This course focuses on how people wrestle with their relationships to faith, morality, ideas of justice, and conceptions of good life, and how they deal with the emotions that mediate these relationships. Emotions such as anger, happiness, disgust, kindness, and grief play an important role in shaping moral convictions and acts. We will learn some of the theoretical tools, research methods, and analytical practices that help anthropologists discern how morality can both be linked to and be separate from religious considerations, and how emotions can both ground us in a moral order and also make us question our faith and moral orientations.

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.

This course draws on anthropology, history, critical theory, films and documentaries, fictive and journalistic writing to explore violence, its power and meaning. We will explore conquest and colonialism, genocidal violence, state violence and political resistance, everyday violence, gendered violence, racialization, torture, as well as witnessing and repair. Building across disciplines and working with heterodox theoretical frameworks (post-colonial/decolonial, non-Western, feminist, and indigenous approaches), this course invites us to understand violence in its multifaceted physical, symbolic, social, political and cultural manifestations.

Students will be introduced to anthropological and cross-disciplinary studies of multiple, divergent ways in which the Circumpolar populations experience, perceive and respond to environmental, political and socio-economic changes from within distinct horizons of knowledge & modes of sociality. By focusing on social and historical processes as well as current/emerging practices, worlds/cosmologies, the course will analytically evaluate such notions as Anthropocene, the Fourth World, indigeneity and decolonisation as well as examine attempts of various scholars to better understand complex interconnections of climate, environment and society.

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 course examines the relationship of art and medicine in the construction and production of race in the British Empire from the early modern period until the beginning of the twentieth century. We will analyze how image-making has been used in the development of medical knowledge and how scientific concepts of vision and natural history have been incorporated into art making. We will then examine how these intersections were deployed to visualize and, sometimes, challenge continually changing meanings about human and geographical difference across Britain and its colonies.

The 19th century in Europe and America saw the rise and fall of empires and unprecedented innovation in industry, technology, science, and the arts. Through a series of topics, including history, science, medicine, perception, and time, this course considers how intellectual revolutions in diverse disciplines, such as biology and philosophy, and the invention of new fields of knowledge, such as ethnography and psychology, shaped art-making. The work of David, Cole, Church, Eakins, Manet, Courbet, Tanner, Inness, Van Gogh, and Cézanne will offer unique perspectives onto the modes of seeing and knowing that defined 19th-century culture.

This course is an opportunity to reimagine engineering as a liberatory and collective practice that challenges systems of domination, inequality and environmental exploitation in cities. Interdisciplinary readings and films on topics ranging from urban water systems to algorithmic policing will examine how social and environmental injustices in cities have been produced or reinforced through engineering designs while also exploring new frameworks for designing just cities. Students will put these frameworks into practice by participating in a conceptual design studio, focused on the radical redesign of urban infrastructures and technologies.

Roman history courses usually cover the grand narratives based on the more traditional, literary evidence. Usually these courses leave no room for discussing how knowledge is created and the new and 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 as they consider humanistic questions. Through different case studies and hands on activities, students will learn about different scientific, technological and mathematical methods and how knowledge of the past draws on multiple disciplines.

Most often seen in opposition, Greco-Roman Classical culture and Christianity have a long history of reciprocal reliance. Neither would look as it does today without the other. Through readings and discussion of both Classical and Christian texts, as well as art and architecture, this course will inquire into the Classical roots of much Christian theology, ethics, cosmology, and values more broadly, while also considering the effect on Classics as a cultural cornerstone of societies beholden to these twin traditions.

This course compares ideologies and practices of monarchic rule across Greece and the Near East. We will investigate how monarchs established their rule, how they faced opposition, and which strategies they adopted to legitimize their power. We will ask what makes a monarch a "tyrant" rather than a "king" and why monarchy turned out to be disgraceful for the Greeks compared to their neighbors. We will read texts produced by royal courts as well as compositions which sketch the profile of the "ideal monarch". We will also look at monuments which monarchs erected during their reigns and investigate their historical and political significance.

This discussion-based seminar will examine political, social, economic, and cultural factors that led to the collapse of a republican political system in Rome in the middle of the first century BCE. We will study the period from 146 BCE (the destruction of Carthage) to the assassination of Julius Caesar (44 BCE), which is the best documented time in all of antiquity, in light of primary sources of various kinds. This course will also consider why this historical era remained so fascinating for later generations, notably the American Founders. Students will be able to choose a topic to research for their oral report and final paper.

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.

This seminar will explore the perennial fascination with forms of narrative that purport to tell true stories about actual individual lives: biography and autobiography, memoir, diary, hagiography, and more. What is at stake, what can be gained by writers and readers from life writing in its various genres? Readings will be primarily though not exclusively European. We will read and discuss some theoretical works alongside the life writings themselves.

The Body: we all have one and inhabit it in a myriad of ways, as a source of joy, a contradiction to be reckoned with, a failed experiment, an inadequate container for all that we are, and an unending mystery. In traditional workshops we don't discuss what we are writing about and why; content and context come second to craft. In Vital Signs we will explore narratives of the body, beginning by reading material illustrative of a wide-range of expression and experience while working toward finding language for our individual physical and emotional experience.

For three decades, Mao Zedong presided over one of the most ambitious social experiments in human history. This course explores everyday life in China in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: the radical reordering of economic, political, and social relations; the shattering experiences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; and the evolution of a party-state which governs China up to the present. While Maoist ideology and policies were homogenizing in intent and often in effect, this course will emphasize the ways in which the experiences of the Mao era were mediated through categories like gender, social status, and ethnicity.

Filmmaking is a mural art. Due to the contemporary ubiquity of screens, our physical environment is increasingly eclipsed in the human experience. Yet vernacular filmmaking does not simply replace our physical nature, rather lets it emerge just as terroir wines reveal the natural environmental factors of winemaking without industrial tempering. Less industrial, more poetic film production can teach us a more respectful relation to our environment. Together with guest professors and filmmakers, we will study the interface of environmental and film studies through examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises.

Feeling lost? This course links two key forms that shape the spaces we dwell in, cross through, and imagine: medieval maps and travel narratives. These strange artifacts also index familiar categories like difference, identity, and control. We'll query what these epistemes make happen, including cultural diffusion and definitionally transgressive tales of travel. Along with critical and cognate works, these texts will expose worlds in which space wavers and dislocates where we're mapped.

Phenomenology 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.

This course explores the narrative articulation of conflict and loss in a selection of works from different historical contexts, including slavery, the Holocaust, and the postcolonial world. Emphasis is placed on voice both from a narratological perspective and as a mode of thematization pertaining to such issues as class, gender, and race. Subjects to be discussed also include history, memory, and memorialization; the features of posttraumatic life; and the question of créolité.

This seminar offers a critical survey of recent trends in media theory with an eye to their relevance to questions of aesthetic form and of representation in general. We focus specifically on six approaches around which work in media theory has coalesced in the last two decades: cultural techniques, disability studies, media archaeology, elemental media, network theory, and assemblage theory.

This seminar course examines how people during the early Middle Ages defined their existence through negotiated boundaries of gender, class, ethnicity, race, religion, and the human condition. Our work will curate the contributions of marginalized groups to decenter traditional narratives. Students will leave this course with a broad understanding of early medieval history, an appreciation of historical work done by people often omitted from our histories, and a mastery of historical and interdisciplinary tools for promoting awareness and understanding marginalized groups.

This course surveys aspects of mid-19th century American culture through the life of Abraham Lincoln. This includes the imaging, ideologies, concepts, visions of behavior, institutions -- and the means for disseminating these -- which abounded in American life between 1848 and 1877, and which intersected at various points with the life of Abraham Lincoln. It pays attention to the emergence of markets for the arts and the restraints which those markets and 19th-century technology placed on them. The purpose is to have you at 'the cutting edge' of Civil War-era and Lincolnian cultural history scholarship.

The ancient Greeks imagined a woman's body ruled by her uterus. Medieval Christians believed in a womb touched by God. Renaissance doctors uncovered the 'secrets' of women through dissection, while early modern states punished unmarried mothers. This course will ask how women's reproductive bodies were sites for the production of medical knowledge, the articulation of state power, and the development of concepts of purity and difference from ancient Greece to 18th-c. Europe. The course will incorporate sources as varied as medieval sculptures of the Madonna, Renaissance medical illustrations, and early modern midwifery licenses.

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.

Music and language offer unique pathways into studying the human mind. This interdisciplinary course explores the parallels and differences between music and language by investigating their functions and structures, as well as the variety found in each across the globe. We will examine how both past experiences and cognitive processes shape perception in real time. Through a variety of interdisciplinary readings, guest lecturers, and hands-on activities, the course aims to highlight current lively debates and provide students with the background and tools needed to study the relationship between music and language from multiple perspectives.

This course explores East Asia in the global context of imperialism, colonialism, the Cold War, and neoliberalism. We will traverse a wide range of materials (literature, film, photography, installation art) to understand how they are connected by historical forces. Open to anyone interested in a critical understanding of modern East Asian cultures, this course offers an interdisciplinary introduction that draws upon methods from film and media studies, art history, literary studies, and critical race studies.

Excavate/Illuminate will guide students' archival research and collaborative exploration of US history, journalism, and performance, focusing on the pivotal Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) as a case study. We will read several examples of documentary theater to see how artists create theater from the raw materials of history. For the first half of the semester, students will work in small groups, exploring online resources in order to develop and perform original scripts in the style of Federal Theatre Project Living Newspapers. During weeks 7-12, students will select collaborators and historical topics of interest to devise final performances.

In a data-driven society, we are attuned to see data as objective, as the most representative of truth. Yet, what is behind the data? Together, we'll look at data collection, cleaning, and visualization. How do we turn complex human productions, like books and art, into data points, and should we do this? We will discuss how data is implemented in real-world scenarios and explore the impacts of data on human lives. How does data create narratives that shape our perception of the world? Using Digital Humanities methods and tools, the class will learn how to create an ethical hypothesis from humanities data.

This course will study the role that the arts can and do play in Trenton: a so-called invisible city, 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 will 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 desegregation in Trenton; students can also choose to assist in curating a show featuring Trenton artists.

This seminar will explore methods in the sociology of literature and computational literary criticism--two methodologies that approach literary works as part of larger systems of relations between people, texts, technologies, and institutions. We'll look at the data of literary study--from colonial lending library records to course syllabi--and what such they can tell us about how cultural works are produced, consumed, consecrated, and distributed. We'll learn advanced techniques in computer-assisted reading and situate them within a longer genealogy that includes book history, critical archival studies, and Marxist literary theory.

Situated between the academic study and museumization of premodernities and contemporary art, the course examines curation as a transdisciplinary practice of care that preserves, values, and claims knowledge of objects and periods marked in colonial modernity as "ancient" or "classical." How is antiquity shaped as an object of expertise and attention within the university and the museum? In what ways does curating distant pasts construct, challenge, or remake communities in the present? Drawing on case studies from Greece and India, we also ask how comparison both abets and blocks the theorization of antiquity as an object of care.

This course will examine the history, contemporary reality, and likely future of higher education, especially in the United States but also abroad. We will consider the changing and often conflicting ideals and aspirations of parents, students, instructors, and administrators from classical Rome to Christian institutions in the European Middle Ages to American athletic powerhouses today, seeking answers to fundamental practical, economic, and political questions that provoke vigorous contemporary debate.

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.