Humanistic Studies
- AAS 303/GSS 406/HUM 314: Topics in Global Race and Ethnicity: Scientific Racism: Then and NowThis course explores the intellectual history of scientific racism, paying close attention to how its theories influence power and institutions today. Reading primary sources from the history of science, each class will trace the reverberations of scientific racism in media, education, politics, law, and global health. Our conversations will consistently analyze the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and age in the legacies of scientific racism. We will also examine the impact of scientific racism in public discourse about the Black Lives Matter Movement and collectively brainstorm for activism towards restorative justice.
- ARC 594/MOD 504/HUM 593/ART 584: Topics in Architecture: Building Life: Space, Field, TerritoryPart of a series of seminars studying the parallel development of biological theories and architectural practices in the 19th and 20th c., this course focuses on processes of spatialization, territorialization, and colonization of natural and metropolitan environments on a global scale. Topics include the techniques of fieldwork, mapping, measurement, and classification along the study of building typologies in institutions ranging from natural history and anthropology museums, biological stations, laboratories, zoos and aquariums, to libraries, universities, and prisons.
- ART 311/MED 311/HUM 311: Arts of the Medieval BookThis course explores the technology and function of books in historical perspective, asking how illuminated manuscripts were designed to meet (and shape) cultural and intellectual demands in the medieval period. Surveying the major genres of European book arts between the 7th-15th centuries, we study varying approaches to pictorial space, page design, and information organization; relationships between text and image; and technical aspects of book production. We work primarily from Princeton's collection of original manuscripts and manuscript facsimiles. Assignments include the option to create an original artist's book for the final project.
- CLA 212/HUM 212/GSS 212/HLS 212: Classical MythologyAn introduction to the classical myths in their cultural context and in their wider application to human concerns (such as creation, sex and gender, identity, transformation, and death). The course will offer a who's who of the ancient imaginative world, study the main ancient sources of well known stories, and introduce modern approaches to analyzing myths.
- CLA 250/HUM 253: PompeiiThe astonishing preservation of Pompeii has captured popular imagination ever since it was rediscovered beginning in the 1700s. This course will uncover the urban fabric of the city. We will look at its layout, at public and private buildings and their decoration, and at the wider cultural, geographical and historical contexts. Using physical remains alongside texts in translation, we will explore aspects of the lives of the inhabitants, including entertainment, housing, religion, economy, slavery, political organization and expression, roles played by men and women inside and outside the family, and attitudes towards death.
- CLA 326/HIS 326/HUM 324: Topics in Ancient History: Town and CountryBy the first century BCE, the city of Rome had over one million inhabitants, and was the largest and most densely populated city in the Mediterranean, if not the world. In fact, no other city surpassed ancient Rome in population until the 19th century. Yet scholars have estimated that as much as 80% of the population engaged in agriculture. The urban-rural divide was an important concept in antiquity. In this seminar, we will look at a wide range of evidence -- literary, material, visual, etc. -- to examine the cultural concepts associated with 'town' and 'country' for the ancient Romans.
- COM 457/HUM 457/ENG 457: Ways of Knowing: Philosophy and LiteratureDo works of poetry and fiction produce their own distinctive forms of knowledge, or do they simply help preexisting philosophical concepts get absorbed more easily? This course explores the mutual implications of philosophy and literature for epistemology. We'll read lyrical poems, short stories and novels alongside philosophical accounts of language and mind, linking textual phenomena with features of cognition. Topics include conceptuality vs. non-conceptuality, argument vs. narrative, metaphor and image schema, knowledge by acquaintance vs. by description, defamiliarization and estrangement, logic vs. association, form and spontaneity.
- ENG 390/COM 392/HUM 390: The Bible as LiteratureThis course will study what it means to read the Bible in a literary way: what literary devices does it contain, and how has it influenced the way we read literature today? What new patterns and meanings emerge? This course will examine the structures and modes of the Biblical books; the formation of the canon and the history of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books; questions of authorship; its literary genres; histories of exegesis, interpretation, and commentary; the redaction, division, and ordering of biblical texts; the cultural, political, and intellectual worlds within which these texts were written.
- ENG 572/HUM 572: Introduction to Critical Theory: PhenomenologyPhenomenology is a tradition concerned with how the world gives itself to appearances. It is also an epistemological method, committed to perpetual beginning as a way of apprehending the world and our place in it. This course is an introduction to this philosophy of continual introductions, beginning with several of Edmund Husserl's foundational texts, then moving to a multi-week reading of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, alongside recent works of critical phenomenology that engage race, gender, sexuality, and disability.
- FRE 530/COM 511/HUM 530: Essayism: Trajectory of a GenreThis course explores the thematically capacious genre of the essay, a compact prose form where science and poetry meet. Students learn the essay's history, explore various theories of the essay, and encounter prominent examples of essayistic writing from across the centuries. The essay, itself a hybrid form, seems always to reach beyond text toward other media: essay-film, photo-essay, desktop essay. The class invites students to analyze these new essayistic experiments and consider the implications the essay form might have for their own scholarly writing.
- HUM 216: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture I: Literature and the ArtsHumanistic Studies 216-219 is an intensive yearlong exploration of the landmark achievements of the Western intellectual tradition. With a team of faculty drawn from across the humanities and social sciences, students examine pivotal texts, events, and artifacts of European civilization from antiquity forward. The course is enhanced by guest lectures from preeminent scholars. This double-credit course meets for six hours a week and fulfills distribution requirements in both LA and HA.
- HUM 217: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture I: History, Philosophy, and ReligionIn combination with HUM 216, this course explores the landmark achievements of European civilization from antiquity to the middle ages. Students must enroll in both 216 and 217, which constitute a double-credit course. The lecture component for HUM 217 is listed as TBA because all meetings are listed under HUM 216. There are no separate meeting times for HUM 217.
- HUM 233/EAS 233/COM 233: East Asian Humanities I: The Classical FoundationsAn introduction to the literature, art, religion and philosophy of China, Japan and Korea from antiquity to ca. 1400. Readings focus on primary texts in translation and are complemented by museum visits and supplementary materials on the course website. The course aims to allow students to explore the unique aspects of East Asian civilizations and the connections between them through an interactive web-based platform, in which assignments are integrated with the texts and media on the website. No prior knowledge of East Asia or experience working with digital media is required.
- HUM 247/NES 247: Near Eastern Humanities I: From Antiquity to IslamThis course focuses on the Near East from antiquity to the early centuries of Islam, introducing the most important works of literature, politics, ethics, aesthetics, religion, and science from the region. We ask how, why, and to what ends the Near East sustained such a long period of high humanistic achievement, from Pharaonic Egypt to Islamic Iran, which in turn formed the basis of the high culture of the following millennium.
- HUM 335/EAS 376/HIS 334: A Global History of MonstersThis class analyzes how different cultures imagine monsters and how these representations changed over time to perform different social functions. As negative objectifications of fundamental social structures and conceptions, monsters help us understand the culture that engendered them and the ways in which a society constructs the Other, the deviant, the enemy, the minorities, and the repressed. This course has three goals: it familiarizes students with the semiotics of monsters worldwide; it teaches analytical techniques exportable to other topics and fields; it proposes interpretive strategies of reading culture comparatively.
- HUM 365/PSY 365: Freud on the Psychological Foundations of the MindFreud is approached as a systematic thinker dedicated to discovering the basic principles of human mental life. For Freud these basic principles concern what impels human thought and behavior. What moves us to think and act? What is it to think and act? Emphasis is placed on the close study and critical analysis of texts, with particular attention to the underlying structure of the arguments.
- HUM 450/ART 482/ARC 450/ECS 450: Empathy and Alienation: Aesthetics, Politics, CultureIn 19- and 20-c. debates that crossed borders among disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, art history, philosophy, and political theory, empathy and alienation emerged as key terms to describe relations among human beings, works of art, and commodities. This seminar addresses the dynamics of empathy and alienation across a range of discourses and artifacts in European culture. Our explorations of how relationships between empathy and alienation were variously conceptualized in psychological aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and critical theory will aim to open up new perspectives on recent debates about identity and affect.
- HUM 470/MUS 470/CLA 470: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities: Abandoned WomenThis team-taught interdisciplinary seminar will trace the fates of a series of abandoned women in ancient literature, interweaving their story with responses in operatic and musical formats from the modern world. The seminar will investigate why this theme is so prominent in both the ancient and modern traditions, and it will concentrate on how opera transforms the plots and characters of drama and narrative.
- HUM 583: Interdisciplinarity and AntidisciplinarityAcademic life is largely configured along disciplinary lines. What are "disciplines," and what does it mean to think, write, teach, and work within these socio-cognitive structures? Are there alternatives? This course, drawing on faculty associated with the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM), takes up these questions, in an effort to clarify the historical evolution and current configuration of intellectual activity within universities. Normative questions detain us. The future is a persistent preoccupation. Collaborative work and generic experiment are encouraged.
- HUM 598/CLA 588/ENG 585: Humanistic Perspectives on the Arts: Thinking in Public, Writing for the WorldThis course examines the ever-evolving role of the university-trained scholar in contemporary culture. In the varied ecosystems of contemporary publishing, what are the boundaries between academic and public-facing work? What obligations, if any, do scholars have to engage with the public? How do institutional structures like discipline and field bear on what we choose to write about in non-academic venues? What does it mean, as a scholar, to be "very online"? Through these questions, and others, we attempt a critical and creative evaluation of the paths for scholarship outside, or alongside, traditional venues for academic writing.
- POL 332/HUM 339: Topics in American Statesmanship: Abraham Lincoln's Politics: Concepts, Conflict and ContextCourse will examine the political development, principles and practice of Abraham Lincoln, and especially grass-roots politics in the 19th century Republic, the international context of liberal democracy in the 19th century, the war powers of the presidency, the contest of Whig and Democratic political ideas, the relation of the executive branch to the legislative and judicial branches, diplomacy, and the presidential cabinet.
- SLA 303/HUM 306/ART 330: Seeing Health: Medicine, Literature, and the Visual ArtsThis seminar explores representations of health and illness through the literary and the visual media. From death and dying to epidemics, from disability to care giving, we will examine how these universal conditions are conveyed through literary texts, public health campaign posters, graphic novels, paintings, illustrations, and photography. Most of the meetings will take place at the Princeton University Art Museum to engage in depth with the items in the collection. Students will have the option to submit creative projects for the midterm and the final assignments.
- SLA 368/HUM 368/GHP 368/COM 388: Literature and MedicineThis course will examine themes that are paramount in our lives as individuals, communities, and societies' illness and healing, caregiving, epidemics, the distinction between normal and pathological. Our reflections on ethics will feature stories and storytelling as an entry point. Why do doctors and patients need stories? How does storytelling illuminate medicine as a system of representation? What rhetorical devices are embedded in the way we conceive of sickness, well-being, and the medical institutions? We will address these questions and will explore the overlaps between medicine and storytelling within texts from all over the world.
- SPA 250/LAS 250/HUM 251/LAO 250: Identity in the Spanish-Speaking WorldHow are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Spain, Latin America, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the United States? Who is "Latin American," "Latinx," "Chino," "Moor," "Guatemalan," "Indian," etc.? Who constructs these terms and why? Who do they include/exclude? Why do we need these identity markers in the first place? Our course will engage these questions by surveying and analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions from the time of the foundation of the Spanish empire to the present time in the Spanish speaking world.
- TRA 200/COM 209/HUM 209: Thinking Translation: Language Transfer and Cultural CommunicationTranslation is at the heart of the humanities, and it arises in every discipline in the social sciences and beyond, but it is not easy to say what it is. This course looks at the role of translation in the past and in the world of today, in fields as varied as anthropology, the media, law, international relations and the circulation and study of literature. It aims to help students grasp the basic intellectual and philosophical problems raised by the transfer of meanings from one language to another (including in machine translation) and to acquaint them with the functions, structures and effects of translation in intercultural communication.
- TRA 400/COM 409/HUM 400: Translation, Migration, CultureThis 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.
- URB 300/ARC 300/HUM 300/AMS 300: Urban Studies Research SeminarThis seminar introduces urban studies research methods through a study of New York in conversation with other cities. Focused on communities and landmarks represented in historical accounts, literary works, art and film, we will travel through cityscapes as cultural and mythological spaces - from the past to the present day. We will examine how standards of evidence shape what is knowable about cities and urban life, what "counts" as knowledge in urban studies, and how these different disciplinary perspectives construct and limit knowledge about cities as a result.
- URB 378/ARC 344/SAS 378/HUM 378: South Asian MigrationsThis interdisciplinary course explores 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 other activities, 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 include the history of Asia's great migrations, partition and refugee resettlement, indentured and imported labor, gender politics, South Asian diasporas in the US, and the rural-urban divide in the global South.
- URB 385/SOC 385/HUM 385/ARC 385: Mapping GentrificationThis seminar introduces the study of gentrification, with a focus on mapping projects using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Readings, films, and site visits will situate the topic, as the course examines how racial landscapes of gentrification, culture and politics have been influenced by and helped drive urban change. Tutorials in ArcGIS will allow students to convert observations of urban life into fresh data and work with existing datasets. Learn to read maps critically, undertake multifaceted spatial analysis, and master new cartographic practices associated with emerging scholarship in the Digital and Urban Humanities.