Freshman Seminars
- FRS 101: Afronaut Ascension: A Creative Exploration of Afrofuturism & the Avant GardeAfrofuturism is a practice and art form that allows black people to imagine themselves in a future beyond the trauma of the past and present. In this seminar students of all backgrounds are invited to participate in visiting some of the pioneers of Afrofuturist thought and literature, learning from visual and performing artists that lean on Afrofuturist principles in their practice, as well as becoming familiar with how the emerging technology like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are used to deepen the impact of Afrofuturist discourse.
- FRS 102: Poetry in the Political & Sexual Revolution of the 1960s & 70sWhat does artistic production look like during a time of cultural unrest? How did America's poets help shape the political landscape of the American 60s and 70s, decades that saw the rise of the Black Panthers, 'Flower Power,' and Vietnam War protests? Through reading poetry, studying films and engaging with the music of the times we will think about art's ability to move the cultural needle and pose important questions about race, gender, class, and sexuality. We will study Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, and others. We will talk about The Beats, The San Francisco Renaissance and The New York School poets.
- FRS 103: Self to SelfieThis course explores the concept "self" in anthropology and psychoanalysis. In many cultural traditions, from Buddhism in Asia to psychoanalysis in the West, the self is an important object of speculation. Through written and visual material (ethnography, psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy, and film) we examine three questions: How is the self formed? Under what conditions can the self change? What is the self's relationship to the phantasmatic and digital? Our goal is to arrive at a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the self as an object of study, and of the ethical and social implications of this understanding.
- FRS 105: American Identity at a Crossroads?Is America a country built on systemic oppression or a land of opportunity where anybody can flourish and prosper? We engage the key texts in discussions on race, religion, class, and gender to evaluate these conflicting claims. We examine the meaning of 'justice' in social justice movements by assessing their core tenets alongside the ideas and values long undergirding American institutions. The seminar encourages students to reflect on what it means to live in America in this pivotal cultural moment. Students will also have the opportunity to meet guest speakers, themselves leading figures at the forefront of these debates.
- FRS 107: Happiness and Being Human in Catholic ThoughtThis course offers, to interested students of any background or worldview, an introduction to the Catholic intellectual tradition from its beginnings with the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers through the modern day.
- FRS 109: The Other 'F' Word - Success and Innovation's Sibling?See website
- FRS 111: Everyday Enchantment: Blurring the Boundary Between the Arts and LifeThis seminar seeks enchantment in everyday experience, considering the allure and the danger of mixing up life and art. In addition to studying and writing about historical artworks, students will research current-day practice and will complete open-ended creative projects. Experience in any artistic discipline is welcome but is by no means required; more important is a spirit of curiosity and exploration. For our purposes, "art" refers not only to visual art but to a wide variety of creative undertakings that result in performances, objects, rituals, stunts, and other possibilities we will soon discover.
- FRS 113: Global Poverty - Who is Responsible?Global poverty is enormous in scale and insupportable in its moral consequences. More than 700 million people live on less than $1.90 a day. A child born in Spain today can expect to live to 83 years; a child born in Sierra Leone or Nigeria has a life expectancy of less than 55 years. The likelihood of dying under the age of five is 20 times higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in Australia or New Zealand. Who is responsible for this global calamity-rich countries, poor countries, you and me? And what should be done? This course addresses the moral responsibility for, and the drivers of, global poverty.
- FRS 114: Mother TonguesLanguages are systems of communication, but they are also social institutions, ideological battlegrounds, instruments used to homogenize populations, define citizenship, and create social hierarchies. In this seminar, we discuss language as part of the social, cultural, and political machinery that enabled the rise of the nation-state, linguistic colonialism, hybrid identities and multilingualism in the 21st century. We approach language as social practice, raise critical awareness of the ways in which language is linked to cultural value and national identity, and deconstruct the notions of linguistic authority and nativism.
- FRS 115: What Makes for a Meaningful Life? A SearchWith the pressures and frenzied pace of contemporary American life, it might sometimes feel as if there is little time to contemplate the question of what makes for a meaningful life. How does a person find deeper meaning for him/herself? What is the purpose of my life? What is the relationship of the meaning of my life to a larger purpose? How do our lives fit into the world around us? The course explores, from many perspectives, some of the responses to the "big questions" of life. Readings and films are taken from different cultures, different time periods, and different spheres of human endeavor and experience.
- FRS 117: Music, Memory and the HolocaustThis course explores the role music played before and during the Holocaust, as well as the part it continues to play in reflecting upon this historic tragedy. We begin with an overview of the first years of the Hitler regime, including the Nazi-sponsored Jewish Cultural Association as well as the first concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald. We then consider music in both the 'model camp' Theresienstadt/Terezín and the work and extermination camp in Auschwitz. Finally, we examine a range of works written in direct response to the Holocaust that both bear witness and provoke contemporaries to confront the ongoing horrors of genocide.
- FRS 119: Race, Representation, and Education PolicyThe seminar seeks to provoke open debate and discourse about representation, race, education policy, and racial inequality. The emphasis is on stimulating seminar participants to think about and to analyze how minority representation impacts the range of policies implemented to address political, social, and economic inequality with emphasis on education policy, African Americans, and Hispanic/Latino Americans.
- FRS 121: Behind the Scenes: Inside the Princeton University Art MuseumParticipants in this seminar will go behind the scenes of a major university art museum with an encyclopedic collection of more than 100,000 objects from ancient to contemporary art. Sessions will focus on close looking and discussions of museum best practices and the role of the museum in the 21st century with a special emphasis on collecting.
- FRS 123: Wordplay: A Wry Plod from Babel to ScrabbleThis course brings together interesting reading, thoughtful scholarship, and hands-on revelry in the exploration of the ludic side of language. We will consider the formal features, aesthetic pleasures, and societal roles of wordplay from a wide temporal and geographical perspective by reading poetry, stories, and novels both familiar and unfamiliar, having fun with scripts besides our own, and regularly trying to produce decent examples of "constrained writing" ourselves. In the end we will arrive at a better understanding of how language works and how these workings can be bent in unusual ways to produce striking effects.
- FRS 127: Body Builders: Living Systems as Art MediaThis course will explore the crossover collaborative of bioengineering and art, presenting the notion of bioengineering as an artistic practice. A creative portrayal has the potential to humanize this highly technical field. Advancements in the field of biotechnology will be examined as potential tools to not only improve health care, but also as an art medium. The course material will expose students to organisms manipulated in an imaginative context and consider how these artistic ventures may affect public perception of emerging biomedical technologies.
- FRS 129: Monsters Among usWhy do literature and the visual arts like to represent monsters? Monsters are a way in which cultures determine what may be intellectually conceived and physically exist. Delimiting what we deem to be normal and organizing our aesthetic reactions, monsters have something to tell and a lot to teach us about the cultures that engendered them. The seminar will cover a wide array of primary texts from antiquity to the present, all populated by excessive creatures, abnormal human beings, and aberrant behaviors. Screenings and discussions of classical and popular horror films complement the course.
- FRS 130: Drawing the Divine Religion and Spirituality in Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga, and AnimeThis cross-cultural exploration will survey the presence of the religious in modern popular visual productions (print and film) in the West (US, France, and Belgium), and the East (North Africa, Iran, and Japan). The materials will expose students to the three monotheist religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), as well as Buddhism and Shinto, and will introduce them to the history and the art of American, European, and Japanese graphic novels and animated films.
- FRS 131: Sizing Up The UniverseThe 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.
- FRS 133: What Will Happen to Her Next?This freshman seminar concerns itself with the laws by which fictional female lives are told: narratives by which we anticipate as well as judge--vigilant observers that we are--what is going to happen to her next. A fundamental claim of this course is that dramatic suspense problematically takes momentum from gendered laws and cues: when we see a lightly-clad woman, drenched in blood, stumbling from a highway stop we are conditioned to assume that she has been raped. But what happens when a female director "disappoints" our narrative expectation because the presumed female victim turns out in fact to have cannibalized a truck driver?
- FRS 135: Ways of Knowing: Knowledge and PowerIn this class we engage with texts in a variety of disciplines and genres that stage inquiries into power, privilege, and knowledge. Analyzing novels like Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, theory like Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto, and films like Jordan Peele's Get Out, we examine how power and social identity shape the way that knowledge is produced, manipulated, disseminated, and consumed. The course offers an epistemological framework that links our liberal arts education with pressing issues of inequity and injustice in the world, like racism, gender disparity, classism, and sexism.
- FRS 139: Ways of Knowing: Knowledge and PowerIn this class we engage with texts in a variety of disciplines and genres that stage inquiries into power, privilege, and knowledge. Analyzing novels like Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, theory like Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto, and films like Jordan Peele's Get Out, we examine how power and social identity shape the way that knowledge is produced, manipulated, disseminated, and consumed. The course offers an epistemological framework that links our liberal arts education with pressing issues of inequity and injustice in the world, like racism, gender disparity, classism, and sexism.
- FRS 141: Ancient Egypt and Its HieroglyphsHow do you--and how did the Egyptians--read hieroglyphs? If you have ever stood before brightly decorated sarcophagi from millennia-old pyramids, staring in respectful awe at row after row of amazing symbols without ever imagining that you, too, could read and write like an Egyptian, this interactive, hands-on seminar will get you started.
- FRS 142: History and Cinema: Fascism in FilmProduced from the post-World War II period to the present, the Italian, French, German, and Polish films we will study in this seminar establish a theoretical framework for the analysis of Fascism, its political ideology, and its ethical dynamics. We shall consider such topics as the concept of fascist normality, the racial laws, the morality of social identities (women, homosexuals), the Resistance, and the aftermath of the Holocaust. An interdisciplinary approach will be combined with learning basic concepts of film style, technique, and criticism.
- FRS 143: Is Politics a Performance?Politics as 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.
- FRS 145: Learning to 'Spell': Visions of School in Fantasy and Science FictionThis course explores fantastical works that showcase the very real issues that shape education, including race, class, gender, privilege, and disability. How might television shows such as The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina or fiction by writers like G. Willow Wilson and Ursula Le Guin inform the ways we imagine the educational policies and institutions we frequently take for granted? Throughout the semester, we'll consider the experiences of characters like Hermione Granger, Kamala Khan, and the X-Men to see how they speak to our own fantastic experiences as students and citizens at Princeton.
- FRS 147: How People Change: Short Stories and Life's TransitionsWe 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.
- FRS 149: Ethics in FinanceThe global financial crisis and recent high-profile scandals (e.g. Wells Fargo in the United States, Wirecard in Germany, Luckin Coffee in China) highlight the extent to which we seem to have made little progress in stamping out unethical behavior in finance. This seminar 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.
- FRS 151: Time Capsules for Climate Change, to be Opened at Your ReunionsThis seminar is about thinking about the future of the planet and your own future. You will create four time capsules, to be opened at your graduation and at your 10th, 25th, and 50th reunions. These capsules will contain your essay, which will treat a single topic that you work on all semester. Some of your analysis will be quantitative; you should enjoy numbers and have an appetite for arithmetic. Lectures will introduce the Earth as a physical system affected by human activity; fossil, nuclear, and renewable energy; uses of energy and land; and low-carbon policy. You will read some published science papers.
- FRS 153: Pandemic Pedagogy: School and Society in a Time of Disruption and TraumaThis seminar will take a multi-disciplinary approach and include research from the fields of education, psychology, history, economics, and political science. It will focus on the relationship between theory and practice in all aspects of teaching, learning, and working as well as the relationship between school and society. Readings will be far-ranging and include scholarly papers as well as newspaper articles and other forms of social media. The goal will be to make every member of the seminar a smarter, wiser, and more self-regulated learner and informed citizen.
- FRS 155: The Human ContextThe context we inhabit influences our attitudes and behaviors in ways that we fail to appreciate. Beyond obvious features, like climate or wealth, the human context includes features, like inequality, discrimination, social norms, societal narratives, and the law, that are less apparent. These veiled features are an integral part of our experience: they affect our preferences, memories, perceptions of success, and life satisfaction. They shape our behaviors at home, at war, in neighborhoods, and as citizens. The course will explore the under-appreciated power of context, and contemplate ways it might be made more conducive to human thriving.
- FRS 157: The Bad Old Days? LGBTQ Writing Before StonewallWhat was it like to be queer in small-town Georgia in the 1930s? In upper-class London in 1890? In New York City during the great artistic and cultural movement that was the Harlem Renaissance? This Freshman Seminar takes a deep dive into the fascinating archive of literature produced by LGBTQ people before the Stonewall Riots of 1969. We will read a range of American and British writers including Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Radclyffe Hall, and Truman Capote in order to learn more about queer life on both sides of the Atlantic in the early to mid-twentieth century.
- FRS 159: Science, Technology and Public PolicyThe overall objective of this seminar is to understand and assess how developments on the scientific and/or technological frontier may raise issues and challenges for public policy as well as associated ethical and/or legal issues in the U.S. context. The focus will be on developments on the scientific frontier since World War II. Through the course of our discussions, we will come to see the many inherent and potential conflicts of interest that may arise when scientists serve as advocates and advisors in controversial policy debates and where scientists themselves are supplicants for federal research resources.
- FRS 161: How Green is Your Campus?How green is Princeton's campus? What is the total area of green space, and is all green space of equal quality? In nominally green areas, how diverse is the vegetation, how tall are the trees, how healthy are the leaves, and how permeable is the soil? Each student will be in charge of a square subregion of the campus where they will make a battery of measurements using a diversity of instruments. The ultimate group goal is to build a quantitative map of campus greenness, with which we can address problems as diverse as sustainability and climate change.
- FRS 163: Imagining Joan of ArcJoan of Arc, arguably one of the most famous celebrities of the Middle Ages, left her small village as a girl, dressed in men's clothes, convinced a prince to give her an army, and turned the tide in France's war with England, only to be burned at the stake for her trouble. This seminar surveys the numerous retellings of this dramatic story, from the original transcripts of her heresy trial in 1430 to her invocation as a transgender hero today. Working with a range of literary and filmic works, we will focus particular attention on the shifting meanings accorded to Joan's cross-dressing, thereby collaborating on a broader history of gender.
- FRS 165: Archaeology as HistoryOver the course of the semester, we will examine how historians and other scholars can use archaeological methods to interpret the lives of the people we study, especially the people who are not mentioned in texts. How is archaeology related to history, and vice versa?
- FRS 167: Europe, Russia and in-Between: Historical Encounters, Late Eighteenth Century to the PresentDecades after the official end of the Cold War, the escalating tensions between Russia and the West are at the forefront of current politics forcing many to rethink the chronology of the Cold War and its end in 1991. The focus of attention has been on Russia or the West, but the territories in-between--formerly part of the Soviet Union and the communist block--have been affected most severely by this confrontation. The aim of this seminar is to introduce students to the history of the complicated relationships between different regions in Europe towards a better understanding of politics today.
- FRS 169: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Wisdom of CrowdsThis 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.
- FRS 171: The Lives of Early Christian WomenHow can we understand the lives of early Christian women? In this course, we examine topics such as constructions of femininity and masculinity, debates on sex and abstinence, freedom and enslavement, and fashion and footwear. Texts we analyze include sections from the Bible, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Acts of Thecla, the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas. We incorporate evidence from the material world (papyrus letters, archaeological remains, textiles, shoes) and also reflect on how ancient debates relate to contemporary issues on religion, gender, and class.
- FRS 173: First Year Painting Studio SeminarA painting studio class/seminar for first year students where they will learn about the basics of painting in their own time.
- FRS 174: Drawing DataData is everywhere. Using site-specific research methods, students will explore their local environs, on campus and beyond, searching for data and the patterns and stories that follow. They will collect their observations in evolving archives, iterating on modes of communication (including documentary drawing, sensory visualization, and information design). The output of the course will consist of small weekly projects and responses to data-driven readings, films, design, and art, culminating in the production of a larger creative data visualization project, which illuminates a local story or pattern via data uncovered during the semester.
- FRS 175: Performance and PhotographyWhat does it mean to photograph yourself? Is it an act of self-exploration, narcissism, self-love, representational justice? What are the possibilities and limitations of making art in this way? What can our bodies teach us if we pay attention? Through making self-portraits students will reflect on how it is to be in their particular body. Each class will have guided warm-ups which foreground embodiment and play, out of which students will generate material for their photographic explorations. We will learn the basics of camera operation and consider how things like framing, angle of view, and distance influence meaning.
- FRS 177: Aerial Knot TheoryAerial silks acrobats hold themselves aloft through an intricate tangle of their limbs and supporting fabrics. We will explore ways to understand the choreography of aerial silk acrobatics through the lens of a field of mathematics called "knot theory," which classifies how knotted strings can be arranged in space. No prior mathematical background or aerial silks experience is necessary.
- FRS 179: Princeton and the Dawn of the Information AgePrinceton and Princetonians have played foundational roles in creating the information technologies - computers, smart phones, and the Internet, for example - that help to define today's world. This seminar will both introduce students to some of the basics of information technologies and emphasize Princeton's role in the development of these technologies. The seminar will examine the contributions of pioneers such as Alan Turing, John Von Neuman, Claude Shannon, John Bardeen, and Robert Kahn, among others, to information technologies. The material will be presented at a level suitable for students with general backgrounds.
- FRS 181: On Love and PoliticsWhat is the relationship between artistic creation, political action, and love? In this course we will explore different philosophical concepts of love - eros (romantic ecstasy), agape (pure or divine love), philia (friendship), storge (familial love) and xenia (hospitality) - in their peculiar relationship to politics. We will analyze how the work of poets, visual artists, photographers and filmmakers testifies to the roles of affect in resisting State order, as well as how these works, as labors of love, subvert the logic of twentieth-century authoritarian regimes, becoming essential tools for social, political and cultural revolution.
- FRS 183: A Portrait of the Artist As...Protagonists of great literary works in the tradition of the Künstlerroman (artist's novel) are typically young men--from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister to Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and beyond. Countless readers and writers have seen in those characters possible models for self-fashioning in art and life. This course focuses on works of literary fiction in which the aspiring artist is not a young man, even sometimes not a human being. Reading and discussing texts that challenge our assumptions about individuality, creativity, and humanity at large, we will explore how ideas about art can matter to how we live.
- FRS 185: Tragedy and the Meaning of LifeFor 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--usually, but not always, dramatic 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 Goethe's Faust. 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.
- FRS 187: ACTING Against Oppression: Notes from the other AméricaMost Latin American countries have weathered political and social traumas. Through this instability and struggle, artists have reimagined the use of theater to challenge structures, and to empower the oppressed. We will learn how different Latin American playmakers have chosen to tackle social/political theater from the '60s on. Our main focus will be Augusto Boal's "Theater of the Oppressed." Each class will include improvisations and games from the genre (NO ACTING experience necessary), readings, discussions, and watching performances. The seminar will culminate in a student created project (script, happening, play, structure).
- FRS 189: Sufis, Slaves and Soldiers: Premodern Mobility in South and Central AsiaThis freshman seminar will take students on a journey across the historically interconnected regions of pre-modern Central Asia, Iran and India to discover a world where people, goods and ideas traveled, where spaces were shared and where fluid identities adapted to changing spatial contexts. An engaging mix of textual, visual and material sources with methods of cartography will enable students to learn about diverse historical experiences that include the Sogdian-Turkic commercial symbiosis in Pre-Islamic Central Asia, gendered spaces in peripatetic Mughal courts, and forced relocations caused by slavery in the Turco-Persian world.
- FRS 191: Atheism and the Death of GodFew statements have had more of an impact on modern thought than Nietzsche's infamous "God is dead, and we have killed him." If God is dead, what is to give purpose to human existence? This freshman seminar introduces students to Nietzsche's almost paralyzing thought that the Western world is set adrift "through an infinite nothing" without the authority of a supreme being. In addition to works by Nietzsche, we will examine thinkers like Darwin, Marx, Camus, and Dawkins. Our goal will be to reflect on the philosophical significance of the idea that "God is dead," as well as its influence on popular culture (film, music, and other media).
- FRS 193: Belief and IdeologyThis course studies the nature of belief and ideology from a perspective that integrates contemporary work in philosophy, cognitive psychology, consumer research, and political science. Topics include how ideology shapes contemporary social and political conflicts, major philosophical positions in the ethics of beliefs, the psychology of reasoning and ideology, and effective persuasion.
- FRS 195: StillnessIn 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).
- FRS 197: Imagining New York: the City in FictionThis Freshman Seminar will explore the wide variety of ways in which the fiction of New York City embraces the diversity, possibilities, and realities of American life. Our exploration will include novels of immigration and high society and supernatural horror, historical tales and works of science fiction, and memoirs and graphic narratives--all of which share a commitment to exposing the dynamics of a city that embodies both the best possibilities of the American Dream of transformation and the cruel realities of poverty, racism, and social injustice.
- FRS 199: Diplomatic Encounters -- Or, So You Want To Be a DiplomatThis seminar offers an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of international diplomacy, drawing on the instructor's experience as former ambassador and current scholar. We will survey the classics and explore some of the more recent diplomatic memoirs, focusing on case studies such as the end of the Cold War, the Iraq fiasco, the U.S. opening to Cuba, the Iran nuclear deal, and the challenges of dealing with Russia and China today. We will then descend from high politics down to ground level, focusing on practical aspects of diplomacy on which students can draw if and as they aspire to careers in international relations.