Earlier this fall, Wallace Best, professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton, took the students in his “African American Religious History” course on a walking tour of Harlem. “It was truly an educational highlight of my time at Princeton,” said senior Adam Hudnut-Beumler. Best’s course is one of the 24 undergraduate courses offered by Department of African American Studies this fall.

Is the American socioeconomic ladder sturdy, offering a good chance for people to move up and down? Or is it rickety, leaving most people stuck where they are? Psychologists at Princeton University and Memorial University of Newfoundland have found that how Americans view social mobility affects their willingness to defend the basic underpinnings of American society — such as social and economic policies, laws, and institutions.

Researchers at Princeton University and the University of California-Los Angeles have found that the moon is at least 4.51 billion years old, or 40 million to 140 million years older than scientists previously thought.

In August 2015, a dust storm blanketed large areas of seven Middle East nations in a haze of dust and sand thick enough to obscure them from satellite view. At the time, the storm’s unusual severity was attributed to the ongoing civil war in Syria.  Now, a team of researchers including Elie Bou-Zeid, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton has found that it was caused not by human conflict, but a combination of climatic factors and unusual weather.

The technique that the hepatitis E virus — an emerging liver virus historically found in developing countries but now on the rise in Europe — uses to spread could present a weak spot scientists can exploit to treat the disease, according to a new study.

Six new technologies — from a method that enhances X-ray images to a strategy that eliminates cybersecurity threats — will receive University funding aimed at helping to transform promising discoveries from the laboratories at Princeton into widely available products and services for the benefit of society.

Princeton University’s Office of Admission launched a new interactive website on Jan. 5, providing prospective students and others with engaging and useful information about the quality and affordability of a Princeton education.

Princeton University has a substantial impact on the New Jersey economy, generating an annual total of $1.58 billion in economic output as an employer, research and innovation leader, sponsor of construction projects, purchaser of goods and services, and financial and civic contributor to local communities. That total supports an estimated 13,450 jobs with $970.7 million in earnings.

One hundred years ago, Italian chemist Giacomo Ciamician predicted a future society that would run on sunlight. Ciamician’s vision has not yet arrived, but a handful of Princeton researchers have succeeded with one part of his legacy: they are harnessing light to perform previously impossible feats of chemistry.

Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber has received the U.S. Navy’s Distinguished Public Service Award, the highest civilian honor given by the Secretary of the Navy. The award is given to someone who has “demonstrated exceptionally outstanding service of substantial and long-term benefit” to the Navy.

Banding together as a nation is often lauded for getting through challenging times, but a new study published by Princeton University and global collaborators finds that both harmony and conflict unify nations’ identities.

This fall, a Princeton instructor charged students with brainstorming some highly creative improvements to the Palmer Square shopping district. They were warned to avoid the commonplace. Almost all of them failed.

A committee to establish a marker at the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs that “educates the campus community and others about the positive and negative dimensions of Wilson’s legacy” welcomes input from Princeton students, alumni, faculty and staff through a new website.

Policymakers have little room for error when it comes to responding to the climate crisis. Yet they must take specific measures based on numerous projections of the Earth’s future climate that are drawn from the work of thousands of researchers around the world. Political leaders may be left to wonder how all that work was vetted and condensed — and who exactly put in the work, in order to have confidence in the result.

A tool that uses light to manipulate matter inside living cells has begun to explain how proteins assemble into different liquid and gel-like solid states, a key to understanding many critical cellular operations.

The global ocean is the Earth’s heating and cooling system, pushing balmy tropical waters toward the poles and bringing back colder, nutrient-rich waters. But modeling this system is extremely complex, resulting in billions of data points. To tackle the complexity, researchers at three Princeton-area institutions have transformed complex modeling data into an easily understandable animated movie showing how ocean temperatures and saltiness change over time.

More than two years after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the fraught relationship between law enforcement and African Americans continues to spark controversy and calls for action. This tension — and how to address the divide between communities and the police — were examined at a policy forum held Friday, Dec. 9, at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he also teaches in the art and archaeology, English, and classics departments. His scholarship focuses on early modern literature and art history, and theory and practice in the interdisciplinary study of culture.

What are the ethical implications of craft-making? Seven first-year students are spending their first semester at Princeton seeking answers to this question as part of “Design, Craft and Ethical Value,” a freshman seminar taught by Guy Nordenson, professor of architecture.

Princeton University has offered admission to 770 students from a pool of 5,003 candidates who applied through single-choice early action for the Class of 2021. The pool was the largest in the last six years, representing an 18.3 percent increase over last year’s early applicant pool.