This year, the Humanities Council is supporting ten Breakthrough Seminars, which offer students courses with experiential or field components that move outside the traditional classroom setting. For 65 years the Council has been home to interdisciplinary team teaching and curricular innovation, and these seminars are designed to enrich, deepen, and internationalize learning across the humanities curriculum.
Team-taught, interdisciplinary courses in the Program in Humanistic Studies move across departments and divisions, examining “big questions,” creating laboratories for experimentation, and building bridges either within the humanistic disciplines or reaching out to the humanities, creative arts, social sciences, and natural sciences. Course topics have included incarceration, poetry and augmented reality, urban humanities, and medical humanities. In recent years, students worked with local archaeologists to examine material findings at the Princeton Battlefield (the “BattleLab” course), and they addressed questions around illness, health, and the human body in a team-taught course entitled “Medical Story-Worlds.”
Through these Breakthrough Seminars, students from the Council’s Program in Journalism have the opportunity to report from the field and learn critical thinking skills employed by the world’s most accomplished journalists. Students have visited Bosnia, France, Greece, and Canada, as well as the headquarters of leading news outlets such as The New York Times and Buzzfeed. This year, students will visit the southern U. S. states and Hungary.
During each fall break, the Humanities Council and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies invite students to experience Greek and Roman history and culture first hand.
Many of the seminars emerge from Council’s “Global Initiatives,” multi-year research and teaching collaborations that aim to develop new humanities networks around the world; these are unfolding in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, China, Russia and Eastern Europe, and North and South America.
Read about the 2019-20 Breakthrough Seminars here.
