Andrew Feldherr (Classics) and Peter Wirzbicki (History) were among the Princeton faculty and staff who participated in the Warrior-Scholar Project 2025, a weeklong academic boot camp at Princeton held in July.
The program hosted 16 transitioning service members and enlisted veterans on campus from July 19 to 26 for an intensive humanities college preparatory course exploring the connections between American democracy and military service, according to the story on the University homepage.
This year’s humanities program focused on seminal texts that have shaped democracy from Ancient Greece to America, and students attended seminars on constitutional frameworks and modern democratic citizenship.
In his lecture on the “Origins of Democracy,” Feldherr emphasized to this year’s WSP-Princeton cohort how the democratic principles of the U.S. Constitution that participants are sworn to defend are rooted in accounts of Athenian democracy from the fifth-century Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides. Feldherr encouraged the participants to engage with those ancient texts as a way of learning “how to read history.”
Wirzbikcki is a member of the Humanities Council’s Behrman Faculty Fellows, a program designed to recognize exceptional humanists as they enter the ranks of the senior faculty and to provide a forum for conversation and collaboration across disciplines. Feldherr co-taught the Humanities Sequence “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture” in 2023-24. In Spring 2025, he co-taught a new course in the Program in Humanistic Studies called “Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities: The Sound of Ovid’s Metamorphoses” with Wendy Heller (Music).
