Global Arc

Why do development projects succeed or fail? This course examines how to design a human-centered development project using anthropological theory and methods. It looks closely at what anthropologists mean by culture and why most development experts fail to attend to the cultural forces that hold communities together. By examining development projects from the vantage in North Africa, students learn the relevance of kinship, power, religion, and ontologies. Students will also work with local organizations in the High Atlas Mountains as a way to study development in practice.

This course explores early modern figurations of gender and sex in the literature and philosophy of Europe. We will look carefully at poetry, plays, utopian fiction, and natural philosophy from early modern England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the wider Atlantic world. Orienting our reading around the intersecting paradigms of faith, labor, and utopia, this course will offer us the chance to explore historical theories of gender, sex, and desire as well as consent, race, and property. We will also consider how early modern problems and assumptions inform more recent debates concerning gender and sexuality.

Introduces the transdisciplinary field of trauma studies by examining visions of humanity from the Global South that prioritize alternative narratives and paradigms of healing individual and collective trauma. Re-orienting healing as a decolonizing process enables students to re-politicize personal trauma as it intersects with global legacies of violence, war, racism, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, orientalism, homophobia, ableism, capitalism, and extractivism. The course participates in a new project to help illuminate how the humanities itself can offer new paths to understanding trauma and healing.

This course examines feminist critiques of art history and contemporary art. What challenges did they pose to the fields of art history and contemporary art? Drawing on artworks by Rosa Bonheur, Georgia O'Keeffe, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, Shahzia Sikander, Andy Warhol and others from the Princeton University Art Museum, as well as readings in art history, art criticism, cultural criticism, literature and philosophy, we will see how the feminist critique transformed art history and contemporary art, and was itself transformed in the process.

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."