Global Arc

Amazonia is a planetary hotspot of biocultural diversity and a massive carbon sink on the brink. The seminar explores how Indigenous knowledges and the environment co-produce one another and considers the significance of forest-making practices for conservation science and climate change mobilization. Drawing from historical, ethnographic, and ecological studies, Planet Amazonia is a platform for alternative storytelling and future-making agendas based on new scholarly and activist alliances. Students will engage with Indigenous scholars and environmental activists and will craft alternative visions to safeguard this vital planetary nexus.

Politics as Performance helps us understand how local governments function, and how the performance of democracy can be different from its enactment. The class offers a hands-on way to learn about decision-making, empathy, citizenship and the dramaturgy of power. We'll use tools from sociology, philosophy, civics and theater to analyze local democratic processes in Princeton and Trenton today. At a time when our commons feels frayed at best, this course helps activate possible ways to work with each other, both in the evolving digital commons and in person.

This course examines the representation of women as outlaw in literature. It takes as its premise the quest for women to transgress their gender identities by questioning the acceptable traditional, religious, and cultural gender norms that undermine their self-potential. Through class discussions and presentations, students will explore how writers through their female characters interrogate, redefine, or fortify the boundaries of womanhood. At the end of the class, students will be able to identify and relate with some of the sociocultural, political, religious, and economic factors that lead to women's quest for self-identity.

We will examine moments of change at different crucial stages in the life cycle (childhood, adolescence, courtship and marriage, work, maturity, and finally death) as they are portrayed in outstanding short stories and one novella. We'll attempt to discover how this change is conveyed convincingly and compellingly, to delineate the nature of the conflict at each stage, and how much of the change comes from without and within, and what the story has to tell us about the essence of each time of life.

Whether we like it or not, the algorithm directs how we perform ourselves in person and online. Students will engage with hybrid media and performance practices through which artists consider the body in public space, onstage, and digitally. The course will explore various sites of cutting-edge art practices from scenes of political theater to experimental staged performances. Texts will include live and recorded performances, as well as historical and theoretical secondary sources. The class will host a guest artist talk series on the ever-shifting cultural climate.

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Our way of speaking is an essential part of our identity. Our particular language variety gives information to the listeners about where we were born, how old we are, our social class and even our race or ethnicity. However, since not all dialects are equally accepted, some speakers might feel judged because of their way of talking. In this seminar, we will analyze the reasons behind the belief that some language varieties are better than the rest, and debunk that myth. We will look at several examples of dialects around the globe and especially here in the US and we will study linguistic situations like multilingualism in our society.

Explores the creative output of one of the most exceptional figures in European history: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), composer, dramatist, poet, mystic, healer. Hildegard's staggeringly original corpus of works across media was uniquely directed toward the cultivation and care of her fellow creatures. A millennium out, when society's failure to care has proven catastrophic, Hildegard's vision of cosmic connectedness provides a historical counter-case. Class activities move between medieval and modern, historical and hands-on, using workshops in medieval medicinal gardening, baking, and singing as springboards to Hildegard's complex works.

Scholars trying to explain the human past are confronted with some major problems: To what degree can objectivity be achieved in the analysis of history? Is there anything such as 'historical truth'? What 'literary' constraints are imposed upon historiographic writings? Can narration on its own provide a real understanding of the past? Is a 'scientific' history possible? We will study how historians have approached these questions and envisioned the study of history. In addition, we will deal with a highly controversial case study - Nazi Germany- which tests the relevance of historians' debates.

We will explore magic ("fairy") tales from around the world, focusing on traditional narrative patterns and their meanings. Viewing them as stories that reflect significant events of the life cycle, we will treat symbolic journeys (e.g., of initiation), the Other World, and family relationships as well as oral composition, variants, multiforms, storytellers, performance, critical approaches to the study of the genre, and how magic tales inform other types of narrative in literature and film. Our goal is to "read" the "texts" of magic tales and understand how and why they so vividly express the human experience.