Global Arc

This course examines mental health, from the increasingly biological models espoused by psychiatric practitioners, to spiritual, social, and political understandings of psychic distress and healing. It investigates contemporary trends in mental health practice, exploring how diagnostic criteria are created and inhabited, experiments in pharmaceutical thinking, and alternative psychotherapeutic approaches across a variety of historical and social contexts. The class will explore how social worlds are shaped by mental health categories, and how identities, politics, economics, and philosophies contend, produce, and confront psychic distress.

This course focuses on Indigenous world-makings in the Anthropocene. We will reflect on how the current climate crisis is actively being produced through the destruction of Indigenous worlds. Two key anthropological questions guide our seminar: How do Indigenous groups differently understand world endings? How are Indigenous peoples resisting neocolonial and extractivist violence? We will work mainly with ethnographic writings, films, journalistic reports, and artworks, with a focus on Indigenous perspectives. Starting in Amazonia, we will develop a comparative perspective of Indigenous worldings across the Americas.

Africa, Europe and the Middle East meet at the Mediterranean. This course will look at two millennia of Mediterranean history to see how this sea has been both shared and contested. This course is organized around a geographical entity rather than a political framework such as a state. As such, environmental and maritime history will be a theme running throughout the course.

Over the past 3,000 years, texts written in Greek played a central role for how people in Western Eurasia understood themselves, their society, their values, and the nature of the universe. Over the same three millennia, the Greek language played a central role in a variety of political communities, including ancient Athens, the empire of Alexander, the Roman empire, Byzantium, and the modern nation state of Greece. In this course, we will trace the history of these two phenomena: the political life and fortunes of Greek speakers and the cultural life of texts written in Greek, seeking to understand the relationship between the two.

This is an intensive six-week summer immersion course in Twi language and culture open to Princeton students with no prior proficiency in the Twi language. Combining both in-class language and culture study as well as interactions with native speakers, the course aims at enriching students' language acquisition through speaking, writing, reading, and listening. This immersion program combines TWI 101 and TWI 102, and learners are expected to reach a proficiency level of Intermediate low.

Massive protests in the summer of 2020 reignited discussions about the most effective path to equality. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) have been thrust into the spotlight as a site for potential cross-racial cooperation and space for redress. This course will explore persistent inequality in American education through the lens of these colleges that were created in the shadow of emancipation. It will focus on history and impact of HBCUs on African American life and culture, their role in the political and cultural development of the nation and the possibilities they represent in efforts to create "a more perfect union."

The demand to be yourself permeates many aspects of our culture. Identity has become a contemporary dogma of sorts. In this course, we will question this be-yourself mantra, and focus on what is most deeply human: attention and engagement with everything outside the self. Instead of identity, then, we will focus on impersonality, a concept explored and adopted by many artists, thinkers, and doctors to explain the point of their practice: becoming the other through fiction, observation, or empathy, and aiming towards something beyond the self's limited experience.

Unfinished art captivates by revealing its maker's creative processes, by leaving its subject matter open and unresolved, and by inviting its viewers to imagine its completion. This seminar examines the rise of unfinishedness as a central, and disruptive, new category of Renaissance art, and probes its meanings and implications. Incomplete paintings, statues, prints, and architecture by Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, and others, will be brought into dialogue with incompleteness in art-theoretical, religious, literary, scientific, political, and theatrical contexts. This class will coincide with a major conference on the topic.

The course examines how issues of race and gender shape the medical, social, and cultural discourses of reproduction. It will explore contested meanings of reproductive health alongside histories of eugenics, contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, emerging reproductive technologies, and reproductive justice activism. It will also address the enduring legacies of racism and reproductive violence in medical practice, and their impact on current issues of health inequality.

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?