Yelena Baraz, the Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature and Professor of Classics, has been appointed director of the Society of Fellows of Liberal Arts, beginning in fall 2023. She will succeed Michael D. Gordin, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, who has led the Society since 2017.
Baraz’s scholarship focuses on Latin literature, Roman cultural history, ancient philosophy, translation theory and practice, and the history of ideas. She is the author of numerous articles and two monographs, “Written Republic: The Cultural Politics of Cicero’s Philosophy” (2012) and “Reading Roman Pride” (2020). At present, she is working on a study of post-Vergilian pastoral, an introduction to Cicero’s corpus, and, in a collaboration with the writer Jhumpa Lahiri, on a new translation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”
Baraz served as a Behrman Professor in the Humanities from 2019-2022, where she taught in the Program in Humanistic Studies and led the HUM 216-219 sequence, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture. She is a current member of the Council’s Executive Committee.
The Society, established by a gift from charter trustee Lloyd Cotsen and the Humanities Council’s leadership in 1999, is an interdisciplinary community of postdoctoral fellows and Princeton faculty members that aims to bring innovative approaches to scholarship and teaching. It offers outstanding young scholars with a recent Ph.D. the opportunity to enhance their teaching and research over a period of three years.
