ECS 301/EPS 301
Turning Points in European Culture (Gateway course for ECS and EPS)
Professor Brigid Doherty
W 1:30 – 4:20

Seminar draws on expertise of guest faculty from Princeton and elsewhere to provide a broad, multi-disciplinary perspective on turning points in European culture from the late middle ages to the present. Gateway course for ECS and Contemporary European Politics and Society. Topics in literature, art, music, philosophy, political theory, history of science. Guest faculty include: R. Hollander (Dante), D. Garber (Descartes), R. Darnton (Enlightenment), C. Abbate (Wagner), A. Nehamas (Nietzsche), H. Morris (Freud), S. Corngold (Kafka), M. Jennings (Benjamin), and F. Zeitlin (Holocaust and questions of memory in European Culture since 1945).

ECS 392/POL 414/REL 392
God & Politics
Professors Leora Batnitzky and Eric Gregory
Tuesday 1:30 – 4:20

Focusing on select primary texts from antiquity to the present, this seminar considers various attempts to delineate God's relation to politics from within the history of western political thought, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the American Founding. Prominent politicians, public intellectuals, and religious leaders will also visit and offer lectures outside of the course.

ECS 406/ANT 424
European Rituals and the Individual: The Social and Political through Expressive Culture
Professor John W. Borneman
W 7:30 pm - 10:20 pm

This course explores the "individual" as produced through European rituals that crosscut national boundaries, yet grow out of particular local, regional, and national cultures. How is the individual formed in the rituals of modern expressive culture? What are the functions of dance, music, visual culture, political culture, local festivals, and sport? What are the rites of passage, consumption activities, free time (vacations, tourism), and work cultures? The course will analyze empirical cases and select social theoretical frames that try to explain the emergence and development of "the individual" in modern European life.

ECS 354/SLA 345
East European Literature and Politics
Professor Irena G. Gross
MWF 11 – 12:20

In the course we will analyze the culture of resistance in the post-World War II Eastern Europe. We will look through the lens of literature at the main political issues that afflicted Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other countries in the second part of the 20th century. We will study texts (essays, memoirs, novels, short stories, plays, and poems) which offered various ways to resist moral and political oppression. The authors will include George Orwell, Franz Kafka (as a precursor), Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel, Tadeusz Borowski, Bertolt Brecht, Heda Kovaly, and others. All readings will be in English.