Courses for Auditors
The Community Auditing Program offers two types of courses to auditors, University courses and Auditor Only Series courses. The University courses are the courses which Princeton students attend. They are part of the regularly scheduled classes at Princeton University. The Auditor Only Series courses are scheduled by the Office of Community and Regional Affairs. Princeton students do not attend Auditor Only classes.
Guidelines
- Registration is limited to the undergraduate courses in the catalog. We do not offer graduate level courses in this program.
- Community auditors may not participate in University courses. In these courses the student population must be the focus of the professor's attention before, during, and after class.
- In the Auditor Only Series courses, the community auditors are the students and may fully participate.
- Community auditors are not eligible to take Visual Arts, Performing Arts, or Writing courses.
- Very few courses are offered in the evening.
- Courses are not offered during the summer.
Course Catalog Link
To view and print the fall 2025 course catalog click on the document Fall 25 Community Auditing Lecture List.
Auditor Only Series - Fall 2025
ASC108 Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Other Masterpieces of 1925
Professor: Alfred Bendixen
Description/Objective: An exploration of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby one hundred years after its publication in the context of some of the other literary masterpieces that make 1925 arguably the greatest year in the history of American fiction. In that same year, major books appeared by Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Ellen Glasgow, and Anzia Yezierska. All these works attempt to extend and expand the American novel into a form capable of probing the meaning of American identity in the modern world, a world marked by rapid change and social turmoil, the growth of urban life, and the dissolution of some of the certainties that seemed to define American civilization.
Schedule: September 26, October 3, 24 and 31, 2025
Time/Day: 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM Friday’s
Location: on campus
About: 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. His most recent books include A Companion to the American Novel, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), The Cambridge History of American Poetry (co-edited with Stephen Burt; Cambridge University Press, 2015), and The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture (co-edited with Olivia Carr Edenfield); Routledge, 2017). The Library of America volume of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems is his latest publication.
ASC109 From Rebellion to Revolution: The Making of American Independence
Instructors: Michael Blaakman
Description/Objective: In April 1775, when redcoats and minutemen exchanged fire at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, American colonists considered themselves proud subjects of the Crown and still hoped that Parliament would recognize their rights as loyal members of the British empire. A mere fifteen months later, they declared themselves an independent republic and claimed equal status “among the powers of the earth.”
This auditor-only mini-course examines how and why American colonists made the radical choice for independence, transforming a colonial rebellion into a revolution. In four lectures and discussion of assigned readings, we will examine the dramatic events of 1775 and early 1776, including the creation of the Continental Army, Dunmore’s Proclamation, the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and the drafting of the Declaration. Lectures will pay special attention to historical documents that will be included in next year’s exhibition at Firestone Library commemorating the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.
Schedule: October 24, 31, November 7, 14, 2025
Time/Day: 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM Friday’s
Location: on campus
About: Michael Blaakman is a historian of revolutionary and early national America. His scholarship focuses on politics, empires, and North American borderlands, and his interests extend to include gender history, the history of capitalism, and microhistory.
Blaakman’s first book, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), investigates a frenzied land rush that swept the United States during its first quarter-century. Chronicling white Americans’ attempts to make the seizure and public sale of Native American land a basis for republican statecraft, the book uncovers the revolutionary origins of a real-estate bonanza that stretched across millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and Georgia to the Great Lakes.
His next book project, tentatively titled The Simcoes and the Enemies of the American Revolution, traces the extraordinary lives of a globe-trotting British power couple, weaving their story with those of the white, Black, and Native people they encountered in a world remade by revolutionary tumult to explore the many reasons and ways people resisted the American Revolution.
Blaakman completed his undergraduate studies at the College of William & Mary, and he earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 2016. His dissertation was awarded the 2017 Manuscript Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia and an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minn., before joining the Princeton faculty in 2018.
ASC110 Finales and Codas: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Endings
Professor: Leslie Rowley
Description/Objective: A re-imagining of the popular Freshman Seminar “Endings, Before and After,” this course explores the complexities of our relationship to endings and the ways that the tools and insights from a variety of disciplines—from philosophy and theology to psychology and sociology—might help us form new perspectives on the end of things. It is also designed to augment the Princeton University Concerts 2025-26 Music & Healing series, which will center on how music helps us navigate endings—shaping artistic memory, offering solace in times of loss, and sustaining cultural heritage.
We start by asking the fundamental question of how we know when something is over, considering theological and philosophical conceptions of endings. Who has authority to declare the end of a political dynasty, artistic movement, global pandemic, cultural trend, your childhood? Even when some “official” definition exists for endings—recessions, wars, human life itself—questions can still linger as to whether it’s really over.
We use our individual experiences as a guide, along with disciplinary tools from economics, public health, art, military strategy, and other fields. We look at the psychological underpinnings of our resistance to endings and also consider the sociological implications of our current approaches.
We will learn from actors as diverse as mountain climbers, Trappist monks, Broadway producers, death doulas, and those tackling America’s “digital divide” to illustrate endings that were unexpected, how some could have been anticipated, and when a new approach could have led to more optimal outcomes. We even look at cases in which finales were anticipated but never came—failed apocalyptic prophecies and death row reprieves—to reflect on the ways that belief and identity further complicate our relationship with the end. While the scope is broad and all types of endings will be on the table, human mortality will no doubt come into the conversation. Across the weeks we will touch on loss and grief but also legacy and opportunity.
Endings happen, even if we may not want them to. This seminar will help students unpack what endings signify and in what contexts reframing could be beneficial. The class will come to a close with students having considered how to look at endings in a more nuanced way and how this embrace may lead to time better spent before the end comes.
Schedule: October 7, 21, November 4, 18, 2025, Tuesday's
Time/Day: 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Related Concerts: Community auditors registered in the Finales and Codas: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Endings Auditor Only course will receive a discount code to purchase tickets for the Princeton University Concerts Music & Healing Programs related to the theme of endings on October 8, 2025; December 3, 2025; March 26, 2026; and April 29, 2026. Learn more
October 8, 2025, 7:30 PM W – Choreographer Mark Morris, “The Dance Lives On: Contemplating Artistic Legacy”
December 3, 2025, 7:30 PM W – Director Peter Sellars, “Mourning Through Music”
March 26, 2026, 7:30 PM TH - Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, “Dies Irae”
April 29, 2026, 7:30 PM W - Violinist Lisa Batiashvili, “Sounding Defiance: Georgia & Ukraine”
About: Leslie Jennings Rowley, PhD serves as Associate Director for the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy in Princeton’s School for Public and International Affairs, where she develops interdisciplinary initiatives and cultivates research collaborations both internal and external to Princeton to link academic insights in the behavioral sciences to real world issues. For the past three years, she has led a Freshman Seminar entitled “Endings, Before and After” and has also guest lectured in Princeton University courses ranging from environmental studies to entrepreneurship. A graduate of Dartmouth College with an AB in Economics and Geography, she holds an MBA in international business and a PhD in psychology with an emphasis on media. Her previous research has centered on the impact of narrative media on measures of adolescent self-identity, self-construal, and national identity. She is currently investigating how individuals and Western society as a whole approach the idea of endings and what behavioral insights may lend to their reimagining. She sits on the governing board of the Behavioral Science and Policy Association and the national board of Compassion & Choices, the largest end of life options advocacy and education organization in the U.S. She also founded Hereafter Partners, an organization that aims to make conversations about death, dying, and aging more normalized and accessible for younger cohorts of society. She also chairs the Princeton University Concerts Committee. Leslie lives in Princeton with her husband, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Professor Clancy Rowley, and their two teenagers.