The sensation of an ocean breeze; the taste of watermelon; the smell of a familiar person: how to put such visceral experiences into words? While social scientists have focused on language as a way to communicate human experience, this course focuses on the visceral ways in which we interact with the world: through our body and our senses. Drawing on ethnographies, history, art, music, podcasts and films, we will look at how senses--touch, hearing, smell, taste, sight, movement and balance, and beyond--are experienced in different cultural, social and political contexts. We will go on mini-field trips to experience hands-on ways of knowing.

Medical Anthropology explores how structural violence and the social markers of difference impact life chances in our worlds on edge. While addressing biosocial and therapeutic realities and probing the tenets of medical capitalism, the course articulates theoretical and practical contributions to apprehending health as both a struggle against death and a human right. We will learn ethnographic methods, engage in critical ethical debates, and experiment with modes of expression. Students will develop community-engaged and artistic projects and consider alternative forms of solidarity and care emerging alongside newfangled scales of harm.

Are our emotions reliable sources of moral intuition? What role do emotions play in political life? This course focuses on how humans engage with questions of morality, faith, justice, and social wellbeing, and how emotions mediate these engagements. Emotions such as anger, happiness, disgust, shame, compassion, love, and grief play an important role in shaping and challenging moral convictions and political orientations. Through ethnographic and theoretical readings, we will learn how anthropologists discern the emotional textures of our moral and political lives.

This course treats the supernatural and the paranormal as phenomena warranting serious exploration in their entanglement with race, gender, the psyche, and the body. Texts and audio-visual materials will introduce us to ghosts, fairytales, monsters, witches, spirit possession, and many forms of enchantment. Through a series of case studies, we will investigate how several key concepts work together to create our sense of reality: nature, science, religion, magic, reason, modernity. Ultimately, the course will push students to interrogate their assumptions about what is natural, normal, rational, and real.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, human experience has become heavily defined by our digital/virtual interactions. From Zoom calls and classes online to meeting up with friends in magical lands in video games, we have come to rely on digital technologies in ways rarely seen in the past. But how does one go about understanding our new digital condition? And how might one develop research around the many virtual worlds that have come to exist? This course is an anthropological exploration of the history of human interaction with the internet, social media, virtual worlds, and other forms of digital existence.

This course explores what we do with language and other modes of expression and how these modes shape our communicative capacities. Why do we gossip? How do we decide what communication is appropriate face-to-face or via text or email? What informs our beliefs about civility and obscenity? How do we decide what credible speech is? What happens when a culturally rooted expressive form (say, a dance) is taken up by people elsewhere for other aesthetic and political ends? We will explore such questions by studying theories and ethnographies of a range of phenomena: love-letters, gossip, poetry, asylum appeals, spoken word, and more.

This course delves into East Asian-styled architecture in the US through the lens of diaspora. By surveying Chinatowns, Japanese gardens, and period rooms via immersive field trips and the visual and textual documents, we examine how the experiences of immigration, racialization, and cultural exchange are reflected in the formal language, spatial interaction, cultural symbolism, and social dynamics of the built environment. Additionally, we interpret the process of representation, appropriation, modification, and ultimately, reinvention of architecture and space, all within the context of negotiation between the home and host land.

The course explores how art worked in politics and religion from ca. 300-1200 CE in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Students encounter the arts of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam, great courts and migratory societies; dynamics of word and image, multilingualism, intercultural connection, and local identity. We examine how art can represent and shape notions of sacred and secular power. We consider how the work of 'art' in this period is itself powerful and, sometimes, dangerous. Course format combines lecture on various cultural contexts with workshop discussion focused on specific media and materials, or individual examples.

This seminar will examine the historical concept of 'plague' from antiquity to the present using works of art, archaeological contexts, and bioarchaeology. Students will also learn the scientific principles behind each disease outbreak, including how the pathogen was first discovered; how it is currently understood by modern infectious disease experts; and how it functions within the human body and as part of ecosystems. The course will explore in particular the three pandemics of Y. pestis, malaria, and smallpox; the social impact of plagues during the ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern periods; and the history of medicine.

This seminar will explore ethical issues in the study and practice of archaeology, cultural resource management, museum studies, and bioarchaeology. Students are expected to substantively contribute to class discussions on a weekly basis, as well as to lead the discussion of one set of readings. Weekly seminars will be accompanied by a group midterm debate on an assigned ethical issue and an individual final research project (with a class presentation and 20-minute final conversation with Prof. Kay).

This seminar explores the politics of color in the work of artists, writers, and thinkers who create or engage images in ways that challenge us to see color as neither arbitrary nor neutral, but instead as portals that allow us access to powerful social and cultural dynamics. Our emphasis is on the resonances of dark color, specifically the varying intensities of blacks, browns, blues, and violets. We consider their extended manifestation in shadow, night and negative space, blind fields and color adjustments.

This course provides a foundation in the history, concepts, methodologies, and tools of digital humanities research. Students learn to critically evaluate and incorporate computational and data-driven methods into their research, as well as achieve a baseline fluency in accessing, filtering, and analyzing humanities datasets. No prerequisites or preexisting technical skills are required. Students working with texts, images, and artifacts are welcome.

Roman history courses usually cover grand narratives based on literary evidence and usually no room for discussing how knowledge is created and the different methods for studying ancient history. This course instead looks at different questions to shed light in fruitful collaborations between scholars from different fields. Students will engage with STEM and digital humanities methods as they consider historical questions. Through different case studies and hands-on activities, students will learn how different scientific, technological, and computational methods help us employ a multi-disciplinary approach to learning about the ancient past.

This discussion-based seminar will examine the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of food and dining in the ancient Roman world. This course will approach food in the Roman world through a variety of sources, literary and archaeological, and will push students to consider what we can learn about Roman society and culture through the lens of food.

Fairy tales are among the first stories we encounter, often before we can read. They present themselves as timeless--"Once upon a time..." - yet are essentially modern. They are often presented as children's literature, yet are filled with sex and violence. They have been interpreted as archetypal patterns of the subconscious mind or of deep cultural origins, yet perform the work of shaping contemporary culture. They circulate in myriad oral variations, and are written down in new ones by the most sophisticated literary authors. In this course we will explore the fantasy, enchantment, labor, and violence wrought by fairy tales.

This course considers the impact of medical history, its advances and effects, in various historical periods and in dialogue with literary representations of human experience. Starting with definitions of medical humanities (in technology, philosophy, social sciences and religious studies), we explore medical history in diverse literary texts chosen from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. From our readings and discussions,we will gain an understanding of how medicine and the humanities are, in fact, inextricably linked.

The age-old relationship between literature and war is fundamentally a problem of ethics. This course is centrally concerned with ethics and aesthetics: the ethics of war, the aesthetics of war literature and film, and the ethics of making art about war. It explores the triangulation of warfare, literature, and ethics in the 20th-21st centuries, approaching this relationship through multiple frames and genres (poetry, fiction, film, photography, and essays), with texts drawn from a diverse array of world cultures. Topics include total war, memory and trauma, translation, partition, war and comics, monsters, and virtual warfare.

The seminar introduces the manuscript culture of ancient and medieval China from the 4th century BCE to the advent of printing in around 1000 CE. We discuss the creation, uses, purposes, and the visual and material aspects of writings on bamboo, wood, silk, and paper. Examining texts buried in ancient tombs, left in watchtowers, or stored in desert caves, we look at writings to accompany the dead; personal letters; calligraphic masterpieces; copies of the classics; and carriers of medical, legal, administrative, or mantic knowledge cherished by the cultural and political elite and soldiers and peasants alike. With two museum visits.

This transdisciplinary course investigates `home' as a central concept in both environmental studies (settler-colonial vs nomad) and arthouse cinema (anthropocentric vs environmental perspective). With the help of examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises, we will experiment with a possible compromise between the civilizational paradigms of settler colonialism vs nomadic homelessness.

This course covers the three major historical moments of documentary work from its emergence in the interwar avant-gardes to its rediscovery in the 1960s and the contemporary documentary turn. With an eye toward the specific political conditions, technologies, and formal conventions that established the boundary between reality and representation at each of these three moments, this seminar considers: deskilling and the industrialization of writing; the contest between literature and technical media; the emergent properties of mass culture; changing conditions of authorship; documentation, the archive and forensic investigation.

Ruled from Constantinople (ancient Byzantium and present-day Istanbul), the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire survived the collapse of the Western Roman Empire by over a millennium. This state on the crossroads of Europe and Asia was Roman in law, civil administration, and military tradition, but predominantly Greek in language, and Eastern Christian in religion. The course explores one of the greatest civilisations the world has known, tracing the experiences of its majority and minority groups through the dramatic centuries of the Islamic conquests, Iconoclasm, and the Crusades, until its final fall to the Ottoman Turks.

This class examines the relationship between law and society in the Roman and post-Roman worlds. We begin with the origins of Roman law in the ancient world, and end with the rediscovery of Roman law in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries. Over the course of the intervening millennium, we will focus on pivotal moments and key texts in the development of the legal cultures of the Roman and post-Roman worlds of Western Eurasia. Our goal will be to think about how law and law-like norms both shape and are shaped by society and social practices.

This team-taught double credit course examines European texts, works of art and music from the Renaissance to the modern period. Readings, lectures, and discussions are complemented by films, concerts, and special events. It is the second half of an intensive interdisciplinary introduction to Western culture that includes history, religion, philosophy, literature and the arts. Although most students will have taken HUM 216 - 217, first-years and sophomores are welcome to join at this point.

In combination with HUM 218, this is the second half of a year-long interdisciplinary sequence exploring Western culture from the 15th to the 20th centuries. Students must register for both HUM 218 and HUM 219, which constitute a double-course. The lecture component for HUM 219 is listed as TBA because all meetings are listed under HUM 218. There are no separate meeting times for HUM 219.

Second in the two-semester sequence on East Asian literary humanities, this course begins in the seventeenth century and covers a range of themes in the history, literature, and culture of Japan, Korea, and China until the contemporary period. Looking into the narratives of modernity, colonialism, urban culture, and war and disaster, we will see East Asia as a space for encounters, contestations, cultural currents and countercurrents. No knowledge of East Asian languages or history is required and first-year students are welcome to take the course.

This course compares the canonical cosmogonies of ancient Mesopotamia, Israel and Greece. We will study in detail the creation epic Enuma eliš and the flood epic Atra-hasis from Babylon, the opening chapters of the Biblical book of Genesis, and Hesiod's Theogony and Catalogue of women; as well as considering related texts from across the ancient Mediterranean. We will ask how the set texts describe the earliest history of the world and what this meant for their ancient audiences, how they relate to each other, and how they inform the long history of human investigation into the origins of the universe.

This course invites us to compare the stories, teachings, lives, deaths, and communities associated with Jesus and Buddha. While respecting each tradition's unique and distinctive sources, cultures, ideas and legacies, it invites us to deepen our understanding of each tradition by looking through the lens of the other. Course readings include accounts of the lives of Jesus and Buddha, what each taught about how to live and create society, and how they articulate the meaning of life and death, suffering and salvation.

What does it mean to look at language? What does it mean to read art? Focusing on the intersection of language and visual art in modernist and avant-garde experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries, we study such phenomena as the global rise of concrete and visual poetry, language-based conceptual art, and score-based performances. Utilizing methods drawn from art history, literary studies, history, and philosophy, students explore close looking and reading in relation to such topics as medium, representation, abstraction, networks. Students also as engage material practices by realizing instruction pieces, assembling magazines, etc.

How can computational tools help us to understand art and literature? This seminar offers an introduction to the 'big tent' that is called Digital Humanities (DH), emphasizing the integration of computational methods in the study of humanities. The course covers a range of digital tools and approaches designed to organize, explore, and narrate data-driven stories. Course topics will range from a critical reflection on the boundaries - or boundlessness? - of DH research, to the creation of digital cultural artifacts. Students will learn about a variety of theories and methodologies, actively engaging with a broad array of digital tools.

Artificial intelligence existed in fiction well before the first computer was built. In fact, storytelling and AI appear to be inseparable: apart from countless science-fiction works, stories ranging from mass unemployment to doomsday scenarios have become entangled with real-world AI and its development. This class studies some iconic representations of AI in the arts alongside non-fiction texts that shed some light on how AI works, its potentialities, limits, and biases. In so doing, we will make sense of the stories that we read about AI, and reflect on whether the former can teach us anything about the latter.

In this community-engaged class, students will be invited to learn about the dynamic history and role of the arts in Trenton through conversations with local artists and activists. Students will develop close listening skills with oral historian/artist Nyssa Chow. Readings include texts about urban invisibility, race, decoloniality, and public arts policy. Students will participate in the development of a virtual memorial and restorative project by Trenton artist Bentrice Jusu.

This course explores the different ways that medicine is represented in the fields of literature and the visual arts, using the concept of storytelling to examine themes that are at once medical and existential, and that are part of everybody's lives, such as death and dying, epidemics, caregiving, disability, and public health. Focusing on literary texts and art, we'll analyze how these themes are staged in the different sources. We'll develop a toolbox of concepts and techniques by which to investigate the narrative structures used to convey meanings about medicine, be it as a field of knowledge, a set of practices, or a mode of experience.

The Middle Ages was a period of far-ranging travel, long-distance entanglements, and cultural hybridity. This course will study how geographers and travelers - including eco-travelers like crops and disease - encountered a world grown smaller through empires, trade, and migration, ca. 750-1250 CE. By gathering texts, artifacts, and art from regions often studied separately, this course will test the possibilities for defining a "global Middle Ages" and what that means for our understanding of globalization today. Includes visits from outside experts and trips to special collections.

In this course, we investigate questions of material persistence and plasticity through artifacts, embodied practices, and textually embedded ideas of matter and body that emerged in the ancient Mediterranean and carry on today. Moving along three conceptual axes (body, cosmology, change) and working with three primary materials (plaster, rubber, wax), we experiment with practices of close reading; speculative, material-based art-making; different genres of writing; historical analysis; and other strategies of engaging premodern techniques of making alongside ancient philosophies of matter within contemporary materialist projects.

Trauma has become a part of our everyday lives with the pandemic, mass shootings, police brutality, etc. What is the role of researchers, reporters, filmmakers, and museum workers in mitigating the effects of trauma on individuals and communities? Throughout this course, students will learn how to conduct trauma informed interviews, interpret, and present their findings in a safe and respectful way that can facilitate healing rather than increase the pain. By the end of the course, students will be expected to develop their own interview-based research project.

How did the introduction of new text technologies impact premodern culture? What motivated or delayed the adoption of the codex or the various types of print? Did these technologies encourage new practices or suppress old ones? And how does the story change when we turn from European to Near Eastern contexts? By learning about past text technologies, we'll gain a fuller understanding of how today's digital text technologies leave their mark on how we interact with texts and with the world. This course teaches relevant digital humanities methods for texts and reflects critically on both our current moment and premodern pasts.

An exploration of original texts in the history of ideas about the workings of the human mind starting in Antiquity and leading to the development of the empirical discipline of psychology in the 19th century and some of its modern trends. Subsequent developments, including the child study movement, are explored though 20th century writings, culminating with Sartre's philosophical psychology and sources in Eastern thought to put the Western trajectory in perspective.

Close study of empirical works by Freud. The course continues HUM/PSY 365 (Freud on the Psychological Foundations of the Mind), which scrutinizes Freud's general theory of the mind, and forms the backdrop to this course's inquiry into specific portions of mental life Freud investigated. Topics include aesthetic sensibility, dreaming, humor, mental glitches, superstition, indecision, group psychology, and religion. The aim is to examine the psychology emerging from those investigations and the method by which Freud extrapolates it. More recent research and commentary is consulted for additional perspective.

Analysis of philosophical, literary, and theological accounts of love and justice, with emphasis on how they interrelate in personal and public life. Is love indiscriminate and therefore antithetical to justice, or can love take the shape of justice? What are the implications for law, politics, and social criticism? Particular attention will be given to discussions of virtue, tragedy, forgiveness, friendship, and happiness.

This course will explore the crucial connections between migration, language, and translation. Drawing on texts from a range of genres and disciplines - from memoir and fiction to scholarly work in translation studies, migration studies, political science, anthropology, and sociology - we will focus on how language and translation affect the lives of those who move through and settle in other cultures, and how, in turn, human mobility affects language and modes of belonging.

This class explores what land means for different groups of people-- as an asset, a risk management device, and an icon of cultural meaning. It asks what happens not just at "land's end" (in which land is stolen) but "people's end"-- in a global political economy where land is often worth more than its inhabitants? This course treats land as an orienting concept to trace processes of dispossession, commodification and financialization amid transformations in conceptions of space, material resources, and communities.