Long-Term Visiting Fellows 2009-2010
Each year distinguished writers, artists and scholars spend a semester at Princeton, teaching one course.
Judith Jarvis Thomson, MIT philosopher, wrote one of the most widely read and discussed papers in contemporary philosophy, "A Defense of Abortion," 1971. She has also created important discussions of so-called "trolley problems," about the circumstances in which it is or is not morally permissible to kill one person in order to save several. As Old Dominion Fellow in Philosophy this fall, she is teaching a graduate seminar on moral philosophy.
Leo Bersani, Class of 1932 Fellow in French and Italian, has written about Baudelaire, Proust, Mallarmé, Beckett, Joyce, Henry James and Freud, as well as about painting and cinema. Professor Emeritus at Berkeley, he is a teaching a course this fall on the crisis of subjectivity in the modern period in which students rethink concepts of identity, intimacy, aesthetics and psychoanalysis.
Lisa Green is founding director of the University of Massachusetts Center for the Study of African American English and author of an important book on that topic. As Old Dominion Fellow in Linguistics this fall, she is teaching a course on linguistic variation: how dialects and languages can be analyzed, and how children learn the linguistic variations in their speech communities.
Christoph Markschies, President of Humboldt University, is a scholar of Early Church History, particularly the Gnosis and Church Fathers. He will be a Stewart Senior Research Scholar in March-April, hosted by the Religion department and the program in Judaic Studies, leading a workshop that explores the intersections of Jewish, Gnostic and Christian traditions.
