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.

This Berlin-based seminar provides a survey of the major writings of German critical theorists on the media, totalitarianism, and the public sphere along with responses from several Anglo-American and French cultural theorists. In the final week we explore structuralism as an alternative model of critical philosophy. Each week includes one required excursion germane to the reading; optional excursions to various museums and cultural sites around Berlin will be organized for other afternoons.

This course immerses students in the art and culture of early twentieth-century Vienna, a center of radical experimentation across literature, philosophy, and the arts. Through select readings and site visits, we will explore how writers like Schnitzler and Musil traced the dynamics of consciousness, how Freud revealed instinctual forces beneath the rational self, and how painters like Klimt and Schiele captured these forces on canvas. We will also survey Vienna's formative influence on modern philosophy (Wittgenstein) and music (Schönberg), and study how these movements both arose from and contended with the city's turbulent history.

This course offers an introduction to German critical thought, focusing on theories of knowledge that have profoundly shaped modern intellectual discourse. Beginning with the philosophical revolution sparked by Kant's examination of the limits of human knowledge, we will explore how thinkers such as Hegel and Marx analyzed knowledge's historical and material conditions and grapple with Nietzsche's and Freud's discovery of the unconscious. Classical sources will be read alongside modern thinkers, including Arendt, Foucault, and Angela Davis. Our overarching goal is to introduce key concepts of critical thought and probe their relevance today.

This introductory class will explore the work of writers, artists and filmmakers emerging from the global experience of 21st-century migration and the new forms of hybridized expression they have invented to deal with their uprooting. How do migrant authors challenge and reshape their languages? What is the relationship between the polyphonic character of such writing and the struggle for identity or what one might call "migrantity"? Marcel Proust says "beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language": shouldn't literature created in multiple foreign languages be thus at least twice as lovely as that written in just one idiom?

Junior Independent Work 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 seminar will investigate the lesser-known far right governments, organizations, networks, and actors in Austria (as well as their opponents) between the First and Second World Wars, not only in light of their connections and antagonisms with the National Socialists in Germany, but also within the specific context of the end of the Hapsburg monarchy in 1918. Materials range over a number of disciplines and media, including intellectual, cultural, political, and material history; literature; art; and others in an age of attempted renewal in the ruins of a multilingual and -ethnic empire. Taught in German.

"It seems certain," wrote Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in 1929, "that we do not feel comfortable in our present-day civilization." Maybe you've sometimes come to the same conclusion about how we live today. Freud thought he knew why. Our drives and desires as human animals, and as sexual beings especially, are at odds with the demands of cultural development. This course provides an introduction to Freud's writings, from his founding of psychoanalysis in the 1890s, to his epochal Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, to his reflections on culture and civilization as at once achievements of human creativity and constraints on our happiness.

This course introduces the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, from his early work on ancient Greek tragedy and his reflections on modern opera and literature to his major critiques of morality, religion, and modern culture. Reading The Birth of Tragedy and On the Genealogy of Morality as well as several of his experimental and sometimes enigmatic aphoristic texts, this course examines how Nietzsche challenges inherited values, questions the purpose of historical reflection, and redefines the task of philosophical thought.

Why is it harder to read a book than watch a video? Can our field of vision be changed by a text? How do theories translate into images? This seminar traces the deep history of this media (in)compatibility through exemplary cases and interactive assignments from the classics to our digital age. We will discuss readings, images, and films from media studies, art, literature, philosophy, reading science, and psychology. In self-experiments, we will engage with crossovers such as diagrams, tutorials, ekphrasis, gamification, and GUIs to investigate contemporary understanding and imagining. Our goal is a critical media anthropology of today.