Global Arc

This seminar surveys influential writing about North American cities, towards the goal of students developing their own research. We begin in the 19th century but focus on the 20th. Why have some publications set popular frameworks, while others languished? Where have new ideas originated? Comparing different genres, what writing has shaped experiences of cities, and policy? How has region mattered? Writing about built environments poses unique challenges. Since the 1950s, oppositions have dominated urban frameworks, such as Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses. Students will explore the potential for fresh perspectives on past and present.

This course explores the medieval understanding of nature, the heavens, bodies, and minds. In medieval Islam and the Latin West, science was shaped by debates over important questions - the extent of divine and human power, the existence of other worlds, the generation of life, the legitimacy of magic and astrology. We will ask how medieval people sought to put this knowledge into practice, from healing sickness and prolonging life, to making automata, transmuting metals, or predicting the future. The course draws on a wide range of sources, including books, images, material objects, and our own attempts to reconstruct experiments in class.

From the consolidation of European imperial control in South and Central Asia through the present day, Afghanistan has featured in the global imagination of empire. Imperial writers have termed it a "buffer state," "the graveyard of empires," and the land of the "great game". But how have Afghans experienced imperialism? We will trace the history of imperial engagement with Afghanistan alongside Afghan articulations of history, society, and culture. We ask how empires imagined Afghanistan and established regional authority. Equally, we study how Afghans responded to imperial geopolitical claims and developed their own historical narratives.

In this course we will explore various examples of "the dictator novel," attempting to make sense of the genre in its overlapping historical and world-literary contexts. Each week our focus will be on a specific novel, which is to be read alongside scholarly work and other writing as we consider the aesthetic, political, and cultural significance of this strikingly global literary form. We will strive to understand the complex relationship between literature and politics; more specifically, the representation of state power, authoritarian rule, and struggles for human freedom in--and through--cultural production. All readings are in English.

Explores the 300-year history of what has been described as an "impossible but inevitable city." Settled on perpetually eroding swampland at the foot of one of the world's great waterways, this port city served as an outpost of three empires and a gateway linking the N. American heartland with the Gulf Coast, Caribbean, and Atlantic World. A unique crossroads of capitalism and cultures, New Orleans is, as one writer puts it, "an alternative American history all in itself." From European and African settlement through Hurricane Katrina, we'll consider how race, culture, and the environment have defined the history of the city and its people.

The prison is a growth industry in the U.S.; it is also a central institution in U.S. political and social life, shaping our experience of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and political possibility. This course explores the history of incarceration over the course of more than two centuries. It tracks the emergence of the penitentiary in the early national period and investigates mass incarceration of the late 20th century. Topics include the relationship between the penitentiary and slavery; the prisoners' rights movement; Japanese internment; immigration detention; and the privatization and globalization of prisons.

An in-depth exploration of a topic in American legal history. In some years the course will investigate an event, such as a famous or infamous trial or case. In other years the course will explore historical dimensions of a particular legal concept, such as "rights," "coercion," "dependency," the "family," or "property." One three-hour seminar.

This seminar course examines how people during the early Middle Ages defined their existence through negotiated boundaries of gender, class, ethnicity, race, religion, and the human condition. Our work will curate the contributions of marginalized groups to decenter traditional narratives. Students will leave this course with a broad understanding of early medieval history, an appreciation of historical work done by people often omitted from our histories, and a mastery of historical and interdisciplinary tools for promoting awareness and understanding marginalized groups.

Knowledge is produced by people in conflict. In this course we will read across the seventeenth century's broad intellectual currents to consider artistic, philosophic, and historical knowledge as products of opposition and rivalry. What does it mean to stake out a radical or a conservative position in the seventeenth century? Can one be a reactionary without a concept of progress? Does the concept of progress exist in Europe before the Enlightenment? What role does representation play in these issues? We will investigate major figures including Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Perrault, Rubens, and Velazquez.

Do you ever wonder how and why the objects and landscapes you pass every day or see from a plane got to be as they are now? This seminar teaches you how to "read" things and built and unbuilt landscapes, and how historical archaeologists, anthropologists, historical ecologists and historians have used the material realm to understand the past in ways they could not through written records alone. The course is local and global in focus, covering different epochs of human societies in Princeton, its environs, and the broader world. You will be able to practice new material literacy skills in field trips and in projects for public audiences.