This course explores the history of what has been described as an "impossible but inevitable city" over three centuries. Settled on perpetually shifting swampland at the foot of one of the world's great waterways, this port city served as an outpost of three empires and a gateway linking the N. American heartland with the Gulf Coast, Caribbean, and Atlantic World. From European and African settlement through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we will consider how race, culture, and the environment have defined the history of the city and its people.

Love is a deeply personal experience. Yet, powerful social, political, and economic forces determine who we love, when we love, and how we love. Looking at practices of romantic love, dating, sex, marriage, queer love, friendship, and familial love across different social and global contexts, this course explores how social and cultural factors shape our most intimate relationships. Drawing on ethnography, history, and journalism, we examine the intersections between love and technology, gender, race, the law, capitalism, colonialism, and religion. For the final project, students will use creative writing or multi-media to tell a love story.

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.

What roles do feelings and emotions play in our evaluations of the world? Are our emotions reliable sources of moral intuition? Can we take our feelings to be our own? This course focuses on how humans engage with issues of morality, faith, justice, collective wellbeing, and political critique, and how our feelings, emotions, and sensations mediate such engagements. Through ethnographic and theoretical readings, we will learn how anthropologists discern the affective textures of our moral and political lives.

This upper-level seminar examines how ideas about language, disability, and science shape each other in contexts ranging from everyday life to expert medical practice. We look at how anthropologists and historians of science and technology have (or have not) considered disability and language in their research and, conversely, how scientific and technological innovations, like new media technologies, can change practices of communication and conceptions of disability.

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.

This course explores what we do with language and other modes of expression and how these modes shape our communicative capacities. How do we decide what communication is appropriate face-to-face or via text or email? Why do we gossip? What informs our beliefs about civility and obscenity? How do we decide what credible speech is? What happens when a culturally rooted expressive form is taken up for other aesthetic and political ends? We will explore such questions by studying theories and ethnographies of a range of phenomena: dance, gossip, poetry, asylum appeals, advertisements, protest speech, and more.

Part of a series of seminars studying the parallel development of biological and architectural practices from the 18th c. to the present, this course focuses on recent ecological and environmental discourses through the writings of anthropologists, sociologists, material and environmental scientists, as well as architectural and literary critics. The seminar focuses on the effects of the diminishing distinction between the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic as well as the human and the non-human in the creation of living habitats and recreation of inequities within an environmentally challenged planet.

We explore art's roles in politics and religion from ca. 600-1300 CE in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The course introduces the arts of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Islam; great courts and migratory societies; works made for private use and public display. Through narrative arc in lecture and precepts dedicated to artistic media, textual and material primary sources, and/or key intellectual themes, we consider how art participates in forming sacred and secular power. We explore how the work of 'art' in this period carries powers of its own, and how art shaped a multi-lingual, multi-confessional, multi-cultural medieval world.

This 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.

This course provides a foundation in the history, concepts, methodologies, and tools of digital humanities research. Students learn to critically evaluate and incorporate computational and data-driven methods into their research, as well as achieve a baseline fluency in accessing, filtering, and analyzing humanities datasets. No prerequisites or preexisting technical skills are required. Students working with texts, images, and artifacts are welcome.

This course introduces students to interdisciplinary methods for conceptualizing trauma in Ancient Greek and Roman texts. Using a range of theories about trauma and memory, we will consider how these concepts expand our interpretations of ancient texts. We will consider how ancient authors approached rhetorical, aesthetic, and ethical considerations involved in representing suffering, especially with the aim of making audiences "sympathetic," as well as social historical concerns with how trauma narratives shape group identity. Finally, we will look at how these texts have been used to address trauma therapeutically in contemporary contexts.

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.

Fairy tales are among the first stories we encounter, often before we can read. They present themselves as timeless--"Once upon a time..." - yet are essentially modern. They are often presented as children's literature, yet are filled with sex and violence. They have been interpreted as archetypal patterns of the subconscious mind or of deep cultural origins, yet perform the work of shaping contemporary culture. They circulate in myriad oral variations, and are written down in new ones by the most sophisticated literary authors. In this course we will explore the fantasy, enchantment, labor, and violence wrought by fairy tales.

This course considers the impact of medical history, its advances and effects, in various historical periods and in dialogue with literary representations of human experience. Starting with definitions of medical humanities (in technology, philosophy, social sciences and religious studies), we explore medical history in diverse literary texts chosen from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. From our readings and discussions,we will gain an understanding of how medicine and the humanities are, in fact, inextricably linked.

Can poetry supplement for the dead? Atone for the ravages of love lost? What is the relationship between mourning and eros? This course will focus on a single genre- the elegy from antiquity until today- in order to explore: lyric's love affair with absence; whether desire is directed toward the physical or the phantasmatic, sensuality or sublimation; the tensions between individual and collective mourning; and the politics of gender and sexuality in lyric address. Through careful attention to individual poems, students will learn the art of close reading and how the finer points of rhetoric and poetic form relate to broader social questions.

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.

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 interdisciplinary course explores the wide range of ways photography has been used for aesthetic, scientific, documentary, political, and surveillance purposes. Particular attention is given to the rich history of photography in France, beginning with the work of early inventors (Niépce's héliographie, Daguerre's daguerréotype, the Lumière brothers' vues photographiques animées) and practitioners (Atget, Nadar). We explore aerial & biometric photography, landscape, still life, portraiture, photo novels & photo essays, photojournalism, and photography's use as a tool of social control in the colonial context.

Why have crises of modernity so often manifested as crises of attention? This seminar traces the deep history of attention and its entanglement with modern subjectivity and society. We will explore how the capacity -- or failure -- to focus has shaped conceptions of the self, from the rational subject of the Enlightenment to the overstimulated individual in the modern metropolis and the distracted digital user of today. Combining media and discourse analysis with practical exercises, the seminar seeks to cultivate a deeper understanding of how attention is structured in contemporary culture -- and facilitate a freer relationship with it.

This class examines the relationship between law and society in the Roman and post-Roman worlds. We begin with the origins of Roman law in the ancient world, 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 of the Roman and post-Roman worlds of Western Eurasia. Our goal will be to think about how law and law-like norms both shape and are shaped by society and social practices.

In this course we will read ten (mostly short) novels, originally written in Greek and translated into English, spanning nearly two millennia, with a view to exploring how fiction has served as a focal point for the exploration of Hellenism. The course is intended both for students seeking to fulfill the requirements for the Hellenic Studies Minor and those interested in cultural history and literature more broadly.

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 at the turn of the twentieth 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. 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. Readings will include literary works written originally in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew.

Nostalgia is one of the most pervasive and multifaceted feelings of our time; an engine of artistic production, it informs the works of Homer and James Joyce. One can be nostalgic for childhood or for a time when one's country was different. Fashion and music are imbued with nostalgic feelings, as are countless videos on our feeds. This class studies nostalgia from an interdisciplinary and global perspective: leveraging literature, cinema, philosophy, history, and cultural studies, it will explore how nostalgia is formed, and its role in the arts and society.

Why do people love Broadway musicals? How do audiences engage with musicals and their stars? How have fan practices changed since the 1950s alongside economic and artistic changes in New York and on Broadway? In what ways does "fan of" constitute a social identity? How do fans perform their devotion to a show, to particular performers, and to each other? This class examines the social forms co-created by performers and audiences, both during a performance and in the wider culture. Students will practice research methods including archival research, ethnographic observation, in-depth interviewing, and textual and performance analysis.

Focusing on René Char's wartime "notebook" of prose poetry from the French Resistance, Feuillets d'Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos), this course joins a study of the Resistance to a poet's literary creation and its ongoing "afterlife" around the globe. History, archival research (traditional and digital), the practice of literary translation, and a trip to France that begins in Paris and follows Char's footsteps as poet and Resistance leader on the Maquis will all be part of our exploration. The poet's widow and editor will accompany us in France. We conclude with a presentation of the "notebook" in multiple languages by seminar participants.

In 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. Our explorations of how empathy and alienation were variously conceptualized in psychological aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and critical theory will aim to open new perspectives on recent debates about identity, affect, and human-animal and human-AI relations.

This team-taught interdisciplinary seminar has the double aim of exploring the themes of music, sound, and the voice in Ovid's epic poem and how later composers in turn gave voice to Metamorphoses through the musical, especially operatic works that it inspired. We will engage in the close study of Ovid's treatment of myths like Marsyas, Orpheus and Eurydice and Echo and Narcissus in relation to earlier versions and then consider the continuities and differences between the poem's soundworld and its musical realizations in works such as Monteverdi's Orfeo, Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice, and Strauss' Daphne.

This interdisciplinary seminar examines death as a social process and a historical event. The first part focuses on death rituals in a variety of contexts: preparing and disposing of dead bodies, and mourning and commemorating the dead. Key texts address religion, rites of passage, symbolic efficacy, ontologies of personhood, and theologies of the soul. The second part explores the intersections of death with law, the state, and museums: forensic investigations, public commemorations, and curations of funerary objects and human remains, considered as means of public reckoning with death, especially in contexts of war and political violence.

"What shall we say of the Marxian philosophy and of its relation to the American Negro?," Du Bois once asked. His answer was that "it must be modified," not because Marx was wrong but because Capital is one of the four "books in the world which every searcher for truth must know." To know Capital to be true, in this seminar, is to understand how Marx, after the American Civil War, learned to include in his work the most brutal facts of capitalism: chattel slavery, servitude, and extraction in colonies across the globe. "Race," and everything signified by this four-letter word, completes Marx's own expansive account of modernity.

The course begins with the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476 and ends with the collapse of the Eastern (or Byzantine) Empire in 1453. Among the topics addressed are the following: the western successor states, the birth and expansion of Islam, the Carolingian Empire, the Vikings, and the political entities of the High and Late Middle Ages. Due attention will also be paid to religious beliefs and devotional practices, economic change, cultural development, gender relations and other aspects of social history.

How did the introduction of new text technologies impact premodern culture? What motivated or delayed the adoption of the codex or the various types of print? Did these technologies encourage new practices or suppress old ones? And how does the story change when we turn from European to Near Eastern contexts? By learning about past text technologies, we'll gain a fuller understanding of how today's digital text technologies leave their mark on how we interact with texts and with the world. This course teaches relevant digital humanities methods for texts and reflects critically on both our current moment and premodern pasts.

This seminar explores constitutional and legal issues posed by the attempted secession of eleven states of the Federal Union in 1860-1865 and the civil war this attempt triggered. Issues to be examined include the nature of secession movements (both in terms of the constitutional controversy posed in 1860-1861 and modern secession movements), the development of the "war powers" doctrine of the presidency, the suspension by the writ of habeas corpus, the use of military tribunals, and abuses of civil rights on both sides of the Civil War.

An exploration of original texts in the history of ideas 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.

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.