Global Arc

This course invites students to reflect upon the interdependence between humans and the natural world through the voice of poets, philosophers, filmmakers, and artists whose attention focuses on nature's glow, that is, on its inspiring aura. Can a work of art or a cultural artifact help us understand the connection of all living and nonliving things? Can it allow us to deepen our understanding of our place on earth? Can art's insight inspire compassionate knowledge, and spark action? The final project for this course will be to imagine and craft an ecological restoration project.

Does modern progress corrupt our morals and degrade our humanity? Has the march of civilization exhausted our souls? This course engages classic literary and philosophic works that explore how humanity has been shaped by modernizing forces. Students will investigate the enlightenment's promise to improve the human condition through the accumulation of knowledge, the technological mastery of nature, and the conferral of natural rights. They will consider--and question--modernity's faith in the goodness of progress, liberalism, socialism, science, technology, and democracy.

In Western society, we're not great at endings. We try to prolong the life of a person or venture at all costs. We avoid planning for or even talking about the end. Yet new initiatives often cannot begin without something else's end. This course explores the complexities of our relationship to endings: their philosophical and theological conceptions, the psychological underpinnings of our resistance to them, the sociological implications of current approaches. We also contemplate ways that behavioral science and other disciplines might inform a new and potentially more advantageous approach to policy decisions by keeping the end in mind.

In this seminar, students learn how subjectivities are negotiated in and through language, and perform a critical exploration of languages as social institutions, ideological battlegrounds, instruments used to homogenize populations, define citizenship, and create hierarchies. We discuss language as part of the social, cultural, and political machinery that enabled the rise of the nation-state, linguistic nationalism and colonialism, and we focus on the emergence of complex multilingual identities against a backdrop of monolingual forces that remain ubiquitous in our political institutions and cultural and epistemological productions.

This seminar studies how relations among pets and humans have changed over the past two centuries. Reading across humanities and social science disciplines, we will consider the unexpected connections that link pets to specific articulations of gender, race, sexuality, class, ability, and species. Arranged topically and historically, the seminar considers issues ranging from the gendered development of cat breeds in Victorian England to the racial politics of modern dog rescue. We will study animal companions not as passive receptacles of human culture, but rather as beings with agency who have co-determined their places in our lives.

This seminar focuses on the intersection of environmental and climate justice. Drawing upon scholarly articles, books, music, art, films, and testimonies from experts, we will learn about the conditions that have given rise to environmental and climate justice movements; differences in demands, strategies, and worldviews expressed by such movements around the globe; and grapple with the structural and institutional barriers they face. This seminar also pays special attention to our local context, highlighting relevant scholarship at Princeton University in order to expose freshmen to faculty and the ENV certificate program.

This course explores the construction, imaging, and experience of the racialized body while considering modern regimes of power. It examines the legacies of White supremacy and Coloniality in relation to cultural production and the body. This course's pedagogical approach is rooted in Chicana/o Studies and will examine power in relation to Latinx and other communities of color--it does not focus on Mexican/Latinx communities exclusively. When analyzing power, it recognizes the importance of contextualizing visual, audio, and embodied performative representations of culture to understand how the body speaks back to power.

The Molecular Biology Research Experience is a two-semester sequence that provides sophomore students with an in lab research experience mentored by faculty in the department. MOL 280, offered in the fall semester, is a non-credit bearing P/D/F course and the required prerequisite for MOL 281, which is offered in the spring semester and carries one unit of credit. Students must earn a "P" in MOL 280 to enroll in MOL 281. Students are expected to spend a minimum of 6 hours per week engaged in research and attend weekly meeting as determined by the mentoring faculty.

This class considers atonality and noise as resources for 20th & 21st century musicians, ranging freely across folk, popular, and notated traditions. We begin with percussion music, music concrete, and sampling; then consider pitch as a kind of noise: free atonality, free improvisation, textural music (Penderecki, Xenakis, etc.), and spectralism. Also fusions of pitch and noise: feedback, distortion, extended techniques, and modular synthesis. Ending with set theory, total serialism, and the attempt to devise a "language" of atonality.

An exploration of ritual and ceremony as creative, interdisciplinary spaces imbued with intention and connected to personal and cultural histories. A broadening and deepening of knowledge around historical and contemporary ritual, ceremonial, and community-building practices of queer and trans artist communities from around the world, with a deeper focus on the extraordinary history of the queer trans shamans of early 20th century Korea.