Global Arc

What makes hell what it is? What archetypes of the underworld helped to cement its importance in different religious systems? Why is hell so alive in secular culture today? This course explores the literary topos of the descent into the underworld in several strands of literary culture in the west. In the seminar, we will discuss underworld themes and archetypes in 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.

Increasing global connectivity has brought forth multiple challenges such as such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the rise in cryptocurrency assets driven by mistrust in institutions, and informational opacity despite continuous digital connectivity. To 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. Starting with the evolution of Bell Labs and the invention of the transistor in 1949, every decade since has seen a path-breaking invention.

Data is everywhere. Using site-specific research methods, students will explore their local environs, on campus and beyond, searching for data and the patterns and stories that follow. They will collect their observations in evolving archives, iterating on modes of communication (including documentary drawing, sensory visualization, and information design). The output of the course will consist of small weekly projects and responses to data-driven readings, films, design, and art, culminating in the production of a larger creative data visualization project, which illuminates a local story or pattern via data uncovered during the semester.

What does it mean to photograph yourself? Is it an act of self-exploration, narcissism, self-love, representational justice? What are the possibilities and limitations of making art in this way? What can our bodies teach us if we 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 foreground embodiment and play, out of which students will generate material for their photographic explorations. We will learn the basics of camera operation and consider how things like framing, angle of view, and distance influence meaning.

This seminar will explore, primarily in American literature, themes of individual and cultural identity from 19th century texts (Irving, Poe, James) to 20th and 21st century fiction and selected works of art, photography, and film. Students will write 1-2 page papers each week, present an analysis and discussion of a text or art-work, and write a paper of 12-15 pages. Questions will be: Is the "American Dream" an ideal, a shared cultural identity, or is it a chimera? How does the "Dream" manifest itself in individual works of art?

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.

Princeton and Princetonians have played foundational roles in creating the information technologies - computers, smart phones, and the Internet, for example - that help to define today's world. This seminar will both introduce students to some of the basics of information technologies and emphasize Princeton's role in the development of these technologies. The seminar will examine the contributions of pioneers such as Alan Turing, John Von Neuman, Claude Shannon, John Bardeen, and Robert Kahn, among others, to information technologies. The material will be presented at a level suitable for students with general backgrounds.

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 called the most filmed location in the world. This seminar will take a deep dive into its history and cultural meanings, and will approach the park through a myriad of disciplinary lenses. The course will take up the complexity and contradictions inherent in the creation and preservation of 'nature' in the city that would become the cultural and economic capital of the United States.

They say, "you are what you eat," but what does the food that we consume say about us and our ways of being? La cocina, the kitchen, as the heart of the home often appears in literature, film, commercial enterprises, and television. This course will examine food practices and behaviors through the anthropological, historical, sociological, and psychological interpretations of food and eating. An understanding of how food and meals have evolved to create culture and identity will augment students' understanding of their relationship with food and culture, history, geography, and themselves.

In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? What are the aesthetic, political, and daily life possibilities within stillness? In this studio course, we'll dance, sit, question, and create substantial final projects. We'll play with movement within stillness, stillness within movement, stillness in performance and in performers' minds. We'll look at stillness as protest and power. We'll wonder when stillness might be an abdication of responsibility. We'll read within religious, philosophy, performance, and disability studies, and will explore social justice, visual art, and sound (and silence).