Street - "Magic School Trips"

Thursday december 3, 2015

The Daily Princetonian

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magic school trips SEATBELTS, EVERYONE! TRAVELING WITH SPRING 2016 COURSES The best classes transport students to new levels of intellectual understanding — but it’s also pretty nice when classes include all-expenses-paid spring break trips. Street scoured the course catalog to bring you the inside scoop on four classes going to Cuba, Italy, Peru and Puerto Rico.

ART 367 in Peru

ART 466 in havana ANGELA WANG Staff Writer

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ANDIE AYALA Staff Writer

Most travel bucket lists might be considered incomplete if they neglect to include Peru’s Machu Picchu and the ancient Incan capital of Cusco, but if these places are on your list, here’s your chance! The course ART 367: Inca Art and Architecture, cross-listed as LAS 373 and ANT 379, offers students the occasion to travel to both one of the the oldest continuously inhabited archaeological capitals in South America and the world’s coolest lost city during spring break 2016.

Funded by the Department of Art and Archaeology, the course will give 12 students the opportunity to witness the architectural wonders of the Incan Empire first-hand. The largest empire in pre-Columbian history, the Inca Empire is known for having some of the finest stonework of the Americas.

In addition to teaching the course, postdoctoral fellow Andrew J. Hamilton, who specializes in Andean art from the pre-Columbian period, is in the process of writing his forthcoming book “Scale and the Incas,” which “examines the conceptual role of scale in Inca material culture and built environments,” according to Hamilton’s biography on the art and archaeology department’s webpage.

In Hamilton’s words, the point of the class “would be to bring the students to Cusco to be able to explore the city and get a sense of it spatially, which would be next to impossible in a classroom

otherwise.”

Students who participate in the course will have to choose an object or space, such as the Plaza de Armas in Cusco, and will analyze the meaning of its history, visit the object, conduct further research and construct a final paper based on these conclusions.

Hamilton explains that part of the reason for the excursion is that there is an aesthetic phenomenon of Incan architecture that can only be personally physically experienced.

“The discipline of art [and] architecture has often described Incan architecture as undecorated, or unadorned,” Hamilton said.

Yet, as Hamilton describes, when you see a wall through the course of a day and really witness its texture and consider the different ways that it looks in the morning sun or the noon sun, you realize that the nature of the image looks completely different depending on the time of day and the space that you are in.

The course’s interdisciplinary approach incorporates readings and knowledge from anthropology, art history and archaeology. As such, there are no requirements for prerequisites or majors that students have to take before applying for the class, and students will be able to tailor their research to the discipline in which they are most interested.

As Hamilton states, “An experience like this is such an important part of curriculum at a place like Princeton. It’s the sort of the life-changing experience that you have in college that makes you become dedicated to the material.”

LAT 333 in ITALY DANIELLE TAYLOR Senior Writer

While most students may see Latin as a dead language, one course this spring is bringing it back to life by immersing students in Roman terrain. In an email statement, Yelena Baraz, the professor of LAT 333: Vergil’s Aeneid, said that the course studies the epic poem in Latin by focusing on Italy’s landscape and topography to study how Roman identity was formed.

According to Baraz, Vergil’s Aeneid follows the Trojan hero Aeneas and other survivors after the sack of Troy by the Greeks. The Trojans are searching for a new homeland, believing that the gods will reveal the location to them.

The perfect site is gradually revealed to them, and although they do not know that Rome will develop into a metropolis with significance that will reverberate across the millennia, they can look to the future with hopes that their new home will come to represent who they are. For the Romans of Virgil’s time, the epic

President Barack Obama announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba last December, but if you’d like to visit Cuba before the embargo potentially ends, then take ART 466: Havana: Architecture, Literature and the Arts. Led by professor of art and archeology Esther Roseli da Costa Azevedo Meyer and professor emeritus in the english and comparative literature departments Michael Wood, you’d get to travel to Havana during spring break.

“The course is meant to allow us to think of Havana as a kind of real place and an imaginary place at the same time,” Wood said, elaborating on the interplay of Havana’s architecture with its cultural associations.

Wood will give lectures and insights on Havana from literature and movies. According to Wood, one of the movies will be “The Last Supper,” a Cuban historical film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, a pioneer of the New Latin American Cinema movement. The syllabus also details the reading of “Three Trapped Tigers” by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a supporter of the Communist Revolution.

Da Costa Meyer will lead the students to look more closely at the colonial buildings of Old Havana, architecture from the Revolution, as well as Vedado, a Havana neighborhood built in the early 20th century.

“Much of Havana is in ruins, but ruins can always be restored: The city has thus

preserved what other Latin American and Caribbean cities have destroyed,” da Costa Azevedo Meyer said.

CDs might be added to the syllabus, according to Wood.

“Neither of us has any professional connections to music,” Wood said, “but I was thinking that both the music itself and the forms of music and the lyrics of the songs will be an interesting way into things that people imagined.”

A typical day on the trip will consist of visiting museums, self-guided exploration, examining buildings and discussing books and movies, as well as meeting people. For example, Leonardo Padura, an author of Cuban detective fiction, will meet and discuss his work with the students, Wood explained.

Harvard professor Julio César Pérez, a participant in the city’s Master Plan, will talk to the students, along with other architects from all over the world, according to da Costa Meyer.

“The whole world is watching Havana to see how they preserve this extraordinary metropolis,” she said.

The trip will consist of 15 juniors and seniors from various majors. The applications submission period closed on Dec. 1, so it is not certain who exactly will be on the trip.

From literature to movies to architecture and maybe even music, the class will enrich students’ understanding of Cuba comprehensively.

When asked what he is most looking forward to, Wood answered, “Just walking around and getting a feeling of the city in general.”

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poem conveyed their hopes for defining a cohesive Roman identity revealed through iconic monuments and spaces.

Funded by a grant from the 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, the spring course will visit Rome, Roman sites in the Bay of Naples, a Greek site near Salerno, and various sites in Etruria. Admittance is by application only and requires LAT 203 or instructor permission as a prerequisite. “[These sites] flesh out the different populations that contribute to this composite picture of Italy, both historically and within the poem,” Baraz said. Not only will students study Roman identity and its interaction with its Italian setting, but they will also be able to view

objects from varying Italian cultures in their original context to better shape their understanding of the poem.

“Since we will be reading the text in conjunction with studying the sites that are described in them, it will enhance the course to be able to visit the sites and see, for instance, where they are in relation to each other,” Baraz said. Students will each prepare a project that combines analysis of the poem with the physical monuments and locations. While on the trip, they will present these projects at the relevant sites to obtain a deeper understanding of the significance of location to the formation of identities — not only that of the Trojans, but also

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The Daily Princetonian

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Thursday december 3, 2015

UNFAMILIAR STREET

U.S. Route 395 in the Eastern Sierra, Calif.

HARRISON BLACKMAN Associate Street Editor

‘Unfamiliar Street’ is a column series in which we take you around the world and introduce you to a cool STREET far from the well-trod gravel of Prospect Avenue. o get to one of the most beautiful places on Earth, you have to drive through hell.

U.S. Route 395 stretches from the Canadian border to the mouth of Southern California’s Interstate-15 in the Mojave Desert. As a Californian by birth, I tend to identify all interstates as “freeways,” but it’s roads like Route 395 that I specifically label as highways — the two-lane road that stretches endlessly through a desert horizon. The nature of this endless horizon means two things — there will

T

be extraordinary beauty along the way, but this beauty is perhaps more appreciated with your growing familiarity with the great spaces of emptiness, landscapes without water, places with the haunting reminder of nature’s cruel power.

Case in point — one of the first stops on your journey into The Wasteland from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Region might very well be Adalento, Calif., home to a great deal of subdivisions, a minor league baseball team, and unfinished residential developments. Vacant lots with paved cul-de-sacs, plans for more housing that died with the Great Recession, imply that in this landscape, something is very wrong. There

is no water. People shouldn’t live here, but they do.

This pattern changes as you descend into the Owens Valley, where there used to be a lot of water until 1920s-era 1913 aqueduct-building caused the draining of Owens Lake. Still, black and sinister volcanic rock and small, glittering lakes adorn the land, leading you as you race around sharp, snaggle-toothed mountains, the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada range. Stunning landscape and proximity to Hollywood have made this territory the filming location for many Westerns. The region also doubles as Afghanistan in more movies than you would think (“Iron Man,” for one). A film museum celebrates this

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Aerial photograph of Bishop, Calif., which U.S. Route 395 runs through the Sierra Nevada range.

history in Lone Pine, the resort town adjacent to Mount Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower 48 states.

In part of the region’s darker history, you pass by Manzanar, one of the major sites of Japanese internment during World War II. A small visitor center and a rebuilt watchtower are all that distinguish a site that has been cleared of its barracks and fences, the desert reclaiming the site, obscuring the legacy of wartime fear and xenophobia.

But you keep going, and you start to notice how civilization brings water to otherwise arid land. Each settlement can be seen from afar by the sight of green. Trees and grasslands are maintained through irrigation, and you begin to respect the power of engineering, the tenacity of peoples who settled here, who lived here before anyone else, the strange hardiness of living far from the coasts and far from everything, really.

You pass through Independence, and then Big Pine. Finally you arrive in one of the last outposts on your journey — Bishop. The largest town in the Owens Valley, with a population of just under 4,000, is home to a railway museum and the legendary Erick Shat’s bakery.

When I was there last, clouds of ash from fires across the mountains left the town’s skies in an eerie fog. The air tasted of dust.

But the 395 continues, ascends into the caldera of a dormant supervolcano volcanic chain. The destruction from a recent brushfire has left many trees as blackened trunks. Eventually, something happens and

you cross into a different world — Mammoth Lakes — and the landscape transforms from desert to idyllic mountain resort.

Log cabin architecture abounds in this pine-wooded environment, and you wonder how this is possible, considering the landscape you left. Sparkling, tranquil lakes, spectacular mountainsides, sandy terrain and thin air suggest that you have indeed arrived in a form of heaven. To the uninitiated, Mammoth Lakes is the equivalent destination for Angelenos as Yosemite is for the Bay Area.

It is a ski resort in the winter, and a fishing and camping paradise in warmer months.

Full disclosure: Mammoth Lakes and Bishop were the sites of many vacations my family took when I was a child. This summer I stood at the foot of Horseshoe Lake in Mammoth, returning to the place of beauty surrounded by a dazzling, treacherous landscape.

In Mammoth, near Horseshoe Lake, there’s a plot of trees that are all dead. Volcanic activity has produced a carbon dioxide vent that kills trees. Signs tell you not to sleep on the ground nearby, for fear of asphyxiation.

Like the spectacular desert landscape, whose danger lies in its unrelenting heat and cold and its dearth of water, Mammoth’s beauty obscures the volcanic secret beneath. There’s always trouble in paradise, a snake in Eden. A Manzanar in a valley of natural wonder.

Regardless, Route 395 will take you there — to wasteland, to strange and daunting places, to paradise — and back.

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Virgil’s contemporaries during the time of Augustus.

According to Baraz, one significant moment in the poem occurs when Aeneas is walking around a wild place and readers are asked to map out future buildings and monuments in this site, which will become Rome. While in Princeton, students will study those monuments and their meaning for Romans of Virgil’s time. When students travel to Italy to follow Aeneas’ path, they will be able to experience Rome as Vergil’s contemporaries did and gain more profound understanding of both the epic poem and its terrain.

“Think of studying what it

means to be American in terms of landscape and monuments,” Baraz added. When studying the history and significance of monuments, such as Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty, viewing photographs of them can be informative; however, experiencing the monuments in person can change how we understand their importance.

Similarly, studying the Aeneid in a classroom setting can be useful, but the full weight of the significance of the Trojans’ experiences, and the way in which Romans under Augustus related to them, cannot be fully grasped without visiting the fated landscape of Rome in person.

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The Daily Princetonian

Thursday december 3, 2015

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CLOUD NINE EXPLORES COLONIALISM THROUGH FRESH, SEXY LENS Photos courtesy of LIN KING Street Editor The Lewis Center for the Arts presents “Cloud Nine,” a twoact British comedic play by Caryl Churchill that explores political and sexual oppression in colonial times. The show is directed by faculty member Robert Sandberg and features Victoria Gruenberg ’16, Tyler Lawrence ’16 and Will Plunkett ’16. Performances will be in the Matthews ’53 Acting Studio on Dec. 4-5, 11, and 13 at 8 p.m., and Dec. 12 at 2 p.m.

SPA 327 in PR DANIELLE TAYLOR Senior Writer

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Unlike many of the other tripbased classes offered next semester, SPA 327: Latino Global Cities isn’t going abroad, but to another corner of the United States: Puerto Rico.

Traveling to San Juan over spring break, the course studies urban Latino cultures in cities throughout the United States, the Caribbean and Spain. Cross-listed as a Spanish, urban studies and Latino studies course, SPA 327 requires a 200-level Spanish course, or instructor permission, and a one-page motivation letter, followed by an interview, to be selected as one of 14 students allowed to take this course. Priority is given to students who are planning on concentrating in Spanish and Portuguese.

“The first part of the course is a preparation of the travel. The second part will use the trip’s experience to analyze other comparative cases,” associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese Germán Labrador Méndez said in an email. Funded by the Spanish and Portuguese department and the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities, the course is built around the trip, but students will spend the weeks preceding spring break in preparation for the experience.

In an email statement, professor emeritus of Spanish and Portuguese explained that the course will pay a lot of attention to Puerto Rican history and the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States, especially in cities such as New York, Hartford and Orlando. The course especially focuses on San Juan, a unique city because of its connections to the Caribbean, its reshaping by Spanish colonialism and subsequent remolding by U.S. imperialism since 1898.

Some of the course’s texts include

the works of Julia de Burgos, Pedro Pietri and Federico García Lorca.

Additionally, the course references work by Efrén Rivera Ramos, Ed Morales, Julia Ramírez, Mike Davis and David Graeber. To complement the literary and sociological texts, the artwork of Tania Rivera and Francesc Torres will be analyzed, along with the work of musicians such as Manu Chao, Camarón and Enrique Morente. Furthermore, students will watch screenings of documentaries and a concert in February by Miguel Zenón, a renowned jazz musician.

“We will also have an opportunity to meet and engage in dialogue with visual artists, musicians and scholars, as well as with activists dealing with the enormous repercussions of the debt crisis,” Díaz-Quiñones added. While students will learn more about Puerto Rican cultural traditions, they will also discuss American citizenship in a U.S. colony with Rivera Ramos, a scholar from the University of Puerto Rico. Students will also travel to Cayey to discuss race and racism in Puerto Rico and other global Latino cities with Isar Godreau. The class will meet with community leaders and government officials in San Juan to discuss the economic crisis, which stems from debt owed by the government and public corporations.

While exam questions will include fun topics such as Latino salsa, Puerto Rico’s beaches and everyone’s favorite topic — gastronomy — the course will also focus on serious issues faced today in Puerto Rico, and specifically in San Juan, including race, citizenship, the debt crisis and environmental issues. The trip will serve to establish a panoramic perspective on how the shaping of cities like San Juan can inform the experience of people living in those places.

BAC DANCE PRESENTS

THE MOTIVE Photos courtesy of LIN KING Street Editor

This weekend, Black Arts Company Dance brings us the ultimate murder mystery: it’s sensual, energetic and just a little terrifying. Performances will be in the Frist Film/Performance Theater on Friday and Saturday at 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m.

STREET’S

TOP TEN Applications you should have started earlier

1 3 5 7 9

IIP.

2 4 6 8 10 CAMPUS PICKS PICS.

The class that goes to Havana.

The class that goes to Peru.

The class that goes to Greece.

The class that goes to Italy.

The class that goes to Puerto Rico.

The class that goes to the Princeton Cogeneration Plant.

The GEO class that goes to an undisclosed location.

Law school.

MUSIC VTONE PRESENTS “TEMPO TANTRUMS” 1879 Arch Thursday, 10 p.m.

VTone is Princeton’s one and only East Asian a cappella group — though they also do English songs! — and is having its annual fall arch in, yes, an arch. Grab late meal (or grab an underclassman’s late meal) and head over to hear the sweet strains of songs by artists ranging from Bastille to Winner to Jay Chou float through 1879.

EVENT THE NASSAU LITERARY REVIEW PRESENTS “FALL & WINTER ISSUE LAUNCH PARTY” Small World Coffee Thursday, 10:30 p.m.

The Nass Lit wants to you to “drop it like F. Scott” with a hot pot of coffee at everyone’s favorite spot, Small World. (Is it too late for us to submit our poetry for publication in this issue?) Channel hip Brooklyn coffeehouse vibes at the biannual Nass Lit launch party, featuring free coffee, free live music and a free open mic.

POETRY ELLIPSES SLAM TEAM PRESENTS “(AMPERSAND)” Theatre Intime Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.

Why “(AMPERSAND),” you ask? Because Ellipses’ winter show will feature more than just poetry — poems will be accompanied music & dance & photos & films for a mixedmedia show unlike anything the group has done before. Chapbooks of original poetry will also be sold for $5.

HEADLINERS AND HEADSHAKERS headlines you didn’t read this week DAILY PRINCETONIAN STAFF

Whig-Clio marks 250th anniversary; political clu b is quietly older than coun try

ssau Post office relocated to 259 Na for amid debate, old location eyed m restaurant development ... hm

Through Arts and Transit Project, Fenwick Hospitality Group expands restaurant empire’s territorial possessions

Berdahl-Baldwin ’16, Hosie ’16, Low ’16 named Marshall Scholars; the force is strong with these ones

N.J. Supreme Court rejects appeal to halt Institute for Advanced Studies construction, the Institute’s academic empire grows stronger

Czulak ’17, Wu ’17 to enter runoff election for USG presidency; waffle fries will never die, just fade away

DANCE LEWIS CENTER OF THE ARTS PRESENTS “PRINCETON DANCE FESTIVAL” Berlind Theater Friday, 8 p.m.

Saturday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Sunday, 1 p.m.

It’s back! The Lewis Center’s annual dance festival, this year at the end of the fall semester instead of in February, will feature students performing two pieces first staged in the ’80s, as well as four works by faculty and guest choreographers.

MUSIC PRINCETON UNIVERSITY WILDCATS’ 28TH ANNUAL JAM Taplin Auditorium Friday, 7 p.m.

Princeton’s youngest and most purple all-female a cappella group, the Wildcats, is having their 28th annual jam. That’s right — even though they’re the youngest all-female a cappella group on campus, they’ve been having jams for longer than most of us have been alive. This year’s love-themed show features guest performances by La Vie en Cello, eXpressions, Old NasSoul, and Songline.