Class catalog
Click on the pdf to view the fall 2021 course listing. (updated 8/16/21) 
fall_21_lecture_list.pdf
Community auditors are not eligible to take Visual or Performing Arts courses or Writing courses. Very few courses are offered in the evening. Courses are not offered during the summer.
Just Added: COS333 Advanced Programming Techniques.
Fall 2021 Auditor Only classes
ASC 100 – The Making of Paris 1800-1900
Professor: Caroline Harris, Diane W. and James E. Burke Associate Director for Education Princeton University Art Museum
Description: In the nineteenth century, Paris went through a startling metamorphosis from a medieval city of small, twisting streets to a modern metropolis with wide boulevards, beautiful parks, and a state of the art sewage system. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who served as prefect of the Seine from 1853-70, and Emperor Napoleon III, r. 1852-70, were the two men most directly responsible for this transformation. Paris, the celebrated city of lights, was in many ways the product of their vision. This course will place those achievements in the wider context of urban planning and development of the city from 1800-1900. Each week, this course will cover about two decades of urban development in Paris, exploring as well works by visual artists like Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec who captured the changing city in their works.
October 1: Paris from the First Empire to the Bourbon Restoration
October 8: From July Monarchy to Second Empire
October 15: The Man Who Made Paris Paris
October 22: Paris after the Franco-Prussian War
Time: 10:00-11:30 am
Dates: Friday's, October 1, 8, 15 and 22, 2021
Caroline Harris, Ph.D., University of Virginia, has led the Education Department at the Princeton University Art Museum for almost two decades. Prior to coming to Princeton, she served as staff lecturer in charge of academic affairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her main research interest is 19th-century French painting, and her most recent publication is “Alfred Sisley’s Portraits of Place” for the museum’s catalogue Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection.
ASC 200 – Contemporary American Fiction
Professor: Alfred Bendixen, Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Freshman Seminars
Description: An exploration of the themes, techniques, and power of recent American fiction through the study of four recent major novels. Our course explores four of the most popular and most critically acclaimed novels of our time:
November 5: Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing (2018)
November 12: George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)
November 19: Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give (2017)
December 3: Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018)
All of these books had a significant run on the New York Times best-seller list with Delia Owens dominating that list for over two years and Angie Thomas dominating the young adult list for almost that long. George Saunders earned the Booker Prize; Richard Powers won the Pulitzer Prize. In Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens offers a fascinating coming of age story that evolves into an intriguing murder mystery – and all of this is set within a vivid depiction of the North Carolina marshlands. George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo uses President Lincoln’s grieving for his dead son as the springboard for a dramatically multi-vocal encounter with the meaning of both death and American history. In The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas offers a vivid rendition of the pain and anxiety a young African American girl experiences when she witnesses her friend’s brutal death at the hands of the police. Richard Powers’ The Overstory is a long novel in which the interweaving of multiple stories ultimately transforms into an ambitious confrontation with our relationship to the natural world. Each of these novels has its own claim to importance, but the opportunity to explore all four together should lead us to a new appreciation of the ways that fiction both portrays and engages the complex realities of American life in the 21st century.
Time: 10:00-11:30 am
Dates: Friday's, November 5, 12, 19 and December 3, 2021
Alfred Bendixen received his Ph.D. in 1979 from the University of North Carolina and taught at Barnard College, California State University, Los Angeles, and Texas A&M University before joining the Princeton faculty in 2014. Much of his scholarship has been devoted to the recovery of 19th-century texts, particularly by women writers, and to the exploration of neglected genres, including the ghost story, detective fiction, science fiction, and travel writing. His teaching interests include the entire range of American literature as well as courses in science fiction, graphic narrative, and gender studies. Professor Bendixen may be best known as the founder of the American Literature Association, the most important scholarly organization in his field, which he continues to serve as Executive Director and as a frequent director of its national conferences.