For 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.

Seeds are ubiquitous. We eat them. We plant them. We blow them in the wind. But do they need saving? Seed saving is an heirloom practice that is as old as the notion of agriculture itself. Yet, seed saving practices sit at the center of an intensifying debate about biodiversity, food sovereignty, intellectual property rights, and the future of our species. This course will explore the oft-overlooked complexity of seeds and the people who are working to save them with special attention to intellectual, scientific, ethical, and practical challenges.

The piano is a central fixture of European classical and contemporary music, an inheritor of centuries' worth of repertory and performance practice. In the past century, the instrument has amalgamated with various genres and spread to every corner of the world, becoming part of rich and varied musical communities. The seminar will provide a comprehensive understanding of the instrument, covering its design (mechanics, acoustics, and tuning) and the cultural contexts that inspired it, the repertory from the 18th century to the present, recital culture and pedagogy, and recent innovations such as prepared pianos and synthesizers.

What do elephant ivory, pangolin scales, and baby orangutans have in common? They are all major players in the global wildlife trade. From discussions of the origins of COVID-19 to concerns about the extinction of the last white rhinos, the wildlife trade has garnered significant attention worldwide. In this this course we will explore how species have been appropriated as inputs into markets, including as wild meat, pets, medicine, and luxury goods. We will draw on diverse fields such as ecology and anthropology and will apply the tools of systems thinking to analyze the wildlife trade through the lens of conservation science.

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.

This freshman seminar concerns itself with the laws by which fictional female lives are told: narratives by which we anticipate as well as judge--vigilant observers that we are--what is going to happen to her next. A fundamental claim of this course is that dramatic suspense problematically takes momentum from gendered laws and cues: when we see a lightly-clad woman, drenched in blood, stumbling from a highway stop we are conditioned to assume that she has been raped. But what happens when a female director 'disappoints' our narrative expectation because the presumed female victim turns out in fact to have cannibalized a truck driver?

This 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.

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.

This 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.

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.

This 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.

In this course we will be looking at narrative structures that comprise the mechanics of textual and visual storytelling. Whether it is Aristotle's 'Poetics' or Quentin Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction', a PC adventure game, or a music video, they share the social and cultural activity of storytelling. From analyzing the art of comic strips and e-books designed for tablets, together we will be not only reading and watching the stories made by others, but also creating the stories of our own. You will try your hand at street photography, shoot a short film, conceptualize a publicity campaign together with your classmates, and much more.

Traditionally art and the sciences have been treated as separate disciplines, but both are systems of understanding and describing the world around us. By studying them together, new possibilities emerge. This course takes a holistic and renaissance view that encourages students to find a creative practice inspired by the concepts and scope of their area of concentration. The approach is interdisciplinary, experimental, and pragmatic, and will facilitate the completion of an interdisciplinary project over the course of the semester while becoming familiar with contemporary research-based work and discourse around STEAM education and practice.

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. 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.

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.

What is a nation, how is it made, and how does it constantly have to be remade? How do ideas about language, race, gender, and culture shape perceptions of the past and understandings of belonging? This course takes Greece as a case study to examine the concepts and tools that go into making a nation. Each week we consider a different resource for nation making, from the use of history and the shaping of ethnicity to sports and food. We also explore the relevance of this study to understanding the U.S. today. Students work towards a final project that educates the public about how works of art contribute to making, or unmaking, the nation.

This course offers, to interested students of any background or worldview, an introduction to how centrals texts and thinkers in the Catholic intellectual tradition explore the central questions about human nature, the good life, and virtue.

This 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.

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.

"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.

This course offers a bird's eye view of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. We will trace the history of the Universe from the earliest initial conditions that we can tangibly infer based on the physics of what we observe in the Universe today. Students will be asked to develop a short film clip describing the cosmic history starting with weekly short essay assignments on elements of cosmic history. No prerequisites in math or physics are required. This course is about learning something meaningful about the physics that governs the early period of the Universe and being able to convey that understanding to others.

This course examines the representation of women as outlaw in literature. It takes as its premise the quest for women to transgress their gender identities by questioning the acceptable traditional, religious, and cultural gender norms that undermine their self-potential. Through class discussions and presentations, students will explore how writers through their female characters interrogate, redefine, or fortify the boundaries of womanhood. At the end of the class, students will be able to identify and relate with some of the sociocultural, political, religious, and economic factors that lead to women's quest for self-identity.

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.

It is 1633. Galileo stands trial before the Roman Inquisition, charged with committing heresy for advocating the Copernican belief that the sun lies at the center of the universe. It is up to you to decide the outcome. Should Galileo's books be banned? Should he be placed under arrest, or even worse? In this course you get to rewrite history. The main part of this course involves the role-playing game 'The Trial of Galileo' developed using the Reacting to the Past format. You will also help design a new microgame based on the Roman Inquisition's Index attempt to place Lucretius poem on ancient atomism on the Index of Forbidden books.

King Arthur of Camelot has fascinated writers and artists for centuries. This seminar interrogates the grip the legend has had on Western imagination, beginning with 20th- and 21st-century novels and films. How do such works "read" Arthur and what do these interpretations imply about their own contexts? Tracing the legend back to its earliest (5th c.) manifestations in Latin chronicles, students explore the creation, deployment, and transmission of myth over time and thereby develop their ability to perform close readings of different media as well as more nuanced understandings of both the present and the past.

This seminar will study how true crime narratives and its cultural history in what became the United States of America helped shape and reflect issues of American citizenship, immigration, gender, class, race, sexuality, and violence for over 350 years.

This seminar offers a contemporary, interdisciplinary introduction to the study of the Holocaust. We will study this unthinkable atrocity in both its historical specificity and its relevance to the present. We will thus move between works of history, first-person accounts, fiction, poetry, film, critical theory, and philosophy, testing the limits and powers of divergent idioms and genres in the face of atrocity. Is poetry possible 'after Auschwitz'? What about philosophy? We will conclude by asking how the Holocaust relates to contemporary forms of racism and fascism and if it is possible to think about the Holocaust 'intersectionally.'

Rembrandt (1606-1669) is an artist we feel we know, perhaps because he painted, etched and drew more self-portraits than any earlier artist. In this seminar, we will study all aspects of Rembrandt's art and examine firsthand his works held by the Princeton University Art Museum and museums in New York City.

Science underpins many of our biggest societal challenges and is therefore crucial to the most complex issues facing Washington, DC. Influencing the outcomes involves understanding the policy of the issue, the politics of change, and the process of government. Students will learn these skills from practitioners, academic literature, and class lectures and put them to work by lobbying in groups on a topic of their choice. Students will visit Washington, DC to meet with and influence policy makers.

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.

War, disease, environmental collapse, and other disasters remain as relevant now as they were for ancient societies. Apocalyptic literature, which claims to reveal knowledge regarding the cosmos and history, has offered powerful accounts of the end of the world in many historical contexts. This course will trace how apocalyptic ideas and idioms forged in the ancient and medieval worlds continue to inform modern speculation about the end times. It will illuminate the flexibility of apocalyptic language, its ability to interpret changing historical situations, and its ongoing power to move people, whether to acceptance or to radical action.

This course investigates the relationship between the built environment and the human cultures that create them. The focus is on the Ise Shrines in Japan, which we will visit. The study of their history and architecture will allow us to identify how celestial orientation, materials, form, craft and ritual can all play important roles not only for shrines but simple storehouses and granaries, temples and churches, and modern museums.

The 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.

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.

Many Latin American performance artists have reimagined the use of theater to challenge social and political structures. Boal's 'Theater of the Oppressed', Teatro Yuyachkani, TiT, Teatro Trono, and more, challenge, subvert, and manipulate classic Eurocentric theater perspectives to spur awareness and action in their audiences. Through readings, discussion, viewing, writing, improv and play we will explore these artists' work, theatrical origins, and socio/geopolitical contexts. We will apply inspired tactics to our own work. Spanish not required. Acting experience not required. Willingness to play and take risks is integral to class.

What does it mean to photograph yourself? Is it an act of self-exploration, narcissism, self-love, representational justice, performance? What can our bodies teach us if we pay attention? Through making analog self-portraits, students will reflect on how it is to be in their particular body. Classes will be spent in the Black and White Darkroom and participating in guided somatic workshops that foreground embodiment and play. Students will learn the basics of film photography and experimental darkroom techniques while reflecting on their identity and their first semester at Princeton.

In this class we will learn how to 'read' films. Like literary scholars investigating the poetics of text, we will similarly 'read' videographic language to understand how films convey meaning. We will analyze storytelling elements (plot, genre, context) and technical aspects (cinematography, montage, mise-en-scène) of filmmaking. The city of Rome will serve as our central cinematic landscape to study works spanning over a century from the Italian silent era (Cabiria, 1914) to the digital blockbusters of the new millennium (Gladiator, 2000). Class will comprise lectures, discussion, creative assignments and presentations.

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.

This course invites students to reflect upon the interdependence between humans and the natural world through the voice of poets, philosophers, filmmakers, and artists whose attention focuses on nature's glow, that is, on its inspiring aura. Can a work of art or a cultural artifact help us understand the connection of all living and nonliving things? Can it allow us to deepen our understanding of our place on earth? Can art's insight inspire compassionate knowledge, and spark action? The final project for this course will be to imagine and craft an ecological restoration project.

Does modern progress corrupt our morals and degrade our humanity? Has the march of civilization exhausted our souls? This course engages classic literary and philosophic works that explore how humanity has been shaped by modernizing forces. Students will investigate the enlightenment's promise to improve the human condition through the accumulation of knowledge, the technological mastery of nature, and the conferral of natural rights. They will consider--and question--modernity's faith in the goodness of progress, liberalism, socialism, science, technology, and democracy.

In 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.

In this seminar, students learn how subjectivities are negotiated in and through language, and perform a critical exploration of languages as social institutions, ideological battlegrounds, instruments used to homogenize populations, define citizenship, and create hierarchies. We discuss language as part of the social, cultural, and political machinery that enabled the rise of the nation-state, linguistic nationalism and colonialism, and we focus on the emergence of complex multilingual identities against a backdrop of monolingual forces that remain ubiquitous in our political institutions and cultural and epistemological productions.

This seminar studies how relations among pets and humans have changed over the past two centuries. Reading across humanities and social science disciplines, we will consider the unexpected connections that link pets to specific articulations of gender, race, sexuality, class, ability, and species. Arranged topically and historically, the seminar considers issues ranging from the gendered development of cat breeds in Victorian England to the racial politics of modern dog rescue. We will study animal companions not as passive receptacles of human culture, but rather as beings with agency who have co-determined their places in our lives.

This seminar focuses on the intersection of environmental and climate justice. Drawing upon scholarly articles, books, music, art, films, and testimonies from experts, we will learn about the conditions that have given rise to environmental and climate justice movements; differences in demands, strategies, and worldviews expressed by such movements around the globe; and grapple with the structural and institutional barriers they face. This seminar also pays special attention to our local context, highlighting relevant scholarship at Princeton University in order to expose freshmen to faculty and the ENV certificate program.

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.