Global Arc

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year.

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year.

This course studies artistic and cultural practices that created different aesthetics and politics of memory that have become essential to respond, denounce, and creatively resist to different forms of violence and human rights violations. Looking at essays, literature, visual arts, and sites of memory, the course will analyze how cultural works on memory and human rights have helped to create connections between past and present histories of both violence and resistance. Although the course focuses on Latin America, it will also look at forms of cultural transfer among memory practices from different parts of the world.

This course traces the social and literary history of maritime rebellion. From Pirates of the Caribbean to the specter of "Somali hijacking", Wikileaks, and the Orca uprising, seafaring (or web-surfing) agitators are back. Tracking the figure of the pirate in novels, ethnographies, films, comics, and counter-histories from the 16th century to the present, this course will approach piracy from three angles: "enemies of all mankind" and the making of international political orders; pirate predation and rebellion in the circuits of capital and Empire; mutiny, slave revolt and the new social orders that emerge out of pirate utopias.

This course surveys twenty and twenty-first century Southern African literature, with a focus on African epistemologies (ways of knowing). How have Southern Africans thought about human beings, the city, the divine, and nature? How do they conceptualize Black African futures? How do these literatures reflect indigenous theories of the world? Students will close read these epics, novels, and a few poems (some in translation from African languages) and develop their skills in exegesis and use of critical methodologies, such as postcolonial criticism, African feminism, and ecocriticism.

This course takes up major works of Herman Melville in a comparative frame, thus examining Melville alongside some of his contemporaries (Marx, Baudelaire, Douglas, Whitman), critical readers (C.L.R. James, Deleuze, Sedgwick), and spiritual descendants (Dickinson, Robert Walser, Claire Denis). We will focus on Melville as an experimental, anti-programmatic political writer particularly concerned with the rise of industrial and financial capitalism, slavery and abolition, anarchy and insurrection, sexuality; finally, we will also pay particular attention to Melville's peculiar humor and its various modalities (irony, parody, word-play, etc.).

This course explores the fictional life of the ocean. Drawing from literary and theoretical works we will examine how maritime life and infrastructures - from the slave ship to the death ship, from container terminals to coral reefs - have shaped imperial fantasies, climate crises and the production of global hierarchies. We will track the emergence of projects to exploit the ocean out of practices of governing the colonies, the plantation, the factory floor, racialized and gendered bodies. Finally, we will explore the sea's submerged history as the spawning ground of radical horizons, epistemological overhaul and speculative futures.

We will read global 21st-century speculative young adult fiction about characters caught between cultures or worlds real or imagined. How do we describe the Other, how do we compare ourselves to the Other? When do we become foreign? Finally, how do we come to terms with our own identity? We will read works from Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, and diasporic communities. Texts include short stories and novels, standalone works and volumes from series, from science fiction to fantasy to dystopias. We will also consider international fan culture, exploring how the readers of these works interact with the literature, authors, and each other.

From profane to heretical content, book censorship in the Spanish-speaking world is rooted in the underlying belief that the reading individual threatens imperial culture and government ideologies. Looking at texts that have been banned and burned in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, this course covers Hispanophone literature and culture from the 16th-20th centuries: the contexts of colonial expansion, Latin American dictatorships, and imperial vestiges in the transatlantic world. It also examines debates about gender and racial politics, historical revisionism, hegemonic global powers, language globalization, and academic freedom.

Junior Independent Work II requires students to complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. The work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the semester. See below for details on works-in-progress submissions and due dates. This course provides a venue for a second term of Junior Independent Work and, as such,  can only be taken after successful completion of the department¿s Junior Independent Work (398).