. Scientific writing and computer programming are integral parts of this seminar and its assessment.
https://geoweb.princeton.edu/people/simons/FRS-CCCI.html

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

In this course we will explore classic magic ("fairy") tales from around the world, focusing our attention on traditional narrative patterns and their meanings. We will view magic tales as stories that reflect significant moments and experiences of the life cycle (e.g., coming of age, marriage, etc.) and will explore symbolic journeys (often of initiation, both male and female), representations of the Other World (forests, faraway kingdoms, the land of the dead, etc.), and family relationships (between parents and children, siblings, etc.), to name a few. Topics we will examine include oral composition, variants and multiforms, storytellers and performance (including storytelling as a revived art form), the major critical approaches that have influenced the study of the genre (oral-traditional, historic-geographic, structuralist, myth-ritual, psychological, symbolic, socio-historical, and feminist), and how magic tales inform other types of narrative (in literature and film).

Most of the seminar (9 weeks) will focus on traditional magic tales and how they function not only in Euro-American but also non-Western cultures; during the last two weeks of the course (3 weeks), we will examine how magic tales are adopted and adapted in Western literature and film. We will seek to understand how and why magic tales are composed and performed--how and why they resonate so profoundly and evoke such intriguing layers of cultural, social, and psychological meaning. Our goal in this seminar is to “read” the “texts” of magic tales and to understand how and why they so vividly express the human experience.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Description: In nature, groups of thousands of individuals cooperate to create complex collective behavior purely through local interactions – from fireflies that synchronize, to ant colonies that form miles of foraging trails, to termites that build meter-high mounds, to the complex and mesmerizing motion of fish schools and bird flocks. Swarms are everywhere! What makes these natural systems so fascinating is that, even though each individual has limited ability, as a collective they achieve tremendous complexity. From a human perspective, it seems almost impossible how such complexity can emerge. What are the rules by which this amazing collective behavior comes about? Why do swarms evolve in the first place?

In this freshman seminar we will explore the emergence of self-organization and swarm intelligence across animal groups, from cells, to insects, to fish, to humans. We will study and discuss how biologists have uncovered the principles behind such phenomena, what insights have emerged, and the resistance and controversies around the definition of self-organization and swarms. We will also explore how mathematicians and computer scientists have strived to express the emergence of higher-order patterns and structures through artificial swarms. In addition to readings and discussions, we will have a “hands-on” component: we will ourselves “play around” with the rules, using in class games and a programming tool called Netlogo.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

The question of who benefits from power cannot be separated from who is excluded from privilege through forms of social hierarchy like race and caste. Why are contemporary human social formations characterized by such inequality when democracies around the world preach the need for equality, the rule of law, and justice? Is this a systemic issue related to “human nature,” or is it something more abstract, relating to the very nature of nation-state forms of political hegemony?

In order to answer these questions, this course will examine caste and racial formations in South Asia and the US. As global, transnational iterations of human hierarchy, we will use caste and race as analytical frameworks to examine how inequality operates in the shadows of normative narrations of political power. In particular, we will examine how African American Studies scholars have used “caste” as an analytical framework to examine American forms of systemic racial inequality. Alongside this close analysis, students will also examine how key South Asian Studies scholars consider caste in South Asia and the diaspora. Throughout, students will learn about distinctions and specificities relating to social hierarchy, compartmentalization and racial and casteist forms of social classification. A central question throughout will be how and why do these systems of oppression persist. Can we use caste as an appropriate logic to think about systemic human inequality, or is race a more appropriate, specific mode of thinking through what makes us, ostensibly, different? Moreover, what do we need at a sociopolitical level to move beyond the limitations of these systems?

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

This seminar will study the history and nature of myths —- traditional as well as urban myths —- particularly in regard to the way that myths, legends, and superstitions reflect the concerns and fears of all cultures. We will examine the ways in which each genre differs, and the means by which communities, seized with conviction for generations, disseminate and fortify them. The collective unconscious is often manifested in metaphor, particularly in literature and film, and the legitimate anxieties, fears (and guilt) that it reflects will be the subject of our study. We will discuss urban myths through history (witchcraft; alchemy and the philosopher’s stone; prophecies of the end of the world, conspiracies) as well as contemporary myths (post-truth beliefs), and the technological, religious and cultural shifts that cause them.

Students will read from a collection of relevant essays and papers as well as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Fairy Tales of Perrault, The Uses of Enchantment, as well as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Road. We will watch the films ‘Walkabout;’ ‘Moonlight;” ‘Let the Right One In;’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (Cocteau).

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

In this seminar, we will accomplish two things.  First, we will gain a deeper understanding of the history, theology, and practice of Mormonism, the general term for religious traditions that trace their histories to the revelatory career of Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-1844). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by far the largest of these groups, is today regarded as one of the fastest-growing religious movements in the world and will be the focus of much of our attention. However, there are other Mormon groups, and we will spend time thinking about the history and the conditions (social and theological) of schism and realignment.

Our second goal, achieved through this close study of Mormonism, will be an understanding of the terms, methods, and sources of the academic study of religion. Using Mormonism as a case study, we will explore how scholars utilizing historiographical, literary, sociological, ethnographic, and anthropological methods approach their various sources to generate knowledge about religion as a human phenomenon. The scholars of religion we will read have examined Mormonism from the perspective of gender studies, historical Christian theology, the study of race, nineteenth-century American history, the study of sexuality, scriptural studies, and ritual studies. Because it was founded in the nineteenth century, Mormonism is an ideal case study for this exploration of religious studies as a field—there are comparatively plentiful sources, and the field’s many questions about authenticity, authority, and approach are very legible and close to the surface when it comes to a movement so recent. This seminar will feature significant scholarly work in the field of Mormon Studies, as well as extensive reading in the relevant primary sources—the Mormon scriptures as well as non-canonical texts essential to understanding the development of this tradition in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Assignments will include participation in weekly discussion, leading part of class at least once, intermittent short “book reviews,” and a final research paper on a relevant topic of your choice.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Using an array of creative research methods, students will explore their environments, searching for data and identifying connective patterns, stories, and observations. They will collect and catalog their findings in evolving digital archives, iterating on modes of communication and techniques of design. Some topics to be covered include: Personal & Local Data, Documentary Drawing, Sensory Visualization, Data Collection, Information Graphics, and Interaction Design. Written responses and discussions of the work of data-driven artists, writers, filmmakers, designers, and engineers will provide context to these topics.

Students will practice and investigate these approaches through the production of small, weekly creative projects. In-class exercises and demonstrations will introduce assorted digital media tools and technologies. The course will culminate in the production of a larger creative data visualization project. This final project will be built on the foundation of one or more of the smaller weekly sketches, developed and iterated upon throughout the semester. Together, the class will share their research, highlighting stories and patterns via data uncovered during the semester.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Crosswords. Department stores. Transit systems. What do all of these have in common? One answer highlights the prominence of grids—on a page, in a built environment, or across the landscape—in constructing twentieth-century urban American life. How have these grids orchestrated how we think, how we desire, and how we connect, without us consciously clocking their effect? In this seminar, we’ll explore the ways these grids, in effect, are artifacts of a secret history that we’ll recover, explore, and unpack. Grids can easily go unnoticed, but once you pay attention, they’re everywhere. Though going off the grid might be highly touted among privacy-seeking celebrities or rural communities, we’ll discern ways that, in truth, grids—from power grids to modernist art, from scaffolding to Tetris––shape our interconnected lives. In this course, students will conduct deep dives into three case studies of grid-based artifacts that have shaped the rhythms of modern life: the humble crossword puzzle, the department store and its afterlife, and transit systems.

The class begins with the simplest yet most maddening grid of all: the crossword puzzle. The crossword, invented almost by accident in 1913, immediately became a sensation. Through the ways it touches socioeconomics, class, gender, and media studies, the crossword is not merely peripheral to society, but a central actor. We then move into the grids of department stores. These “palaces of consumption” might seem irrelevant today, thanks to online shopping, but their legacy thrives through Amazon (the “everything store”) and targeted social media campaigns. Students investigate the department store in the cultural imagination, from Zola to Ishiguro to Miracle on 34th Street. Finally, the class explores mass transit systems, investigating how the transportation that structures a city can both expand the reach but also abandon its citizens. Uncovering the decisions that go into a city’s transit reveals much about its racial and socioeconomic makeup—even the graphic art of the map design can have major effects. We examine the primary artery to and from Princeton––the iconic Dinky––and consider how the shortest scheduled commuter rail in the United States shapes our bubble.

The course’s three major projects are multimedia and creative in nature. Students construct a crossword puzzle; design or re-purpose a department store; and, as the final assignment, create a business proposal that investigates renovations to the Dinky.  Additional requirements will include weekly responses and leading discussion during one week of class.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Information technologies, such as computers, smart phones, and the Internet, pervade today’s world, and Princetonians and Princeton institutions have played major foundational roles in conceiving and creating these technologies. This seminar will trace these developments through the contributions of Princeton faculty, students and community members who made major contributions to them.  These include pioneering figures such as Alan Turing, John Von Neumann, Claude Shannon, John Bardeen and Robert Kahn, among others, who were the progenitors of computer science and engineering, digital communications, semiconductor technology and the Internet, and other aspects of modern information technology, as well as Princeton institutions such as Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Study, and RCA Laboratories, where many advances took place. 

Each week we will consider an individual or individuals (or an institution), examining biographical information, connections with Princeton, and contributions to the development of information technology.  The latter will involve an examination of the contributions themselves and assessments of the impact that they have had on subsequent developments.

The purpose of the seminar is thus twofold:  first, to introduce some of the basics of information technologies, and, second, to emphasize the role that Princeton has had in their development.  The material is intended to be accessible to students having general backgrounds.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Why do we love talking about love? Why are we so moved by lyric poetry, love songs, and romance novels? In this course we will explore different philosophies and concepts of love in the Western tradition—Eros (desire), Agape (divine love), Philia (friendship), Storge (familial love) and Xenia (hospitality)—in their peculiar relationship to politics.

We will see how love represented in literature and performed in the arts intersects with activism as it attempts to spark social change. We will analyze how the work of poets, visual artists, photographers and filmmakers testifies to the roles of affect in resisting State order, as well as how these works, as labors of love, subvert the logic of twentieth-century authoritarian regimes, becoming essential tools for social, political and cultural revolution.

Using case studies drawn from literature, art, film and photography, the course will focus on key historical moments in Europe, North Africa, and the Americas, in which love as desire, friendship, compassion, solidarity and hospitality has resisted and triumphed over political violence: the Mexican Revolution, Fascism in Italy, the Spanish Civil War, the 1973 Chilean military coup, and the decolonization and independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s in the Maghreb.

Our readings will include a variety of genres and media, as well as historical and theoretical secondary sources, in order to explore different methodologies and practices of textual analysis and critical writing in the Humanities.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

For those who find human reason unequal to the task of understanding existence, religion has
been the traditional place to go. In this course, we will examine a period in the Christian west when tragedy — usually, but not always, dramatic tragedy — took on the burden of exploring doubts about who and what we are, and about how we are supposed to behave. After two introductory classes in which we will consider what tragedy is and isn't with reference to the classical tradition, our texts will range from the Italian Renaissance to Goethe’s Faust. En route, we will consider tragedies by (amongst others) Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Racine, and Dryden. We will also ponder whether — and if so, how — tragedy began to wane by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and whether tragedy has a place in our twenty-first-century age of confessional transparency and hyper-realistic depictions of real and imagined violence. All texts not originally written in English will be read in translation.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Many Latin American countries have weathered many political and social traumas--dictatorships, coups, mass violence, political disruptions, and severe economic disparities. (Sound familiar?) In this mix of undesirable ingredients, theater artists reexamined and reimagined the use of theater to challenge and criticize structures, and to empower those who have been the most oppressed.

We will learn about how different theatermakers from Latin America chose to tackle social/political theater from the ‘60s to the present. (We clearly cannot cover all of the countries or movements, but will note, among others, Peru’s Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Argentina’s Workshop of Theatrical Investigations, Guillermo Calderón’s work in Chile, and others)

Considerable emphasis will be placed on on Augusto Boal’s seminal “Theater of the Oppressed” --breaking down what has traditionally been considered a well told story or play, identifying how it operates as a tool for an oppressor, and what other options Boal proposes. We will see how theory and application has spread around the globe. Each class will have some time dedicated to improvisations and games in the genre (NO ACTING experience necessary! Almost preferred), as well as readings, analysis and discussion, and watching performances. The class will culminate in a project (script/happening/play) that students will create addressing a social/economic/political issue within a community of their choice.

*Please be aware that we are studying nations that are in great transition and flux. There will be material and history of violence, sexual violence, tactics of oppression and suppression, and other crimes against humanity. It is the goal of the class and the work to enable action and healing against such crimes. Please be aware that the material may be sensitive for some.*

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

This freshman seminar will introduce students to various forms of travel, migration, and movement across the historically interconnected regions of pre-modern Central Asia, Iran and India. Students will discover a world where people, goods and ideas traveled, where spaces were shared and where fluid identities adapted to changing spatial contexts. Focusing on a different theme associated with pre-modern movement each week, the syllabus and its assortment of textual, visual, material, and scholarly sources will take the class on semester-long journey with several stops across this Turkic, Persianate and Islamicate trans-regional space. Students will learn about diverse historical experiences including the Sogdian-Turkic commercial symbiosis in Pre-Islamic Central Asia, gendered spaces in peripatetic Mughal courts across India and Iran, and forced relocations caused by slavery in the Islamicate Turco-Persian world.

By the end of the course, students will be able to identify various kinds of movement and mobility in the pre- modern world. By learning about the widespread movement of peoples across history, they will be able to think critically about popular narratives that reduce processes of movement and exchange to being products of globalization and modernity. The class will also train students to appreciate how spaces were often shared by people with complex identities and see premodern Central Asia, Iran and India beyond the restrictions placed by modern borders and national identities. Students will additionally learn how to critically read and unpack non-textual sources like materials, images and maps in order to develop sensitivity to a diverse range of historical experiences far removed from our own.   

As this is a freshman seminar curating Near Eastern Studies for an audience unfamiliar with the history of premodern Central and South Asia, there are no prerequisites. There are no foreign language requirements and training will be provided for all digital tools used in the classroom. The only restriction is that enrollment is reserved for freshmen.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

This FRS explores how people balance love and work, two lifelong projects said to be our primary preoccupations. Using a social psychology perspective, we will take a broad behavioral scientific approach. By love, we mean close relationships with partners, family, intimates. By work, we mean paid and unpaid jobs, careers, household work, volunteering. We will look at what motivates a person in a given situation. We will aim to be inclusive by social class, gender, sexual orientation, marital/partner/parental status, culture, age… Most adults work (at least, sometimes). Most adults love someone (again, some of the time). Given finite hours per day, how do people allot time to love and work? What impels people, whether by choice or not, to do neither, one over the other, or both at once? We read and discuss the behavioral science of close relationships, theories of social class in everyday life, and lived experiences in work-life balance. We use the tools for discovery (systematic observation, surveys, narratives) that hint at answers to our lives’ burning questions.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

They say, “you are what you eat,” but what does that say about us and our ways of eating? The home and hearth are essential elements of what defines a community, yet this concept differs radically throughout the world. La cocina—the kitchen—as the heart of the home often appears in literature, film, commercial enterprises, and television. This course will examine food practices and behaviors in Spanish-speaking regions and the Americas through an interdisciplinary lens the anthropological, historical, sociological, and psychological interpretation of food and eating. An understanding of how food and meals have evolved to create culture and identity as well as distance and otherness (You eat what?!) will augment students’ understanding of their relationship with food and culture, history, geography, and themselves. Because food is one of our most basic of needs, understanding its significance will allow us to explore how food conveys (and limits) self-expression and creates relationships and boundaries between individuals and groups.

Through literature, historical texts, food criticism, visual media, and empirical research, this course examines food perception, production, preparation, consumption, exchange, and representation and the ways in which food structures individual and communal identities. The theoretical perspectives used to examine eating cultures in this course will draw from a range of disciplines including, but not limited to, anthropology, literary, gender, and cultural studies, psychology, sociology, and economics. By the end of this course students will: understand theories or explanations of food and human behavior to describe social phenomena and the relationship between individuals and communities; examine the development of belief systems, behaviors, and assumptions that affect individuals and communities; apply interdisciplinary approaches to understand human behavior or explain social phenomena; access and analyze materials related to individuals and their food choices; and compare and contrast social phenomena across individuals or communities.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? What are the aesthetic, political, and daily life possibilities within stillness? In this studio course open to all, we'll dance, sit, question, and create substantial final projects. We'll play with movement within stillness, stillness within movement, stillness in performance and in performers' minds. We'll look at stillness as protest and power. We'll wonder when stillness might be an abdication of responsibility. We'll read widely within religions, philosophy, performance, disability studies, social justice, visual art, sound (and silence).

I developed Stillness after years of teaching interdisciplinary courses within the Program in Dance at Princeton. As I worked closely with Princeton students, I realized that, for many, their growing edge is in exploring a gentler, deeper, and more still approach to learning and physicality rather than continuing to push faster and further. In this class we pause and reflect, develop tools to practice—and even value—a quieter approach to learning and work.  We integrate an intellectual approach to the study of stillness with an embodied one, moving back and forth between learning about stillness across fields and then practicing it. Students’ homework includes readings, viewings, and creative projects. They write reflective journal assignments twice a week to integrate the material.

Many of the upperclassmen I’ve worked with in this course have said they wished they’d had it at the beginning of their time at Princeton. They found tools that helped them dig deeper into their studies while also caring for themselves, ultimately helping them feel connected to their work, and lives, in a way that is sustainable. I love working with first year students!  One of my goals for the course is to develop a warm and generous community of students who can support one another for the rest of their time at school. Students develop personal stillness practices, and often friendships, that last long past the end of the course. My hope is that the class gives students a warm welcome to Princeton and sends them off into the rest of their years with a set of tools to engage with Princeton in a full and centered way.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

This seminar examines science fiction in Anglo-American literature and film with special emphasis on its dialogue with the Russian and Eastern European tradition and their mutual influences. We will follow the evolutionary trajectory of the genre: from time-travel to dystopias; from alien invasions to interplanetary encounters; from the outer space to robots; from human-machine hybrids to questions of gender and ethnicity. We will discuss foundational literary texts and films by such authors as H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Evgenii Zamiatin, Isaac Asimov, Stanisław Lem, Andrei Tarkovskii, Stanley Kubrick, Arkadii and Boris Strugatsky, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, and more—all with particular attention to the historical and cultural milieu in which these works were produced and to cross-media adaptations. We will analyze the questions, hopes and anxieties that these narratives address and articulate, the imagery they employ, and the features of the story-worlds they construct. We will investigate how questions of authorship and agency, of narrative time and space, and the definitions of the self, the other, the human and the posthuman are framed and negotiated.
Evaluation: https://registrarapps.princeton.edu/course-evaluation/search

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

This seminar offers an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of international diplomacy, which we define broadly as a set of activities by which political leaders and other officials, both senior and junior, conceive of, develop, and implement foreign policy. The course draws on the instructor’s experience as former ambassador and current scholar to examine the changing role of diplomacy in today’s digitally connected yet increasingly fragmented world. Our core texts will be Henry Kissinger’s World Order and a recent co-edited volume by the instructor covering a series of case studies in successful diplomacy.

We will begin with a survey of some of the classics: Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Callières, Richelieu, Clausewitz, and others. We will then explore the wonderful 20th-century diplomatic memoirs by Harold Nicolson, George F. Kennan, and Dean Acheson, as well as more recent ones by Condoleezza Rice, William Burns, Christopher Hill, Michael McFaul, Wendy Sherman, Nabil Fahmy, and others. In these, we will focus selectively on key events and issues, such as the creation of the post-World War II international order, the U.S. opening to China in the 1970s, negotiation and renegotiations of NAFTA, initiatives toward Middle East peace, the ending of the Cold War, the Iran nuclear deal, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, dealing with Russia under Putin, and the Obama administration’s opening to Cuba. We will look at the various dimensions of a diplomat's life as well as such questions as what can be done when a diplomat disagrees with the policies she/he is instructed to carry out.

Toward the end of the semester, we will descend from high politics down to ground level, focusing on practical aspects of diplomacy on which students can draw if and as they aspire to careers in international relations. Topics include strategic planning, analysis and decision-making, cross-cultural communication, and negotiating techniques. Underlying all of our explorations is the conviction that international diplomacy is a critical element of a workable system of relations among states and of a rules-based international order in which disputes are settled by means short of war. In this sense, diplomacy can be seen not just as a practical art but as an essentially ethical undertaking.

For further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.