Fifty years ago, India alerted the world there was a new player in the atomic arms race with its first nuclear weapons test, code-named Smiling Buddha. That same year, two Princeton University scientists launched something new, now known as the Program on Science and Global Security (SGS). The...

In summer 2024, the Princeton in Beijing (PiB) summer language program returned to in-person instruction in China after a hiatus due to COVID-19, marking its 30th anniversary. Since its inception in 1993, PiB has provided over 4,500 students from Princeton and around the world the opportunity to...

Creative writing professor Aleksandar Hemon’s life was upended by war. In 1992, he was a 27-year-old journalist on an international visitors’ program in the United States when war broke out in his homeland of Bosnia. “It’s the defining event of my life,” Hemon said. With Sarajevo under siege,...

To explore the rise of coffee as a commodity with significant global intersections, students in the “History of Coffee in Africa and the Middle East” course traveled to Ethiopia over fall break to examine the cultural history of coffee in the context of the development of the coffee...

Leonard Wantchekon, James Madison Professor of Political Economy and Professor of Politics and International Affairs, traces much of his scholarship to his formative years as a student activist in Benin.In the ’80s, he helped found the Front Démocratique du Bénin, a national organization that...

The Humanities Council’s Program in Journalism will launch an innovative reporting seminar based in Athens, Greece, in Summer 2025. “Shockwaves: Climate, Migration, and Culture in Greece,” co-taught by longtime journalist Rachel Donadio (The Atlantic) and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eliza Griswold...

Novelist, poet, and essayist Patrick Chamoiseau, Belknap Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian, has been selected to receive the Lifetime of Excellence in Fiction Award from the Center for Fiction. The award honors “a writer who, through their exceptional...

“The Global Ghetto” a summer 2024 PIIRS Global Seminar, The Global Ghetto, transported 13 Princeton students to Rome and Warsaw for six weeks of immersive instruction, during which they traced the history of Jewish ghettos from their origins in 16th-century Italy through the Nazi era. “The...

To safeguard the Amazon and avoid planetary environmental catastrophe, Western science must engage Indigenous knowledge, combining science–based conservation approaches with the restoration and biocultural diversity practices of Indigenous peoples. So argue the authors of “Indigenizing Conservation...