African literature and films have been a vital (but often unacknowledged) stream in and stimulant to the global traffic in invention. Nigerian literature is one of the great literatures of the twentieth century. Ethiopian literature is one of the oldest literatures in the world. Senegalese films include some of the finest films ever made. In this course, we will study the richness and diversity of foundational African texts (some in translation), while foregrounding questions of aesthetics, style, humor, epistemology.

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.

Disabled people are the largest minority in the world. Attention to the lived experiences and discourses of disability is crucial to our understanding of what it means to be human in an ever-changing world. This course moves beyond a medicalized view of disability and develops an historical and ethnographic critique of ableism with a focus upon the diverse forms of impairment and their social, economic, and technological contexts. What are the moral and political stakes of an anthropology of disability today?

What does "Justice" mean? What do efforts to achieve "Justice" tell us about injury, retribution, and peace? This class will explore how justice is defined and sought by looking at criminality, fights for indigenous and women's rights, post-conflict transitions, environmental catastrophe, debates about reparations, and intimate forms of repair. We will combine a global perspective with engaged local work to think about what struggles for justice look like in theory and on the ground. These debates will illuminate about how the past is apprehended, and how visions of possible utopias and dystopias are produced in the present.

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.

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.

What does it mean to be free? From slavery to cyborgian imaginations, from anarchy to abolition, from exploration to decolonization, what would make us free? Can we be free under capitalism? Can we be free amidst persistent violence? Can we be free if our bodies are subject to state-mandated regulation? Can we be free if we cannot move across borders? What might it mean to articulate the answers to these questions via film? Will new people gain access to new conceptualizations of freedom? Can film liberate? Can the process of making these films make us free?

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.

An 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.

This seminar will consider how travel could and did take place in the Roman empire during the first century. A close reading of the Acts of the Apostles will afford insights into the experiences of Paul of Tarsus on his journeys around the Mediterranean as he engaged in economic activities and spread new religious ideas. Topics will include modes and seasons of travel, dangers and challenges on land and sea, interactions with Roman government officials and soldiers in various provinces, how to meet and greet the locals, building networks of contacts for future visits, and how to plan and finance an ambitious expedition abroad.

This course will examine the origins, evolution and organization of the democratic system in Athens, and address some of the most controversial questions about the topic: To what extent was Athens democratic? What were the links between Athenian democracy and its aggressive imperialism? What are the similarities and differences between ancient and modern ideas of democracy?

A seminar on magic speech, defined as performative language that does not so much describe reality as change it. Our subjects will range from spells and enchantments to blessings, curses, prayers and oaths. We will focus on medieval literature, philosophy, and theology; at the same time, we will discuss some contemporary perspectives on magic and speech acts in literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology. Attention will be paid to the Arabic, Scholastic, and vernacular traditions of medieval Europe.

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 provides a survey of the major works in the philosophy of technology from the nineteenth century to today. Rather than start with the Aristotelian distinction between techne and episteme, our inquiry instead begins with the division between manual and cognitive labor in the industrial workplace. What questions does modern production pose of metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology? The answer demands a philosophy of technology that also conceives of technology itself as philosophy and that confronts the prospect of machine intelligence.

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.

Humanistic 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. Students must enroll in both 216 and 217.

In 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.

An introduction to the literature, art, religion and philosophy of China, Japan and Korea from antiquity to ca. 1600. 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.

This 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.

This course will provide the historical and theoretical background essential for understanding the evolution of women's film in European cinema. Particular attention will be paid to questions of sexual difference and to the challenges feminist and queer theory pose to a politics of identity in film. Students will explore and assess the ways cultural identity determines the cinematic representation of women, while receiving a solid grounding in the poetics of cinema as it developed across time, genres, and cultures.

This course introduces students to the humanities as a field of knowledge within the academy. What are the forms of inquiry that have traditionally defined the humanities, and what is the place of these forms within the architecture of the modern research university? In pursuit of answers, we will range from histories of individual humanistic disciplines to publications within the expanding field of critical university studies. We will also examine the local history of humanistic study on Princeton's campus, and its alignment with (and divergence from) national and international trends in the development of the humanistic disciplines.

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.

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 investigates ancient architecture beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Art History and Civil Engineering. Students will master relevant elements of structural engineering to solve problems underlying the realization of large structures, including their design, materials, and construction. Students will also historically contextualize architecture, including the technological developments, sociological aspects, and aesthetic underlying these monuments. Course projects are based on collaborative group work. In fall 2024, this course will focus on the architecture of ancient Greece, including a planned trip to Athens.

What is the exact relationship between literature and history? What does it mean to read literature historically and history as a work of art? The course explores these and related questions through texts from antiquity to the present. We will explore the claim that literature is both more and less than "what really happened"; literary works as an escape from, but also remedy for, historical predicaments; modes of interpretation that allow one to read a single text simultaneously both as historical and fictional; and instances when literature followed historical events or, inversely, served as their blueprint.

Academic 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.

This course unfolds from a variant on the anthropologist Stefan Helmreich's question "what was life?" to trace vitalism across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while interrogating its contemporary theoretical implications in relationship to biopolitical theory and the ontological plasticity of life at the horizon of technological expansion. We consider scalar complexity, from the cell to the cosmos and the new planetary connectedness. We also consider differently scaled histories of life through receptions of classicized Greek texts in modern vitalisms and the unstable temporality between the modern and the contemporary.

Why do we like some works of art more than others? Can an evil artwork be beautiful? How do aesthetic and interpretive norms vary across mediums? The aim of this course is to introduce students to philosophical issues about the nature of art objects and their interpretation, with a special focus on film and literature. On-going topics of discussion will include the relationship between moral and aesthetic evaluation, the interpretive significance of medium, and the nature of fictional representation. Assignments will include watching films, which will be central subjects of class conversation.

This seminar covers the history and stakes of debates over the meaning, virtues, and vices of capitalism and the free market. It proceeds broadly in two veins. First, students will read canonical modern texts debating the market economy and related issues, including commerce, luxury, liberalism, and equality. Alongside these historical texts, students will read more recent attempts of philosophers, economists, and historians to offer theoretical accounts of the origins and evolution of the capitalist economy, with particular attention to developments following the second world war.

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.

This course considers the diverse, and at times contradictory, ways in which modernity has both shaped and been shaped by the reception of the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on the books of Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, and Job, the course explores how the Bible inspired an array of modern writers, philosophers, and political theorists, from Machiavelli to Shakespeare to Melville to Kierkegaard to Camus to Baldwin to Morrison, and beyond.

How 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," "Boricua," "Chino," "Moor," "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.

Translation 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.

Translation is at the core of our encounters with East Asia. From translations of the literary classics to contemporary novels and poetry, from the formation of modern East Asian cultural discourses to national identities to East-West travels of works in theater and film, the seminar poses fundamental questions to our encounters with East Asian cultural artifacts, reflecting on the classical principles of translation and problematizing what the "translation" of "original works" even means anymore in our globalized world. Open to students with or without knowledge of an East Asian language.

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 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.

This 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.