For centuries, shoes have provided signals about a person's character, social and cultural status. Shoes have also carried religious, cultural, and symbolic meaning. They remain a unique lens through which to interrogate and understand innovation, manufacturing, and industrial design. Recently, shoes have refocused our attention on issues of ethics and morality. Shoes are a window into our personal and collective history and future. Students in this seminar will explore, through the evolution of shoes, seminal interdisciplinary ideas, build and refine their academic skills, and create a measurable impact on campus.

Food and science are integrated in our everyday lives, and this seminar explores their intersection in the kitchen. You will learn how to prepare foods like humus, falafel, manakish za'atar and to make cheese, yogurt, pickles, kombucha, and much more! Through food production and consumption, you will discover the fascinating world of molecular biology, microbiology, and biochemistry. We will also study how naturally occurring chemicals produced by microbes or plants can affect our bodies and health. This course will mostly prepare vegetarian foods and no prior cooking experience is required.

An exploration of the graphic novel with particular attention to the ways specific works combine visual imagery and language to enlarge the possibilities of narrative form. We will develop strategies for interpreting and evaluating the cultural significance and aesthetic quality of narratives based on sequential art.

Some 125 stone plaques in Rome mark inundations dating back 800 years. We trace the rise and fall of the Tiber using the tools of geodesy. We introduce the quantitative geoscience of measuring Earth's shape, deformation, and its gravity field. Lectures on fundamental principles and programming exercises prepare for outdoor on-campus field-work and the mandatory week-long research trip to Italy. In Rome, we measure and map the elevation of known historical flood markers, placing them in the chronological context of urbanization, interpreting them in the light of humanity's attempts to control nature.

Glass is so ubiquitous that we barely notice it. Yet, glass has far-reaching applications in global communications, biomedical, and energy industries! Glass has also been a versatile medium for creating visually stunning artworks. Few materials so brilliantly connect the artists and the scientists among us. The seminar introduces the material science, physical and chemical properties of glass that result in applications that impact culture, scientific discoveries, and technology. Through museum and artisan studio visits in Venice, and hands-on activities, we highlight how material properties connect to artistic characteristics.

For those who find human reason unequal to the task of understanding existence, religion has been the traditional place to go. In this course, we will examine a period in the Christian west when tragedy took on the burden of exploring doubts about who and what we are, and about how we are supposed to behave. Our texts will range from the Italian Renaissance to the Enlightenment. En route, we will consider tragedies by (amongst others) Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Racine, and Dryden. All texts not originally written in English will be read in translation.

With the frenzied pace of life, there is little time to ponder the meaning of life. How does a person find deeper meaning? What is the relationship of the meaning of my life to a larger purpose? Writers, thinkers, & religious thinkers; ordinary folks--a neighbor, one's parents & grandparents--have grappled with these questions. The course explores some responses to the "big questions" of life. Readings & films are taken from different cultures, times, & spheres of human endeavor & experience.

This literature and creative writing-based course considers the rich intersection of poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid creative writing called documentary poetry. Like documentary films, documentary poems make use of primary source materials such as interviews, news articles, diaries, letters, photographs, medical reports, and public records. These works are designed to move your understanding of public events from knowledge of the facts, however complex, to their emotional and philosophical implications. Course requirements include a final 10-page documentary poetry/hybrid project and an oral presentation of the work to the class.

This seminar explores the process of scientific inquiry by investigating the many ways in which field biologists observe and study organisms in the lab and field. Through hands-on learning experiences in the lab and field, we will combine technology, problem-solving skills, and creativity to collect and interpret behavioral, morphological, physiological, and sensory data in living and non-living organisms. This course will include coordinated trips during class time to local sites in the Princeton area, and also offers an optional 3-week field experience at Mpala Research Centre located in Laikipia, Kenya during January 2025.

The diameter of the observable universe is known to be about 46 billion light years. That's big! Not only is 46 billion a big number but even one light year, the distance a beam of light travels in one year, is a very long distance. How far is it? In this seminar, we will investigate the size of things starting with familiar objects having sizes we can readily grasp and carefully working our way up to the largest most distant objects in the observable universe. We will describe how these sizes and distances were first measured by scientists/philosophers as our understanding of the universe we live in evolved and matured over the years.

What is the role of sound in film? Music and sound effects are central elements of telling its stories by establishing pacing, enhancing mood, commenting on or interpreting, even contradicting and subverting what we see. This course explores these questions from the "talkies" of the late 1920s to the films of today. Over this time filmmaking technology has been transformed by post-production editing. We will analyze selected films and scenes to develop a technical and critical vocabulary to describe and assess the multiple visual and aural layers of a still evolving art form in which what we hear is as important as what we see.

This course will focus on cross-cultural issues surrounding representation in documentary filmmaking, both in front of and behind the lens. Through film production, screenings and texts, we will explore the question of "who has the right tell whose story, and why?" Students will direct two documentaries each: one set in their own cultural sphere, the other set outside of it. Each student will direct these films while another student assists them. They will then switch roles, giving every student exposure to the construction of four different documentaries.

"Is Politics a Performance?" helps us understand how local governments function, and how the performance of democracy can be different from its enactment. The class offers a hands-on way to learn about decision-making, empathy, citizenship and the dramaturgy of power. We'll use tools from sociology, philosophy, civics and theater to analyze local democratic processes in Princeton and Trenton today. At a time when our commons feels frayed at best, this course helps activate possible ways to work with each other, both in the evolving digital commons and in person.

We will examine moments of change at different crucial stages in the life cycle (childhood, adolescence, courtship and marriage, work, maturity, and finally death) as they are portrayed in outstanding short stories and one novella. We'll attempt to discover how this change is conveyed convincingly and compellingly, to delineate the nature of the conflict at each stage, and how much of the change comes from without and within, and what the story has to tell us about the essence of each time of life.

Despite the slew of high-profile scandals exposed over the past two decades, examples of ethical transgressions in financial markets continue to abound. At the same time, we see well-established as well as innovative ways in which the finance industry is able to assert its credentials as a force for good in society. We will explore ethics in the finance industry using a case-based method and will be grounded in an understanding of the role of a financial system in an economy and society. We will draw on moral philosophy, financial theory and concepts of behavioral ethics, corporate governance, economic development, and public policy.

This seminar will investigate four disasters: the Titanic shipwreck, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, and the implosion of the submersible Titan in 2023. Using original sources, it will study how conscientious responses to previous disasters may indirectly contribute to new ones. How can we improve priorities of risks to address? How does the cultural aftermath of events affect decisions? The seminar will introduce and draw on concepts from the humanities, social sciences, and engineering suggesting how history synthesizes diverse ideas.

For as long as we have been human, we have been looking up. In this course, we will explore the connection between past and present: what tools did ancient civilizations use to study astronomical phenomena, how did they then explain said phenomena, and how does what they learned compare to what we know now? In addition to readings and discussions, we will collaborate on the creation of "artifacts," conduct research, and visit museums to view artifacts associated with the history of astronomy. This course will combine the creative and the scientific. Fall break will be spent in Cusco, Peru, where we will tour Incan astronomical sites.

In this cross-disciplinary seminar, students will embark on a journey to understand language technology i.e ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama etc and, in particular, its application to the intricacies of the African languages. By examining the evolution of language technology and its limited application to commercially profitable languages, the course will highlight the need for expansion into a wider array of world languages in order to equally provide the cultural and societal benefits that the technology provides. Students will gain an understanding of how language technology impacts daily life through examples like smart devices and virtual agents.

This seminar examines the role of music as a tool for social resistance, resilience and change across various historical and cultural contexts in the Americas. Through the analysis of a variety of musical genres and social contexts, students will examine how music reflects, shapes, and responds to social and political contexts, as well as how it mobilizes communities, challenges powers, and amplifies marginalized voices. For songs and genres performed in other languages, no previous knowledge of other languages is required.

This seminar will study the history and nature of fairy tales, legends, classical myths, and urban myths, particularly in regard to the way that they reflect the concerns and fears of society. We will examine the ways in which myths differ from folk tales, fairy tales and superstition, and the means by which entire communities, seized with conviction often for generations, disseminate and fortify them. The collective unconscious is often manifested in metaphor, particularly in literature and film, and the legitimate anxieties, fears (and guilt) that it reflects will be the subject of our study.

In Western society, we're not great at endings. We try to prolong the life of a person or venture at all costs. We avoid planning for or even talking about the end. Yet new initiatives often cannot begin without something else's end. This course explores the complexities of our relationship to endings: their philosophical and theological conceptions, the psychological underpinnings of our resistance to them, the sociological implications of current approaches. We also contemplate ways that behavioral science and other disciplines might inform a new and potentially more advantageous approach to policy decisions by keeping the end in mind.

Immigrant rights advocates propose sanctuary as a framework for immigrant inclusion while conservatives have countered with legislation, lawsuits, and rhetoric. But what does sanctuary mean for immigrants and community members who embrace the concept? What are practical tools drawn from sanctuary that shape welcoming communities in the U.S., and how can they evolve to account for new realities? Using scholarly writings, first-person accounts, gray literature, periodicals, and multimedia resources, we will examine sanctuary. We will also engage with theorists and practitioners conceptualizing and applying sanctuary to community-engaged work.

In a universe filled with movement, how and why and where might we find relative stillness? What are the aesthetic, political, and daily life possibilities within stillness? In this studio course, we'll dance, sit, question, and create substantial final projects. We'll play with movement within stillness, stillness within movement, stillness in performance and in performers' minds. We'll look at stillness as protest and power. We'll wonder when stillness might be an abdication of responsibility. We'll read within religious, philosophy, performance, and disability studies, and will explore social justice, visual art, and sound (and silence).