Global Arc

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.

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.

Excavate/Illuminate will guide students' archival research and collaborative exploration of US history, journalism, and performance, focusing on the pivotal Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) as a case study. We will read several examples of documentary theater to see how artists create theater from the raw materials of history. For the first half of the semester, students will work in small groups, exploring online resources in order to develop and perform original scripts in the style of Federal Theatre Project Living Newspapers. During weeks 7-12, students will select collaborators and historical topics of interest to devise final performances.

This seminar focuses on the intersection of language and visual art in the twentieth-century. We begin by examining modernist and avant-garde experiments in word and image and then investigate the global rise of concrete and visual poetry and text-based art movements after World War II. We compare and combine methods from literary studies and art history, as well as other disciplines, including history, sociology, and philosophy. We examine artworks from, and the networks that connect, Brazil, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This class analyzes how different cultures imagine monsters and how these representations changed over time to perform different social functions. As negative objectifications of fundamental social structures and conceptions, monsters are a key to understand the culture that engendered them. This course has three goals: it familiarizes students with the semiotics of monsters worldwide; it teaches analytical techniques exportable to other topics and fields; it proposes interpretive strategies of "reading culture" comparatively beyond the stereotype of "the West and the Rest."

This course introduces students to the socio-historical and political processes through which religion is represented, contested, and managed in the built environment. The course pays particular attention to the way that claims of religion implicate questions of diversity, difference, and justice in contemporary cities. Students will study the conceptual and historical debates on the role and place of religion in the public sphere and analyze empirical cases of how spatial decisions regulate or enable expressions of religious difference in urban settings.

Why do people love Broadway musicals? How do audiences engage with musicals and their stars? How have fan practices changed since the 1950s alongside economic and artistic changes in New York and on Broadway? In what ways does "fan of" constitute a social identity? How do fans perform their devotion to a show, to particular performers, and to each other? This class examines the social forms co-created by performers and audiences, both during a performance and in the wider culture. Students will practice research methods including archival research, ethnographic observation, in-depth interviewing, and textual and performance analysis.

Have you ever wondered how to measure the complexity of a literary text? What if you could map the personal connections in a Jane Austen novel or a Shakespeare play? Have you had an intuition that you haven't been able to follow because processing the information was too intimidating? If so, the digital humanities can help you. This course will explore the large and exciting field of digital humanities. You'll learn how to read and understand texts using DH methods and will start your own DH project.

Revolution! Espionage! Alexander Hamilton! George Washington! Cannon fire on Nassau Hall! This fall, think outside of the classroom and explore the past in your own backyard: Revolutionary-era Princeton and the physical remains of the legendary battle between American and British forces on January 3, 1777. What happened on that day? Who died? Where are their bones? Why are lawyers fighting over the land? In this new, interdisciplinary course, you will undertake to answer these questions and help solve the longstanding puzzle of the Battle of Princeton. In the process, you will explore how events of the past persistently shape the present day.