Afrofuturism is a practice and art form that allows black people to imagine themselves in a future beyond the trauma of the past and present. In this seminar students of all backgrounds are invited to participate in visiting some of the pioneers of Afrofuturist thought and literature, learning from visual and performing artists that lean on Afrofuturist principles in their practice, as well as becoming familiar with how the emerging technology like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are used to deepen the impact of Afrofuturist discourse.

What does artistic production look like during a time of cultural unrest? How did America's poets help shape the political landscape of the American 60s and 70s, decades that saw the rise of the Black Panthers, 'Flower Power,' and Vietnam War protests? Through reading poetry, studying films and engaging with the music of the times we will think about art's ability to move the cultural needle and pose important questions about race, gender, class, and sexuality. We will study Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, and others. We will talk about The Beats, The San Francisco Renaissance and The New York School poets.

Natural Law theory has a rich and varied history extending back to the classical period. Although in recent decades it has often been associated with religious thinkers, especially Catholic ones, it also has non-Catholic, and even non-religious adherents. This theory offers a first-personal account of practical reason that acknowledges diverse basic values as fundamental aspects of living a fulfilled life. For some, contemporary natural law theory offers a compelling alternative to other ethical theories. For others, it offers a stimulating sparring partner that helps philosophers of different perspectives to refine their own argument.

Is America a country built on systemic oppression or a land of opportunity where anybody can flourish and prosper? We engage the key texts in discussions on race, religion, class, and gender to evaluate these conflicting claims. We examine the meaning of 'justice' in social justice movements by assessing their core tenets alongside the ideas and values long undergirding American institutions. The seminar encourages students to reflect on what it means to live in America in this pivotal cultural moment. Students will also have the opportunity to meet guest speakers, themselves leading figures at the forefront of these debates.

Theoretically, poverty is a point-in-time description of a person's financial assets. Practically, at least in the US context, poverty bears a heavy moral judgment that is to many suggestive of individual shortcomings or deficits. What are the origins of this phenomenon? How has it changed over time? Who has benefited and how? What are the consequences? Looking at New York City from the 1870s to today, we will explore these and other questions that are at the heart of contemporary American life.

Princeton students are naturally focused, if not actually fixated, on success--in the classroom, on the athletic field, and elsewhere. But success has a less well-understood sibling, which is often a precursor or even prerequisite for that success: failure. Although we often view failure as a regret, it can become a truly strategic resource, invaluable in its ability to show us - sometimes painfully and reluctantly - what we don't yet know but need to, in order to succeed in our chosen path. This seminar offers a unique interdisciplinary window into the "other 'f' wor[l]d" of failure, with an opportunity to see firsthand how that can be.

An 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.

Global poverty is enormous in scale and insupportable in its moral consequences. More than 700 million people live on less than $1.90 a day. A child born in Spain today can expect to live to 83 years; a child born in Sierra Leone or Nigeria has a life expectancy of less than 55 years. The likelihood of dying under the age of five is 20 times higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in Australia or New Zealand. Who is responsible for this global calamity-rich countries, poor countries, you and me? And what should be done? This course addresses the moral responsibility for, and the drivers of, global poverty.

With the pressures and frenzied pace of contemporary American life, it might sometimes feel as if there is little time to contemplate the question of what makes for a meaningful life. How does a person find deeper meaning for him/herself? What is the purpose of my life? What is the relationship of the meaning of my life to a larger purpose? How do our lives fit into the world around us? The course explores, from many perspectives, some of the responses to the "big questions" of life. Readings and films are taken from different cultures, different time periods, and different spheres of human endeavor and experience.

This course explores the role music played before and during the Holocaust, as well as the part it continues to play in reflecting upon this historic tragedy. We begin with an overview of the first years of the Hitler regime, including the Nazi-sponsored Jewish Cultural Association as well as the first concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald. We then consider music in both the 'model camp' Theresienstadt/Terezín and the work and extermination camp in Auschwitz. Finally, we examine a range of works written in direct response to the Holocaust that both bear witness and provoke contemporaries to confront the ongoing horrors of genocide.

The word horror brings to mind a genre often rife with supernatural elements, as well as dramatic historical events and, perhaps, even some personal experiences of our past. This class interrogates works of fiction, memoirs, movies, manga, and philosophical texts to study what horror means and why it may fascinate us. In analyzing representations of horror within and beyond the horror genre, we will consider whether it belongs to our modern lives. Honing the participants' close-reading and critical analysis skills, this course will also provide an opportunity to reflect on what horror reveals about our society and ourselves.

Participants in this seminar will go behind the scenes of a major university art museum with an encyclopedic collection of more than 100,000 objects from ancient to contemporary art. Sessions will focus on close looking and discussions of museum best practices and the role of the museum in the 21st century with a special emphasis on collecting.

Global warming is emerging as one of the major issues of our times. It is also highly polarizing. In this seminar, we study climate change through some common claims made by climate skeptics. As we do so, we explore our inherent biases and how they affect our choice of news sources. In our search for "truth," we will do field work to evaluate the assertion that protecting and growing forests is essential to achieving a carbon neutral future. For our final project, we will examine our personal responsibility in the climate problem and the ethical, economical and societal value of buying offsets to erase our carbon footprint.

This course explores the fundamentals of drawing through process-based mark making on paper and fabric, building images through repetitive actions, line by line, color by color. A range of techniques such as hand and machine sewing, embroidery, resist dyeing, stamping, and batik will build a drawing vocabulary through accumulation. Weekly journal assignments will build confidence in each student's personal vision and will focus on light and shadow, surface texture, and perspective. Through readings, class discussions and project assignments, we will cover the context and history of these techniques, as well as how they are used today.

This 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.

This 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. We will discuss a variety of methodologies and technologies that researchers use to design thoughtful experiments and collect meaningful data. 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 seminar includes coordinated trips during class time to local sites in the Princeton area.

The 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.

Grounded in work from psychology and philosophy, this course explores questions about the nature of the mind, and how a mind comes to know itself and others. To do so, we will use personal and philosophical exploration with thought experiments, and we will take deep dives into questions, answers, and ongoing debates across multiple disciplines and traditions of thought.

This seminar will equip students to wade into and engage with Americans' current fascination with the "founders": the group of American politicians who presided over the new nation. It will do so by digging deeply into American history during the early national period, as well as by giving students opportunities to perform their own research and analysis. It will examine politics, high and low, as well as cultural and intellectual developments. By making these moves, and, crucially, by thinking about how we make them, the course will teeter constantly between its express content and larger lessons about historical methodology and practice.

In this reading and writing intensive seminar, we will critically examine some of the fundamental ideas of modern political conservatism, as presented by some of its leading thinkers. We will attempt to better understand conservative thought and develop a framework for assessing its strengths and weaknesses, with respect to a number of representative topics, including the following: distributive justice and the apparent tension between liberty and equality; immigration policy; criminal justice policy; and social conservatism and the role of religion in society.

Driverless 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.

Amazonia is a planetary hotspot of biocultural diversity and a massive carbon sink on the brink. The seminar explores how Indigenous knowledges and the environment co-produce one another and considers the significance of forest-making practices for conservation science and climate change mobilization. Drawing from historical, ethnographic, and ecological studies, Planet Amazonia is a platform for alternative storytelling and future-making agendas based on new scholarly and activist alliances. Students will engage with Indigenous scholars and environmental activists and will craft alternative visions to safeguard this vital planetary nexus.

"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.

Jerusalem is considered a holy city to three faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this course, students will learn the history of Jerusalem from its founding in pre-biblical times until the present. Over the course of the semester, we will ask: What makes space sacred and how does a city become holy? What has been at stake--religiously, theologically, politically, nationally--in the many battles over Jerusalem? What is the relationship between Jerusalem as it was and Jerusalem as it was and is imagined?

We 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.

The 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.

Explores the creative output of one of the most exceptional figures in European history: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), composer, dramatist, poet, mystic, healer. Hildegard's staggeringly original corpus of works across media was uniquely directed toward the cultivation and care of her fellow creatures. A millennium out, when society's failure to care has proven catastrophic, Hildegard's vision of cosmic connectedness provides a historical counter-case. Class activities move between medieval and modern, historical and hands-on, using workshops in medieval medicinal gardening, baking, and singing as springboards to Hildegard's complex works.

This seminar is a historical survey of the mathematical applications to astronomy. It will cover topics from the astronomy of the ancient Babylonians to the Newtonian model of the solar system and general relativity. The focus of the seminar will be to understand at a fundamental level how mathematical thought influenced astronomy and to learn the science behind the major discoveries.

This course will provide an overview of the scientific study of gemstones. Topics covered will include crystallography, crystal structures, and optical properties of gems. Diamonds and gems will be used to illustrate geological concepts such as plate tectonics and our planet's deep interior. The course will also examine recent analytical advances for constraining the provenance of historical gems as well as new applications of gemstones in modern technology. The course will make use of Princeton's large gem collection for hands-on demonstrations and activities and will include a field trip to the American Museum of Natural History.

In this course you will combine satellite remote sensing and geological and geophysical field observations with modeling, interpretation, and reporting, to answer questions like- How is the energy of Earth and the Sun harnessed in its various forms? What is the impact of agriculture and resource extraction on landscapes? How do climate and topography influence what can be grown? In the classroom, around campus, and on the required field trip to rural Italy, you will gain practical experience collecting data, analyzing them statistically, and reporting them. https://geoweb.princeton.edu/people/simons/FRS-CCCI.html

We 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.

From fireflies that synchronize, to ant colonies that create miles of trail networks, to the mesmerizing behavior of fish schools and bird flocks, swarms are everywhere! Even humans exhibit swarm behaviors! What are the rules by which this amazing collective behavior emerges? Why do swarms evolve? In this freshman seminar we will explore the emergence of self-organization and swarm intelligence across animal groups, through readings, discussions, in class games, and simple programs.

Why are contemporary human social formations characterized by inequality when democracies around the world preach the need for equality and justice? Is this a systemic issue related to "human nature," or is it something more abstract, relating to the very nature of nation-state forms of political hegemony? In order to answer these questions, this course will examine how scholars consider caste and race in South Asia and the US. As global, transnational iterations of human hierarchy, we will use caste and race as analytical frameworks to examine how inequality operates in the shadows of normative narrations of political power.

This 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.

This seminar will explore the history, theology, and practice of Mormonism, the general term for religious traditions that trace their origins to the career of Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-1844). The scholars of religion we will read have examined Mormonism from the perspective of gender studies, literary studies, historical Christian theology, the study of race, nineteenth-century American history, the study of sexuality, scriptural studies, and ritual studies. We will also explore the academic study of religion as a field, looking at how scholars draw on disparate primary sources to generate knowledge about religion as a human phenomenon.

Data is everywhere. Using site-specific research methods, students will explore their local environs, on campus and beyond, searching for data and the patterns and stories that follow. They will collect their observations in evolving archives, iterating on modes of communication (including documentary drawing, sensory visualization, and information design). The output of the course will consist of small weekly projects and responses to data-driven readings, films, design, and art, culminating in the production of a larger creative data visualization project, which illuminates a local story or pattern via data uncovered during the semester.

Crosswords. Department stores. Transit systems. How do these grid-based cultural artifacts orchestrate how we think, how we desire, and how we connect? In this seminar, students will conduct multimedia, creative deep dives into three case studies of grid-based artifacts that have shaped modern life. Students will construct a crossword puzzle and design a department store; in the final assignment, they will re-invent Princeton's Dinky.

Princeton and Princetonians have played foundational roles in creating the information technologies - computers, smart phones, and the Internet, for example - that help to define today's world. This seminar will both introduce students to some of the basics of information technologies and emphasize Princeton's role in the development of these technologies. The seminar will examine the contributions of pioneers such as Alan Turing, John Von Neuman, Claude Shannon, John Bardeen, and Robert Kahn, among others, to information technologies. The material will be presented at a level suitable for students with general backgrounds.

What is the relationship between artistic creation, political action, and love? In this course we will explore different philosophical concepts of love - eros (romantic ecstasy), agape (pure or divine love), philia (friendship), storge (familial love) and xenia (hospitality) - in their peculiar relationship to politics. We will analyze how the work of poets, visual artists, photographers and filmmakers testifies to the roles of affect in resisting State order, as well as how these works, as labors of love, subvert the logic of twentieth-century authoritarian regimes, becoming essential tools for social, political and cultural revolution.

For those who find human reason unequal to the task of understanding existence, religion has been the traditional place to go. In this course, we will examine a period in the Christian west when tragedy--usually, but not always, dramatic tragedy--took on the burden of exploring doubts about who and what we are, and about how we are supposed to behave. Our texts will range from the Italian Renaissance to Goethe's Faust. En route, we will consider tragedies by (amongst others) Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Racine, and Dryden. All texts not originally written in English will be read in translation.

Most Latin American countries have weathered political and social traumas. Through this instability and struggle, artists have reimagined the use of theater to challenge structures, and to empower the oppressed. We will learn how different Latin American playmakers have chosen to tackle social/political theater from the '60s on. Our main focus will be Augusto Boal's "Theater of the Oppressed." Each class will include improvisations and games from the genre (NO ACTING experience necessary), readings, discussions, and watching performances. The seminar will culminate in a student created project (script, happening, play, structure).

This freshman seminar will take students on a journey across the historically interconnected regions of pre-modern Central Asia, Iran and India to discover a world where people, goods and ideas traveled, where spaces were shared and where fluid identities adapted to changing spatial contexts. An engaging mix of textual, visual and material sources with methods of cartography will enable students to learn about diverse historical experiences that include the Sogdian-Turkic commercial symbiosis in Pre-Islamic Central Asia, gendered spaces in peripatetic Mughal courts, and forced relocations caused by slavery in the Turco-Persian world.

How do people balance love and work? A social psychology perspective takes a broad behavioral scientific approach. By love, we mean close relationships with partners, family, intimates. By work, we mean paid and unpaid jobs, careers, household work, volunteering. We will look at what motivates a person in a given situation. We aim to be inclusive. How do people allot time to love and work? What impels people, whether by choice or not, to do neither, one over the other, or both at once?

They say, "you are what you eat," but what does the food that we consume say about us and our ways of being? La cocina, the kitchen, as the heart of the home often appears in literature, film, commercial enterprises, and television. This course will examine food practices and behaviors through the anthropological, historical, sociological, and psychological interpretations of food and eating. An understanding of how food and meals have evolved to create culture and identity will augment students' understanding of their relationship with food and culture, history, geography, and themselves.

In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? What are the aesthetic, political, and daily life possibilities within stillness? In this studio course, we'll dance, sit, question, and create substantial final projects. We'll play with movement within stillness, stillness within movement, stillness in performance and in performers' minds. We'll look at stillness as protest and power. We'll wonder when stillness might be an abdication of responsibility. We'll read within religious, philosophy, performance, and disability studies, and will explore social justice, visual art, and sound (and silence).

This 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.

This seminar offers an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of international diplomacy, drawing on the instructor's experience as former ambassador and current scholar. We will survey the classics and explore some of the more recent diplomatic memoirs, focusing on case studies such as the end of the Cold War, the Iraq fiasco, the U.S. opening to Cuba, the Iran nuclear deal, and the challenges of dealing with Russia and China today. We will then descend from high politics down to ground level, focusing on practical aspects of diplomacy on which students can draw if and as they aspire to careers in international relations.