The course, being taught next spring by Professor Wendy Belcher, is offered through the Comparative Literature and African-American Studies departments. Its full title is "Model Memoirs: The Life Stories of International Fashion Models." And yes, there will be in-class visits:

Explores the life-writing of American, African, and Asian women in the fashion industry as a launching point for thinking about race, gender, and class. How do ethnicity and femininity intersect? How are authenticity and difference commodified? How do women construct identities through narrative and negotiate their relationships to their bodies, families, and nations? This course will include guest lectures by fashion editors and models; discussions of contemporary television programs, global fashion, and cultural studies; and student self-narratives about their relationships with cultural standards of beauty, whether vexed or not.

How much I would pay to be a fly on the wall the day the class asks Vogue's Candy Pratts Price how she commodifies authenticity and difference.

Far be it from windbag me to suggest that modeling is lacking in meat for young people's intellectual delectation. (Besides, it's my limited experience of these things that the professors behind the fluffiest-sounding courses team the material with theory from from only the most punishing and willfully obtuse of the French deconstructionists. Either that or my Advanced Topics In Popular Culture: "Breakin' II, Electric Boogaloo" course was just totally hard.) But I can't help but notice that Prof. Belcher hasn't yet fleshed out her reading list. It includes a mere three items: Alek Wek's memoir, Alek: From Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel, Irina Pantaeva's Siberian Dream, and Jillian Shanebrook's Model: Life Behind the Makeup. Clearly this needs some work.

Given my (onetime) profession and my (eternal) predilection for reading, I have kind of a Thing for books written by models. Often, they're unintentionally hilarious — even before Naomi Campbell came out and admitted she had writer Caroline Upcher to thank for her novel Swan, did anyone actually believe she'd written it? Others can be strangely affecting: Susan Moncur's They Still Shoot Models My Age is awesomely written, if kind of insane. (Among other things, it taught me that notorious gaping asshole photographer David Bailey called his models "ratface.") Shoot is now out of print, but there's no reason the Comp Lit whippersnappers couldn't scour Amazon for second-hand copies. I'd put Crystal Renn's recently released memoir, Hungry — written with Marjorie Ingall — on the list, too. If Belcher is interested in models as women who are permitted, by virtue of their physical aspect, to move frictionlessly across cultures and classes, you could do worse than to consider the experience of a 14-year-old girl from small-town Mississippi thrust into the Manhattan fashion industry.

I have not read Cheryl Diamond's Model: A Memoir, but other sources have said it accurately portrays the realities of modeling. For something with pep and honesty and humor, assign Elyse Sewell's LiveJournal. And definitely make 'em read Waris Dirie's Desert Flower. If they can handle the genital mutilation.

If it were up to me, I'd have the students read all of the above, and then watch Sara Ziff and Ole Schell's documentary, Picture Me. And Frederick Wiseman's Model.

And then, we'd all eat cupcakes and never look at fashion magazines or catalogs or billboards or JC Penney's fliers the same way again.

Image via British Vogue

Princeton's Next Top Model (Class) [The Ink]
Course Details For Model Memoirs: The Life Stories of International Fashion Models [Princeton Registrar]

• Saberi said she was moved to hear that so many people worked for her release. She added, "I think that if somebody is supposed to speak about my case from now on, nobody knows about it as well as I do, and I will talk about it more in the future." • Tennessee has nullified the 18-month marriage of a transgender woman and a man because the state considers them both men. The woman was born a man and had a sex change operation, but the state does not recognize gender change (or gay marriage) even after sex reassignment surgery. • A Sacramento woman survived a car crash because she was hurled out of the car, over the the highway sound wall, and landed in a plum tree in a backyard. Firefighters say she survived because the tree cushioned her fall. • A Turkish court has ordered that an employer give a woman her job back after she was fired for kissing her boyfriend at work. The kiss was brief, and no customers say it, but her boss caught it on a security camera and fired her. • The banning of four books of French erotic literature in Turkey has caused debate over the qualifications of committee members to determine what is literature and what isn't after they decided to ban a book by the acclaimed French poet Apollinaire. • A new study suggests chemicals and hormones produced from our changing moods can affect eggs and sperm, altering the patterns of genes that are active in them and thus how a child develops. • Scientists have found that by observing the pattern of activity in the brain they can tell whether a person heard words spoken in anger, joy, relief, or sadness. This is the first study to show that emotional information is represented by distinct spatial signatures in the brain. • Scientists in Australia have figured out why there is an obesity epidemic: we eat too much food. They calculated how much people are eating today as opposed to three decades ago by comparing agricultural data. They determined that based on the total amount of food that is grown and imported, humans are actually less fat than we should be based just on changes in consumption, which may be explained by exercise. • A McDonald's in Alabama pulled Kidz Bop CDs from the store's Happy Meals because parents complained they could hear an obscenity in a cover of Gavin DeGraw's "I Don't Wanna Be." McDonald's says there's no obscenity in the song, but a parent says, "In the song the word is supposed to be 'looking,' but they're saying the f-word with the -ing on the end." • A stripper working at a Times Square peep show caught an ex-con who was counterfeiting money. She noticed that the two $10 bills he handed her looked like they were made on an Ink Jet printer and alerted her manager. When confronted, the man panicked and dropped 21 more bills. The man was arrested and is currently out on bail. • A British man was arrested after he drove up to a police officer posing as a prostitute and how much she would charge to have sex with his 14-year-old son, who was sitting in the car. The man won't serve jail time because of his "previous excellent character" and the boy will be allowed to live with his father, but the man will be put on the sex offender registry for five years. • A study found that in many police units in England and Wales female officers have to wear uniforms and stab vests designed for men. Maria Eagle, the justice minister, said, "It does make a very clear point, doesn't it? How welcome would you feel as a woman in a police force like that, if you can't even get clothes that fit you? It's crazy." • Police are investigating whether a Russian gynecologist, Igor Ivanov, purposely sterilized his pregnant ex-fiance, Olga Sokolova, when she was admitted to a hospital with abdominal pains. Sokolova had called off their wedding on the night before they were supposed to get married because she believed he was cheating on her. She started dating someone else and got pregnant. Ivanov was the only doctor on duty when she was admitted to the hospital, and he told her she was miscarrying and performed emergency surgery, causing serious internal damage that will prevent her from having children. • On Saturday Sister Mary Elizabeth Lloyd will run a 100-mile marathon in Florida while wearing her nun's habit to raise money to help orphaned children. ''I'm like Johnny Cash,'' Lloyd said. 'I wear black to draw attention. And when people ask me: 'Why in God's name are you doing this?' I can say, 'For the orphaned children.''' • A video posted by the U.K. National Health Service in Leicester was banned by YouTube after 24 hours for showing what looks like a teenage girl giving birth on a playground while students watch. The NHS was trying to get their anti-teen pregnancy message to young people with a viral video. • Business is booming at Cryos, the world's biggest sperm bank. In 2008 the number of donors tripled, from 30 a day to 100 at its four offices in Denmark. The worldwide demand for sperm surged in the past three or four years and Cryos "can't meet the avalanche of demand from the western world, in particular the United States," said Chief executive Ole Schou, "We help a tsunami of highly-educated single women who are more demanding and who prioritised their careers and who want to have a child before it is too late." • Vietnam is experiencing a boom in male births, which researchers believe can be blamed on the tenfold increase in the availability of ultrasounds in the last decade. They believe women being able to know the sex of their unborn child is increasing the number of sex-specific abortions. • A scientist who writes under the name "Mike The Mad Biologist" blogged that he perceives a double standard in how female scientists are viewed when they party after work. "If a female scientist at a meeting parties hard and flirts, she is viewed as a 'party girl.' In other words, she is no longer viewed as a scientist with an interesting social life, but as 'a good time' (although perhaps not sexually)," he writes, adding, "Mind you, I think this double standard sucks. But... I'm not sure what we (including male scientists) can do about it, other than not be assholes (which would be a good start)." • Here's a letter to the Princeton Alumni Weekly from an alum of 1945: "Gone is the distinct masculine flavor of an all-male college. The maleness of the Nassau Inn's Tap Room has been replaced by a female, dainty, tearoom atmosphere... My fear is that the Princeton University I knew has been taken over by a female majority (for better or worse). I am surprised that other male graduates are not upset by these developments." • English ice cream maker Frank Frederick is reviving his Italian family's 100-year-old gelato brand, along with his grandfather's practice of singing opera to his cows to make them produce endorphin-rich milk. Frederick flew in opera tenor Marcello Bedoni from Italy to serenade his cows. "The cows are such gentle beasts and have a good ear for opera," said Bedoni. •

There have been a few articles here and there about how the right is dusting off its old playbook from 1992 to tar Michelle Obama with the same brush they so successfully used against Hillary Clinton. And, hey, why not! She's an Ivy League educated lawyer, obviously deeply respected by her husband, whose career paid their bills while he pursued more lofty ambitions. She isn't a potential First Lady in the model of Laura or Barbara Bush, all adoring looks and quiet charm, she's smart, outspoken, not incredibly inclined to political diplomacy and obviously protective of her husband.

Also, she's black. And, of course, that comes with a whole host of other issues, including the ability for people to think things like "Hey, Obama rhymes with baby-mama" and to comment on her physical appearance in a myriad of ways both insulting to women and African-Americans. One of my favorites thus far, was a post on the "Hillary is 44" site, since removed but immortalized here, that called her "lantern-jawed," because it's so appropriate to mock a woman for her bone structure.

Anyway, so for being a strong woman who isn't simpering around her husband, Michelle Obama is gonna be in for a rough ride, and I hope that the same people who are running around yelling about sexism in the primary start watching the general because Michelle is the new Hillary, and it's going to be ugly (which neither of them are).

Michelle Obama Thesis Was On Racial Divide [Politico]
Are We Getting Two for One? [Slate]
Learning to be Michelle Obama [Boston Globe]
Hey Feminists—Why No Love For Michelle Obama? [Glamocracy]
On Michelle Obama, Sexism And Ill-Considered Rhymes [Glamocracy]
Michelle Obama: Ain't She Woman [Racialicious]

The whole thing is here, not that I could download it. Perhaps some of you nerds might have better luck? [Wonkette]