Global Arc

In this course we will be looking at narrative structures that comprise the mechanics of textual and visual storytelling. Whether it is Aristotle's 'Poetics' or Quentin Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction', a PC adventure game, or a music video, they share the social and cultural activity of storytelling. From analyzing the art of comic strips and e-books designed for tablets, together we will be not only reading and watching the stories made by others, but also creating the stories of our own. You will try your hand at street photography, shoot a short film, conceptualize a publicity campaign together with your classmates, and much more.

Traditionally art and the sciences have been treated as separate disciplines, but both are systems of understanding and describing the world around us. By studying them together, new possibilities emerge. This course takes a holistic and renaissance view that encourages students to find a creative practice inspired by the concepts and scope of their area of concentration. The approach is interdisciplinary, experimental, and pragmatic, and will facilitate the completion of an interdisciplinary project over the course of the semester while becoming familiar with contemporary research-based work and discourse around STEAM education and practice.

What is a nation, how is it made, and how does it constantly have to be remade? How do ideas about language, race, gender, and culture shape perceptions of the past and understandings of belonging? This course takes Greece as a case study to examine the concepts and tools that go into making a nation. Each week we consider a different resource for nation making, from the use of history and the shaping of ethnicity to sports and food. We also explore the relevance of this study to understanding the U.S. today. Students work towards a final project that educates the public about how works of art contribute to making, or unmaking, the nation.

This course offers, to interested students of any background or worldview, an introduction to how centrals texts and thinkers in the Catholic intellectual tradition explore the central questions about human nature, the good life, and virtue.

This course offers a bird's eye view of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. We will trace the history of the Universe from the earliest initial conditions that we can tangibly infer based on the physics of what we observe in the Universe today. Students will be asked to develop a short film clip describing the cosmic history starting with weekly short essay assignments on elements of cosmic history. No prerequisites in math or physics are required. This course is about learning something meaningful about the physics that governs the early period of the Universe and being able to convey that understanding to others.

It is 1633. Galileo stands trial before the Roman Inquisition, charged with committing heresy for advocating the Copernican belief that the sun lies at the center of the universe. It is up to you to decide the outcome. Should Galileo's books be banned? Should he be placed under arrest, or even worse? In this course you get to rewrite history. The main part of this course involves the role-playing game 'The Trial of Galileo' developed using the Reacting to the Past format. You will also help design a new microgame based on the Roman Inquisition's Index attempt to place Lucretius poem on ancient atomism on the Index of Forbidden books.

King Arthur of Camelot has fascinated writers and artists for centuries. This seminar interrogates the grip the legend has had on Western imagination, beginning with 20th- and 21st-century novels and films. How do such works "read" Arthur and what do these interpretations imply about their own contexts? Tracing the legend back to its earliest (5th c.) manifestations in Latin chronicles, students explore the creation, deployment, and transmission of myth over time and thereby develop their ability to perform close readings of different media as well as more nuanced understandings of both the present and the past.

This seminar will study how true crime narratives and its cultural history in what became the United States of America helped shape and reflect issues of American citizenship, immigration, gender, class, race, sexuality, and violence for over 350 years.

This seminar offers a contemporary, interdisciplinary introduction to the study of the Holocaust. We will study this unthinkable atrocity in both its historical specificity and its relevance to the present. We will thus move between works of history, first-person accounts, fiction, poetry, film, critical theory, and philosophy, testing the limits and powers of divergent idioms and genres in the face of atrocity. Is poetry possible 'after Auschwitz'? What about philosophy? We will conclude by asking how the Holocaust relates to contemporary forms of racism and fascism and if it is possible to think about the Holocaust 'intersectionally.'

Rembrandt (1606-1669) is an artist we feel we know, perhaps because he painted, etched and drew more self-portraits than any earlier artist. In this seminar, we will study all aspects of Rembrandt's art and examine firsthand his works held by the Princeton University Art Museum and museums in New York City.