Global Arc

This course focuses on the Near East from antiquity to the early centuries of Islam, introducing the most important works of literature, politics, ethics, aesthetics, religion, and science from the region. We ask how, why, and to what ends the Near East sustained such a long period of high humanistic achievement, from Pharaonic Egypt to Islamic Iran, which in turn formed the basis of the high culture of the following millennium.

This course introduces students to Near Eastern societies and cultures over the last one thousand years. Students will explore the diverse cities and regions of the Near East and the equally diverse religious, ethnic, and ultimately national communities that populated them. Students will have the opportunity to study a variety of genres of sources from religious polemics to architecture, travelogues to hagiographies, philosophical treatises to imperial edicts, feminist critiques to nationalist and religious revivalist tracts, along with short stories, novels, and even graphic memoirs.

This course offers a peek behind the curtain of academic thought, examining how knowledge is created in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Each week we focus on a different discipline, deciphering its assumptions and understanding how its scholars pose questions, conduct research, and advance arguments. In small seminar meetings, students discuss classic works from the discipline and practice its thinking, reading, and writing techniques. Once a week, all seminars gather for a colloquium with a Princeton scholar or scientist, who will reflect on his or her current work in relation to the discipline as a whole.

Ways of Knowing empowers students to become active producers of knowledge by introducing them to scholarly ways of thinking, reading, and writing across the University. Students analyze a variety of multidisciplinary texts that raise questions about power, institutions, and identity. In Summer 2022, Ways of Knowing will focus on the ways knowledge is produced, manipulated, disseminated, and consumed. Students gain an understanding of the diverse--and intersecting--ways that scholars ask questions and generate knowledge. Most importantly, students will use this understanding to make their own contribution to this scholarly conversation.

This is a course in the history of American thinkers and American ideas, and the patterns we can identify as distinctively American. It will begin with the import of European philosophical and religious frameworks and trace the emergence of distinctive pathways of ethics, law, politics, literature and science in American thinkers, on a diverse spectrum that includes Jonathan Edwards, Francis Wayland, John Williamson Nevin, Margaret Fuller, William James, Frederick Douglass, the New Left, Leo Strauss, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Angelina Grimke.

This course introduces the study of religion by juxtaposing the narratives, teachings, careers and legacies of the founders of Christianity and Buddhism. While respecting each tradition's unique and distinctive texts, rituals, philosophies, and histories, the course invites us to deepen our understanding of each tradition by looking through the lens of the other. Course readings will include accounts of the lives of Jesus and Buddha, what each taught about how to live and create society, and how each understood the meaning of life and death, suffering and salvation.

This course introduces students to critical approaches to media and data with the goal of helping students better assess media and data's permeating role in society, culture, and politics today. Through modules covering visual culture, science and technology studies, and digital humanities, student will learn to analyze mass-circulated images and text; examine the historical and social context of technoscientific innovation; and experiment with data sets and visualization. As we explore these approaches to the study of media, culture, and technology, we will consider the stakes of such inquiry from the standpoint of justice and equity.

HUM 302 explores illness, health, and the body using storytelling as an entry point. It examines how science, subjectivity, and social difference -- race, class, gender, and sexuality -- are articulated on a global scale. The 1920s construction of the New Soviet Man resonates with histories of medical discrimination in the US; early Soviet studies on biomechanics and the body-machine illuminate current debates on disability and health disparities; the Russian tradition of the Holy Fool jumpstarts a discussion of neurodiversity. Guest lecturers from across Sciences and Humanities will each teach a class in their own institutional space.

This seminar introduces students to basic concepts of working with literary texts and working with data. Crossing the divisional boundaries of literary analysis and quantitative and computational reasoning, we'll learn how to develop a compelling research question, to explore the many methodologies for using computation to analyze literature, and to put our work in context of the long history of literature conceived of as data. We'll think broadly about the role of humanities in data science, and learn the importance of interpretation, exploration, iteration, creativity, analysis, and critique in both literary and quantitative work.

This course engages the core disciplines of history, literary analysis, and archaeology to examine how people in medieval Britain and northwest Europe understood and created the physical, imaginative, and sociocultural landscapes in which they lived. Through texts, structures, and objects, we will recover what individuals in these cultures believed, how they ate, and what they longed for. We're interested in arcs of trade and political contacts, as well as in creative exchanges worked out in brilliant metalwork and unforgettable poetry.