Global Arc

Empirical and theoretical research is at the core of linguistic work. The primary goal of independent work in linguistics is for you to learn how to understand, conduct, and communicate research. LIN majors will complete LIN 498 in the fall (graded P/D/F) and LIN 499 (letter graded) in the spring. In the spring, seniors submit an updated thesis progress summary and one chapter (week one) and the final thesis (week eleven), with interim deadlines determined on an individual basis between the student and their thesis adviser. Presentations involve participation in our monthly independent work gatherings for majors.

Language and music are fundamentally human systems used to express complex ideas and feelings. They share many properties, involving timing, rhythm, and pitch, likely in part due to common neurocognitive underpinnings. This course explores the language-music connection by surveying diverse artistic traditions that blur the lines between the two, like tune-tone association in Chinese opera, African talking drums, Ancient Greek poetic meter, and rhyming in rap. Students are equipped with the linguistic and musical tools to analyze, interpret, and appreciate the intricacies and beauty of these traditions.

This class examines the transpacific entanglements between the United States, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. The central aims of the course is to 1) unpack how narratives of American exceptionalism and rescue have historically been used to justify US military and capitalist interventions in Asia and the Pacific Islands and 2) connect the ways in which this contributes to the continued dispossessions, displacements, movements, and racializations of Asian and Pacific Islander peoples.

This course surveys Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences in sociology, anthropology, American studies, ethnomusicology, and education. This course develops an account of racializations beyond the black/white binary while situating Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences of exclusion and differential inclusion in the larger context of US wars and empires Asia and the Pacific Islands; settler colonialism; racial capitalism; displacement & migration; and popular culture and mass media.

This course engages Asian American Studies by introducing students to the basic concepts of critical logistics studies, which involve thinking through dynamics of space/placemaking, movement/restriction and labor/production/consumption. Through an array of cultural texts including film, new media, video art, and photography, we will examine how material structures such as logistics infrastructures shape political, economic and cultural imaginations and vice versa.To that end, we will take a global view to understanding the place of Asian America in the world through histories of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism, and nationalism.

Why is so much of Asian American culture described as "cringe"? Once an obsequious gesture, cringe now names an embarrassed response when acts of self-presentation misfire, and in the 21st c. it has become a derogatory label for awkward earnestness. This course examines cringe as surplus feeling: sincerity tipping into humiliation, provoking shame and even aggression. We pair Asian American literature with theories of aesthetics and capitalism, tracing cringe's ambiguous ties to camp, satire, and irony, and to racialized affects like cuteness and animacy, to consider how cringeness troubles judgments of authenticity, failure, and success.

This course examines migration, displacement, and diaspora through an Asian American Studies lens, drawing on a Global Asias approach that treats Asia and its diasporas as produced through movement under conditions of empire, war, and racial and settler violence. Rather than understanding mobility as a neutral or voluntary process, the course traces how Asian American racial and settler formations emerge through histories of military conflict, colonial occupation, genocide, forced displacement, and managed circulation across multiple global sites.

This course offers a survey of visual cultures across transpacific Asian America. Through an array of cultural texts including film, new media and photography, we will examine how visual cultures and global political, economic and cultural imaginations shape one another. Cultural texts will include films by S. S. Rajamouli, art installations by Dinh Q. Lê, new media dissemination of "Hallyu," and the Dafen Painting Replica Factory. Thinking through what "Asian America" signifies in a global art market, students will explore how visual cultures arise and are contested through histories of imperialism, colonialism, nationalism and capitalism.

This course engages Asian American Studies through an introduction to Marxist approaches to cultural geography, which involves dynamics of space/placemaking, movement/restriction and the political economy of production, circulation, and consumption. Through texts that analyze urban, rural and suburban space, we will examine the relationship between material structures from logistics infrastructures to architectural forms and how they shape and are shaped by social and cultural power. We will take a global view of Asian America in the world through histories of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, abolition, and nationalism.

The senior thesis for AB COS majors (498A-499A) 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. Therefore, students will receive a P/D/F for COS 498A and a letter grade for COS 499A.