This seminar will open the wonders of immunology to the humanities, and vice versa.  Instruction in science will be combined with instruction in character development, dialogue generation, and storytelling.  Students will write short plays or screenplays about immune defense against parasites, including viruses such as SARS-CoV-2.   This will cultivate biological understanding by harnessing the imagination: students will devise characters that embody traits of different cell types and infectious agents, and then create stories that explore how cells of the immune system work together to combat common enemies.

The seminar will be organized around 3 primary themes that transcend scales of biology: from individual cells, to populations of cooperating host cells, to warring factions of host and parasite cells.  These themes also transcend dramaturgical elements:  from development of characters, to relationships and dialogue among characters, to conflict and resolution in a storyline.   

1) Character development.  The mammalian immune system comprises tens of millions of cells, of about a dozen types.  Each type of cell has characteristic physical and functional traits that set it apart.  For example, macrophages are large, multi-armed cells that eat parasites whole, whereas killer T cells are small, compact cells that poke holes in virus-infected cells.  It is impossible to understand immunology without first understanding this array of cell types, or this cast of characters.   In parallel, it is impossible to understand a play without understanding traits and motives of characters.

2) Relationships.   Skilled though cells are, the immune system can only achieve defense of the entire host via coordinated action.  Thus, relationships and communications among cells are crucial to the success of an immune response.   Some communication is private between pairs of cells while other communications are broadcast widely (e.g., when molecular messages are secreted into the bloodstream for circulation throughout the body).   The content and volume of messages aid cooperation and chart the course of the immune response.  Likewise, relationships among characters determine how they communicate, collaborate with or undermine each other, and chart the course of a play.

3) Story.  The immune system ultimately determines whether the host clears infection or succumbs, whether it keeps beneficial gut microbes, and whether a tumor grows.  This generates a lot of potential dramatic material – e.g., antagonism with parasites, cooperation with gut microbes, or the treachery of tumors.  Each of these can fuel metaphor and sculpt a dramatic arc while enriching understanding of how immune systems work.

Protagonists of great literary works in the tradition of the Künstlerroman (artist's novel) are typically young men--from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister to Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and beyond. Countless readers and writers have seen in those characters models for self-fashioning in art and life.

This course focuses on works of literary fiction in which the aspiring artist is not a young man, even sometimes not a human being.  A fictional young woman of color in Baltimore c. 1900 ponders problems around subjectivity and interpersonal communication in a text whose narrative form reinvents the novella before our eyes; an artist in 21-c. New York (Glenn Ligon, b. 1960) responds critically to the descriptions of persons of color in that novella by American modernist Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) in neon sculptures that disrupt the usual conditions of viewing in contemporary art museums. A fictional ape narrates his life on and off the stage to an audience of early 20-c. scientists; thinking perhaps of that fictional ape, an invention of Prague-born Jewish modernist Franz Kafka (1883-1924), an artist in 21-c. Cologne (Rosemarie Trockel, b. 1952) incorporates into her own work paintings made by an orangutan in the Cologne Zoo. A fictional 1990s female performance artist reeling with grief reshapes her body in a pseudo-Gothic delirium in American novelist Don DeLillo’s (b. 1936) early 21-c. novella. A fictional university student in 2010s Dublin practices collaborative spoken-word poetry while pursuing a complicated romantic life alongside the pleasures and demands of queer female friendship in the debut novel of Irish writer Sally Rooney (b. 1991). Those are sketches of a few of this seminar’s “portraits of the artist as...”

Some of the works that we will study in this seminar prompt questions about the ways race, gender, sexuality, and social class shape our ideas and fantasies about art and life. Others ask us to consider how our ideas and fantasies about art and life shape our understandings and misunderstandings of ourselves and others. Several raise difficult questions concerning anxiety and depression in relation to creativity and personal relationships.

Reading and discussing works of literature and art that challenge our assumptions about individuality, creativity, and humanity at large, we will explore how ideas about art matter to how we live. Through a series of short-to-medium-length assignments developed specifically with the ambitions and demands of the first-year, second-semester student experience in mind, we will enrich our reading with writing exercises designed to hone skills in critical analysis while providing occasions for creative experimentation.

Protagonists of great literary works in the tradition of the Künstlerroman (artist's novel) are typically young men--from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister to Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and beyond. Countless readers and writers have seen in those characters models for self-fashioning in art and life.

This course focuses on works of literary fiction in which the aspiring artist is not a young man, even sometimes not a human being.  A fictional young woman of color in Baltimore c. 1900 ponders problems around subjectivity and interpersonal communication in a text whose narrative form reinvents the novella before our eyes; an artist in 21-c. New York (Glenn Ligon, b. 1960) responds critically to the descriptions of persons of color in that novella by American modernist Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) in neon sculptures that disrupt the usual conditions of viewing in contemporary art museums. A fictional ape narrates his life on and off the stage to an audience of early 20-c. scientists; thinking perhaps of that fictional ape, an invention of Prague-born Jewish modernist Franz Kafka (1883-1924), an artist in 21-c. Cologne (Rosemarie Trockel, b. 1952) incorporates into her own work paintings made by an orangutan in the Cologne Zoo. A fictional 1990s female performance artist reeling with grief reshapes her body in a pseudo-Gothic delirium in American novelist Don DeLillo’s (b. 1936) early 21-c. novella. A fictional university student in 2010s Dublin practices collaborative spoken-word poetry while pursuing a complicated romantic life alongside the pleasures and demands of queer female friendship in the debut novel of Irish writer Sally Rooney (b. 1991). Those are sketches of a few of this seminar’s “portraits of the artist as...”

Some of the works that we will study in this seminar prompt questions about the ways race, gender, sexuality, and social class shape our ideas and fantasies about art and life. Others ask us to consider how our ideas and fantasies about art and life shape our understandings and misunderstandings of ourselves and others. Several raise difficult questions concerning anxiety and depression in relation to creativity and personal relationships.

Reading and discussing works of literature and art that challenge our assumptions about individuality, creativity, and humanity at large, we will explore how ideas about art matter to how we live. Through a series of short-to-medium-length assignments developed specifically with the ambitions and demands of the first-year, second-semester student experience in mind, we will enrich our reading with writing exercises designed to hone skills in critical analysis while providing occasions for creative experimentation.

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

This is a hands-on seminar and laboratory experience about the engineering design of motorcycles. Students will restore a vintage Triumph motorcycle and will compare it to previous restorations of the same make and model of motorcycle from other years (1954, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1962, 1963, and 1964). No previous shop or laboratory experience is necessary, and we welcome liberal arts students as well as engineering students. Senior Technical Staff member Jon Prevost will assist Professor Littman in the laboratory. Students will examine, disassemble, model, test, and rebuild a vintage motorcycle. All motorcycle subsystems will be considered with special attention to the power, structural, and control subsystems. Classic and modern engineering tools to be used include computer-aided design (CAD) software for the documentation and prototyping of engine parts, engine simulation software for understanding factors affecting engine performance, and engine brake dyamometer for determination of engine power and torque. Students will assess and restore motorcycle components. Precise measurement, repair, and redesign (where appropriate) of key parts will include the restoration of cylinder, piston, head, cam, valves, transmission, brakes, fork, oil system, clutch and chain. Students will also inspect and restore all electrical system components as needed and disassemble, clean, repaint, and restore the frame and suspension. We welcome liberal arts students as well as engineering students. As in previous years, students will read and discuss two books that are rich in their references to motorcycle systems – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, and Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Mathew Crawford. Precept time is also used to explore the underlying science of motorcycle design and operation.

The class meets twice each week. Each session starts with a 90-minute precept followed by a 90-minute laboratory. Please note that only the precept time is listed on TigerHub and Course Offerings. 90-minute laboratory sessions will follow immediately after each precept.

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

This course explores transnational and diasporic formations of race in the Americas. Drawing on Ethnic Studies, Latin American Studies, and anthropological approaches to the study of race we comparatively explore racial formations in Latin America and its transnational communities. It is unique in placing into conversation historiographical approaches with anthropological critique and insights from cultural and ethnic studies. Focusing on studies of Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala, students will gain a deep understanding of the ways that scholars from a range of disciplines have analyzed the meanings that have been attributed to Latin American racial identities; the impact of economic, political, and social structures on the making and remaking of ethnoracial identities, interpersonal and inter/intra-community relations, and the life chances of Latin American origin people in the US and different regions of Latin America.

This course offers an interdisciplinary and transnational examination of theoretical questions regarding race, diaspora, and globalization. The goals of this course are to understand race and racial formations as culturally contextualized and situated within the politics of difference. How are U.S. racial-ethnic categories embraced, contested, or reconfigured across the Americas, and vice versa? We begin by examining Spanish colonial and Latin American notions of race, including cruzamiento, blanqueamiento, castas, castizaje, and mestizaje and how these shape and influence social differences. In paying attention to the ways colonial practices produce worlds, we begin to interrogate the connections between gender, race, and nation building. We will examine Caribbean migration and think through notions of racial democracy and American architectures of racism. In the second part of this course, we explore hemispheric approaches to the study of race and mestizaje to move beyond national frameworks and examine how ideas about race have developed dialogically across the Americas. We conclude with a critical analysis of multiculturalism, border thinking, transnational identities, discourses of hybridity, and its discontents. The course develops skills to think critically about race debates as they appear in the popular press and academic literature.

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

Have you ever wanted to “pay someone back” because you felt injured?  To “get even” with someone?  In this seminar, we will ask what revenge is and what purposes it serves, using well-known literary examples in which revenge is center-stage. The after-effects of retribution are dramatic, arresting, and often disruptive of social order and civility.  But revenge may also encompass subtler acts of resistance, showing a culture’s racial and gender biases, revealing who has power and who doesn’t, and how or if the equilibrium of justice can be attained.  We’ll actively compare how literature engages with revenge, what spaces it gives us to imagine and think through revenge’s heart-stopping problems versus how the discourses of law, philosophy, and popular media understand what legitimate conditions there might be for mercy, justice, and honor.  Essential lines of the problem of retribution will be threaded through global readings and through representations of revenge at the Princeton University Art Museum and in Firestone Library’s Special Collections.

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

In the history of religion and philosophy, many important works have been written by authors who were behind bars. This course probes this extensive tradition and the concerns raised. Such texts deal, not only with classic problems in the history of philosophical and religious studies, but also with concerns that many of us share. Topics to be addressed include: arguments for and against the existence of God; whether there is life after death; the logic and rationality of nonviolent rebellion; the nature of evil; whether divine foreknowledge negates human freedom; ethical reasoning in times of radical crisis; justice, forgiveness, and reconciliation; the metaphysics of time; and the abolition of prisons.

Readings span the world’s major religious and philosophical traditions and include imprisoned figures such as Socrates, Boethius, Marguerite Porete, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Hannah Arendt, Angela Davis, and detainees at Guantánamo Bay. As we explicate the influence imprisonment has had within philosophy and religion, we will probe incarceration as both site and concept for individual moral growth, as a standard for societal justice and equity, and as the frequent tool of choice to eradicate the abnormal. While many of these authors have become standard reading, this course attempts to hear the voices “from below” as rebel, reformer, and outcast. Works will be exegeted according to contexts of origination while also asking what they have to teach us about abusive power, mass incarceration, and our own intellectual and political history.

MLK left us a legacy of the sacrament of imprisonment while Lenin called prisoners “the best fighters for freedom.” Within the agony, Mandela also felt “the cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself.” Gandhi argued “jail for us is no jail at all,” while Socrates famously argued while enchained that the mind imprisoned by untruth is a greater threat to freedom and civility. What will you learn from jail?

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

Modern technology, from improved crop yield to water purification, has pushed the boundaries of environmental and ecological limits to accommodate the growing societal needs. Yet, technological advancements have also been a double-edged sword. As we marvel at the human ingenuity in our recent technological developments, are there adverse environmental consequences we need to address?

This Freshman Seminar aims to provide students with an opportunity to examine global challenges in environmental sustainability issues in modern society. We will focus on exploring how technological advancements have shaped the landscapes of water, energy, and food productions due to the increasing demands of modern living, meanwhile posing new environmental concerns with emerging contaminants, such as microplastics and nanomaterials. A key component of the course is to develop an understanding of the opposing views on some of the controversial issues in these areas and to allow students to form their arguments in these matters. For this purpose, students will be exposed to various readings written by scientists, politicians, and industrial leaders. The course will also feature guest speakers, both from within the Princeton community and outside, with whom students can have direct conversations.

Another focus of the course is on the quantitative interpretation and visualization of data. Using real-world environmental data from curated sources both globally and in the Princeton community, we will explore ways to effectively present and convey quantitative information to improve science communication. Students will experiment with various ways to display complex data, undergo an iterative process to improve and strengthen their skills through three mini data visualization projects, and ultimately create a capstone project using these skills.

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

When, where, why and how did human language originate? There are no definitive answers, but like cosmologists who propose a Big Bang or geologists who posit an early super-continent on Earth, we consider and evaluate evidence from multiple sciences. This seminar will examine findings from paleontology, archeology, animal communication, neurobiology, genetics, linguistics and statistics, and weigh different hypotheses to gain a better understanding of the possible origin of human language.

We define and distinguish critical concepts such as language and communication and analyze key properties of human language that distinguish it from animal communication. We examine the status of proposed universal properties shared by all human languages. Can children’s language acquisition (ontogeny) and the documented emergence of sign languages in deaf communities shed light on the emergence of human language (phylogeny)?

Research in animal communication shows that our biologically closest relatives (chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas), while lacking the ability for speech, communicate in sophisticated ways and recruit some of the homologous brain regions that are involved in human language processing. At which stage in human evolution were the prerequisites for language given, i.e., when did our ancestors have a “language-ready brain”? We discuss fossil evidence with respect to anatomical features (cranial volume, a descended larynx) required for language. Which features are shared by other species (such as birds and marine mammals) and why did they not develop a full language? In light of paleontological and genetic evidence of Anatomically Modern Human’s migration out of Africa, is a single origin of language (monogenesis) more plausible than polygenesis?

We ask whether language evolved gradually in tandem with primate cognition (symbolic thinking, categorization, Theory of Mind) or whether it appeared within a relatively short time due to a genetic mutation (the “saltational” hypothesis) that is argued to have occurred between 70,000 and 40,000 years ago. Alternatively, was there a precursor to full language such as a gestural or a musical protolanguage?

What degree of societal organization was both a requirement and a catalyst for human language to arise? We examine several competing hypotheses (“verbal grooming,” efficient transfer of tool-making techniques). The earliest known artworks (cave paintings, fertility figurines) were likely created to fulfill ritual functions; prehistoric tools and jewelry similarly point to social structures that required a well-developed language. Why are humans unique in their drive to share thoughts?

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

Most people learn about new developments in science through the popular media. That's true even for professional scientists when it comes to research outside their own fields. It's certainly true for legislators and policy makers whose responsibility it is to decide which projects should get government funding, and how much.

It's clearly important, therefore, that new scientific results be presented accurately and in the proper context, And while some media outlets are unreliable and not to be taken seriously—a number that has increased in recent years as the COVID pandemic has raged and as "alternative facts" have become acceptable in some quarters—we all presume that such respected institutions as The New York Times or The Atlantic or NBC News get it right.

Yet virtually all scientists have had the experience of seeing a new result in their own field covered in the popular media and realizing that this coverage is flawed. Stories are frequently confusing or incomplete; sometimes they are misleading; occasionally they are just plain wrong. The choice of what research to cover in the first place also shapes how the public sees science: the discovery of a new dinosaur will often get much more prominent coverage than, say, the discovery of a new process for making plastic, even though the latter is likely to have vastly more important effect on peoples' lives. This is largely due to the need for reporters to make science more accessible to readers, the majority of whom don't have the background to understand scientific research in its raw form—a problem that doesn't affect more familiar coverage areas like sports or business or world affairs to nearly the same degree. 

In this course, we will examine the forces that underlie this phenomenon in some detail, looking at the roles of journalists; communications departments at universities, research labs and government agencies; scientific journals; and, in many cases, scientists themselves. Students will be guided through this exploration by the instructor, who has covered science for nearly 40 years in publications including Time, Scientific American and National Geographic, and by visitors including journalists, public affairs professionals and scientists.

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

This seminar investigates the nature, causes, and consequences of economic inequality.  We consider five big questions: who is unequal; what is unequally distributed; what causes inequality; what are inequality’s consequences; and how does inequality affect justice?

Who is unequal? Inequality discussions often focus on differences within countries: American women earn less than men, African Americans earn less than whites, rural workers earn less than metropolitan workers, the bottom 50% earns less than the top 1%.  But we also will explore economic differences across countries, and across individuals globally, where inequality is greater still.

What is unequally distributed? Some measures, such as wealth, are more unequally distributed than is income, while other measures, such as spending, happiness and life expectancy, are less unequally distributed. Which measure is most meaningful? And are measured inequality trends the same everywhere?

What causes inequality? The list is long: less progressive tax and transfer policies, corporate governance failures, a widening college wage premium, restrictive land-use regulation and changes in family structure. 

What are inequality’s consequences? Some economic inequality is desirable; it spurs innovation, hard work, and investment in people. But economic inequality is also associated with political corruption, slower growth, and consumption arms races. How much inequality is too much inequality?

How does inequality affect justice? Is poverty or inequality the more serious problem?  Is inequality intrinsically bad or bad chiefly in its consequences? Is distributive justice solely a matter of the structure of a distribution or is it also a matter of the process that leads to that distribution?  Do moral obligations to reduce inequality extend beyond national borders or stop at the water's edge?

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

In this moment of unprecedented economic inequality and populist backlash, the time seems ripe for a return to Marxism. But what exactly would such a 21st-century Marxism look like? How would Marx understand (or not understand) Trump and Brexit or, for that matter, Twitter and Facebook? How might Marxist thought need to be revised in light of the present? What can Marxism learn from other forms of critical thought and activism that have emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially those concerned with race and gender? Our seminar will examine the contemporary viability of Marx’s fundamental concepts—labor, exploitation, ideology, surplus-value, class-consciousness, and revolution, among others. We will thus read classic texts by Marx (and Engels) alongside contemporary texts engaged with Marxist thought.

The question of labor will be a particular focus, with an emphasis on those kinds of labor that do not fit Marx’s primarily industrial conception of labor: the historically unrecognized labor of women—exemplarily housework and “care” (or “affective labor”)—brought to light by Marxist feminism; the racialization of precarious labor; forms of labor associated with the internet and digitality (i.e., “informational” or “communicative” labor”). A second major focus will be the transformation of social movements and revolutionary politics: How do the #Blacklivesmatter and Occupy movements update Marxist paradigms? What does a 21st century strike look like? What forms of resistance and political organization are available to exploited subjects who do not fit the traditional ‘proletarian’ mold, from gig workers to indebted students to the unemployed to the incarcerated? What effects does social media have on political mobilization and political immobilization? Finally, it will also be necessary to ask if the Marxist critique of capitalist modernity supplies any tools to fight impending ecological catastrophe.

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

Movies often involve depictions of psychological phenomena. They offer an accessible medium that communicates to large audiences. But even though the viewing public has intuitions about how the mind works, it is rarely the case that they have a complex understanding of the phenomena being depicted. This course is aimed at illuminating some of the most fascinating psychological phenomena by analyzing their depiction in popular movies. It is an introduction to the complexity of the mind that uses one of the most effective means of public communication: the movie.

As part of this course, students will watch some of the most scientifically accurate popular movies about well-established psychological phenomena – including memory, identity, decision-making, and mental disorders - and will learn the science behind these phenomena. Through movies, brief lectures, and group discussions, students will learn about memory malleability and its relation to identity, will explore the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders, and will learn about how human decisions are oftentimes faulty. Along the way, students will learn about theoretical developments in the field of psychology (e.g., memory systems, social identity theory, diagnosis of mental disorders), as well as methodological innovations designed to study the mind and brain (e.g., neuroimaging techniques, lesion studies, machine learning, and social network analysis).

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

This course will trace the creations of the outlines of American ideas.  We’ll begin with the New England Puritans and end in contemporary times, but in between we will run in unusual directions through early American moral philosophy, Black resistance, religious awakenings, and the creation of American colleges through 19th-century abolitionism and Romantic naturalism, before turning to the 20th-century modernist rejection and the influence of emigre European political thought. Princeton will figure significantly, from John Witherspoon to Archibald Alexander to Woodrow Wilson, and the formation of American collegiate philosophy. In the 20th century, we will examine the creation of a Black elite, the decline of philosophy into academic inertia, Progressivism, feminism, and modern conservative and progressive thinkers. The dominant motif will be the twin origins of American thought in Puritanism and the Enlightenment, and the ways in which these two have opposed each other and co-operated with each other. Readings will range from William Perkins and the Puritan technologia of the 17th century, through Jonathan Edwards and the 18th-century revivals, Archibald Alexander and collegiate moral philosophy, abolitionist thought (Douglass, Garrison, Lincoln), Populism, the Progressives and the socialists (Wilson, Du Bois, Debs), music (Chadwick, Kriebehl, Ives, Dvorak), anthropology (Boas, Benedict, Mead), the New Deal and the influence of European emigres (Adorno, Marcuse, the Nation of Islam) and neo-liberalism.

No attempt will be made to obey the conventional chronology of American ‘intellectual history,’ from Franklin to Emerson to William James, because it has promoted ‘pastlessness’; nor should this be considered as a ‘philosophy course,’ tending only to abstractions. The principal labor of the course will be devoted to directing the readings, and to generating discussion. The most important challenge will be making connections between past and present ideas. We’ll discover that nothing comes from nowhere; the ideas we think are so obvious and so current today have long roots in the American experience. Tracing out their genealogy will be intellectual detective work at its best, and will make clear the distinctive ways in which Americans think.

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

The word “library” traditionally brings to mind high ceilings, miles of bookshelves, and a deep quiet.  Today’s libraries, however, vary widely from community to community, taking on surprising ambitions and responsibilities.  While some resemble palaces, with marble columns and august art items, others are more modest, and handle community needs such as opioid overdose clinics and direct support for homelessness.  In this course, we will uncover libraries’ hidden and surprising meanings, interrogating them as sites of culture, history, and politics.

The course begins with introspection on our own prior experiences with libraries—in our homes, elementary, middle and high schools, and in our hometowns.  We will visit and study several libraries on campus, the Princeton Public Library and the Trenton Public Library.  As we visit physical spaces, we will consider how library spaces send signals to human beings about appropriate behaviors, and how these signals affect issues of inclusion and belonging.

We will explore how libraries “collect knowledge” and the human aspects of choosing what to hold on to for the future.  We will learn about the Archives at Princeton, and new efforts to unearth hidden voices in library collections.  In contrast to commercial booksellers, libraries often land in controversy for highlighting individual books and authors.  We will consider the impact of banned books, library book displays and author talks as techniques for spotlighting individual titles.  Even the terms that libraries use to describe books can be controversial; we will explore recent efforts to update the Library of Congress subject headings through Congressional actions.

We will create portraits of individual libraries situating them in the economic, social and political history that affects their decisions and priorities.  We will end the course with a critical analysis of the staffing in libraries, and the need for greater diversity in the field of academic librarianship.  Students will conduct interviews and observations through in-person visits, and will engage in online discussions on Canvas.  Core assignments include two presentations and a final project / paper on a self-directed research topic.

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

The seminar will explore some of the critical contributions of (mostly Allied) scientists, engineers, and mathematicians during World War II.  Topics will include radar, the Spitfire and the Battle of Britain, cryptography and the breaking of the German Enigma code, microwave radar and other technical breakthroughs in the Battle of the Atlantic against German submarines, the great advances in medicine, amphibious craft and the B-29 in the Pacific Theater,  the proximity fuse and the Mustang P-51 and the erratic history of strategic bombing, tide, weather and other in the D-Day invasion, and the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb.

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

One way to understand the various patterns and processes in our world is to think of them as “systems” (e.g., the criminal justice system, neural systems, economic systems, etc.). There’s lot of talk about these systems (“blame the system”; “you can’t beat the system”) and efforts to change them, but not a lot of understanding about how systems actually work. We will bridge this knowledge gap by learning about what all systems have in common, how they respond to change and why it is difficult to change them in predictable ways.

This course will be an adventure, for you and for me. We will cover a range of subjects and will be "imposters"--experts at none of them. Being an imposter is how we can learn at the fastest rate and see connections that the experts—made complacent by their specialized knowledge—perhaps cannot see; we can ask questions they wouldn’t think to ask.

We will learn about how systems work in general and then explore in depth three different systems. We will learn how they evolved to be what they are: criminal justice, music and capitalism. We may also uncover the larger system that connects all three of these areas.

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

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

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

Amazonia is a global hotspot of biocultural diversity with over 400 Indigenous peoples and more species of animals and plants documented than any other ecosystem. It is also a massive carbon sink on the brink. The rainforest is simultaneously one of the planet’s most threatened ecologies and a bastion for biodiversity sustainability. Studies show that deforestation rates are significantly lower on areas governed by Indigenous Peoples in the nine countries that comprise PanAmazonia. This is particularly noticeable in the Brazilian Amazon that encompasses 60% of the basin, currently threatened by illegal logging, mining, and megafires. Indigenous leaders, such as Ailton Krenak, rightfully critique the ways in which dominant powers suppress diversity and negate “the plurality of forms of life and existence.” There will be no future for Amazonia if Indigenous knowledges are not fully appreciated and foregrounded.

At the core of Planet Amazonia is the trust that Indigenous ontological, epistemological, and sociopolitical theories and practices of ecosystem management offer substantive opportunities to combat biodiversity loss and climate change. We will explore how local knowledge and the environment co-produce one another. Holding the sciences in parallel and in dialogue with Indigenous knowledge, we will seek to understand the dynamic ecologies in which the rainforest is shaped and cared for. Drawing from archeological, ethnographic, and ecological studies, we will examine the interplay between human communities, other than human beings, and landscapes both historically and in the present. Amazonia is not a domesticated landscape, but the product of overlapping world-making activities by many agents. In problematizing forest-making practices, Planet Amazonia expands the frontiers of conservation science and works as a platform for future-making agendas based on new scholarly and activist alliances.

The seminar starts with an overview of the presence/absence of Indigenous and local knowledge in Amazonian conservation science. We will then analyze how scholars in the Global South have alternatively engaged with Indigenous cosmologies and practices of conservation, especially around biodiversity, fire techniques, forest management, agriculture, and plant familiarization. We will conclude with an exploration of the ethical and political tenets and storytelling practices accompanying Indigenous environmental mobilization around forest-making and forest-caring. Throughout, we will pay attention to diverse evidentiary and visualization practices, i.e., juxtaposing satellite imagery and fine-grained human knowledge on the ground. Students will engage with Amazonian environmentalists and Indigenous scholars and will work in groups, developing audiovisual projects and crafting alternative visions to safeguard this vital planetary nexus.

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

What can merfolk–mermaids, mermen, ondine, selkies, rusalki–teach us? This course will explore tales about these merfolk and will equip students to analyze merfolk tales across cultures and media (TV, movies, texts). Perched at the boundary between land and sea, human and animal, merfolk embody cultural and historical ideas about what it means to be human. This course engages merfolk tales in order to unpack those ideas. We will explore ways that these tales are transformative, with a focus on how they challenge social norms, including norms of personhood. Merfolk swim across cultural and linguistic boundaries, both engendering and potentially transforming norms of class privilege, colorism, and gender. Just as merfolk themselves transform, or change form, the tales about them transform across media. Our seminar considers the transformative work translations and adaptations perform on these tales. We will engage works such The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, 2017), Mei Ren Yu (Stephen Chow, 2016), and Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995); The Deep, a novella by Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipe; and Broadway adaptations of Rosa Guy’s novella My Love, My Love: Or, the Peasant Girl, which retells Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” within a colonial context.

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

This seminar uses insights from both cognitive psychology and contemporary philosophy to consider several questions concerning the nature and ethics of empathy, perspective-taking, and other modes of experiencing other minds. Some of the questions discussed include: What distinguishes empathy from emotional contagion, perspective-taking, or other kinds of intersubjectivity? Do empathy and other modes of intersubjectivity have intrinsic value and if so, what is the nature of that value? Do feminist considerations provide a special reason to be wary of the touted values of empathy and other forms of intersubjectivity? What form of perspective-taking features in art, especially narrative fictional art?

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

This course examines the representation of women as outlaw 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. In many societies, women who decide to redefine their gender identities often stand the risk of being outlawed as their chosen life-style poses a threat to the acceptable gender norms. In this course, therefore, we will explore the 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? What rules & expectations delimit acceptable womanhood? Who is constructing these rules 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 further information, including meeting times, general education requirement, and more, please visit the Princeton University Office of the Registrar.

Whether we like it or not, algorithms shape our sense of selves, identity, and collective politics. From how we perform, to how we perceive selfhood, media technologies influence our experience of being alive. This first-year course will introduce students to hybrid media and performance practices through which artists consider the body, identity, and collective history in public space, whether that space is onstage or within the digital domain. Using a visual and performance studies approach, the course will explore various sites of cutting-edge contemporary art practices from scenes of political theater to experimental staged performances. We will dive into the urgent political and personal projects that draw artists to media art forms.  Our texts will include live and recorded performances, as well as historical and theoretical secondary sources. The class will host a guest artist talk series featuring pioneering artists, scholars, and curators sharing their perspectives on the ever shifting cultural climate. Some classes may take place asynchronously and/or remotely.

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

Our way of speaking is an essential part of our identity. Whether we realize it or not, our particular variety of language gives information to the listeners about where we were born, how old we are, our social class and even our race or ethnicity. Of course, this can become an obstacle in society, since not all dialects are considered equal. For that reason, everyday thousands of speakers around the globe consciously try to change their way of speaking, hiding some parts of their identity, so as not to feel judged or discriminated against.

In the first half of this seminar, we will focus on what constitutes a dialect, and differentiate it from a language or an accent. We will start by finding out the uniqueness of our personal idiolect within our language variety. We will learn, through a number of examples, why some dialects are better regarded than others, and why there is some confusion between language and dialect. We will explore the role of society and politics in determining what the prestigious variety is, with a focus on English and the US, including the many geographical dialects and AAE (African American English). We will debunk the myth that there is only one correct way of speaking and examine the reasons behind that belief. During the second half, we will turn our attention to the phenomenon of languages in contact and the distinctive varieties that result from them, including pidgins and creoles. We will focus on one of the most common occurrences in the US, the code-switching between English and Spanish, and also other examples. We will also discuss diglossia, a situation that often appears when two or more languages coexist in the same area, and the implications that eventually follow, for instance, the figure of the heritage speaker. One of the main goals of this course is to empower every language variety and their speakers.

This seminar is designed for students that are interested in how people talk and the social implications of their way of speaking. No previous knowledge in the field of linguistics is required. Students will write about and study some varieties of their own language and the impact of multilingualism in a particular community.

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

Securing the supply of food, water, and energy is one of the greatest global challenges of our time.  In this class we will grow our own food, produce our own fuel, and make our own water. This is a hands-on seminar and laboratory experience about key resource systems relevant to sustainable development and how they are interrelated.  The course consists of three units: Food, Energy, and Water. In the Food unit, students will work in small groups to engineer a system to grow a crop; they will measure the water and energy intensity of the food and develop other quality/performance metrics to evaluate the project. Students will present their findings at the end of term in a final presentation that may include campus stakeholders.  In the Energy unit, students will produce a biofuel (from algae, perhaps) and measure its energy content in the lab.  Finally, in the Water unit, students will study water challenges and work in small groups to design a product/system to address this challenge.  For example, students can make a low-cost desalination unit that uses evaporation and condensation to desalinate water. 

No previous shop or laboratory experience is necessary, and we welcome liberal arts students as well as engineering students. The class meets twice each week and will include field trips to local farms and community development projects.

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

What is a border? ¿Qué es una frontera? How have borderland spaces between Mexico and the US been configured throughout history and imagined by colonizers, indigenous peoples, artists and writers since colonial times? What does it mean to live in-between nations, languages and worldviews?  How does the past inform the present? What does coloniality have to do with it?

In this seminar, students will explore the concept of the border and borderland spaces from a variety of perspectives including Latinx, Chicano/a, Colonial and Mexican Literary Studies. In particular, students will reflect on the different ways in which the border or la frontera between Mexico and the US has been represented in history, literature and art. The seminar aims to develop novel ways of thinking of the US-Mexico border as a geographical space but also as a discursive site where individuals reflect on dreams, (land) struggles, trans-nationalism, language, identity, and human rights. The readings and class activities draw on historical texts from the colonial period such as relaciones and chronicles, as well as contemporary literary texts, music, and films that explore the rich symbolism of the border. We will discuss the development of the idea of the border in relation to: conquest and evangelization, security and militarization, indigenous peoples and cultures, immigration, il/legal discourses, life in the margins, language and nation, trade, and transcultural and transgender experiences. Among the critical concepts to be discussed are: colonialism and coloniality, race, gender, contact zones, memory, writing, and globalization.

This seminar is designed for students who are interested in learning about the US-Mexico border from a humanistic and historical perspective. No previous knowledge of Latinx, Chicano/a, Colonial or Mexican Literary Studies is required. However, some reading knowledge of Spanish will be useful since some of the works discussed in this seminar are bilingual or only in Spanish. In addition, the course includes a service project aimed at engaging with the local community in a context of partnership and reciprocity. Other course components include weekly reflections, a written critical analysis of an artistic work, and two presentations. Finally, we will have at least one guest speaker either from the Princeton community who is engaged in scholarly work on the US-Mexico border, or one of the authors whose work we study in this seminar.

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

Scholars trying to explain the human past are confronted with some major problems: To what degree can objectivity be achieved in the analysis of history? Is there anything such as ‘historical truth’? What ‘literary’ constraints are imposed upon historiographic writings? Can narration on its own provide a real understanding of the past? Is a ‘scientific’ history possible? Are there any fundamental differences between natural and historical sciences? And between historical and social sciences? In the first half of the semester, we will study how historians of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries have approached these questions and envisioned the study of history. One of the goals of the seminar is to learn about different possibilities for studying history and to explore the reasons for this diversity of approaches. In the second half of the semester, we will deal with a highly controversial case study —Nazi Germany— which tests the relevance of historians’ debates. The importance of discussing truth and objectivity in history becomes patently clear when trying to explain and correctly evaluate the development of National-Socialism and its consequences. Because the events of the Holocaust were documented with such meticulous care, the nature of extreme cruelty and its evaluation makes the tension between objectivity and narration evident. In the seminar we will deal with problems concerning the falsification of documents (the Hitler diaries scandal), the debate on the role of Germans in the establishment of the Nazi-regime, and the different ways in which states have reacted to Holocaust deniers.

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

These two sayings present diametrically opposed views of small communities, one emphasizing solidarity, caring and cooperation, the other a nightmare of imprisonment. This course is an exploration of the village and villagers as they appear to us in the historical record. The village is essential to any understanding of the past, since throughout most of human history that is where most people have lived. The village has also proved to be an enduring source of artistic inspiration and fascination, as evidenced by the two sayings above.

The mainstay of the class will be readings in primary and secondary sources, though we will also explore the pull of villages on our imagination through literature and film. While villages are typically studied within the context of Anthropology, this course is emphatically historical. We will consider villages as sites for the making of history, rather than as the “reliquary of old custom,” and ask how villagers create, confront and manage change. The course will range widely in space and time, from the village of Wharram Percy (England), which is Europe’s best known deserted medieval village, to the current attempts to repopulate nearly empty villages in Italy, Spain, and Turkey. These attempts have garnered attention in the mainstream press, no doubt because during these pandemic times villages have beckoned to city dwellers as places of escape and refuge. This is just the latest iteration of the village’s long-standing grip on the modern imaginary.

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

“It’s the end of the world as we know it!”  This cry (here, quoted from R.E.M.’s song from 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 from 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 traditional reading and writing assignments as well as a final creative project.

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

This course will look at representations of the human body in literature and visual culture from the 17th century up to the present day.  We will consider the ways that the body is socially constructed as a site of power, knowledge, desire, and difference.  We will look at texts that seek to subjugate and control bodies, and others that celebrate its unruly potential.  This class will bridge time periods and cultures, looking at bodies defined as disabled and able, as desirable and undesirable, and as object and subject.  We will consider some of the aesthetic, scientific, and economic ways that determine these categories and explore issues such as class, race, gender, and sexuality.  Additionally, we will read authors seeking to recuperate the body as a site of empowerment.

The class will focus on close-readings of literary texts and art works accompanied by theories of the body and important historical contexts.

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

This seminar will explore the challenges and opportunities that today’s rapidly evolving media landscape presents to freedom of the press and to the democracy that the media serve. Discussion will focus on where news comes from and how citizens can best assess the credibility of individual news reports. Students will evaluate how successful traditional mass-media outlets and emerging digital media have been at accomplishing the lofty goals embodied in the First Amendment, and they will craft strategies for determining their own personal media diet. They will explore muckraking, ethics and the rapidly evolving economics of the news industry. Students will discuss the responsibilities of journalists and the sometimes-conflicting professional tenets of objectivity, neutrality and advocacy.

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

This course explores the topos of the descent into the underworld, as it is treated in literary texts from antiquity to the present in several strands of literary culture in the west. Crucial questions that we will ask ourselves are: What are the components of hell? What archetypes or depictions of the underworld helped to cement its importance in different religious systems? And, just as importantly, why is hell so alive in secular culture today?

Throughout the semester we will identify and examine underworld themes and archetypes as we look at excerpts from works of western and eastern antiquity, the Middle Ages, as well as modern and contemporary literature and visual art. Understanding the curious attraction of hell will help us conceptualize what the realm of the dead means for how we inhabit the world of the living.

The aim of the course is threefold: first, to foster historical knowledge of some literary and artistic representations and treatments of the trope of hell, originating in different parts of the world; second, to foster independent reflection on the cultural values associated to these treatments; third, to stimulate collective discussion about the cultural phenomena encountered in the readings.

An interactive class, calling for intense student participation, the seminar is structured in two 80-minute weekly meetings, equally devoted to the discussion of the primary sources and critical readings. The course also includes four feature films connected to the issues discussed in the primary sources.

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

This seminar explores the relationship between communications technology and society in the digital age. The world of ever-increasing global connectivity in which we live has brought forth multiple challenges, to include global health threats such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the rise in cryptocurrency assets driven by mistrust in institutions and authority, and mass migration, possibly related to climate change. Perhaps most intractable are the challenges produced by what we might call informational opacity: despite constant and continuous digital connectivity, either due to deliberate obfuscation or mindless content creation, impactful knowledge exchange is impeded.

In order to coherently address these challenges, we need to understand the history of the technologies that have precipitated their trajectories. In this seminar, we will explore the history of modern communications technology from a non-technical perspective. What are the economic and social factors that played a role?

We will start with the evolution of Bell Labs and the invention of the transistor in 1949. Every decade since has seen a path-breaking invention with the integrated circuit or microchip at Xerox Parc in 1959, the microprocessor or brains of the computer at Intel in 1969, as well as Arpanet, the precursor of the modern internet. Around 1979 we saw the introduction of the personal computer, when the IBM PC and its MS-DOS finally launched in 1981. In 1989, Tim Berner-Lee introduced the world-wide-web. After that, we were in a sprint with streaming technology introduced in 1995, Google in 98, Napster in 99, Facebook in 2004, Netflix in 2007 and so on. The transistors, lasers and information technologies developed by these firms have been incorporated into the computers, communications and devices and processes as the list of new firms shows.

As these new technologies are developed, they have created the need for new technologies to solve the problems created by earlier developments. Taken together, this is the history of innovation.

In addition to class discussion we will have speakers from these various organizations tell their story of innovation. The goal is to understand the process of invention and innovation from a historical perspective and to find some generalizable principles.

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

This class will be a hands-on investigation into performance and photography through making self-portraits. 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?

Through making self-portraits students will reflect on how it is to be in their particular body. Each class will have guided warm-ups which will foreground play, embodiment, and free-association out of which students will generate material for their photographic explorations. Journaling throughout the semester will encourage students to digest their first experiences at Princeton while also helping to spark ideas.

We will start by learning the basics of camera operation and from there will begin to consider how things like framing, angle of view, and distance influence meaning. Though students will learn about how to make images with intention, this is not a deeply technical class.  We will be using video screenshots, phone cameras, or digital cameras and discussing how their differing qualities contribute to the mood and meaning of the final photograph. Students will learn the basics of using digital cameras as well as how to use Photoshop for editing and manipulation. For the final project students will make a series of digital inkjet prints.

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 photography. Students will receive feedback frequently throughout the semester through critiques.

Collaboration will be encouraged.

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

Lasers are not focused, and quantum leaps are tiny. This freshman seminar first explores the science behind quantum technologies. What makes a physical object "quantum", and what does it mean for the way it behaves? The future of quantum technologies, especially quantum computation and quantum cryptography are discussed. Besides the technical aspects, this freshman seminar also explores the use of "quantum" in popular culture, media, film, and literature. This seminar is open to all first-year students, and does not require any specialized prerequisites beyond general high school science and mathematics.

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

The question of the origins and stages of civilization remains a key focus for contemporary debates about society. Why do complex societies emerge at certain times? How might we define “civilization” in the first place? Is civilization itself “good” or “bad”? Has the very notion of civilization created biases about what is to be valued from which we cannot extricate ourselves? Is “civilization” merely a Eurocentric concept? Do we, in fact, need to liberate ourselves from the idea of “civilization” once and for all? While, today, these discussions often come couched as objective, “scientific” arguments about the archaeological record, they also draw on a long pre-existing tradition of narratives about the origins and nature of “civilization,” whether hypothetical, fictional, economic, historical, or scientific. Narratives of origins are themselves a unique form of thought that stands at the boundaries of disciplines as diverse as literature, anthropology, history, paleology, and religion. Our approach will combine readings of these narratives with creative thinking and writing about what our own version of such narratives might look like as well as reflecting together on why this question remains such a source of controversy today.

Beginning in the Enlightenment, which in the West marked a first wave (still present today) of thinking about societies as going through distinct historical stages, we will study a range of texts that address this question, ranging from political theory and early economic thought, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, through to fictional travel narratives like Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters of a Peruvian Woman. Thinking about the relationship between nature and culture was intertwined with reflections about how to define the phases of human history, often around the development of social classes, as in Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire or Honoré de Balzac’s sociological and fictional writings. We will consider non-Western texts together with critiques of Europe’s notion of itself as “civilized,” for instance by Edward Saïd. Lastly, we will look at more recent iterations of this debate, including David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent—and bestselling—the Dawn of Everything. We will ask why, today, the question of defining the origins and stages of “civilization” is again being asked with such urgency, and consider if and how we ourselves might pose—and maybe even answer—it.

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

New York’s Central Park, 843 acres in the center of Manhattan Island, remains, now more than a century and a half after its construction, the most iconic urban park in the United States.  Visited by 42 million people each year, Central Park has been the subject of innumerable paintings, photographs, and images, and has been called the most filmed location in the world.   How can we best uncover the meaning and significance of this place, both as a symbolic site from the past, and as an active public space of the present?  This seminar will take a deep dive into Central Park’s history and employ a wide variety of disciplinary approaches. Examining the social, political, and artistic context of the park’s nineteenth century origins, the course will take up the complexity and contradictions inherent in the creation and preservation of “nature” in the center of the most densely developed region in the nation, and in the heart of the city that would go on to become the cultural and economic capital of the United States.

We will consider the history of the land prior to European settlement down through the present, and will explore both the democratic idealism and strategies for social control embedded in the original design of the park by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.  We will look at the history of Seneca Village, an African-American community of land owners residing within the confines of the present park who were displaced and dispersed by the eminent domain process, and visit the Afrofuturist period room based on Seneca Village in the Metropolitan Museum.  Later on, the course will take up the “exhibitionary complex” of the park (the museums, the zoo, and other attractions) and look at the rich history of different mediums (painting, sculpture, photography, film) through which a wide range of artists have approached Central Park, from its beginnings to the present.

The course will include field trips to New York and Central Park.  Over the semester students will produce a class presentation focusing on one of the attractions of Central Park, a short take-home midterm, and a final project which can be in the form of a research-oriented paper or a creative project such as a photographic essay with text. 

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

Protagonists of great literary works in the tradition of the Künstlerroman (artist's novel) are typically young men--from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister to Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and beyond. Countless readers and writers have seen in those characters models for self-fashioning in art and life.

This course focuses on works of literary fiction in which the aspiring artist is not a young man, even sometimes not a human being.  A fictional young woman of color in Baltimore c. 1900 ponders problems around subjectivity and interpersonal communication in a text whose narrative form reinvents the novella before our eyes; an artist in 21-c. New York (Glenn Ligon, b. 1960) responds critically to the descriptions of persons of color in that novella by American modernist Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) in neon sculptures that disrupt the usual conditions of viewing in contemporary art museums. A fictional ape narrates his life on and off the stage to an audience of early 20-c. scientists; thinking perhaps of that fictional ape, an invention of Prague-born Jewish modernist Franz Kafka (1883-1924), an artist in 21-c. Cologne (Rosemarie Trockel, b. 1952) incorporates into her own work paintings made by an orangutan in the Cologne Zoo. A fictional 1990s female performance artist reeling with grief reshapes her body in a pseudo-Gothic delirium in American novelist Don DeLillo’s (b. 1936) early 21-c. novella. A fictional university student in 2010s Dublin practices collaborative spoken-word poetry while pursuing a complicated romantic life alongside the pleasures and demands of queer female friendship in the debut novel of Irish writer Sally Rooney (b. 1991). Those are sketches of a few of this seminar’s “portraits of the artist as...”

Some of the works that we will study in this seminar prompt questions about the ways race, gender, sexuality, and social class shape our ideas and fantasies about art and life. Others ask us to consider how our ideas and fantasies about art and life shape our understandings and misunderstandings of ourselves and others. Several raise difficult questions concerning anxiety and depression in relation to creativity and personal relationships.

Reading and discussing works of literature and art that challenge our assumptions about individuality, creativity, and humanity at large, we will explore how ideas about art matter to how we live. Through a series of short-to-medium-length assignments developed specifically with the ambitions and demands of the first-year, second-semester student experience in mind, we will enrich our reading with writing exercises designed to hone skills in critical analysis while providing occasions for creative experimentation.

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