Princeton professors Martin Kern (East Asian Studies) and Chika Okeke-Agulu (Art & Archaeology and African American Studies) have received the University’s Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, which “recognizes extraordinary faculty distinction in humanities and publication; in teaching and advising; and in humanities-related University service.”
Martin Kern is the Joanna and Greg Zeluck ’84 P13 P18 Professor in Asian Studies and professor of East Asian studies. His research centers on the textual culture of early China, which covers the first millennium before the common era. He joined the Princeton faculty in 2000 and served as chair of the Department of East Asian Studies from 2013 to 2020.
Kern has written on virtually every major text from Chinese antiquity and in all genres. He is considered the world’s leading scholar on the ancient “Classic of Poetry,” the fountainhead of the Chinese poetic tradition.
He led the Humanities Council’s interdisciplinary, multi-year “Comparative Antiquity” initiative, which involved over 100 faculty members and students across 10 departments, from 2018 to 2022. At Princeton, his undergraduate courses and graduate seminars span Chinese poetry, translation studies, ancient manuscripts and historiography. In 2005, he helped initiate the yearlong, team-taught East Asian Humanities sequence, and it has been taught ever since.
Chika Okeke-Agulu, the Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies and the founding director of Princeton’s Africa World Initiative, joined the faculty in 2008.
An art historian, art critic, published poet, curator and practicing artist from Nigeria whose works are held in museum collections in the U.S., Germany and Nigeria, Okeke-Agulu’s research focuses on indigenous, modern and contemporary African and African diaspora art history. Okeke-Agulu has taught nearly two dozen different courses on modern and contemporary African art and historiography, and served as director of the Program in African Studies from 2021 to 2024.
Okeke-Agulu has curated exhibitions at Princeton University Art Museum and at museums around the world, including in Berlin, Johannesburg, London and Munich. He served as a member of the international jury of the Venice Biennale in 2024 and is currently curating the exhibition “El Anatsui: Print and Play,” opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in December.
