What is religion? And what is religion for anthropology? Is it centered on beliefs or representations or practices or rites? What do we study when we study religion? What do people get out of their engagement with religion? Is justice possible within the framework of religion today? What is the force of religious worldviews in shaping people's ideas about how to live? How does technology mediate religious experience? How does globalization impact religious forms, experiences, and identities? These are some of the questions we will address in this course through our reading of ethnographic, theoretical, and critical texts.

This course asks how intersectional feminism, queer, and trans theory can spearhead new methods of research, objects of study, and ways of seeing and analyzing spaces, buildings, cities, and human alliances within them. Overall, the seminar focuses on practices and forms of organizing around LGBTQ+ rights and how historical actors have formed networks and associations to resist dominant spatial and political regimes.

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, inter-cultural connection, and local identity. We consider how art can represent and shape notions of sacred and secular power, and examine 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. Via Zoom in 2020.

In this course, we will examine archaeological evidence for and art historical depictions of plagues and pandemics, beginning in antiquity and ending with the COVID-19 Pandemic. The course will explore bioarchaeological investigations of the Black Death, the Justinianic Plague, and other examples of infectious diseases with extremely high mortalities, and students will complete six "Pandemic Simulation" exercises throughout the semester. We will also consider the differing impact of plagues during the medieval, early modern, and modern periods: themes in art; the development of hospitals; and the changing ideas of disease and medicine.

This seminar will explore ethical dilemmas in past and current study and practice of archaeology, cultural resource management, museum studies, and bioarchaeology. We will consider conflicts between living communities and archaeological research; the ethics involved in bioarchaeological research; the acquisition and display of items in museums or private collections; and the nature of archaeological inquiry itself. Twice-weekly meetings to discuss readings and recent cases in the news will be accompanied by written assignments and an in-class debate, as well as a student-directed final paper.

Art history's disciplinary origins are inextricable from European colonialism and imperialism, and often work to uphold racialized concepts of development, civilization, style. The contemporary practice of art history demands that we acknowledge these origins while imagining a decolonized art history for the present. Drawing from decolonial paradigms, recent scholarship, and foundational texts of critical race studies, we work to analyze and actively reconfigure conventions of field formation, research, and format. In keeping with the political imperative of praxis, students workshop research topics and problems individually and collectively.

Few technologies of domination have been wielded with more sweeping and devastating global consequence than race. The research and teaching taxonomies of predominantly White institutions such as Princeton bear witness both to this history and to the intricacy of those mechanisms that work to conceal it. Taking our cue from Achille Mbembe - "racial thinking... has been the ever-present shadow hovering over Western political thought and practice" - we'll examine the role of race and racialization in the formation of the intellectual disciplines around which universities like ours are organized, with a particular emphasis on the humanities.

Poetry can be seen as a mode of reflection on history and, very often, as an act of resistance to it. This course will examine works written in Europe, Latin America and the US during the 20th and 21st centuries in different languages and historical contexts. We will explore their oppositional and also their liberatory effects: their ability to evoke their times, to disrupt our usual understandings while offering new political, artistic and ethical perspectives. The course will pay special attention to the work of René Char and Paul Celan, as ideal points of focus for questions of language and resistance.

Global publishing today - both book and digital - is one of the major ways that ideas and culture, hegemony and resistance, all cross borders. Essential to its effects are research, translation, media, and migration. How has the publishing industry contributed to "thinking globally" and led to widespread cultural transformations? In what ways and to what extent has it remained national or regional, focusing largely on the US and Europe? How are current crises around race, economics, and global health affecting the industry today? This course takes both a theoretical and also a more practical look at these and related questions.

This seminar surveys the history of the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim community of about eleven million living mostly in northwest China. The course draws on a wide range of scholarship on Uyghur history, culture, and religion in order to offer a broad overview of Uyghur history from ancient times to the present. Students will encounter numerous native voices directly through translations of Uyghur literature and historical materials. Through discussion, readings, and written work building to a final paper, students will come to understand Uyghur history in contexts ranging from ancient nomadic empires to twentieth-century Communism.

What does it mean to read late-19th Century African American literature now? What critical questions does it answer, what methodological approaches does it demand, and what does it mean to ethically encounter the archive of postbellum black life and literature? We approach these questions by pairing deep readings of African American literature from the late 19th century with criticism that takes the period as its starting point. We read canonical and lesser known texts as sites from which race, freedom, aesthetics, performance, and the archive itself are being theorized, while also exploring how those very ideas might instruct us now.

This course asks questions about interdisciplinarity in relation to professional structures of recognition. We analyze prize-winning monographs which were "first books," first, to begin to build our own toolkits, and second to explore which works become "prize-winning." The "firstness" of our books is a point of departure, even as we place them in genealogies: theoretical, critical, archival. We ask: what is interdisciplinarity in each book and over time? what methods carry over between fields? what makes books 'field-defining'?

Taking our point of departure from Walter Benjamin's artwork essay, we trace the way in which photographers and artists from the late 1970s to the present have asked us to understand their work as resources for doing political work, as strategies of resistance and activism, as even training manuals on how to engage, rethink, and address some of the most urgent issues of our time. We consider works by, among others, Susan Meiselas, Allan Sekula, Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Alfredo Jaar, Marcelo Brodsky, Walid Raad, Taryn Simon, Nikos Pilos, Isaac Julien, Claudia Andujar, and Fazal Sheikh.

How and why has literary criticism relied on or resisted quantitative methods? In this seminar we survey current debates about evidence, Digital Humanities and cultural analytics and discuss methods of evaluating data as evidence across disciplines. Using approaches from data feminism, critical archival studies, and Data for Black Lives, we think about traditional objects of literary study: the book, the text, the poem, the artwork, as data with a complicated past and future. How might humanities and data together build more equitable ways of knowing?

Is literature a "science"? Can science be "literature"? This class reads literary, scientific, and philosophical texts from the Enlightenment and 19th century from the lens of both history of science and literature. We focus on France, Germany, and England, though we also look at scientific voyages beyond Europe. Other than published "works," we will engage with the rich material culture of drafts, notebooks, botanical specimens, illustrations, and research of all kinds that these fields produced. Our aim will be to deepen our understanding of the complex interrelations of practice and thought among the sciences, philosophy, and literature.

What's the point of education? What should anyone truly learn, why, and how? Who gets to attend school? Is it a right, a privilege, a duty, an investment, or a form of discipline? Do schools level the playing field or entrench inequalities? Should they fashion workers, citizens, or individuals? Moving from France to the US, and from the Enlightenment to the present, we look at the vexed but crucial relationship between education and democracy in novels, films, essays, and philosophy, examining both the emancipatory and repressive potential of modern schooling. Topics include: Brown, class, meritocracy, testing, and alternative pedagogies.

We examine the works and figure of Albert Camus - to redefine them. Through the study of his most acclaimed narratives, plays, essays, but also his more obscure juvenilia, notebooks, and up to his last, unfinished novel, we see what confirms the canonical (sometimes sanctified) dimension of Camus, and what challenges it. Looking at his critical reception and his own assessments, we assess his greatest accomplishments, his shortcomings and even (self-proclaimed) failures. Always in between, eternally moving, we reconsider Camus as concerned as much by politics as he was by poetics.

This class examines the relationship between law and society in the Roman and post-Roman worlds. We begin with the Roman Jurists of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD 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 in Europe and the Middle East. We will trace how legal thought and practice evolved across these areas and 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.

HUM 248 will introduce students to the multi-faceted literary and cultural production of a region that at one point stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indus Valley, as well as give them an understanding of the historical shifts in power that took place across the Near East over the past millennium. Starting at the tail end of the Abbasid Empire up to the rise of nation-states in the 20th century, students will learn of the different power dynamics that shaped the region's diverse ethnic, religious, linguistic and ultimately national communities and their worldviews.

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.

Did the invention of cities give rise to the invention of writing? Is it true that the printing press made the Reformation possible? Has social media destroyed democracy? This course will attempt to answer these questions in weekly discussions that explore how "revolutions" in communications' technologies--from ancient cuneiform to modern coding--have altered the course of human history. In complementary weekly "digital practica" we will examine cutting-edge digital archives and learn how to wield the new digital tools that are transforming how historians engage with the past in the wake of our latest digital communications "revolution."

This seminar introduces the digital humanities by exploring key debates around the meaning of humanities data. Like "slow food"--a movement where diners, farmers, and chefs rethink what and how we produce and consume--we will explore data as local, embedded, and requiring careful critical reflection. How can computational tools help us to understand art and literature? What do digital archives reveal (or obscure) about the people who make them? We will explore the foundations of this field while also discussing concerns that emerge when accessing and maintaining digital projects in time and across global and local contexts.

A so-called invisible city, Trenton is one of the poorest parts of the state, but intimately connected to Princeton. Examining the historical and contemporary racisms that have shaped Trenton, we will hear from activists, policy makers, artistic directors, politicians, and artists. Readings include texts about urban invisibility, race, community theater, and public arts policy. The course will follow the development of a new play by Trenton's Passage Theater, about a community-organized sculpture that was removed over "concerns" about "gang" culture. Students will conduct field interviews and work alongside dramatists and playwrights.

This seminar explores how the historical image of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) has been developed in American memory through writing, film and literature. Issues to be examined are the major groups of biographical interpreters (the "personal life," the "Progressive Lincoln," the "Liberal Hero"), the portrayals of Lincoln in literature (Whitman, Vidal), and how concepts of Lincoln have been shaped by film (Spielberg's Lincoln, 2012) and television episodes (The Twilight Zone, Star Trek).

This course offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the work of two renowned Greeks who lived almost two thousand years apart: the philosopher Socrates and the poet C.P. Cavafy. Do these figures, both famous for their use of irony, speak to or past each other across the millennia? In what does their irony lie and what rhetorical techniques contribute towards the creation of the voice of each? How do Socrates and Cavafy each buttress or challenge contemporary theories of truth, virtue, and ethics--of the good life? Does the nature and function of irony change depending on whether it appears in philosophy or in literature?

In the years immediately before and after the 1959 Revolution, Havana was one of the great laboratories for experiments with modern architecture in a tropical and political climate. This seminar expands the understanding of modern architecture and urbanism in Cuba to include the full kaleidoscope of historical, political and cultural effects of the revolution. Through a series of case studies, we explore the spatial dimensions of a wide range of issues: climate, utopia, cold war, prefabrication, tropical modernism, ruins, preservation, disease, sexuality, violence and resistance-using multiple theoretical frames.

In this course, students explore graphic design from the vantage point of topology and topology through the practice of graphic design. We investigate topology at the junctions of surface, network, and set, illustrating the schematic nature of these configurations, as they appear in the context of certain problems in modern and contemporary graphic design. Such as, how to render figures that take multiple forms? Student design work and topological experiments are guided through class prompts, readings, and discussion. No particular experience in design or mathematics required.

The three centuries of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the Americas saw some of the most dramatic transformations in global history, from massive population collapse to the first global commodity chains. This course explores the relationships between abstractions like 'colonialism' and 'capitalism' and the concrete places that shaped and were shaped by indigenous rebels, colonial administrators, missionaries, and enslaved laborers. Bringing together insights from history, archaeology, and historical ecology, we will explore these landscapes through a rich combination of archival maps, satellite imagery, and archaeological datasets.

An exploration of original texts in the history of thought 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.

Drawing on Antonin Artaud's ideas around theatre of cruelty and André Bazin's notions of auteur film and its subversive capacity, this course looks at a group of Latin American and Spanish films and directors to explore how cruelty has become a recognizable aesthetic, one with strategic relevance for Hispanic film. This seminar understands film as a text in which cruelty functions as a cinematic trope, and also reflects on spectatorship, film's ability to inflict pain and, even more, the possibility that film constitutes a modern spectacle of cruelty.

This interdisciplinary course will explore the history, politics, and social dynamics of urban migration on the Indian Subcontinent, home to and source of some of the largest migrations in human history. Through writing, discussion, and mapping, the class will also encounter broader concepts in the study of migration; its diversity, causes, challenges, as well as implications for social organization and city planning. Subtopics will include the history of Asia's great migrations, partition and refugee resettlement, internal migration, indentured and imported labor, gender politics, and the rural urban divide in the global South.