Global Arc

Brexit is the defining problem for British culture and politics in the contemporary moment. This course will read twenty-first century British literature and popular culture through the lens that Brexit provides, as well as reading Brexit through the lenses of earlier historical, political, and cultural touchstones from the mid-twentieth century to the present. We will look at recent works of poetry and fiction alongside film, pop music, and cultural criticism of the last fifty years to ask: what is and was "Britain" in the long lead-up to Brexit, and what might it look like in the future?

How do novels represent the global? How have new media systems and economic exchange transformed not only the way novels are produced and distributed but also the internal form of the literary works themselves? This course examines how writers register the interconnected nature of modern life and the narrative strategies that they invent to make sense of migration, war, urbanization, and financialization. Students will learn interdisciplinary methods for reading literature's potential for sociological and historical knowledge by considering how the global novel grapples with empire and what political futures it forecloses and opens up.

Disability theorist Tobin Siebers explains, "aesthetics track the emotions that some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies." In this course, we will consider if the definition is sufficient by exploring how nineteenth-century artists and writers, and particularly those involved in the Pre-Raphaelite and Aestheticism movements, thought about and transmitted aesthetic values, particularly as such values were expressed in embodied forms.

The last two decades have ushered in an unprecedented era of change and reflection. From the shifting of political and cultural orders at the turn of the millennium to the global circulation of the internet, human modes of expression have developed in dramatically different ways. We will explore novels written in English from 2000 to the present that reflect on change -- cultural, political, technological, environmental -- and in so doing, consider our position as twenty-first century readers in relation to both the past and the future.

Inter-disciplinary class on early modern Amsterdam (1550-1720) when the city was at the center of the global economy and leading cultural center; home of Rembrandt and Spinoza (Descartes was nearby) and original figures like playwrights Bredero and Vondel, the ethicist engraver Coornhert, the political economist de la Court brothers and English traveling theater. We go from art to poetry, drama, philosophy and medicine. Spring Break is in Amsterdam with museum visits, guest talks and participation in recreation of traveling theater from the period.

The critical developments of 20th-century Europe and the consolidation of democracy in European countries, including the legacy of the two world wars, Nazism, Stalinism, the Cold War, colonialism and decolonization, the birth and development of the European Community, the development of the welfare state, the problems confronting the European Union (immigration, enlargement, political institutions, military role), and the varieties of democratic institutions in Europe. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course gives a broad and interdisciplinary perspective on some of the very diverse cultural and historical roots of European identity. It examines contemporary debates over contested identity in the light of long historical trajectories in which identities were continually defined and reshaped. It is conceived as an introduction to many of the courses in Princeton dealing with European issues. The landmarks include, but are not restricted to, written texts. They include Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Marx, and J.S. Mill, but also Fra Angelico, Beethoven and Thomas Mann. One three-hour seminar.

What kind of polity is the European Union? Is it a form of economic and political integration, an actor at the global scene, an interlocutor of the United States? What is its relationship to its Member States? How is it organized? What do democracy, citizenship, and fundamental rights mean for the EU? The seminar is designed to help better understand this organization--its political roots and objectives, its legal foundations and development, and its existence as a new kind of a federal system "beyond statehood". We will study the case law of the European Court of Justice and other writings about the constitutional process of the EU.

This course explores how gender is integral to constructions of health and illness. How do techniques of knowledge production in law, biomedicine, and public health rely on and invent ideas about gender difference? How is gender embodied in individual and collective experiences of suffering and affliction? How are such bodily experiences cross-cut by other conditions of social life, such as; culture, race, class, ethnicity, nationality and migration? The course combines readings in anthropology, literature, women¿s and gender studies, and critical theory to explore these questions in the contemporary context of the United States.

Why are people committed to the "Paleo" diet in the 21st Century? Why do we apply the title "comfort" to certain foods? This class will use anthropology as a platform to explore how diverse health outcomes are connected to the foods we do (and do not) eat. While we will consider how food is implicated in individual health outcomes (such as malnutrition and chronic disease), we will also explore food and diet at an evolutionary scale. Shaping these explorations will be a sharp critical lens that considers how culture shapes our perceptions of food and health and how power intersects in our ability to so access those needs and preferences.