Global Arc

This course introduces students to the humanities as a field of knowledge within the academy. What are the forms of inquiry that have traditionally defined the humanities, and what is the place of these forms within the architecture of the modern research university? In pursuit of answers, we will range from histories of individual humanistic disciplines to publications within the expanding field of critical university studies. We will also examine the local history of humanistic study on Princeton's campus, and its alignment with (and divergence from) national and international trends in the development of the humanistic disciplines.

Nostalgia is one of the most pervasive and multifaceted feelings of our time; an engine of artistic production, it informs the works of Homer and James Joyce. One can be nostalgic for childhood or for a time when one's country was different. Fashion and music are imbued with nostalgic feelings, as are countless videos on our feeds. This class studies nostalgia from an interdisciplinary and global perspective: leveraging literature, cinema, philosophy, history, and cultural studies, it will explore how nostalgia is formed, and its role in the arts and society.

This course familiarizes students with the various features of academic careers in the humanities. The course considers histories and current debates around labor and resource allocation within the academic humanities, with units on research, teaching, service, and mentorship. We will focus on power, identity, and the "diversification" of the professoriate within U.S. institutions of higher education in the past 50 years, with special consideration of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and its longstanding PhD pipeline effort, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program.

Current debates over whether a given political leader or regime deserves to be described as "fascist" often pivot around the question: How much does this person or government closely mimic the genocidal far-right movements that took power in Europe in the 1920 - 30s? Such discussions assume mid-20th Century fascism to be a rupture or aberration in a fundamentally sound Western civilization built around the institutions of liberal democracy and capitalism. This seminar will disrupt these assumptions, exploring ways that political authoritarianism and genocidal practices have been intrinsic to, and inseparable from, capitalist modernity.

This course brings together scholarship from musicologists, cognitive scientists, and biologists to explore the concept of "animal music" from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Animal music is an important topic because it harbors profound information about the history of life--by examining it in relation to human music making, we stand to gain a better understanding of everything from social synchronization and linguistic turn-taking to (bio)semiotics and cultural evolution. Using a combination of short lectures, student presentations, and creative projects, this course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the field.

The Faust legend poses fundamental questions about the nature and value of knowledge, about good and evil, about the divine, the demonic, and their interrelationship. It has become one of the Western cultural tradition's most ubiquitous myths; yet unlike most of those myths, this one is distinctly modern, having been born in the early Renaissance. This course will choose some of the most provocative and influential iterations of the theme. We encourage students to approach the subject from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: literary, musical, historical, artistic, philosophical, religious, scientific.

Course explores the intersecting innovations of philosophy, art, science, and social politics that defined the Modern Breakthrough, a period of dramatic transformation in Scandinavia spanning the late 19th and early 20th c. Students gain a holistic understanding of how diverse disciplines informed and shaped one another in an extraordinary moment in the history of ideas. Course includes visits to the Princeton University Art Museum and a required trip to Denmark over Spring Break, with visits to important historical sites, artworks, and institutions of the Breakthrough.

In the mid-twentieth century, the aphorisms of an archaic Greek thinker, Heraclitus, acquired an unexpectedly contemporary force for a French poet, René Char, and a German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. This seminar will explore the relations, echoes and affinities among those three authors, introducing students to the analysis of poetry and philosophy, reception history, and translation studies. Students will also practice first-hand archival research, working in the Firestone Library René Char Collection.

This course explores the cultures and histories of the early modern Iberian Pacific through the lens of various types of global objects produced in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. From the global Spanish and Portuguese missionary activities to the transpacific journey of chocolate connecting Mexican and Philippine cultures, we will examine how the project of Iberian expansion for spiritual and territorial conquest shaped the cultural landscapes of the early modern Pacific world. Students will engage with folding screens, statues, paintings, news pamphlets, letters, suits of armor, coins, beverages, and books.

This seminar approaches letter-writing as a key genre for constructing and communicating a self. Roman letters allowed correspondents great flexibility in what to reveal to others and to themselves, what kind of relationships to build, and how to sustain their bonds over time and distance. Transformed by new understandings of the self and new technologies, the letter evolved over the centuries as a conduit for ideas, feelings, advice, and formal innovation, including the epistolary novel and verse epistle. Throughout the term, participants will engage in letter-writing practice alongside our authors and reflect on the future of epistolarity.