Seminar explores typologies of the artist in Europe and North America from the Renaissance to the present. Topics will include ideas of the artist as a privileged yet estranged member of society, notions of artistic temperament and "genius," the gendering of the artist, bohemianism and madness, the significance of race and cultural identity, and the artist's engagement with mass media. Analysis of self-portraiture, artists' statements and writings, and artists in film. Case studies include Leonardo, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Artemisia Gentileschi, Dürer, Manet, Van Gogh, Kahlo, Warhol, and Kara Walker.

We speak of the "afterlives of antiquity." What are the afterlives of modernism? What happened to the great avant-gardes of the early 20th century such as Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus? Each movement presented radical ideas of the artwork and the artist: How did these models morph over the last century? How were they reinvented in different contexts? Together we will sketch new genealogies of these avant-gardes from their moment to our own.

What is the 'place' of fiction? How are senses of place configured in literary language and philosophical concepts? How does the question about real and fictional space become a problem within the very practice of writing? This course will approach these questions as they appear in different literary and critical texts throughout the modern and contemporary periods. Some of the topics to be discussed include: the poetics of imaginary spaces, architectural diagrams, dystopias, and the relations between metafiction, writing, and non-place.

Why are borders so central to our political, moral and affective life? Examining legal theory, novels and films of 20th- century migrations alongside poetry and forensic reports of recent border-crossings, this course traces how mobile subjects - from stowaways to pirates and anticolonial militants - have driven the formation of new ethics, political geographies and radical futures. We will situate borders in relation to practices of policing the colonies, the plantation, the factory and, finally, we will ask: why did we stop relating to migrants as political subjects and begin treating them as the moral beneficiaries of humanitarianism?

Drawing on the expertise of distinguished Princeton faculty and visitors, this seminar aims to provide a broad, multidisciplinary perspective on central debates in European culture and society that remain urgent in the present and expand beyond geographic and temporal limits. It serves as the core course for the minor in European Studies, jointly offered by ECS and EPS.

This course examines how politics and culture play out in that most refined of art forms: opera. The course will introduce students to the history of European opera, focusing on 19th century composers in France, Germany, and Italy. We will closely examine three operas: one French (Bizet's Carmen), one Italian (Verdi's Aida) and one German (Wagner's Die Meistersinger). Following Edward Said's work, we will examine how politics and culture play out in these works: European colonialism in Aida; the question of antisemitism in Wagner; stereotypes of Spain in Carmen. Includes excursions to the Metropolitan Opera.

A study of the Romantic movement in an age of revolutions: its literary culture, its variety of genres, its cultural milieu, and the interactions of its writers. Major figures to be studied include Wollstonecraft, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Two 90-minute seminars.

This course will investigate the development of New Wave cinema in the 1960's. Emphasis will be placed on the French nouvelle vague led by directors including Godard, Truffaut, Rouch, Varda, and Eustache, with subsections on the Czechoslovak and Brazilian cinematic new wave movements. The course will investigate both the specific cinematic languages developed by these various directors, as well as the political context of the 1950's and 60's in which these movements developed as critical, often militant interventions against hegemonic cultural and political elites.

Time is notoriously difficult to conceptualize. This course explores recent approaches to understanding time that go beyond simplistic models of cause-and-effect or linear progress. Together we will examine philosophies and theories of temporality, along with their undergirding cultural-political debates and artistic projects. From micro-time and deep time to mythic time and con-temporaneity, we will investigate experiences of continuity, rupture, and crisis. Themes will include utopian imaginaries, nostalgia, and uncanny returns; objects of study will encompass film, art, landscape, literature, ethnography, and scientific instruments.

The Enlightenment was one of the most intensely creative and significant episodes in the history of Western thought. This course will provide an introduction to its major works, and will consider its implications for modern politics, culture, and social life. Each class meeting will consist of a two-hour discussion, followed by a 45-minute background lecture on the subsequent week's readings.

This course will provide the historical and theoretical background essential for understanding the evolution of women's film in European cinema. Particular attention will be paid to questions of sexual difference and to the challenges feminist and queer theory pose to a politics of identity in film. Students will explore and assess the ways cultural identity determines the cinematic representation of women, while receiving a solid grounding in the poetics of cinema as it developed across time, genres, and cultures.

This seminar will examine 20th-century Eastern European history through literary works from a number of countries in the region, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to present-day Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Belarus, Ukraine and the Balkans. Readings will generally consist of one novel per week, but we will also look at a number of other genres, including the short story, poetry, the journal, and reportage. While discussing the historical and political dimensions of this period, we will consider the limits of what literature can depict, and a range of possible ethical and aesthetic responses to authoritarianism.