The Humanities Council is pleased to welcome new faculty, scholars, staff, and visitors to the University for the 2025-26 academic year. They 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.
Visiting Scholars and Practitioners
The Council has appointed six Long-Term Visiting Fellows this year, who will each teach or co-teach a course for a full semester.
This semester, Elizabeth Lambourn, a historian of the Indian Ocean world, will co-teach a graduate seminar with Marina Rustow (Near Eastern Studies) on trade and the circulation of objects in the ancient and medieval Indian Ocean world. She is co-appointed in the Department of History.
In Spring 2026, interdisciplinary scholar Jennifer Bajorek will teach a course on photography, race, and restitution, and complete a manuscript on the materiality of photography in Africa. She is co-appointed in the Department of English. Rana Barakat, whose research interests include the history and historiography of colonialism, nationalism, and cultures of resistance, will be co-appointed in the Department of Anthropology. She will teach the course “Colonialism on Display: Museums, Archives, and Memory in Palestine.”
In the Lewis Center for the Arts, choreographer, and scholar Jay Pather will teach an undergraduate theater course on interdisciplinarity, curation and decoloniality. Co-appointed in the Department of Classics, Victoria Wohl will teach a multi-genre 400-level seminar spanning Greek literature, oratory, and philosophy. Her research focuses on the works and culture of classical Greece, spanning a variety of genres. Novelist, playwright, and director Alice Zeniter will teach a spring undergraduate course on texts written by daughters of immigrants. She will be co-appointed in the Department of French and Italian.
The Council’s Program in Journalism will welcome nine visiting professors for the 2025-26 academic year. These notable visitors, including writers, reporters, filmmakers, podcasters, and translators, will each teach an intensive seminar within the Council for one semester. The visiting journalists’ seminars complement the courses regularly led by the program’s Ferris Professors in Residence.
This fall, Rozina Ali, contributing writer at The New York Times magazine, will teach “The Media and Social Issues: Challenging the Narrative on Race,” which will explore how the media can reinforce or dispel stereotypes about minority groups. JoAnn DeLuna, journalist, audio producer, Spanish translator, and poet, will teach “Audio Journalism: The Fundamentals of Podcasting,” where students will gain important skills from pitch to broadcast. Carolyn Kormann, staff writer for The New Yorker will introduce students to the storytelling behind the climate crisis in the undergraduate course, “The Literature of Fact: Reporting the Anthropocene.” Nonfiction writer Judith Warner will teach “Reading and Writing About Mental Illness,” a seminar that will explore the ways that the media have contributed to prejudicial narratives about people with mental illness and the professionals who treat them.
Next spring, national security correspondent Erin Banco will teach a course that explores investigative journalism in the era of “fake news.” Documentary filmmaker and editor Purcell Carson joins the program to teach a course titled “Environmental Justice Filmmaking in Trenton.” Vinson Cunningham, staff writer for The New Yorker, returns for his second year in the program to teach the McGraw Seminar in Writing. Also returning to the program, journalist, author and podcaster David Kushner will teach a seminar on narrative nonfiction writing and reporting. Journalist Kevin Sack will teach “America’s Racial Narrative,” which will use race relations as a template to explore and practice a variety of genres of nonfiction writing.
The Council’s Fund for Canadian Studies welcomes Toronto-based scholar and organizer Shiri Pasternak in Spring 2025 as the Laurence G. Pathy ’56 Distinguished Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies. At Princeton, she will collaborate with students and scholars on subjects related to Canadian politics and history, and teach a course titled “The Long Arc of Fascism” for the Council’s Program in Humanistic Studies.
Five Short-Term Fellows will also visit campus this year. During intensive three-to-five-day periods, these fellows will lecture and participate in class discussions, colloquia, performances, and informal discussions in their nominating departments.
The Department of Comparative Literature will host scholar and theorist Ali Behdad. Theater and opera director Stéphane Braunschweig, author Robert Pogue Harrison, and Alberto Toscano, author and translator, will contribute to the Department of French and Italian during the year. Curator and broadcaster Jerry Brotton will visit the Department of English.
Humanities Council Associate Research Scholars in the Society of Fellows
The Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts welcomes five new scholars to the University as 2025-2028 Cotsen fellows. Four fellows in the new cohort hold primary appointments as Associate Research Scholars in the Humanities Council. They will teach one course per term while also conducting their own research over a period of three years.
Literary scholar Lauren Horst will work on a book project, inspired by her dissertation, titled “Fictions of Development: Decolonization, Development Economics, and the African Novel.” She will teach Forms of Literature: Reading the World Bank,” a topics class in the Department of English.
Tobias Scheunchen, a social and material historian of the Middle East, will teach “Digital Humanities for Historians and Other Scholars” in the fall. He will also develop his monograph entitled “Recording Justice in Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt (550–800): Material Culture, Ordinary People, and the Making of the Islamic State.”
Historian and community-engagedscholar Daniela Valdes will work on her a book project titled “Clocked and Locked: Race, Gender Nonconformity, and the Making of the Carceral-Psychiatric State, 1945-1995.” She will also teach the course “’Spare change for a starving queen?’ Race and Gender Nonconformity in U.S. History” this fall.
Louis Zweig, who studies Latin literature and focuses on the poetry of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, will co-teach in the Humanities Sequence “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture” this fall. He will also continue work on a monograph about the reception of the Biblical Exodus in Latin verse.
Appointed in the Department of Astrophysics and the Department of Geosciences, Akash Gupta also joins the Society of Fellows. His research investigates the origin and evolution of Earth- and Neptune-like planets.
New and Acting Program Directors
The Council is pleased to announce new and acting program directors and committee chairs, who will begin their service in the 2025-26 academic year.
Christina Lee (Spanish and Portuguese) has been named acting chair of the Humanities Council. Her research focuses on the literary, social, and cultural productions of Iberian Spain and the Spanish Transpacific during the early modern period.
Beatrice Kitzinger (Art & Archaeology), who specializes in the art of the western Middle Ages, has been named director of the Program in Medieval Studies. She is also serving as a Behrman Professor in the Humanities Council, coordinating the Humanities Sequence “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture.” Kinohi Nishikawa (English and African American Studies) has been named director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). He specializes in 20th and 21st century African American literature, book history, and popular culture. He also leads the Program in Humanistic Studies’ Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows.
Thomas Y. Levin (German) has been named chair of the Committee for Film Studies. His teaching and scholarship include a range of topics, from Frankfurt School cultural theory and the history and theory of film to media theory and sound studies. Spyros Papapetros (Architecture) has been named chair of the Program in European Cultural Studies, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. He is an art and architectural historian and theorist whose work focuses on the historiography of art and architecture.
Emmanuel Bourbouhakis (Classics and Hellenic Studies) will serve as acting director of the Program in the Ancient World. His research interests include textual criticism and Greek palaeography, and Byzantine literature and culture.
Old Dominion Research Professors
The Council named Eduardo Cadava (English), Elena Fratto (Slavic Languages and Literatures), Eric Gregory (Religion), and Effie Rentzou (French and Italian)as 2025-26 Old Dominion Research Professors.
Old Dominion Research Professors engage in and contribute to the intellectual life of the Humanities Council throughout the academic year. They are invited to share their research through talks, workshops, and lunch conversations, and to participate in Council activities, initiatives, and cross-disciplinary programs. The cohort will also serve as Faculty Fellows in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.
Behrman Faculty Fellows
Princeton faculty promoted to tenure in the humanities are invited to spend two years as Behrman Faculty Fellows, a program designed to recognize exceptional humanists and to provide a forum for conversation and collaboration across disciplines. This year, the Council welcomes three new members: Reena Goldthree (African American Studies), Florian Lionnet (Linguistics),and Bryan Lowe (Religion).
Humanities Council Staff
The Council welcomed Kristina Corvin to the team in March 2025 as a program manager. She manages several Council programs, including the Program in European Cultural Studies, the Committee for Film Studies, the Program in the Ancient World, and the Program in Italian Studies.
Three staff members have assumed new responsibilities this year. Anna D’Elia will continue to manage the Program in Medieval Studies and the Fund for Canadian Studies and is now serving as program manager for the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. Jeannine Matt Pitarresi was named the program manager for Program in Journalism in January 2025.
Chrisoula Manoussakis will continue as the program manager for the Committee for Early Modern and Renaissance Studies, and is now managing the Gauss Seminars in Criticism, and Council signature events and faculty initiatives, such as the Behrman Faculty Fellows.
Campus Partnerships
In collaboration with University partners, the Council is also pleased to provide substantial support for visitors across campus, including newly appointed scholars and researchers.
Historian Pratima Gopalakrishnan is appointed in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, where she is senior researcher and project coordinator at the Princeton Geniza Lab. This year, her appointment is supported by the Humanities Council’s Stewart Fund for Religion.
The Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, which resides within the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, welcomes two Translators in Residence for the 2025-26 academic year, with additional funding support from the Council and the Lewis Center for the Arts. In the fall, the program will welcome Dong Li, a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French and German. Julia Sanches, who translates in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish into English, will arrive in the spring.
The Council will also provide support for a 2025-2026 fellow in the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities. Eva Vaillancourt, a historian working at the intersection of law, technology, science, and social life, will work on a book project exploring the problem of normativity through the history of modern road traffic rules.
