Global Arc

What does it mean to be a good person in a world of competing obligations, uncertain outcomes, and moral compromise? In this course, we will closely read selected portions of the Mahabharata, one of the longest epics in the world and a key source for Hindu ethics. We will explore the idea of "dharma" (duty, moral order) through dilemmas of love, gambling, exile, "necessary" violence, and grief, where every option has a cost. Readings are in translation (no Sanskrit required). We will also ask how the epic gains authority as "scripture" through interpretation, performance, and retellings in television, film, and theatre.

This course is a multidisciplinary approach to the field of South Asian Studies with a particular focus on the research of Princeton University faculty. Students will gain and understanding and perspective on the region and how a diverse group of scholars and academic fields explore South Asia including history, literature, culture, politics, and religion. Students will directly engage with primary materials, analyze them within context, develop strong arguments and present their insights in class.

In the world of AI and rising techno-automation, work's demise remains a speculative question. What will labor look like, particularly when the idea of the human rooted in labor has influenced Marxist, feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-caste struggles? In this seminar, students will examine humans' intertwined and contradictory relation to work. Through histories of caste, race, gender, and class that shape our understanding of what it means to be a worker, we will discuss the question of value in techno-capitalism. Students will read accounts of different workplaces from the Global South to discuss anti-work politics and post-work worlds.

AI is today dominated by a handful of companies in the West and China. This course examines AI in the rest of the world, especially the Global South. Focusing on India - but including other countries - we ask whether AI will widen global inequality or advance development, and what regulatory and other levers are available to policymakers. Topics include development and technology, digital public infrastructure (DPI), public AI, democracy and accountability, national sovereignty, and global governance. Students will explore issues such as low-resource languages, data access, and compute capacity, and interact virtually with policymakers.

This course examines the formative period of Indian philosophical thought, tracing its development from the pre-philosophical worldviews found in ancient Vedic literature to the systematic metaphysical frameworks that crystallized during the early centuries of the Common Era. Students examine how mythological concepts of creation, reality, time, space, etc., evolved into sophisticated philosophical categories within distinct traditions. Through close reading of primary texts in translation and secondary scholarship, the course explores the transformation from ritual cosmology to rigorous philosophical discourse.

This seminar examines Russian and East European sci-fi in its historical trajectory and in dialogue with works from other traditions. Through close examination of foundational texts and films, from interwar dystopias (Zamyatin) to stories of invasion, reproduction, and generation (Bulgakov), to robots (Capek, Asimov, Lem), Cold-War imagery, space exploration (Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Soderbergh), post-apocalyptic scenarios (Strugatsky), and the post-Soviet aesthetics (Pelevin), we will discuss the hopes, fears, values, and worldviews that characterize the time periods and societies in which those works were produced. All readings are in English.

The main objective of the course is twofold: to develop students' advanced high and above-level Russian language skills such as narrating, comparing, presenting and supporting opinions, and hypothesizing as well as to enhance students' cultural knowledge through a focus on Slavic / Russian visual arts, architecture, music, ballet, opera and drama, thus contributing to their understanding of Slavic culture in general. The highlights of the course are trips to the New York City Ballet and to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. The course will be taught in Russian.

The course offers an overview of the Ukrainian literature in terms of catastrophic thinking and representation of highly traumatic events of the twentieth century, such as war, revolution, Holocaust, Famine, and nuclear disaster. The aim of the course is to examine how trauma influences the literary and cultural imagination and to consider the role of testimony, documentary and afiction in presenting catastrophic events. Among the topics to be discussed are fiction and nonfiction as a means of representing catastrophe, the role of apocalyptic imagination, and transgenerational effects of trauma.

In this language/literature course we will read works by Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky, as well as poems by 20th century authors, in which St. Petersburg plays a central role. We will trace the dualities and paradoxes of Petersburg's cultural myth and will discuss the links that unite these literary works into a single "Petersburg Text of Russian Literature" (the idea introduced by V. Toporov). Readings, discussions, oral presentations, and written papers in Russian. Special emphasis is placed on active use of language and expansion of vocabulary.

The nightmare is familiar to all of us, but we rarely reflect on its significance. This course will investigate the cultural, social, psychological and aesthetic levels of meaning of the nightmare by taking a close look at a wide array of its depictions in literature, taking us from German Romanticism through Russian Realism all the way to 1930s Persia. Our main focus will be on Slavic depictions of the nightmare in the works of such writers as Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Kharms, but we will also attempt to understand them as part of a wider dialogue with other literary and cultural traditions, including the psychological (Freud, Rank).