The Humanities Council welcomes four Long-Term Visiting Fellows s to Princeton University for the 2019-2020 academic year. Chairs of humanities departments nominated scholars from around the world, with support from directors of interdisciplinary programs in the humanities.
Long-Term Visiting Fellows will teach one course during the fall or spring semester. Short-Term Visiting Fellows traditionally participate in lectures, classes, colloquia, and informal discussions for an intensive three- to five-day visit. Public lectures will be posted on the Council’s campus-wide Calendar of Events.
Long-Term Visiting Fellows
Spring 2020
Sara L. Ahbel-Rappe
Professor of Greek and Latin, University of Michigan
Course: Plato’s Phaedrus and Narrative Philosophy in the Roman Empire and Beyond
Professor Ahbel-Rappe will be Visiting Class of 1932 Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Classics. A specialist in late antique philosophy and Neoplatonism, her current work considers the concept of embodiment in cross-cultural readings and translations of Plato’s Phaedrus.
Stephen Michael Best
Professor of English, University of California-Berkeley
Course: Abstraction in Literature, Music, and Contemporary Art
Professor Best will be Visiting Edward T. Cone Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English. His work focuses on African American literature and culture, rhetoric and the law, and film and contemporary art. His recent work focuses on blackness, belonging, and aesthetic life.
François-Xavier Fauvelle
Director of Research, National Center for Scientific Research, Toulouse, France
Course: Ancient and Medieval Africa: History of Ethiopia with Wendy Belcher (Comparative Literature).
Professor Fauvelle is a historian and archaeologist of ancient and medieval Africa. He will be Visiting Class of 1932 Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Comparative Literature. A prolific author, he was named to the Collège de France in November 2018, the first African historian to receive this honor.
Sergey Konaev
Principal Researcher, State Institute for Art Studies, Moscow
Course: How to Build a Ballet from Archival Materials: The Dances Tchaikovsky Sourced for “Swan Lake”
Dr. Konaev will be Visiting Belknap Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Music. An expert on the records of the Russian Imperial Theatres, he conducts research in the history of ballet at one of its most distinctive centers. His publications delve into the transactions between French and Russian composition and choreography in the key late Russian imperial years.
Fall 2019
Rachel Barney
Professor and Canada Research Chair in Classical Philosophy, University of Toronto
Course: Plato’s Republic: A Second Reading (PHI 500/CLA 555/HLS 530)
Professor Barney will be a Visiting Class of 1932 Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Program in Classical Philosophy. Her current work concentrates on the sophistic movement in ancient Athens and Plato’s reaction to it, through close analyses of his texts and arguments.
Verena Lepper
Curator, Egyptian and Oriental Papyri and Manuscripts, Berlin State Museums
Professor Lepper will be Visiting Stewart Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Religion. A leading exponent of developing digital means to approach the papyrological record, especially that of Egypt, she will join the community studying Princeton’s holdings, including a newly acquired Egyptian “Book of the Dead” held by the Princeton University Art Museum. Her visit is a project of the Humanities Council’s Global Initiative in Comparative Antiquity.
Oleg Proskurin
Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures, Emory University
Courses: Pushkin and His Time (SLA 413/RES 413); Pushkin (SLA 514)
A seminal scholar in the contemporary study of Pushkin, Oleg Proskurin will be a Visiting Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. In addition to his teaching, share his current thinking in the Slavic department’s third annual “Pushkinalia” conference.
Elizabeth Wilson
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Emory University
Course: Introduction to Critical Theory: Feminism, Queer, Deconstruction (ENG 572/GSS 572)
Professor Wilson will be Visiting Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English. Her work in queer theory and affect theory draws on psychology, historical methodologies, and cognitive science. Her most recent work is an introductory handbook on the work of affect theorist Silvan Tomkins.
Short-Term Visiting Fellows
Spring 2020
Vincenzo De Risi
Professor, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Professor De Risi specializes in the history of philosophy and has brought the geometrical work of Leibniz to new clarity and significance. His sojourn at Princeton as Visiting Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Philosophy will feature his work on the space of Euclidian geometry, as well as his history of the idea of space itself as an object of geometry and scientific study.
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz
Professor Gruesz specializes in the study of Chicano/Latino/a/x literary cultures and in the history of print culture from the colonial period to the present. She will be Visiting Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English, sharing her current work on multilinguality and Spanish-language printed material in colonial North America.
Caomhim Ó Raghallaigh
Traditional musician, arranger, composer
A performer and composer, Mr. Ó Raghallaigh is a leading fiddler in the contemporary Irish music world. A traditional musician immersed in many folk traditions, his work ventures into live electronics and video. His experience with the crafting of instruments contributes to his virtuosity on the 10-string fiddle, for which he composes. He will be Edward T. Cone ’39 *42 Short-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Music.
Natalya Lusty
Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne
Professor Lusty is a scholar of cultural studies and gender and sexuality studies, whose research reaches broadly across surrealism, the avant-garde, visual culture, and psychoanalysis. Her current work on modernism and the department store touches on questions of urban iconography, photography, and architecture. She will be Eberhard L. Faber Short-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian.
Lawrence Zazzo
Singer and musicologist
A leading countertenor in the operatic scene, Zazzo will be Visiting Belknap Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Music. A scholar and a teacher of both performance and voice, he is a prominent interpreter of Handel. His scholarly publications and recordings have penetrating engagement with several of the composer’s oratorios and operas, in addition to baroque chamber music.
Fall 2019
Amanda Anderson
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, Brown University
A specialist in Victorian literature and literary theory, Professor Anderson’s work addresses broader contemporary debates in the humanities, from intellectual history and disciplinary formation to the role of politics in contemporary theory-making. She will be Visiting Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English.
Annette Becker
Professor, University of Paris-Nanterre; Honorary Senior Members, Institut Universitaire de France
One of France’s leading historians of World War I, Professor Becker will be Visiting Class of 1932 Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of History. Her recent work turns to the Interwar period and to the cultural impact and legacies of total war, including the traumas of genocide, its experience, memory, and commemoration.
Stefan Esders
Professor of Late Antiquity and Early Medieval History, Freie Universität, Berlin
Professor Esders will be a guest of the Humanities Council’s Global Initiative on Comparative Antiquity. His concentration on law, legal diversity, and pluralisms from the late to the post Roman Latin West will contribute to comparative work planned by the Initiative across regions and disciplines of the pre-1000 ce world. He will be the Class of 1932 Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Program in Medieval Studies.
Clément Hervieu-Léger
Director, actor, and sociétaire de la Comédie Française
An actor and director with a focus on the classical texts of French theater, as well as the contemporary “classics,” Hervieu-Leger has co-directed La Compagnie des Petits-Champs since 2010 and is a member of the Comédie Française. He will work with L’Avant-Scène as Visiting Belknap Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian.
Maxime Rovère
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro
A philosopher by training, Professor Rovère will visit as Eberhard L. Faber Short-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian. A specialist on the philosophy of Spinoza, he is also a translator of philosophical and literary texts, combining rigorous scholarship with the imaginative play of humanistic learning. During his visit, he will engage in cross-departmental conversations about the role of translation in philosophy.
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock
Conceptual artists; Beuth University of Applied Sciences, Berlin
Professors Stih and Schnock come to Princeton as Visiting Whitney J. Oates Fellows in the Humanities Council and the Department of Comparative Literature. Their visual and verbal conceptual work, much of which is highly specific to Berlin, explores how memory functions in the social sphere and how art may intrude upon the psychological space of urban dwellers.
