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.

Cuba was one of the first New World colonies of Europe yet among the last to sever the colonial bond. The island was among the last places in the hemisphere to abolish slavery, yet home to the first black political party in the Americas. After the revolution of 1959, among the most radical of the modern world, it became an important international symbol of third world socialism and anti-imperialism, and an unexpected focus of global Cold War struggles. This course serves as an introduction to that fascinating history and to the major themes that have shaped it: race and slavery; nationalism and empire; revolution and socialism.

The Oral History Project is a hands-on course that will teach students how to conduct, catalogue, and archive oral histories. The course will be analyzing oral histories completed in SPA 364: Doing Oral History in Spanish and using them as a jumping off point to conduct more oral histories in the Princeton Latino/a/e community. The goal is to collect oral histories and write articles intended for a website on the Latine community in Princeton. Spanish-language skills are not required for this course.

The last two decades have seen the rise of an extraordinary new attention economy-- a pervasive, technologically-mediated "fracking" of human beings for the money-value of their eyeballs. This dramatic commodification of human attention is transforming social relations, political life, and the experience of personhood. This course (anchored in the history of science, but reaching into theology, media theory, psychology, and philosophy) stretches back from our current predicament, to uncover the deep genealogy of this most intimate feature of human being. What is attention? And how can richer understanding of this question change the world?

The modern histories of Japan and Korea cannot be understood without close attention to the other. This seminar explores major events, starting with the fall of the Choson Dynasty, the Japanese colonial period, the creation of two Koreas, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and decolonization and social revolutions. Students will read primary texts, including memoirs, autobiographies, and novels, and engage with major works and debates on modern Japan and Korea. By adopting a comparative and transnational perspective, the course aims to reveal new ways and approaches to understanding the fraught histories of Japan in Korea, and Korea in Japan.

Data and data-empowered algorithms shape our professional, personal, and political realities. They also increasingly shape how we are able to access and tell stories about the past. This course introduces students to the history of data practices so as to better understand the future we are building together as scholars, scientists, and citizens. In covering the history of the human use of data, we will learn how data are used to reveal insight and support decisions, how data-driven practices make historical and literary arguments, and how data and culture are fundamentally intertwined.

This course will immerse students in archival research and explore the history and nature of archives themselves. Working with original revolutionary-era materials in Firestone, students will contribute to an upcoming exhibition marking the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence. Along the way, we will investigate what archives are, how they are created and evolve, and how they shape historical scholarship. Whose voices do archives preserve or exclude? How do historians navigate them and grapple with their limits? And how are they being transformed in the present? Weekly in-class workshops will focus on 18th-c. manuscripts and rare books.

Socialist governments saw the urbanizing project as an arena and a showcase for the transcendence of the shortcomings of past urban life. This course will explore the great variety of socialist cities with an emphasis on thematic and comparative approaches. An introductory survey of the late nineteenth-century context and the "urban question" will be followed by a roughly chronological movement through some localities of socialist urbanisms across the twentieth century. It will conclude with reflections on post-socialist transitions. No prior knowledge is required.

History of Slavery in Africa and the Middle East focuses on the experiences of enslaved individuals and the powerful social, legal, and political regimes that attempted to define their subjection. Attention will be concentrated on the themes of race, gender, class, and diaspora to examine how these histories both differ from and are informed by histories of slavery globally. This course will analyze the relationship between abolitionist discourses and imperialism, underpinning the ongoing transition from slavery to freedom. Students will engage with literature to understand how historical production has distorted and silenced enslaved lives.

This course will examine the causes, conduct, and outcomes of the First World War. We will delve into the complex factors that led to the outbreak of the conflict, analyzing how a war of such devastating scale and far-reaching consequences spiraled out of control. The course will go beyond traditional military history to explore the human dimension of the war, both on the battlefield and on the home front. We will investigate the experiences of soldiers in the trenches, the impact of the war on civilian populations, and how societies coped with the unprecedented demands and horrors of a total war.