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.

Some say there are two ways to understand the world: as parachutists or truffle-hunters. Where the former take the broad view of events from above, the latter zoom in on the specific and local approach, from below. Here we reject the binary, combining the two sensibilities for lessons about the past, present, and future. What could a close examination of your own life experience or that of your community reveal about the world? And how, in turn, might those revelations--anchored in social science or the humanities--advance the movement for democracy, justice, equity or care?

This course will provide students with an inclusive framework to consider the use of traditional craft methods in creating art. We will work with media such as ceramics, metal, glass, paper making/paper sculpture, dyeing with natural materials, and soft sculpture/quilting. Students will also learn through research, readings, and slide shows about a variety of craft practices spanning a wide transnational and historical range. Theoretical questions concerning craft that are pertinent to contemporary art practices such as questions of authorship, experimentation, symbolism, and ephemerality will be explored.

Food and science are integrated in our everyday lives, and this seminar explores their intersection in the kitchen. You will learn how to prepare foods like humus, falafel, manakish za'atar and to make cheese, yogurt, pickles, kombucha, and much more! Through food production and consumption, you will discover the fascinating world of molecular biology, microbiology, and biochemistry. We will also study how naturally occurring chemicals produced by microbes or plants can affect our bodies and health. This course will mostly prepare vegetarian foods and no prior cooking experience is required.

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.

Some 125 stone plaques in Rome mark inundations dating back 800 years. We trace the rise and fall of the Tiber using the tools of geodesy. We introduce the quantitative geoscience of measuring Earth's shape, deformation, and its gravity field. Lectures on fundamental principles and programming exercises prepare for outdoor on-campus field-work and the mandatory week-long research trip to Italy. In Rome, we measure and map the elevation of known historical flood markers, placing them in the chronological context of urbanization, interpreting them in the light of humanity's attempts to control nature.

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.

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 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 the Enlightenment. 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.

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.

With the frenzied pace of life, there is little time to ponder the meaning of life. How does a person find deeper meaning? What is the relationship of the meaning of my life to a larger purpose? Writers, thinkers, & religious thinkers; ordinary folks--a neighbor, one's parents & grandparents--have grappled with these questions. The course explores some responses to the "big questions" of life. Readings & films are taken from different cultures, times, & spheres of human endeavor & experience.

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.

The GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) is in defense mode today, facing book bans, protests, and critique from all sides. Using qualitative research techniques, we will explore GLAMs in Princeton, Trenton (with ProCES) and nearby. We will learn about historical contexts, donor impact, and new ways to engage the general public. For centuries, GLAMs have served as the critical vehicle for collecting and framing knowledge. We will discuss ways to redescribe what has been collected to be more inclusive. The course includes a final project or paper, two field trips, and two presentations, and encourages multimedia authoring.

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 2025.

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 the role of sound in film? Music and sound effects are central elements of telling its stories by establishing pacing, enhancing mood, commenting on or interpreting, even contradicting and subverting what we see. This course explores these questions from the "talkies" of the late 1920s to the films of today. Over this time filmmaking technology has been transformed by post-production editing. We will analyze selected films and scenes to develop a technical and critical vocabulary to describe and assess the multiple visual and aural layers of a still evolving art form in which what we hear is as important as what we see.

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 explores the cultural history of popular tools that we use to define the self, from horoscopes to Myers-Briggs questionnaires and Buzzfeed personality tests. We will trace these tools to origins that include ancient medicine and 19th-century philosophy, applying theories of self-definition to diverse objects of analysis, such as Charles Dickens's _Oliver Twist_ and the rise of queer astrology. Assignments include a guided research project and the opportunity to design your own personality test. The class will take a field trip to see _Wicked_ on Broadway.

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.

Despite the slew of high-profile scandals exposed over the past two decades, examples of ethical transgressions in financial markets continue to abound. At the same time, we see well-established as well as innovative ways in which the finance industry is able to assert its credentials as a force for good in society. We 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.

This seminar will investigate four disasters: the Titanic shipwreck, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, and the implosion of the submersible Titan in 2023. Using original sources, it will study how conscientious responses to previous disasters may indirectly contribute to new ones. How can we improve priorities of risks to address? How does the cultural aftermath of events affect decisions? The seminar will introduce and draw on concepts from the humanities, social sciences, and engineering suggesting how history synthesizes diverse ideas.

From the perspective of the history of science, this seminar examines the history of Celluloid Science. We will explore how material practices and ways of thinking about film and science transformed together over the past 130 years, from the 19th-century origins of film as an experimental tool of visualization and scientific research through to 21st-century cinematic depictions of scientific theories and adventure.

For as long as we have been human, we have been looking up. In this course, we will explore the connection between past and present: what tools did ancient civilizations use to study astronomical phenomena, how did they then explain said phenomena, and how does what they learned compare to what we know now? In addition to readings and discussions, we will collaborate on the creation of "artifacts," conduct research, and visit museums to view artifacts associated with the history of astronomy. This course will combine the creative and the scientific. Fall break will be spent in Cusco, Peru, where we will tour Incan astronomical sites.

In this cross-disciplinary seminar, students will embark on a journey to understand language technology i.e ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama etc and, in particular, its application to the intricacies of the African languages. By examining the evolution of language technology and its limited application to commercially profitable languages, the course will highlight the need for expansion into a wider array of world languages in order to equally provide the cultural and societal benefits that the technology provides. Students will gain an understanding of how language technology impacts daily life through examples like smart devices and virtual agents.

This seminar examines the role of music as a tool for social resistance, resilience and change across various historical and cultural contexts in the Americas. Through the analysis of a variety of musical genres and social contexts, students will examine how music reflects, shapes, and responds to social and political contexts, as well as how it mobilizes communities, challenges powers, and amplifies marginalized voices. For songs and genres performed in other languages, no previous knowledge of other languages is required.

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.

Students will study the practice of pro wrestling from different theoretical perspectives, including the cultural-comparative, phenomenological, social constructionist, artistic, labor-economic, and political. Students will conduct a mini-ethnography at a local wrestling match, develop creative projects motivated by pro wrestling, and write a final paper analyzing a case of their choice (e.g. ritual elements in wrestlers' entrance themes, Kia Stevens's engagement with stereotyping in the ring and on-screen, or simulated embodiment in wrestling video games) from one or more of the theoretical perspectives addressed in the course.

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.

This seminar will dig deeply into American history during the early national period. It will examine politics, high and low, as well as cultural and intellectual developments. By making these moves, and, crucially, by thinking about how historians make them, the course will teeter constantly between its express content and larger lessons about historical methodology and practice.

This course looks at the "political lives" of Angela Y. Davis as an activist, organizer, public intellectual, and writer whose work has been in the public eye for more than fifty years. The course will be organized around readings of Davis's robust body of her life's work including essays written while she was imprisoned and to books that have become foundational in feminist scholarship. We will examine the enormous bevy of primary sources on Davis. We will also experiment with political writing in the form of the manifesto using Davis's writing as a basis for doing so.

This seminar uses canonical texts, alongside little known primary sources and works of historical analysis to examine the origins of Civil Disobedience theory and practice. We will discuss Civil Disobedience in the context of U.S. fugitive slave law, labor organizers occupying factories, the temperance protesters who went to jail by smashing barrels of rum, the pioneering use of mass civil disobedience by Gandhi, and, of course, the American Civil Rights Movement.

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.

The seminar consists of a collaborative, close reading of the Inferno; short introductory lectures will alternate with student-led class discussions, film screenings, and presentations on Dante's reception in modern poetry and art. We will use a bilingual edition, which allows us to access the text easily, while providing opportunities to observe nuances of meaning or style preserved in the original language. We will also experiment with active-learning techniques, involving all students in an informed, meditated, and collaborative interpretation of the poem.

Is 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.

Immigrant rights advocates propose sanctuary as a framework for immigrant inclusion while conservatives have countered with legislation, lawsuits, and rhetoric. But what does sanctuary mean for immigrants and community members who embrace the concept? What are practical tools drawn from sanctuary that shape welcoming communities in the U.S., and how can they evolve to account for new realities? Using scholarly writings, first-person accounts, gray literature, periodicals, and multimedia resources, we will examine sanctuary. We will also engage with theorists and practitioners conceptualizing and applying sanctuary to community-engaged work.

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 explores prints as a distinct form of art making and reproduction. The course will consider the design, material, artistic, economic, political, and social aspects of print culture in a variety of contexts and geographical locations, from the early modern period to the present.