It’s difficult to imagine a time before the invention of shoes. Yet what started as a practical venture 40,000 years ago has evolved into a differentiated, billion-dollar industry just as concerned with art and style as it is with functionality and performance.  Shoes allow us to navigate, experience, and take advantage of our natural environment, and they are the principal convergence between our body and physical space. For centuries, shoes have provided signals about a person’s character, social and cultural status.

Shoes have also carried religious, cultural, and symbolic meaning. They remain a unique lens through which to interrogate and understand innovation, manufacturing, and industrial design. And recently, shoes have refocused our attention on issues of ethics and morality. In many ways, shoes are a window into our personal and collective history and future.  

The purpose of this seminar is threefold: first, to expose students to leading ideas, frameworks, and theories across the prominent academic disciples they will encounter during their time at Princeton; second, to apply interdisciplinary approaches to understand human behavior or explain social phenomena; and third, to help students build and sharpen the academic skills critical to thriving as an undergraduate.             

Each week, students will summarize readings from history, archeology, technology, art, business, economics, psychology, and politics. Readings will serve as the foundation for critical discussion. One short paper, an individual project where students will design a shoe, and a final group project where students will create an on-campus “shoe drive” constitute the seminar’s assignments.

The course will also consist of a series of discussions with each other, the instructor, and guest lectures from prominent business leaders, artists and designers, policymakers, and cultural icons.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Seeds are ubiquitous. We eat them. We plant them. We blow them in the wind. But do they need saving? Seed saving is an heirloom practice that is as old as the notion of agriculture itself.  Yet, seed saving practices sit at the center of an intensifying debate about biodiversity, food sovereignty, intellectual property rights, and the future of our species. 

Seed-bearing plants have evolved naturally over millennia with the help of conscientious humans who selectively save and cultivate useful specimens.  Yet, scientific advances, new legal frameworks, and corporate consolidation have drastically altered the way seeds are selected, saved, and regrown.  Though much of the work done in the realm of seeds has been thought of as progress, we are nevertheless facing growing concerns about the decline of biodiversity around the globe and food security in the face of climate uncertainty.  

This course will explore the oft-overlooked complexity of seeds and the people who are working to save them with special attention historical and cultural significance.  The course is structured around two novels: All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki and The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson.  We will read a range of interdisciplinary texts alongside these novels that extend themes introduced by Ozeki and Wilson including issues related to intellectual property rights, agricultural practice and policy, climate resilience, Native American sovereignty, and legacies of race and racism in the United States.  

The class will also take fieldtrips, host guests speakers, and do hands-on gardening work at The Seed Farm at Princeton, a campus farm growing rare, culturally meaningful seeds. 

At the conclusion of the course, students will understand the social, scientific, and sensorial significance of seeds and seeds saving, an issue that requires historical understanding, complex problem-solving, and vexing ethical considerations. 

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

The piano is a central fixture of European classical and contemporary music, an inheritor of centuries’ worth of repertory and performance practice. In the past century, the instrument has amalgamated with various genres and spread to every corner of the world, becoming part of rich and varied musical communities. The seminar will provide a comprehensive overview of the instrument, from its invention to various recent innovations.

Since its invention by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1700, the piano has undergone significant changes. We will begin with an investigation of the initial intentions that inspired piano’s design and study the evolution of its hammer mechanism, body, tuning, and string constructions and acoustics over the next two centuries, as it adapted to changing musical demands. The 18th-19th century repertory will be introduced in parallel, with special emphasis on Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. These sonatas were composed during the period of the most radical changes in piano’s construction and acted as both beneficiaries and impetuses for mechanical enhancements. The 19th century repertory will be discussed alongside the development of professional pianists and pedagogy, as well as the rise of recital culture.

Moving into the 20th century, the piano’s story becomes one of crisis and adaptation. The strengthened musical demand for timbre, percussive rhythms, and noises precipitated mechanical alterations of acoustic pianos and the development of synthesizers and software. The piano's adaptation to various genres, such as gospel, jazz, and pop, created diverse performance practices and an exponential increase in the wealth of available repertoire. By tracing the story of the piano, we aim to explore the relationship between our creativity and the tools we invent and change.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

What do elephant ivory, pangolin scales, and baby orangutans have in common? They are all major players in the global wildlife trade. From discussions of the origins of COVID-19 to concerns about the extinction of the last white rhinos, the world has recently turned its attention to the trade of live animals and their derivatives. The trade in wildlife is a multibillion-dollar industry, with millions of animals entering legal and illegal trade networks each year. Unsustainable hunting and trade of wildlife has complex conservation impacts, affecting not only targeted species and populations but also diverse human societies that rely on wildlife to meet subsistence, socio-economic, and cultural needs. This course aims to examine the commodification of wildlife and will explore how species have been appropriated as inputs into markets, including as wild meat, pets, medicine, and luxury goods, among others. We will draw on diverse fields such as ecology, anthropology, and economics for a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of the wildlife trade through the lens of conservation science. Students will apply the tools of systems thinking to understand the relationships between the ecological and social elements that characterize a wildlife trade system, including hunted and traded species, source habitats, human actors, and governance systems. We will examine the social and ecological drivers of the wildlife trade across diverse contexts and scales, explore the economic, socio-cultural, and environmental impacts of unsustainable trade, and identify potential solutions through a critique of case studies across the world. Throughout the semester, students will develop a social-ecological model based on a wildlife trade case study of their choice that will be used to test social and ecological questions within a conservation context.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

This freshman seminar concerns itself with the laws by which fictional female lives are told: narratives by which we anticipate as well as judge – vigilant observers that we are – what is going to happen to her next. A fundamental claim of this course is that dramatic suspense often problematically takes momentum from gendered laws and cues: thus, when we see a lightly-clad woman disappear from a highway stop we are conditioned to assume that she has been raped and killed. But what happens when a female director like Claire Denis ‘disappoints’ our narrative expectation because the presumed female victim turns out in fact to have cannibalized a truck driver?

In this seminar, we will explore an expansive archive of imaginative works – novels, stories, films, tv series – that flip the victim-script while we slowly familiarize ourselves with seminal writings from feminist and narrative theory (switching from Aristotle to Andrea Long Chu). Some fictional works will force us to recalibrate our nervous systems because nothing bad happens to the female protagonist (not even when a girl is left alone at a party, like in Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock). Others present counter-histories to the usual combination of male violence and female sacrifice (e.g. Sally Potter’s Thriller); others again shift the focus from heterosexual romance to meaningful relations between females (e.g. Ursula Le Guin’s short story “Sur” or tv series like Glow or Betty). We will reflect on the genre of the rape revenge movie and its deconstruction in the finale of Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You. Assuming that anxiety is not just a means of protecting us but also a way of being governed and put in check, in the last third of the semester, we will take inspiration from feminist discourses of queer joy that resist the “bury your gays” trope (e.g. from the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror) and from black optimism (especially Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments). We will conclude by weighing how to strike the right balance between acknowledging misogyny (Kate Manne’s Down Girl) and resisting gynopessimism (Jodi Dean’s “Against Gynopessimism”).

This seminar seeks enchantment in everyday experience, considering the allure and the danger of mixing up life and art. In addition to studying and writing about historical artworks, students will research current-day practice and will complete open-ended creative projects. Experience in any artistic discipline is welcome but is by no means required; more important is a spirit of curiosity and exploration. For our purposes, "art" refers not only to visual art but to a wide variety of creative undertakings that result in performances, objects, rituals, stunts, and other possibilities we will soon discover.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Compost is a complex, nutrient-dense mixture of decayed organic matter teeming with microbial life that naturally fertilizes soils, promoting plant growth.  Composting, one the oldest and most effective methods of food waste management, is now being explored as one of the frontline measures to solve the grand challenge of food waste, in which ~1/3 of global food (and its associated human, economic, and natural resources) is wasted every year. In many countries, most food scraps go to the landfill where conditions favor microbial decomposition of food into the potent greenhouse gas methane.  At the same time, food waste will only become a bigger problem given the predicted doubling of global food production by 2050 necessary to meet the demands of a growing population and dietary shifts. Encouragingly, the past few years have seen a large increase of products and policies to promote composting for household and institutional food waste management, including the transition for single use petroplastics to compostable bioplastics.  Princeton University, which has prioritized composting as part of its sustainability plan with the Sustainable Composing Research at Princeton (SCRAP) Lab, is exploring various methods, from in-vessel biodigestion to more traditional outdoor piles, to optimize the composting process for the campus community. This FRS will provide a scientific overview of composting and its role in promoting food, water, biodiversity, and climate sustainability by introducing fundamental concepts in soil science, nutrient cycling (carbon, nitrogen), microbiology (food webs, ecology), food production, water quality, and climate science using lectures, readings, and applied science labs focused on improving campus sustainability operations.  In collaboration with Princeton’s SCRAP lab, Campus as a Lab, Campus Dining, and the NJ Composting Council, students will evaluate the compostability of campus bioplastics and related alternatives by designing experiments, collecting and analyzing data, to produce an actionable presentation and written report.  Students will gain exposure to biogeochemical wet lab methods and the use of analytical equipment, including chromatographic and spectroscopic tools, and to bioinformatics analyses of nucleic acid sequences for characterization of compost composition and activity.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

A sculpture made of half-chewed lard. A film that stars dancing saucepans and whirling whisks. Music based on recordings of cicada sounds and the flight of bees. A performance in which the artist sits still onstage and invites the audience to make cuts in her clothing.

We are familiar with artworks that imitate life through images, sounds and stories. Creative artists may also work more directly with everyday experience, presenting humble, commonplace materials as aesthetic objects and experiences. Artists in various disciplines have long smudged the boundary between art and life, as when Marcel Duchamp (in)famously placed a bicycle wheel on a pedestal in 1913. (It is now held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) Forty years later, John Cage created an equally mischievous piano piece composed only of silence. In the 1960s, choreographer Yvonne Rainer explored "pedestrian movement," and Yoko Ono instructed performers to make art by eating a tuna sandwich, uttering a cough, or watching snow fall.

Earlier generations of experimental artists seemed to revel in mystification and countercultural status, but today we take for granted that everyday experience can be aesthetically invigorating. With ubiquitous digital media and technology, the arts become less distant from ordinary experience, and individual artistic disciplines get mixed up too. Such blurring of boundaries raises questions about aesthetics, authorship, expertise, spectatorship, commodification, and community.

This seminar seeks enchantment in everyday experience, considering the allure and the danger of mixing up life and art. In addition to studying and writing about historical artworks, students will research current-day practice and will complete open-ended creative projects. Experience in any artistic discipline is welcome but is by no means required; more important is a spirit of curiosity and exploration. For our purposes, "art" refers not only to visual art but to a wide variety of creative undertakings that result in performances, objects, rituals, stunts, and other possibilities we will discover together.

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? 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.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

“Poetry can extend the document.”
Muriel Rukeyser

This literature and creative writing-based course considers the rich intersection of poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid creative writing called documentary poetry, which has blossomed over the past 20 years. Like documentary films, documentary poems make use of primary source materials such as interviews, news articles, diaries, letters, photographs, medical reports, and public records. The works we’ll consider “extend the document” by enriching our understanding of historical and current events – with context, with language, with performance, with design, with juxtaposition of other kinds of writing and visual material. The works are contemporary; subject matter spans the 18th through the 21st centuries. These works are designed to move your understanding of public events from knowledge of the facts, however complex, to an understanding of their emotional and philosophical implications and nuances. Public events include the everyday lives of individuals as well as sweeping social movements and injustices.

Course requirements include a final 10-page documentary poetry/hybrid project and an oral presentation of the work to the class. You will also keep a process journal to record the methods, reflections, and progress of your work on your documentary project, from preliminary idea stage to radical revision. Weekly exercises will develop both your critical writing and your creativity with language.

During our seminar:

You’ll gain new perspectives on history: You’ll read about the drowning of 19th century enslaved Africans; a 21st century young Native American gay man’s complicated relationship with nature; the life of 18th century religious leader Ann Lee;  a re-envisioning of Wall Street, and many other topics.

You’ll practice paying close attention to how poems work: We’ll collaborate in understanding the readings, taking everyone’s responses and reactions to make a tapestry of possibilities. We’ll also read poems aloud in class, observing the physical and emotional effects they have on you and noting how the poems achieve those effects. You’ll use this understanding in creating your own documentary works.

You’ll explore your creativity: In-class exercises will help you become comfortable with non-intentional writing, letting you access the wisdom of your unconscious mind. You’ll also practice contemporary modes such as erasure and collage and experiment with the use of visuals to add texture to your writing. Your experiences with generating fresh, affecting, vivid language will energize every type of writing you do throughout your time at Princeton.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CuUmVOlLgb-/

What is common between a fairy-tale, your grandad’s old postage stamp, a Times Square billboard and an Instagram post? They all have a story to tell. As Henry James once said, “every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better the problem is solved” (Guy de Maupassant). In this course we will be looking at narrative structures that comprise the mechanics of textual and visual storytelling. Whether it is Aristotle’s 'Poetics' (c. 335 BCE) or Quentin Tarantino’s 'Pulp Fiction', a PC adventure game, or a music video, they share the social and cultural activity of storytelling. Increasingly in contemporary media practice, texts are deployed across a range of different platforms. From analyzing the art of comic strips and e-books designed for tablets, together we will be not only reading and watching the stories made by others, but also creating the stories of our own. You will try your hand at street photography, shoot a short film, conceptualize a publicity campaign together with your classmates, and much more.

There also will be two field trips during our semester—to a high-tech software development company and to an art museum.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cuj7FPksK7C/

If you are interested in the arts but pursuing a more traditional degree path, you needn’t and shouldn’t abandon your creative self. Traditionally, art and the sciences have been treated as separate disciplines, but both are systems of understanding and describing the world around us. Science is behind mixing paint, or creating perspective, while art has been used to document scientific discovery for centuries. By studying them together, new possibilities emerge.

This course encourages students to find a creative practice inspired by the concepts and scopes of their areas of concentration. For example, chemistry majors might choose to apply their knowledge to developing or expanding photographic processes, or molecular biologists may employ unorthodox approaches to ceramics. Geography can influence core mythologies and folklore. Ground harmonics can create visual patterns. The focus is on forming questions and then finding the answers through experimentation, accepting that failing is part of the process, and seeking new ways to express complex ideas through artistic expression or to embrace the science intrinsic in your art making. The approach is interdisciplinary and pragmatic and will facilitate the completion of an interdisciplinary project over the course of the semester, and potentially lead to groundbreaking ideas and making discoveries in real time.

Each week students will become familiar with contemporary and research-based work in the blended fields of varied art disciplines and science or the humanities. We will look at the connections between STEAM style education and practice and the creative workplace, and between creativity and labor, or the reciprocal relationship between intelligence gained through work and a creative approach as beneficial, even essential, to work of all kinds.

An experiment is conscious wandering, untried actions resulting in knowledge and the potential to expand genres and media, deepen thought, and contribute to the invention of new forms of expression. Studio as laboratory and laboratory as crucible for the creation of art.

We will develop and maintain a culture of open-mindedness, mutual respect, kindness, and inquiry in the classroom.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Art has shaped societal views on technology and impacted research in the sciences since at least the age of Leonardo’s study of human anatomy. In an abandoned petri dish, Alexander Fleming fortuitously grew Penicillium fungus, aiding in the discovery of one of the most efficient life-saving drugs in history. Fleming's intuition to recognize the unfamiliar and extraordinary was honed by his artistic practice - painting with live bacteria.

It is in this spirit that students in this seminar explore advances in the life sciences, the interface between materials and living things, and biological inspiration as a generative influence in art and design.  Students will use tools like laser cutting, 3D printing, and machine embroidery to represent applications of biotechnology through artistic practice and consider societal and ethical questions about their use in our world.

Fall break will be spent in Athens, Greece where students will survey pieces of art and architecture that have been impacted by many years of interfacing with living organisms.  Students will hear from conservators attempting to keep organism growth under control while considering if this growth can be viewed as natural enhancement. 

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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 make observations and study organisms both in their natural environment and in the lab. Each week, we will discuss a variety of methodologies and technologies that researchers use to design thoughtful experiments and gather data. Through hands-on learning experiences in the lab and field, we will use our creativity and problem-solving skills to collect and interpret behavioral, morphological, physiological, and sensory data in living and non-living organisms. We will use the techniques and skills learned in the beginning of the semester to generate novel questions and carry out our own experiments. This independent research project will culminate in the form of an oral presentation and formal paper. Please note that there will be several coordinated trips during class time to local sites in the Princeton area. This seminar also offers an optional 3-week field experience at Mpala Research Centre located in Laikipia, Kenya during January 2024.

Course Format:

The seminar is organized in three cycles. We will begin the course by delving into the process of scientific inquiry. Here, we will gain a better understanding of how scientific questions are generated and investigated, and how findings are interpreted and disseminated. We will then explore varying modalities of observation to better understand topics in ecology, evolution, and behavior. We will make the invisible become visible by transforming observational data into workable data that can be analyzed and interpreted. The course will culminate with an independent research project where you will generate your own questions, design your own experiment, write up your findings, and share your discoveries with your peers. Through this approach, we will see that science is an inquiry-based, dynamic, and continuous process rather than one that is stochastic and unchanging.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

What is a nation, how is it made, and how does it constantly have to be remade? This course takes Greece as a case study to examine the concepts, resources, and tools that go into making a nation. How did Greece get from an ancient site of marble temples and philosophers to a contemporary setting of economic and political crisis? How do ideas about language, race, gender, and culture shape perceptions of the past and understandings of belonging? What makes someone “Greek” and why are people included in or excluded from that identity? In this course we bring the history and anthropology of modern Greece into conversation with theories of nation-making to explore the resources used in the ongoing project of making a nation. After beginning with an introduction to nation-making and nationalism, each week we consider a different resource for nation-making, from the use of history and the shaping of ethnicity to language, sports, and food. While our focus on Greece allows us to consider the variety of resources that contribute to a single project of nation making, we also actively explore the relevance of our case study to understanding the U.S. today. Throughout the semester students work towards a collaborative final project aimed at a public audience—an online resource that educates visitors about how works of art and other cultural artifacts contribute to making, or unmaking, the nation.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Happiness is something we all seek, both for ourselves and for those we care about. Yet even as the lure of happiness guides us, we continue to contest its nature and meaning. From the Greek philosophers, to the Declaration of Independence, to the latest beguilements from Madison Avenue, different visions of happiness compete for our attention. What, then, does happiness consist in? How can the nature and pursuit of happiness illuminate what it means to be human, and vice-versa? In this seminar, we’ll wrestle with these questions, and those that arise from them, by engaging with central texts from the Catholic intellectual tradition and the perspectives, proposals, and puzzles they bring to bear on them. We will read these texts, spread across a wide range of genres and centuries, with care and critical attention; we will interpret and discuss the merits and implications of their proposals; where answers remain unclear or disagreements arise, we will make the best case we can for each option available. In this way, the course will not only introduce you to the Catholic intellectual tradition and equip you to reflect on the nature of the happy human life; it will also prepare you to extend that critical reflection to your own views and your studies more generally.

Our approach will begin with the fundamental ethical question, “How should I live?” and the difference that Catholic understandings make when posing this question and proposing answers to it. We will explore these themes across a variety of genres: from dialogue, spiritual autobiography, and polemic (Augustine), to disputed question (Thomas Aquinas), to epic poetry (Dante), fragment and aphorism (Pascal), treatise (Scheeben), and catechesis (de Lubac). Major questions will include: what role does ethical conduct have in human happiness? How can reason and emotion help or hinder us in the pursuit of happiness? How do grace, freedom, good, and evil interrelate in human action? What does it mean to claim the vision of God is the end of human life? How is human self-understanding shaped by nature, fall, and grace?

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Documentary filmmakers engage with the world by representing it in a myriad of subjective ways. This course will focus on cross-cultural issues surrounding representation in documentary filmmaking, both in front of and behind the camera. Through film productions, screenings, texts, and discussions, this course will explore the central question of “who has the right to tell whose story, and why?” Each student will produce, direct, shoot, and edit two 3-5 minute documentary films.  One film must be set within their own cultural sphere, while the other must be set outside of it. Upon completion of these films, each student will either write an 8-10 page final paper OR prepare a presentation that reflects on their experience making these films. Their films and final essays/presentations will probe the ethical questions of “how should we speak to you about us?” on the one hand, and “how should we speak about them to you?” on the other hand. Students will investigate their own relationship to the role and function of the filmmaker, a mediator of “reality,” and the influence of that mediation on public discourse on local, national and international issues.

On a practical level, each student will learn the basics of how to produce a documentary short using various modes and genres. They will place their experience making these films in the context of contemporary issues surrounding race, ethnicity, gender, age, national and regional identity, social issues, and events. On a more theoretical level, they will write about and discuss ethical issues surrounding ethnography, informed consent, empathy, ideology, authorship, cinematography, editing, and distribution. They will also discuss the cultural contexts for the films they screen, why they were made, what they tell us about the social concerns of the period, and the theoretical questions they raise. By the end of the course, students will have a solid foundation to creatively bring stories from the world we all share to life, as well as a critical and visceral understanding of representation in documentary filmmaking.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

This course is a bird’s eye view of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution.  We will trace the history of the Universe from the earliest initial conditions that we can tangibly infer based on the physics of what we observe in the Universe today.  There are two principal goals of this course.  One is to dispel the major misconceptions and disconnects with the understanding of the Big Bang, and the second is to formulate a structural language for understanding how the Universe is built, much in the same way one would understand structurally how to assemble a dome structure out of bricks with requirements of stability and uniformity.  We look at what works and what doesn’t, including cases where the present Universe would be overwhelmed with black holes.  Students will be asked to develop a short film clip describing the cosmic history.  This process will take the entire term and will begin with short essay assignments on elements of cosmic history.  The target is an audience in a public exhibition and the clip is to convey the essential concepts of the Big Bang to new and diverse communities.  The important historical and Nobel-prize winning contributions to understanding the Universe will be highlighted, especially those from our alumni and faculty.  This course teaches important concepts in physics from causality to the origin of mass and the dynamical properties of spacetime.  Important physical quantities are constructed using dimensional analysis and fundamental physical constants.  Relevant timescales and sizes are expressed using order of magnitude estimates.  No prerequisites in math or physics are required.  This course is about learning something meaningful about the physics that governs the early period of the Universe known generally as the Big Bang and being able to convey that understanding to others who’d like to know how physics gives insights as to how it all started.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

This course examines the representation of women as outlaws in literature. It takes as its premise the quest for women to transgress their gender identities by questioning the acceptable traditional, religious, and cultural gender norms that undermine their self-potential. Some of the novels that we will read include Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Chimamanda Adiche’s Purple Hibiscus, Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero, Ama Ata Aido’s Changes: A Love Story, Azar Nasifi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Flora Nwapa’s One is Enough and Bessie Head’s Maru. We will explore, through these novels, the various ways women are refusing to abide by the traditional gender norms in their various societies. In reading the texts, students should be guided by these questions: What does it mean to be a real or normal woman? Who is defining the traditional gender norms and from what sociocultural, religious, and political standpoints? Conversely, how is the writer refuting these rules or redefining womanhood? Also, in what way(s) are the female characters transgressing traditional gender norms, redefining their identities, creating spaces and voices for themselves? Through class discussions, as well as written and oral presentations, students will explore how writers through their female characters interrogate, redefine, or fortify the boundaries of womanhood. At the end of the class, students will be able to identify and relate with some of the sociocultural, political, religious, and economic factors that lead to women’s quest for self-identity, and desire to create their own voices and spaces in places where they are often denied such opportunities.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS
  
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It is the year 1633. Galileo Galilei stands trial before the Roman Inquisition, charged with committing heresy for advocating the Copernican belief that the sun rather than the earth lies at the center of the universe. It is up to you to decide the outcome. Should Galileo’s books be banned? Should he be placed under arrest, or even worse, executed? In this course you get to rewrite history. The main part of this course will involve the role-playing game ‘The Trial of Galileo’ developed using the Reacting to the Past pedagogical format (https://reacting.barnard.edu/), which consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. In the first part of the course, you will be introduced to different ancient and early modern theories of the cosmos. We will begin by examining what constituted ‘science’ or ‘natural philosophy’ in the ancient world beginning in Greece in the 6th century BC. We will consider the formative role of ancient philosophy on the scientific revolution in the 16th century, before examining the political and religious backdrop to the trial of Galileo. You will then re-enact the trial. This role playing game seeks to draw students into the past, promote active engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual, academic and rhetorical skills. You will be faced with negotiating a politically and religiously sensitive environment, not unlike the one we live in today. In the final part of the course, we will test and play a new microgame being designed by the instructor set in the Roman Inquisition in 1549. Here will look at an attempt to ban the de Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe), a 1st century BC poem by the Roman poet Lucretius, a foundational text from the scientific theory of atomism. Here we will further explore game dynamics and you will have the opportunity to design your own character for the game.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

The legend of the once and future king, Arthur of Camelot, has fascinated poets, artists, and writers quite literally for centuries. What is it about this legend that could explain its powerful grip on twentieth- and twenty-first century popular imagination? Through the analysis of novels and films we will explore how these works “read” Arthur and his milieu and what these interpretations imply about their own more contemporary contexts. What kinds of ideas or ideals about utopia, charismatic leadership, love, power, and betrayal lurk in these works and why? By means of close readings of both literature and film—attending not only to narrative content, but also to the formal literary and cinematic mechanisms through which narratives are constructed—we will unpack what one might call the changing rhetorics involved in the construction of legend. We will then turn to the “roots” of such legends, tracing them back through the Middle Ages to the earliest and highly contested “evidence” for the King Arthur we know today in a 5th century Latin Chronicle. In investigating this body of material, students will consider the ways myth is created, deployed, and transmitted over time, and in the process, meet two objectives: to improve their skills in the critical, comparative analysis of different types of texts; and to acquire a deeper understanding not only of present-day recastings of Arthurian legend but also of the medieval contexts from which these have emerged.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Since the release of the investigative journalism podcast Serial in 2014, true crime podcasts and documentaries are resurging as one of the top forms of entertainment in the United States. They are also one of the most recognizable applications of microhistory and archival research in popular culture: their construction relies on the critical analysis and narrativization of historical documents like newspaper articles, television coverage, court documents, crime scene photographs, oral testimonies, land deeds, material culture, and law enforcement files. They are also rife with the kinds of humanistic and moral questions historians grapple with. Who has a right to tell complex stories about the American past? Which perspective do you take? How do you ethically cite and credit your sources to tell these disturbing stories responsibly? What role does historical research and storytelling have in social justice today?

This seminar will study how true crime narratives and its cultural history in what became the United States of America helped shape and reflect issues of American citizenship, immigration, gender, class, race, sexuality, and violence for over 350 years. We will study true crime’s changing narrative genres and marketable forms in entertainment, from colonial-era captivity narratives documenting kidnappings and massacres between European colonists and Indigenous Americans to the televised broadcast of the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s. We will analyze true crime’s relationship to the rise and creation of mass media from the penny press to dime novels to film noir to tabloids to blogs. We will use true crime as a lens through which we will reexamine major moments in American history like slavery and the Civil Rights Movement from a fresh perspective.

Finally, in this course, students will work to learn how historians and producers identify a story to research and acquire a deeper understanding of the archival research skills and technical aspects of digital storytelling that go into podcast production, practice evidence-based scriptwriting, and the nature of historical work at large. Ultimately, students will conceptualize, research, write, mix, and edit a 5-minute history-focused audio story on a topic selected in consultation with the course instructor.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

This seminar offers a contemporary, interdisciplinary introduction to the study of the Holocaust (or “Shoah”). We will study this unthinkable atrocity in its historical specificity, its afterlife, and its relevance to the present. In the first instance, this entails studying the rise of fascism, the emergence of genocide, as well as questions of memory, testimony, and trauma. We will thus move between works of history, first-person accounts, fiction, poetry, film, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and philosophy, testing the limits and powers of these divergent idioms, genres, disciplines in the face of atrocity. We will also have to ask to what extent the traditional functions of philosophy and theory – critique, speculation, and abstraction – are still valid in the wake of genocide and how they might need to be transformed to reckon with the Shoah. Similarly, we will have to ask, following Theodor Adorno, to what extent poetry (and by extension, the other arts) are still possible “after Auschwitz.” Finally, we will also have to engage a set of specifically contemporary questions: how, if at all, can we compare different genocides? Is it possible to think about the Holocaust “comparatively” or indeed “intersectionally”? How does the Holocaust relate to contemporary forms of racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and fascism? What are the various ways in which the Holocaust is invoked in contemporary culture and politics?

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Rembrandt (1606-1669) is an artist we feel we know, perhaps because he painted, etched and drew so many self-portraits. His art is characterized by an intense intimacy and humanity. Even in his own day, he was lauded for his ability to depict emotions in his narrative scenes, which elicit our empathy. His portraits are not mere likenesses but manage to imply the sitters' inner life. And his technical virtuosity, whether it be with paint, pen and ink, or etching needle, is peerless.  In this seminar, we will study all aspects of Rembrandt's art and examine firsthand his works held by the Princeton University Art Museum and museums in New York City in order to help us understand his universal appeal.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Science underpins many of our biggest societal challenges. Developing policy responses to those challenges are among the most complex issues facing public servants in Washington, DC.  The laws Congress passes and the rules agencies write to deal with these issues impact many aspects of our daily lives, from the cars we drive, the medicines we use, the state of our physical environment, and more.  Efforts to influence these outcomes involve understanding the policy, the politics, and the process of government.

This seminar is hands-on.  Working in groups students will identify a science policy issue to change at the federal level. That means students will define the issue, propose a solution and interact with policy makers to implement the solution.  They will learn how to—and try to—publish op-eds, draft legislation, build coalitions and make change, whatever their issue demands.  Each weekly seminar will involve learning about the key areas for impacting policy, trying to use these skills, and working on their topics.  Students will hear from experts including journalists, lobbyists, congressional staffers, activists or other policy professionals to learn the tricks of the trade.  Limited readings will prepare students for the topics covered each week.  By the end of the semester, the students will understand the messy world of public policy formulation through practical involvement.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

“It’s the end of the world as we know it!” This cry (from the R.E.M. song on the 1987 album Document) has been shouted, in one form or another, for thousands of years and up to the present day. War, disease, environmental collapse, and other disasters remain as relevant now as they were for ancient societies—perhaps even more so. Apocalyptic literature, which claims to reveal hidden knowledge regarding the nature of the cosmos and the course of history, has offered powerful accounts of and explanations for the end of the world in many historical contexts.

This course will consider how different religious, social, and political movements—both ancient and modern, and around the world—have envisioned scenarios of the end times. We will situate the revelation of secret knowledge about the end times within the intellectual horizons of various societies. And we will trace how apocalyptic ideas and idioms forged in the religious traditions of the ancient and medieval worlds continue to inform modern speculation about the end times. Beginning with apocalyptic texts from Mediterranean and Near Eastern antiquity and ending with contemporary social, religious, literary, and artistic movements, we will consider what the real-world stakes are in how people talk about the end of the world. The course will thus illuminate the flexibility of apocalyptic language, its ability to interpret changing historical situations, and its ongoing power to move people, whether to acceptance or to radical action.

The course will examine topics such as: the birth of apocalyptic thought; the development and features of apocalyptic literature as a distinct genre and source of revealed knowledge; the places of apocalyptic texts within the sacred scriptures of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; the relationship of the ancient and medieval apocalypses to the religious, social, and political conflicts of their day; apocalyptic influences on Europeans’ initial contact with and colonization of Africa and the New World; the apocalyptic and millenarian movements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America; and the ongoing appeal that apocalyptic scenarios have in contemporary contexts around the world, both religious and secular.

The course is structured as a 3-hour seminar that meets once per week. Work for the course will include reading and writing assignments as well as a final creative project.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

This course investigates the relationship between the built environment and the human cultures that create them. The focus is on the Ise Shrines in Japan, which we will visit. The study of their history and architecture will allow us to identify how celestial orientation, materials, form, craft and ritual can all play important roles not only for shrines but simple storehouses and granaries, temples and churches, and modern museums. 

The Ise Shrine (Jingū), in Mie Prefecture, Japan, is a complex of Shinto shrines and buildings, including the Naikū and Gekū main shrines, that are rebuilt every 20 years (Shikinen Sengū). The last construction in 2013 is considered to be the 62nd iteration (since 690 CE). The design has barely changed over the centuries, an apparently fixed architecture in wood that is passed through generations of master carpenters. The Ise Shrines have also played key historical symbolic and religious roles from guarantor of the imperial house and protector and then antagonist of Buddhist influence, to the post war renewal of Japanese modernist architecture.

The tangible and intangible heritage of these shrines also point to lessons applicable to the decarbonization and renewal of modern building practices. Their architecture is reminiscent of raised grain storehouses or granaries both in Japan and elsewhere in the world, which is not surprising given the importance of agriculture and rice cultivation when they were first built. The gradual evolution of this architecture, and its close tie to nature, can also be usefully compared to early stone structures from megalithic stone circles such as Stonehenge to the Pantheon and the Gothic cathedrals. Like the shrines they are made of natural materials and carefully crafted but unlike them they are not renewed and the associated craft is long been lost.

This seminar begins then with a brief study of stone structures and Alpine granaries leading to 4 weeks of study of the Ise Shrines. The class will then visit the Shrine during Fall break (departing 12 Oct returning 20 Oct), during which time we will visit Tokyo, Takayama and the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum in Kobe. The seminar concludes with a review of modern architectural practices that in different ways reflect this history. Students will prepare presentations, weekly 50 word summaries of the reading, two short papers and a final paper. The class is a discussion based seminar meeting once a week.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Coffee is one of the most consumed beverages worldwide, and is familiar to all college students. It may be surprising to learn that the process of roasting coffee beans and brewing a cup of coffee involves several fundamental engineering principles. This “hands-on” course explores these fundamental concepts in chemical engineering, fluid mechanics, physics, chemistry, and colloid science. This freshman seminar is a combination of lectures and labs, open to all first-year undergraduate students, with no prior knowledge of calculus, chemistry, and physics required beyond high-school-level math and science. The experiments draw on science and engineering concepts introduced in the lectures; these are team-based activities, where students work in groups of three for all labs. The course culminates in a design competition where groups work to brew the best tasting cup of coffee with the minimum amount of energy.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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This class will be a hands-on investigation into performance and analog photography. What does it mean to photograph yourself? Is it an act of self-exploration, narcissism, self-love, representational justice, theatre, performance? What are the possibilities and limitations of making art in this way? What can our own bodies teach us if we start to pay attention?

In this course students will start by making self-portraits with film cameras. From there they will begin to expand the idea of the self-portrait by incorporating experimental darkroom techniques such as Photograms, Darkroom Collages, and Paper Negatives. Our focus will be on both the hands-on practice of analog photography as well as somatic work in the form of guided in class exercises which foreground play, embodiment, and free association.  Students will be asked to reflect on who they are and what they care about, while considering their new context of being at Princeton. Bookmaking and installation will be explored as final means of presentation for their photographic projects.

Each class will have time devoted to looking closely at one or two artist's work. This will be a way for students to develop their visual literacy and vocabulary for discussing photographic works while also providing art historical context. These sessions and our readings will guide us in conversations about identity, performance, and analog making. Students will receive feedback frequently throughout the semester through critiques.

Collaboration will be encouraged and community building will be central.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

In this seminar we will learn how to ‘read’ films. Like literary scholars investigating the poetics of a written work, we will similarly ‘read’ videographic language to understand how films convey meaning. To become fluent, we consider both traditional storytelling elements (plot, genre, context, metonymy, trope, symbol, etc.) and the foundational technical aspects (cinematography, montage, mise-en- scène) of filmmaking. With particular attention to composition, we will analyze both what we see (setting, props, actors, architecture, costume design, etc.), and how we see it (camera movement, angle, focus, lighting, editing, etc.).

 We take the city of Rome as our central cinematic landscape to study works spanning over a century from the Italian silent era (Cabiria, 1914) to the digital blockbusters of the new millennium (Gladiator, 2000). Anchoring our investigation in Rome, a subject that continues to fascinate filmmakers and spectators alike, will allow us to consider how film communicates a meaning that also shapes history, politics and culture. Our analysis will begin with the guiding question: How do we see Rome in this film? For example, we will look at how depictions of Ancient Rome represent both a call to Fascist imperialism in the 1930s and an American democratic ideal during the Cold War. We consider how a shot of Saint Peter’s Basilica can be a source of hope in the wake of the 1945 Allied liberation and spiritual bankruptcy in consumer-driven 1960s. In tandem with our ‘close reading’ of technical aspects, we will build a contextual knowledge of how cinema influences both American and Italian national identity.

Our investigation will expose us to a range of genres including classic Hollywood epics (Spartacus, 1960), influential neorealist cinema (Rome, Open City, 1945), action films and even horror and teledrama (The Young Pope, 2016).  Each week we will view a film and engage with scholarly criticism and readings about filmmaking. In class there will be lectures, class discussion, close reading/scene analysis exercises, creative assignments and student presentations. The culminating assessment will demonstrate graphic fluency and creative skills in the production of your own film.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

Does modern progress corrupt our morals and degrade our humanity? Has the march of civilization exhausted our souls? This course engages classic literary and philosophic works that explore how humanity has been shaped by modernizing forces. Students will investigate the enlightenment’s promise to improve the human condition through the accumulation of knowledge, the technological mastery of nature, and the conferral of natural rights. They will consider—and question—modernity’s faith in the goodness of liberalism, socialism, communism, science, technology, and democracy. Modern spiritual conditions that have given rise to nihilism, materialism, and moral relativism will also be examined. Readings will confront the central question of whether the modern world has mistaken progress for regress, and whether humankind is devolving instead of evolving politically, morally, intellectually, and spiritually. Explosive ideas that challenge conventional conceptions of left and right, good and evil, and true and false will open the way to a line of questioning that is forbidden by those who hope or assume that the arc of history bends toward justice. Following a sustained study of critics of the modern world, students will consider a variety of competing philosophic, political, and spiritual solutions to the crisis of modernity, all of which purport to show how the human situation can be renewed, restored, recreated, or revitalized to promote the advancement of humankind.  

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

In Western society, we’re not great at endings. We try to prolong the life of a person or venture at all costs. We avoid planning for or merely talking about death. We can’t even let our movie franchises conclude, even after the ultimate “End Game.” Yet new initiatives often cannot begin without an antecedent coming to a close. Pinpointing a true end point, however, can be tricky business. Is the COVID-19 pandemic over yet? Who has authority to declare the end of a political dynasty or artistic movement? How do we know when childhood ends? Even when some “official” definition exists for endings—recessions, wars, human life itself—questions can still linger as to whether it’s really over.

This course explores the complexities of our relationship to endings and uncovers ways that behavioral science and other disciplines might inform a new approach to policy decisions by helping us keep the end in mind.

We start by asking the fundamental question of how we know when something is over, considering theological and philosophical conceptions of endings. We also use our individual experiences as a guide, along with disciplinary tools from economics, public health, art, military strategy, and other fields. We look at the psychological underpinnings of our resistance to endings and sociological implications of our current approaches.

We meet actors as diverse as mountain climbers, Trappist monks, Broadway producers, and those tackling America’s “digital divide”—all to illustrate endings that were unexpected, those that could have been anticipated, and when a new approach could have led to more optimal outcomes. We even look at cases in which finales were anticipated but never came—failed apocalyptic prophecies and death row reprieves—to reflect on the ways that belief and identity further complicate our relationship with the end.

Reading academic and popular writings and interacting with guest lecturers help us consider endings in existential, narrative, and strategic contexts. Students will react to weekly readings and student responses. To culminate the experience, they will conduct research and analysis on societal challenges that could benefit from an endings-first policy approach and will design an intentional end to something in their own lives.

Endings happen, even if we may not want them to. This seminar will help students unpack what endings signify and in what contexts reframing could be beneficial. The class will come to a close with students having considered how to proactively craft endings and how this embrace may lead to time better spent before the end comes.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

In our multicultural, pan-ethnic societies, issues of subjectivity, positionality, and equity in relation to language are part and parcel of daily life. These issues are particularly salient for multilingual speakers, whose private selves and public personas are shaped by their knowledge of and experience with language. To understand the ways in which language impacts their modes of representation and encounters with others, we must go beyond the well-established but over-simplistic idea that languages are systems of communication through which speakers encode and decode meaning. In this seminar, we rely on theoretical developments from multilingual studies, linguistic anthropology, and poststructural and postcolonial theory to approach languages as social institutions, ideological battlegrounds, instruments used by nation-states to homogenize populations, define citizenship, and perpetuate power in society, Historically, languages have always been inextricably linked to social value and national identity. In his seminal work on the origins of nationalism, Benedict Anderson argued that nations are imagined and narrated into being, and that language has a crucial role in this process. How did this linkage between language and nationhood come to be? What is the role of ‘national’ languages in the development of nationalism? What sets the ‘mother tongue’ apart? Do languages need to be protected from undesirable influences? Can a language be improved? Answering these questions requires that we deconstruct linguistic authority, nativism and foreignness, and the one nation-one language paradigm, among other notions. Ultimately, we aim to perform a critical examination of the ways in which language shapes culture and identity, impacts schooling and citizenship in a transnational, interconnected world.

The seminar is designed for students who are interested in learning about language as social practice and critically engaging with the very notion of language itself. Course readings and discussions are grounded in specific geographical and historical contexts and cases. In order to connect theoretical insights with local practices and personal narratives, students will conduct independent research in a language contact situation of their choosing – in the urban landscape and the media, or in their own families and communities. 

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

If you were to visit ten households anywhere in the United States today, you would be greeted by a pet—most likely a dog or cat, but also perhaps a bird, hamster, rabbit, fish, turtle, or another creature altogether—in seven of those homes. And, if you asked, there’s a good chance that nearly all the human inhabitants of those households had, at one point in their lives, cared for a nonhuman animal and perhaps even viewed this creature as part of their family. While recognizable kinds of petkeeping and beliefs regarding these creatures have coalesced across the United States and much of the world, the very idea of what constitutes a “pet,” the roles they perform, the activities required to care for them, and the cultural values they produce have changed over time. “People and Pets” asks how relationships among pets and humans have developed over the past two centuries in the United States, parts of Europe, and around the world. Reading across humanities and social science disciplines, we will consider the unexpected connections that link pets to specific articulations of gender, race, sexuality, class, ability, and species. Arranged topically and historically, the seminar considers issues ranging from the classed and gendered development of dog and cat breeds in Victorian England to the racial politics of modern dog rescue and dogfighting to the global expansion of consumerism and the creation of a multi-billion-dollar pet industry. In taking up these issues and many others, we will study nonhuman companions not as passive receptacles of human culture, but rather as beings with agency who have co-shaped and co-determined their places in our lives. Such a view compels us to ask how petkeeping cultures arise through human-nonhuman relationships and to consider how multispecies relations produce cultural forms and artifacts. Some questions that guide our inquiries include: How have definitions of, and attitudes toward, pets changed over time and across space? How have pets simultaneously upheld and resisted dominant social structures? And how does the interdisciplinary study of pets across cultures support efforts to conceptualize and build more just worlds for humans and nonhumans alike? To address these questions, we’ll take up a wide range of primary materials from creative nonfiction to film, archival objects, advertisements, and children’s books. In addition to regular class meetings and discussions, activities will include a trip to Cotsen Children’s Library and visits from invited speakers.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

For decades Black community leaders have demanded attention to how race and racism produce environmental risk, showing that communities of color are more likely to be exposed to pollution, infrastructural decay, and the siting of toxic facilities than white wealthier communities. Moreover, Indigenous peoples have for five centuries mounted continued resistance to the ways in which European and U.S. settlers and institutions have dispossessed and polluted land, water, and air, and fractured ecological knowledges, relations, and traditional systems of adaptation to change. Now, as the climate crises rages on, international mass mobilizations are demanding that governments of high-greenhouse gas emitting societies pay for the harm disproportionately felt by low-emitting countries. With increasing concerns regarding the hazards and injustices associated with climate change, innovative policy and planning interventions might respond to further displace the demands of long-standing and ongoing struggles for environmental justice. This freshman seminar examines the intersection of environmental and climate justice.

We will read scholarly articles and books and popular media, listen to music, appreciate art and new media, watch films, and hear from advocates and experts to learn about the history of struggles for environmental justice and how climate change poses new dilemmas for social movements. Engaging a wide array of material and hearing directly from experts will enable us to learn about differences in the demands, strategies, and worldviews expressed in different locations around the globe; consider the broader politics of environmental scholarship; and grapple with the structural and institutionalized constraints and barriers to such environmental and climate justice. This seminar also pays special attention to our local context, highlighting relevant scholarship at Princeton University to introduce freshmen to faculty and the ENV certificate program and supporting regional environmental justice initiatives.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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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, Victor Pelevin, and more, 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.

For more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS

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 more information please visit: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings?term=1242&subject=FRS