The Humanities Council will welcome 11 visiting fellows in the academic year 2024-25. These fellowships bring distinguished scholars, artists, writers, and practitioners to Princeton where they contribute to the University community through their work in and out of the classroom. Visiting fellows are nominated by chairs of humanities departments with support from directors of interdisciplinary programs in the humanities.
Six Long-Term Fellows, who are “in-residence” at the University, will teach or co-teach a course for a full semester. Next year’s course topics include Indigenous cosmologies, Caribbean literature and culture, filming liberation, fairy tales and narrated musical theater, the works of Horace, and gender and genre theory.
Five Short-Term Fellows will visit campus for three to five days, where they will lecture and participate in class discussions, colloquia, performances, or other informal events within their nominating departments.
“Next year’s Long-Term and Short-Term Visiting Fellows bring an exciting array of fresh ideas to our curriculum and our conversation,” said Esther Schor (English), chair of the Humanities Council. “We look forward to welcoming them in September.”
Long-Term Visiting Fellows
- Branka Arsić
Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University
Branka Arsić specializes in literatures of the 19th century Americas and their scientific, philosophical, and religious contexts. She is the author of several essays and books, including Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard University Press, 2016), which was awarded the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize for the outstanding book of 2016. Arsić is currently completing a book entitled Ambient Life, Melville, Materialism and the Ethereal Enlightenment, a project for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. The book focuses on images of the elemental, vegetal, and animal that traverse Melville’s work as a means of investigating how he imagined the capacity of matter to move and transform.
Arsić will be a Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Effron Center for the Study of America in Spring 2025. She will co-teach an undergraduate course with Sarah Rivett (English and American Studies) on Indigenous cosmologies.
- Patrick Chamoiseau
Poet, novelist, and essayist
Patrick Chamoiseau is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose multifaceted oeuvre, translated worldwide, has won numerous prizes including the Prix Goncourt (1992), the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe (1993), and the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar (2023). His work involves an aesthetic exploration of creolization and of relational poetics in the contemporary world. He is widely recognized as one of the most important literary figures of the Caribbean and a major writer in the international arena.
Chamoiseau will serve as a Belknap Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian in Fall 2024. He will co-teach a graduate seminar with Thomas Trezise (French and Italian) on the literature and culture of the Caribbean.
- Adam Gidwitz
Author, producer, and storyteller
Adam Gidwitz is an award-winning author, producer, and storyteller for young people. He wrote the bestselling novel A Tale Dark & Grimm and its companions,adaptations of the darker and lesser-known Grimm fairy tales. His medieval epic The Inquisitor’s Tale won the Newbery Honor. He also wrote a Star Wars novel, The Empire Strikes Back: So You Want to Be a Jedi and the bestselling Unicorn Rescue Society series. His newest book is the bestselling Max in the House of Spies. Adam also created Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest, a podcast on which he tells real Grimm tales live to kids, and he produced the animated Netflix adaptation of his novel A Tale Dark & Grimm, which was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Series.
Gidwitz will be a Belknap Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Music in Fall 2024. He will co-teach an undergraduate course with Steven Mackey (Music), titled “Opera without the Singing: Fables, Fairy Tales and Narrated Musical Theater.”
- Peter Heslin
Professor of Classics and co-director for Digital Humanities of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham University
Peter Heslin is a scholar of Classical Latin poetry, Roman art and topography, and the digital humanities. He is the developer of the Diogenes software, open-source software providing digital access to the Classics. He is the author of Propertius, Greek Myth, and Virgil: Rivalry, Allegory and Polemic (Oxford University Press, 2018), The Museum of Augustus: The Temple of Apollo in Pompeii, the Portico of Philippus and Roman Poetry (Getty Museum, 2015), and The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in the Achilleid of Statius (Cambridge University Press, 2005). His current research focuses on applying machine learning and Bayesian models to ancient languages, and on the poet Horace.
Heslin will serve as a Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Classics in Spring 2025. He will teach a graduate seminar on Horace.
- Damani J. Partridge
Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan
Damani J. Partridge has published broadly on questions of citizenship, urban futures, decoloniality, sexuality, post-Cold War “freedom,” Holocaust memorialization, African-American military occupation, Global Blackness, anti-Blackness, the culture and politics of “fair trade,” and the Obama moment in Berlin. He currently directs the Filming Future Cities Project in Detroit and Berlin and has worked on documentaries for private and public broadcasters in the United States and Canada. His books include Hypersexuality and headscarves: Race, sex, and citizenship in the new Germany (Indiana University Press, 2012) and Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Politics, and Black Power in Berlin (University of California Press, 2023).
Partridge will be a Whitney J. Oates Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of Anthropology in Fall 2024. He will teach the undergraduate seminar “Filming the Future of Liberation.”
- C. Riley Snorton
Mary R. Morton Professor of English Language and Literature and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Chicago
C. Riley Snorton is a cultural theorist who focuses on racial, sexual, and transgender histories and cultural productions. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which won multiple awards including the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association and the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. He is the co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (Duke University Press), Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value (MIT Press/New Museum, 2020), and The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024).
Snorton will be a Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English in Spring 2025. He will teach an undergraduate seminar on genre theory and gender.
Short-Term Visiting Fellows
- Nicolas Bouchard
French stage actor
Nicolas Bouchaud is a renowned French stage actor with over 30 years of experience in the public theater. He has regularly performed on prominent stages and festivals in France including the Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe, Festival d’Avignon, and Théâtre National Populaire. His roles have included Alceste in Le Misanthrope, Dom Juan, King Lear, and Count Almaviva in Le Mariage de Figaro, Mésa in Partagede Midi by Claudel. and most recently Iago in Jean-François Sivadier’s Othello.He received the Best Actor award from the Syndicat de la Critique de Théâtre for his role as Alceste in Jean-François Silvadier’s 2013 staging of Le Misanthrope. He recently published a memoir titled Sauver le moment (Actes Sud-Papiers, 2021), reflecting on his craft and career.
Bouchard will be a Belknap Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian in Fall 2024.
- Max Haiven
Associate Professor in English and co-director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab at Lakehead University
Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and serves as the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination for the Government of Canada. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL), a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice, and decolonization.
Haiven will be a Whitney J. Oates Short-Term Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English in Fall 2024.
- Carolin Meister
Chair of Art History at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe
Carolin Meister is an art historian and the Chair of Art History at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe in Germany, where she has served as Vice Rector from 2017 to 2023. Her latest book, Begegnung–Rencontre (Zurich/Berlin, 2021), is co-authored with French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. She has coedited several volumes on topics such as touch in art, physiology and the history of images, drawing as aesthetic knowledge, and the politics of exhibition. She is currently working on the reception of pre-cinematographic techniques in art around 1970.
Meister will be a Whitney J. Oates Short-Term Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Lewis Center for the Arts in Fall 2024.
- Helen Steward
Professor of Mind and Action, University of Leeds
Helen Steward, a Fellow of the British Academy, has worked on a variety of philosophical topics, including free will, determinism, causation, emergence, supervenience, levels of explanation, the event/state distinction, and the concepts of process and power. She has also worked on animality and on understandings of the human being. Before arriving at Leeds, she was a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, for 14 years. She is the author of The Ontology of Mind: Events, States and Processes (Oxford University Press, 1997) and A Metaphysics for Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2012). Currently, she is writing a book on causation.
Steward will serve as a Class of 1932 Short-Term Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Philosophy in Fall 2024.
- Julietta Singh
Stephanie Bennett-Smith Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Richmond
Julietta Singh is an academic and nonfiction writer whose work is rooted in postcolonial feminisms and the ecological humanities. Her three books include Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke University Press, 2018), No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018), and The Breaks (Coffee House Press, 2021). She is currently completing as writer and co-director The Nest, an experimental feature-length documentary collaboration about radical matriarchs, interracial alliances, and anticolonial histories across 140 years told through the portal of a single house in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Singh will serve as a Whitney J. Oates Short-Term Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Effron Center for the Study of America in Fall 2024.
The Council’s Long-Term and Short-Term Visitors are made possible with support from the Belknap Visitors in the Humanities Fund, the Class of 1932 Visiting Lectureship Fund, the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project, the Eberhard L. Faber Class of 1915 Memorial Lecture Fund, the Edward T. Cone ’39 Humanities Fund, the Old Dominion Fellowship Fund, the Virginia and Richard Stewart Memorial Fund, and the Whitney J. Oates Fund for Scholarship in the Humanities. For more information, visit the Humanities Council website.
