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 seminar will focus on the legal, moral, religious, social, psychological, & political dimensions of crime, blame, shame, & punishment as discussed in major works of Russian literature considered against Western cultural background. The 1st part of the course will compare & contrast visions of justice in Eastern & Western Europe and emphases on divine versus human justice. The 2nd part will move to the psychology of the individual person, the criminal. Part three of the course will focus on the state institutions of criminal justice. Students will discuss from their perspectives both the literary & moral critiques of legal justice.

"Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language," writes Raymond Williams in his celebrated book Keywords. This course explores the many meanings of "nature" and attitudes towards the environment in East European literature. We will examine responses to political projects such as collectivization, industrialization, and resource extraction, and trace how ideas about progress competed with aspirations for conservation and agrarian living. Looking at works from Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, and the former Soviet Union, we will investigate how literary forms shape our understanding of ourselves in relation to the more-than-human world.

This course features literary and philosophical works on the conflict between the individual and the state. We begin with theories of civil disobedience in ancient Greece and modern America, with readings from Plato, Sophocles, Thoreau, and Martin Luther King. What tools of resistance can be deployed in combating state injustice? We then examine the Russian and Soviet experiences. A rich tradition of prison writing (e.g. Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn) explores the clash between a powerful state and an embattled individual. What survival strategies (physical and spiritual) emerged in the Russian and Soviet contexts? All readings in English.

Communism and Fascism occupy opposite ideological poles, but parallels between literature, art, and cinema in Fascist Italy and in the Soviet Union teaches us about the relationship between art and politics, modernity, and dissent. The course explores how artists, writers, and film directors positioned themselves towards the regimes and the promises of a modern world. From the avant-garde's enthusiasm for the "new" (in art and politics) to skepticism and outright defiance. We will read political works by Vladimir Lenin and Benito Mussolini and explore the works of Sergei Eisenstein, Luchino Visconti, Evgeny Zamyatin, and others.

Reading and discussion of stories by major 19th century writers such as Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoevsky who use the fantastic for a broad range of reasons: generate mysterious and tense atmosphere; introduce comical or satirical effect; delve into the characters' fears and passions; convey contradictory and irrational features of human nature; introduce spiritual dimension into "the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe," as Dostoevsky defined St. Petersburg. Readings and discussions in Russian. Special emphasis is placed on active use of language and expansion of vocabulary.

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.

Russian and Soviet writers are haunted by the power of the modern state. This course introduces students to the rich tradition of the grotesque and the uncanny in Russophone literature by reading works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that describe the unnerving process of bureaucratic modernization in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, touching on the countries' legal systems, corporal punishment, medical institutionalization, and the Gulag. Close readings of texts accompany examinations of the possibilities for creativity and individual life within these texts, considering when, and how, writers can speak truth to power.

Who succeeds in school, and why? What do schools teach students, in addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic? What is the role of schools in modern society? How do schools reproduce, interrupt, or legitimate the social order? In this course, you will apply sociological perspectives to the study of education.

This course examines the social impact of driverless cars, a rapidly evolving technology that promises to revolutionize the way we travel. Through a sociological lens, we will explore how driverless cars are expected to affect safety, accessibility, employment, urban planning, and environment, as well as privacy and data security. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature, we will analyze the benefits and drawbacks of driverless cars from a sociological perspective. Through readings, discussions, and projects, students will develop a critical understanding of the social impact of driverless cars and the future of transportation.