Global Arc

Designed for students with advanced training in modern Chinese, this course will further develop their language comprehension, communication skills, and cultural understanding. Students will improve their spoken Chinese in various situations, from informal conversations to professional presentations suitable for business and academic settings. Students will also develop their ability to speak and write Chinese using more engaging, complex, and occasion-appropriate language. Course topics will focus on contemporary Chinese society, including cultural identities, pop culture, the economy, environmentalism, law, and social discourse.

This course explores the work and life of poets across the Chinese-speaking world from the tumultuous twentieth century to the present. How does poetry adapt to the evolving media landscape and serve as a storage device for the events, experiences, and myths of modern China? How did poets transform crises--dynastic collapse, colonialism, national failure, revolution, war, displacement, state and mass violence, political repression, environmental calamity--into critical reflections on the diverse yet interconnected human condition? Concluding with a glimpse into the creativity of AI poets, we ask: why do humans still need poetry?

A vortex is known as the rotating, whirling or circular motion of fluid around a common centerline. Through history, humans have drawn on the principles of the vortex to induce a trance state, an altered form of consciousness, and psychospiritual embodiment. This course will explore our ancestry in understanding sacred trance dance practices in the tradition of western theatrical dance and its connection to identity, creativity, and community. Students will work with the original cast of Núñez's choreography The Circle or The Prophetic Dream, to reimagine the choreographic material that they will perform as a final project in an open studio.

This course is designed for students to engage in the process of creating new work for performance. Rather than starting with a written play or a pre-conceived movement vocabulary, the students will work together to develop a show from scratch, using a range of improvisation, experimentation, and writing techniques to generate ideas, shape the content, and structure the performance. This course will take inspiration from Raja Feather Kelly's company `the feath3r theory's' model for devised danced theatre called "The Approach". The final work will be performed at the Princeton Dance Festival in Fall 2023.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a core technology at the heart of modern AI that learn to make good decisions in complex environments. It encompasses technologies such as continuous variable optimization, Q learning, neural networks, policy search, and bandit exploration. In this course, we aim to give an introductory overview of reinforcement learning, its core challenges, and approaches, including exploration and generalization. In parallel, we will present a collection of case studies from intelligent systems, games and healthcare. Students will learn through a combination of lectures, written assignments and coding assignments.

Assumptions and practices by the nonprofit industrial complex, government agencies and affordable housing developers treat poor communities, especially poor communities of color as problems to be managed by those from outside these communities. The Reclamation Studio explores the humanistic design practices applied by social entrepreneurs from low-status communities near Princeton (our "clients") that counteract that history of systemic bias with innovative development projects designed to retain the talent from within their communities. Students will have the opportunity to learn from, and contribute to their efforts.

In this course, students will think dynamically about the relationship between archival records of Black life and Black women's creative expression to interrogate the possibilities and the limits of historical archives. Through hands-on engagement with archival objects in special collections and deep readings of literature, poetry, and visual arts, we will explore what the archival record affords, erases, and silences, and, conversely, how imaginative practices can begin to address and redress its subjects and their histories.

This seminar course will explore the interaction of viral infections and the human nervous system. Topics will include both direct effects of neurotropic viruses affecting the central and peripheral nervous systems and indirect effects of infection on these systems (e.g., rabies encephalitis, Covid-19 brain fog, EBV and multiple sclerosis). The course will be discussion based, focused on primary literature from a multidisciplinary perspective - considering the function of neural circuits and systems, mechanisms of neuroinvasion, and viral pathogenesis.

The goal of this course is to introduce students to the field of motor control from an interdisciplinary and comparative biological perspective. We will focus on how organisms move through a complex, unpredictable environment. Major topics will include muscle and limb control, how animals build and execute a motor program, and how they incorporate sensory feedback into that motor program. We will use examples from both vertebrate and invertebrate systems and look across scales of biological organization. The class will be a mix of the occasional lecture and discussion of primary literature.

When the name of Miguel de Cervantes is mentioned, readers tend to think of the character Don Quijote -most often his idealism or madness. But far beyond that, the radically new work that is Don Quijote - along with several of Cervantes - other creations -offer unorthodox and challenging perspectives on race, ethnicity, gender, class, and human nature. His theater, his highly experimental Exemplary Stories, and the Persiles all offer Mediterranean dramas of exiles, slaves, captives, renegades and male and female protagonists in the confrontation of identity and the hegemonic categories of the Spanish empire.