The Humanities Council is pleased to welcome new faculty, scholars, and visitors for the 2022-23 academic year, who will support the Council’s mission to nurture the humanities locally and globally, engage diverse perspectives past and present, and enrich public dialogue with humanistic approaches.
Humanities Council Acting Chair
Tera W. Hunter, the Edwards Professor of American History and professor of African American studies, has been named Acting Chair of the Humanities Council, effective July 1, 2022. A specialist in the 19th and 20th centuries, her research focuses on gender, race, labor, and Southern histories. She will serve in place of Esther Schor (English), who is on research sabbatical leave for the academic year 2022-23.
Old Dominion Research Professors
Three senior faculty members have been named Old Dominion Research Professors and will join the yearlong program designed to provide additional research time and to enhance the humanities community more broadly.
William Chester Jordan (History) will study the economic and social experiences of migrant laborers in the High Middle Ages in the rural areas of northwestern continental Europe. Rob Nixon (English, High Meadows Environmental Institute) will focus on his most recent book project, “Blood at the Root: Environmental Martyrs and the Defense of Life.” Stephen F. Teiser (Religion) will develop his book project, “Curing with Karma: Healing Liturgies in Chinese Buddhism.”
Old Dominion Research Professors contribute to the Council’s programs and events and engage the campus community in sustained discussions about their research. They will also serve as faculty fellows in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.
Behrman Professor
Katie Chenoweth (French and Italian) joins the Council and the Program in Humanistic Studies as a Behrman Professor in the 2022-23 academic year. The three-year term appointment recognizes distinguished humanities scholars and dedicated teachers from within the University community.
Behrman Professors teach in the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture (HUM 216-219) sequence and play a leading role in building community among students in the interdisciplinary humanities certificate program. Chenoweth, whose research specializations include the French Renaissance and contemporary continental thought, joins current Behrman Professors Yair Mintzker (History) and Moulie Vidas (Religion, Judaic Studies).
Linguistics Faculty and Visitors
The Program in Linguistics welcomes Nikita Bezrukov, Alexander Göbel, and Milena Šereikaitė as postdoctoral research associates and lecturers in the Council. This academic year, they will each teach a fall course and a spring course in the Program. This semester, Bezrukov will teach “Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics,” Göbel will teach “Experimental Linguistics,” and Šereikaitė will teach “Mythbusting Language.”
In addition, Laura A. Janda and Tore Nesset, both from UiT, the Arctic University of Norway – the northernmost university in the world – will serve as Visiting Fellows in the Program in Linguistics and in the Council. Janda’s work focuses primarily on morphology and construction grammar of Slavic languages and the creation of research-based language pedagogy resources, while Nesset’s research interests include corpus and cognitive linguistics applied to the study of Russian and Norwegian.
Visiting Scholars and Practitioners
The Council has appointed eight Long-Term Visiting Fellows, who will each teach a course for a full semester.
This fall, in the Department of History, University of Oxford Professor Martin Conway will bring expertise in the history of democracy in 20th-century Europe. Theater director and filmmaker Mark DeChiazza,who has worked on choreography, scenic and media design, and installation, will co-teach “Opera Performance” with Gabriel Crouch (Music) in the Department of Music. In the Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick Professor Andrew Huddleston will combine his strengths in European philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics to teach “Philosophy of Art: The Idea of a ‘Religion of Art’ in the 19th and 20th Century.” With Brigid Doherty (German, Art & Archaeology), large-scale artist Josephine Meckseper will co-teach “Counterworlds: Innovation and Rupture in Communities of Artistic Practice” for the Department of Art & Archaeology. Brandeis University Professor John Plotz will offer “Studies in the English Novel: Genre Trouble: Realism and Its Others” in the Department of English. In the Department of African American Studies, Zoë Towns, Vice President for Criminal Justice Reform at FWD.us, will co-teach “Topics in Race and Public Policy: Do Black Lives Matter in the News?” with Naomi Murakawa (African American Studies).
Come spring, Suzanne Marchand, Professor at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, will draw on her knowledge of German history, such as regarding Orientalism and European usage of the Chinese invention of porcelain, while visiting in the Department of History. The Department of English will host novelist Kamila Shamsie, whose latest book won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Hellenic Prize.
Two Short-Term Visiting Fellows will also join the University in the fall. During intensive three-to-five-day periods, these Fellows lecture and participate in classes, colloquia, and informal discussions.
Multi-disciplinary artist and educator Daniel Alexander Jones, who works for the Center for New Performance at CalArts, will serve as a Belknap Fellow in the Council and in the Lewis Center for the Arts. In the Department of Music, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, who has performed on a 10-string fiddle called the hardanger d’amore on stages around the world including Carnegie Hall, will contribute to the Department of Music.
Next spring will feature two Short-Term Visiting Fellows. Duke University Professor R. Darren Gobert, who chairs theater studies and directs the Duke in New York: Arts, Culture, and Performance program at his home institution, will connect with the Department of English.* In the Department of Classics, Craig Williams, professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will bring insights from his book-in-progress which features indigenous North American perspectives on Greco-Roman antiquity.
The Program in Journalism has named seven renowned journalists as visiting professors for the 2022-2023 academic year, who will teach an intensive seminar for one semester. The visiting professors’ seminars will complement those regularly led by the Program’s Ferris Professors in Residence.
ESPN investigative reporter Steve Fainaru will reveal unexpected connections to human rights, social justice, and mental health in “The McGraw Seminar in Writing: What Sports Tell Us about Our World.” BBC political correspondent Tara McKelvey will offer “Audio Journalism: Storytelling for Radio, Podcasts and Beyond,” training students to harness sound, images, and other elements of multi-platform journalism. Teaching in the Program for the second time, Kushanava Choudhury, whose writing has circulated in both the United States and India, will probe urban migration through his course “The Literature of Fact: The World and the City.”
Next spring, Neil Bedi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at ProPublica who investigates federal government agencies and policies, will offer a seminar on accountability reporting with data. Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award winner Nadja Drost, frequently a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, will teach about how reporting on social upheaval shapes public understanding of other countries, with special attention to Latin America. Writing about economic justice in a “post-pandemic” world will form the focus of a seminar led by NPR chief business editor Pallavi Gogoi. Channing Joseph, a contributor to The Nation, will cover writing about racial justice in the United States and the long history of major news outlets excluding and maligning minority groups.
Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts
The Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts welcomes a new cohort for the 2022-2025 term. Fellows hold appointments as lecturers in their academic host departments and in the Council, teaching half-time while conducting their own research over a period of three years.
Literary scholar Andrea Capra will expand his research on the aesthetics of horror, while teaching a Freshman Seminar in the fall. In the spring, he plans to teach a course on the “Italian weird” in literature, cinema, and visual arts in the Department of French and Italian. Social scientist and writer Marcus Lee will pursue a book project that examines the conditions under which Black gay/lesbian groups attained political “visibility” in the “post-civil rights era.” In the fall, Lee will teach “The Black Radical Tradition” in the Department of African American Studies. He also plans to teach a course on “Racial Histories of Gender and Sexuality.”
Bailey Sincox, a scholar of early modern English drama and performance, will pursue her first book project, “Female Revenge on the Early Modern Stage.” This fall, Sincox will teach “Allegory: From Chaucer to Colson Whitehead” in the Department of English. In the spring, she will co-teach in Princeton’s Humanities Sequence, housed in the Program in Humanistic Studies. Guy St. Amant studies the religion and intellectual history of premodern South Asia. At Princeton, he will pursue research related to the topics of scripture and language. In the fall, St. Amant will teach the course “The Making of Hinduism” in the Department of Religion.
Appointed in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Jahmour Givans also joins the Society of Fellows. He will use a combination of theoretical modeling, simulations, computations, and data analysis to describe astronomical systems.
Humanities Council Executive Committee
Yelena Baraz (Classics), who specializes in Latin literature, Roman cultural history, and history of ideas, has joined the Council’s Executive Committee. Members come from across the humanities departments and meet monthly to select visiting fellows, Old Dominion Research Professors, grantees of the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Fund, Behrman Professors, and Belknap Visitors in the Humanities.
In addition to these specific tasks, the committee deliberates on interdisciplinary research and teaching proposals and thinks about the humanities as they intersect with the arts, social sciences, and natural sciences more broadly.
Humanities Council Program Directors and Committee Chairs
Elizabeth Davis (Anthropology), will serve as Acting Director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) for the 2022-23 academic year. She has been an active member of the IHUM community and has served on the Program’s Executive Committee since 2018. Steven Chung (East Asian Studies) has been named Acting Chair of the Committee for Film Studies. His research and teaching interests range widely, from Korean and East Asian film and media to global histories of political and religious conversion to traditions in film theory and critical theory.
Campus Partnerships
The Council provides substantial support for several visitors across campus, in collaboration with our University partners.
The Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, which resides within the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, appointed two Translators in Residence, with funding from the Humanities Council and the Lewis Center for the Arts. This fall, Saskia Vogel, a translator from Swedish to English, will translate a 760-page novel in verse, “Aednan,” by Sámi-Swedish author Linnea Axelsson. Neil Blackadder, who specializes in theater translation from German and French, will join the University in the spring.
The Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities appointed Babak Manouchehrifar as a Princeton-Mellon Fellow and Stewart Fellow in the Humanities Council. He will teach “Religion and the City” in the spring, and he will explore the intersection of race, place, and religion to understand how urban planners can attend carefully to the faith-centered calls for racial justice and spatial equity in contemporary cities.
The Program in Judaic Studies will also welcome Ukrainian scholar Iuliia Skubytska, who joins the University this semester as an Associate Research Scholar, with support from the Council.
To read more about our 2022-23 visitors, and find up-to-date information about events and funding deadlines, please visit the Humanities Council website.
*UPDATE: R. Darren Gobert’s visit has been postponed to Spring 2024.
