Freshman Seminars
- FRS 101: Get Your KicksFor centuries, shoes have provided signals about a person's character, social and cultural status. Shoes have also carried religious, cultural, and symbolic meaning. They remain a unique lens through which to interrogate and understand innovation, manufacturing, and industrial design. Recently, shoes have refocused our attention on issues of ethics and morality. Shoes are a window into our personal and collective history and future. Students in this seminar will explore, through the evolution of shoes, seminal interdisciplinary ideas, build and refine their academic skills, and create a measurable impact on campus.
- FRS 111: Exploring the Graphic NovelAn exploration of the graphic novel with particular attention to the ways specific works combine visual imagery and language to enlarge the possibilities of narrative form. We will develop strategies for interpreting and evaluating the cultural significance and aesthetic quality of narratives based on sequential art.
- FRS 115: Decomposing the Science of Composting: How To Turn Waste into ResourceThis course overviews the science of composting by covering nutrient cycling (carbon and nitrogen, pollution), soil science (chemistry), microbial ecology, and the food/water/biodiversity/climate grand challenges. Local samples will be used. The course will enhance campus sustainability efforts through student research projects. Students will help the SCRAP lab optimize composting practices (e.g. aerobic biodigestor) to process dining-sourced bioplastics into healthy compost with low C emissions. Student findings will be an integral component of a larger NJ DEP supported project to advance campus recycling goals.
- FRS 119: Everyday Enchantment: Blurring the Boundary Between the Arts and LifeThis seminar seeks enchantment in everyday experience, considering the allure and the danger of mixing up life and art. In addition to studying and writing about historical artworks, students will research current-day practice and will complete open-ended creative projects. Experience in any artistic discipline is welcome but is by no means required; more important is a spirit of curiosity and exploration. For our purposes, "art" refers not only to visual art but to a wide variety of creative undertakings that result in performances, objects, rituals, stunts, and other possibilities we will soon discover.
- FRS 123: Poetry Makes History, History Makes Poetry: Reading and Writing Documentary PoemsThis literature and creative writing-based course considers the rich intersection of poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid creative writing called documentary poetry. Like documentary films, documentary poems make use of primary source materials such as interviews, news articles, diaries, letters, photographs, medical reports, and public records. These works are designed to move your understanding of public events from knowledge of the facts, however complex, to their emotional and philosophical implications. Course requirements include a final 10-page documentary poetry/hybrid project and an oral presentation of the work to the class.
- FRS 127: Body Builders: Living Systems as Art MediaThis course will explore the crossover collaborative of bioengineering and art, presenting the notion of bioengineering as an artistic practice. A creative portrayal has the potential to humanize this highly technical field. Advancements in the field of biotechnology will be examined as potential tools to not only improve health care, but also as an art medium. The course material will expose students to organisms manipulated in an imaginative context and consider how these artistic ventures may affect public perception of emerging biomedical technologies.
- FRS 129: Visualizing Nature: Techniques in Field BiologyThis seminar explores the process of scientific inquiry by investigating the many ways in which field biologists observe and study organisms in the lab and field. Through hands-on learning experiences in the lab and field, we will combine technology, problem-solving skills, and creativity to collect and interpret behavioral, morphological, physiological, and sensory data in living and non-living organisms. This course will include coordinated trips during class time to local sites in the Princeton area, and also offers an optional 3-week field experience at Mpala Research Centre located in Laikipia, Kenya during January 2024.
- FRS 131: Sizing Up The UniverseThe diameter of the observable universe is known to be about 46 billion light years. That's big! Not only is 46 billion a big number but even one light year, the distance a beam of light travels in one year, is a very long distance. How far is it? In this seminar, we will investigate the size of things starting with familiar objects having sizes we can readily grasp and carefully working our way up to the largest most distant objects in the observable universe. We will describe how these sizes and distances were first measured by scientists/philosophers as our understanding of the universe we live in evolved and matured over the years.
- FRS 138: Representation in Documentary FilmmakingThis course will focus on cross-cultural issues surrounding representation in documentary filmmaking, both in front of and behind the lens. Through film production, screenings and texts, we will explore the question of "who has the right tell whose story, and why?" Students will direct two documentaries each: one set in their own cultural sphere, the other set outside of it. Each student will direct these films while another student assists them. They will then switch roles, giving every student exposure to the construction of four different documentaries.
- FRS 139: The Coming of Driverless CarsDriverless cars have become an exciting topic in recent years. How soon will they be available to general consumers on public roads? What needs to be done to prepare for their grand entry into the world? Addressing these questions, this seminar focuses on what it will take for driverless cars to work effectively as well as their impact on everyday life and society at large. The seminar will be of interest to students interested in the topic of driverless cars and their social impact. It is also meant to help students see the changing globalized world through the lens of driverless cars.
- FRS 143: Is Politics a Performance?"Is Politics a Performance?" helps us understand how local governments function, and how the performance of democracy can be different from its enactment. The class offers a hands-on way to learn about decision-making, empathy, citizenship and the dramaturgy of power. We'll use tools from sociology, philosophy, civics and theater to analyze local democratic processes in Princeton and Trenton today. At a time when our commons feels frayed at best, this course helps activate possible ways to work with each other, both in the evolving digital commons and in person.
- FRS 147: How People Change: Short Stories and Life's TransitionsWe will examine moments of change at different crucial stages in the life cycle (childhood, adolescence, courtship and marriage, work, maturity, and finally death) as they are portrayed in outstanding short stories and one novella. We'll attempt to discover how this change is conveyed convincingly and compellingly, to delineate the nature of the conflict at each stage, and how much of the change comes from without and within, and what the story has to tell us about the essence of each time of life.
- FRS 149: Ethics in FinanceThe global financial crisis and recent high-profile scandals (e.g. Wells Fargo in the United States, Wirecard in Germany, Luckin Coffee in China) highlight the extent to which we seem to have made little progress in stamping out unethical behavior in finance. This seminar will explore ethics in the finance industry using a case-based method and will be grounded in an understanding of the role of a financial system in an economy and society. We will draw on moral philosophy, financial theory and concepts of behavioral ethics, corporate governance, economic development, and public policy.
- FRS 163: Once Upon a Time: Magic Tales and their MeaningsWe will explore magic ("fairy") tales from around the world, focusing on traditional narrative patterns and their meanings. Viewing them as stories that reflect significant events of the life cycle, we will treat symbolic journeys (e.g., of initiation), the Other World, and family relationships as well as oral composition, variants, multiforms, storytellers, performance, critical approaches to the study of the genre, and how magic tales inform other types of narrative in literature and film. Our goal is to "read" the "texts" of magic tales and understand how and why they so vividly express the human experience.
- FRS 167: A Perfect Cup of CoffeeThe process of roasting coffee beans and brewing a cup of coffee involves several fundamental engineering principles. This course, a combination of lectures and labs, open to all first-year undergraduate students, explores fundamental concepts in chemical engineering, fluid mechanics, physics, chemistry, and colloid science. The experiments draw on science and engineering concepts introduced in the lectures, and the course culminates in a design competition where students work in groups to brew the best tasting cup of coffee with the minimum amount of energy.
- FRS 169: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Wisdom of CrowdsThis seminar will study the history and nature of fairy tales, legends, classical myths, and urban myths, particularly in regard to the way that they reflect the concerns and fears of society. We will examine the ways in which myths differ from folk tales, fairy tales and superstition, and the means by which entire communities, seized with conviction often for generations, disseminate and fortify them. The collective unconscious is often manifested in metaphor, particularly in literature and film, and the legitimate anxieties, fears (and guilt) that it reflects will be the subject of our study.
- FRS 185: Endings, Before and AfterIn Western society, we're not great at endings. We try to prolong the life of a person or venture at all costs. We avoid planning for or even talking about the end. Yet new initiatives often cannot begin without something else's end. This course explores the complexities of our relationship to endings: their philosophical and theological conceptions, the psychological underpinnings of our resistance to them, the sociological implications of current approaches. We also contemplate ways that behavioral science and other disciplines might inform a new and potentially more advantageous approach to policy decisions by keeping the end in mind.
- FRS 190: Reasons to Believe: Religions of EnlightenmentIs social life even possible without some form of religion? But which form should that be? What is the purpose of a profession of faith? To understand why these questions still matter today, we need to go back to the source of the process called "secularization." In eighteenth-century Europe, Enlightenment philosophers relentlessly questioned the moral, social and historical aspects of one of the most common human phenomena. This course will explore the multiple notions they devised to apprehend it--faith, ritual, deism, atheism, fanaticism, superstition, and how these concepts may inform today's public debate.
- FRS 197: American and Russian Science Fiction: Story-Worlds in DialogueThis seminar examines sci-fi in Anglo-American literature and film with special emphasis on its dialogue with the Russian and East-European tradition. We will follow the trajectory of the genre: from time-travel to dystopias; from interplanetary encounters to robots; from human-machine hybrids to questions of gender and ethnicity. We will analyze the questions, hopes and anxieties that these narratives articulate, the imagery they employ, and the features of the story-worlds they construct. We will investigate how questions of authorship and agency, and the definitions of the self, the other, the human and posthuman are framed and negotiated.