The Humanities Council has named Katja Guenther (History), Devin Fore (German), Brooke Holmes (Classics), and Beth Lew-Williams (History) as 2026-27 Old Dominion Research Professors. The yearlong program seeks to enhance Princeton’s humanities community and provides additional research time for University faculty.
Over the course of the academic year, Old Dominion Research Professors engage in and contribute to the intellectual life of the Humanities Council. They are invited to participate in cross-disciplinary programs and initiatives and share their in-progress research through talks, workshops, and lunch conversations. The cohort also serves as Faculty Fellows in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.
Devin Fore is a professor of German and chair of the Department of German. His research and teaching focus on the material culture, political logics, and media infrastructures of German and Russian modernism. He is the author of Realism after Modernism (2012), Soviet Factography (2024), and Mass Technics of the Document (forthcoming). He is an editor of the journals October and New German Critique and, together with Kerstin Stakemeier, edits a monthly column in e-flux titled “Fantasies of the People.” Fore’s project as an Old Dominion Research Professor, a book titled History, A Procession of Peasants, examines the explosion of interest in the cultures and economies of nomadic peoples during the 1920s.
Katja Guenther is a professor of history. Her research focuses on the sciences and medicine of the mind and brain in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and North America. Her publications include The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences (2022) and Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of the Neuro and Psy Disciplines (2015). She is currently working on several book projects on the history of mental therapeutics. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2022. Guenther’s Old Dominion Research Professorship will support work on Thinking with Geel: A History of Psychiatric Therapeutic Communities, a book project examining the centuries-old yet ongoing practice of psychiatric foster care in the small town of Geel in Flemish Belgium.
Brooke Holmes is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics and the director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism. She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (2010) and Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy (2019), as well as over 50 articles, and the co-editor of six volumes. Her book Tissue of the World: The Nature of Ancient Sympathy will be published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2027. As an Old Dominion Research Professor, Holmes will develop a research project titled An Archive of Knots, which traces the diasporic development of ancient sympathy (sumpatheia) in the early Afro-Eurasian world. She will also advance work on a book project that explores how modern appeals to ancient Greek ideas about life and nature have shaped secular ethics over the past two centuries.
Beth Lew-Williams is a professor of history and the director of the Program in Asian American Studies. She is the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (2018) and most recently, John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (2025), which won the 2026 Bancroft Prize. The book, which was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, draws on archives across the U.S. West to reveal the depth of anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion. As an Old Dominion Research Professor, she will work on The Development of American Alienage, 1776-2026, a book-length history of alienage in the United States, which will trace the development of the socio-legal status over the past 250 years.
Read more about the Old Dominion Research Professorship on the Humanities Council website.
