The Humanities Council will welcome five Long-Term and 11 Short-Term Visiting Fellows in the academic year 2023-24.
These fellowships bring distinguished scholars, artists, and writers to Princeton to contribute to the University’s flourishing intellectual community. Visiting fellows are nominated by chairs of humanities departments with support from directors of interdisciplinary programs in the humanities.
Long-Term Fellows, who are “in-residence” at the University, will teach a course for a full semester. Short-Term Fellows will visit campus for three to five days, where they will lecture and participate in classes, colloquia, and informal discussions.
Long-Term Visiting Fellows
- Frances Ferguson
Mabel Greene Myers Distinguished Service Professor of English and the College at the University of Chicago
Frances Ferguson will serve as a Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of English in Spring 2024. She is the author of Wordsworth: Language as Counter-spirit (Yale University Press, 1977), Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (Routledge, 1992), and Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). She is currently completing a study on the rise of mass education (around 1800). Recent essays center on Bitcoin (published) and on eighteenth-century oratory and the English novel (forthcoming).
- Joseph Fins
The E. William Davis, Jr. M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics and Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics, Weill Cornell Medical College
Joseph J. Fins will be an Old Dominion Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of Classics in Fall 2023. He is the founding Chair of the Ethics Committee of New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center where he is an Attending Physician and Director of Medical Ethics. The author of over 500 papers, chapters, essays, and books, his most recent volume is Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics, and the Struggle for Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He was appointed by President Clinton to the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy and currently serves on the New York State Task Force on Life and the Lawby gubernatorial appointment.
While at Princeton, Fins will teach a course with Brooke Holmes (Classics) entitled, “Bio/Ethics: Ancient and Modern” and conduct archival research for a biography of the physician-humanist, Dr. Lewis Thomas ’33.
- Meir Hatina
Professor in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and Jack and Alice Ormut Chair in Arabic Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Meir Hatina will be an Old Dominion Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of Near Eastern Studies in Spring 2024. His fields of research focus on the history of ideas and politics in the modern Middle East and from a comparative perspective, especially in relation to Western and Jewish thought. His publications include Martyrdom in Modern Islam: Piety, Power and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Arab Liberal Thought in the Modern Age (Manchester University Press, 2020). He is also co-editor of Religious Knowledge, Authority and Charisma: Islamic and Jewish Perspectives (University of Utah Press, 2014); Martyrdom and Sacrifice in Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2017); and Cultural Pearls from the East (BRILL, 2021).
- Timothy Jackson
Bishop Mack B. and Rose Stokes Professor of Theological Ethics at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University
Timothy P. Jackson will serve as a Stewart Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of Religion in Fall 2023. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Jackson received his B.A. in Philosophy from Princeton and his Ph.D. in Philosophy and Religious Studies from Yale. He is the author of Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian Charity (Cambridge, 1999), The Priority of Love: Christian Charity and Social Justice (Princeton, 2003), Political Agape: Christian Love and Liberal Democracy (Eerdmans, 2015), and Mordecai Would Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism (Oxford, 2021). He is currently working on a book entitled Faith in Science?: How Three Scientific Revolutions Help to Reconcile Theology and Empirical Inquiry.
While at Princeton, Jackson will teach the undergraduate seminar, “Christianity and the Holocaust.”
- Viktoria Tkaczyk
Professor in the Department of Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Viktoria Tkaczyk will be a Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of German in Fall 2023. Before joining the faculty at Humboldt-Universität, she was assistant professor of art and new media at the University of Amsterdam and Head of the Research Group “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her most recent book is Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900 (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Currently, she is working on a new project exploring how humanistic and scientific technologies relate to geopolitics and resource regimes, and on a collaborative project entitled “Applied Humanities: Genealogies and Politics.”
While at Princeton, Tkaczyk will co-teach the graduate course “Topics in German Media Theory & History: Ecopolitics of Media: Material, Knowledge, Resource Regimes” with Thomas Levin (German).
Short-Term Visiting Fellows
- Eva Doumbia
Author, director, and actress
Eva Doumbia received a degree in theater from the University of Aix-en-Provence and trained at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Paris, where she notably studied with Jacques Lassalle, Krystian Lupa, and André Engel. In 1999, she founded the theater company La Part du Pauvre. She is a founding member of the collective Décoloniser les Arts, and founded multidisciplinary festival Afropéa, which showcases Afro-European creators. In September 2019, her company moved to the Théâtre des Bains-Douches in Elbeuf, a multicultural, working-class town in Normandy. Doumbia will be a Short-Term Edward T. Cone Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian in Fall 2023.
- Larissa FastHorse
Writer
Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation) is an award-winning writer and 2020-2025
MacArthur Fellow. Her satirical comedy, The Thanksgiving Play, made her the first-known
female Native American playwright on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theater under the direction of
Rachel Chavkin. Her new plays in 2023 are Wicoun (Cornerstone Theater Company),
Democracy Project (Federal Hall), Fake It Until You Make It (CTG Mark Taper Forum), For the
People (Guthrie), and the national tour of Peter Pan (Networks). Larissa also writes in film and television, most recently as a creator for NBC, Disney Channel, Dreamworks, Muse, Netflix and others. She will be a Short-Term Edward T. Cone Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Lewis Center for the Arts.
- R. Darren Gobert
William and Sue Gross Professor of Theater Studies and English, Duke University
R. Darren Gobert serves as chair of theater studies and director of the Duke in New York: Creative Industries program. He is the author of The Theatre of Caryl Churchill (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Action in the Cartesian Theater (Stanford UP, 2013), which won awards for best book in the field of theater history from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and the American Society for Theatre Research. He will be the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of English in Spring 2024.
- Jo Guldi
Professor of History, Southern Methodist University
Jo Guldi is a practicing data scientist and the author of four books: Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Harvard, 2012), The History Manifesto (Cambridge, 2014), The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale, 2022), and The Dangerous Art of Text Mining (Cambridge forthcoming). Her historical work ranges from archival studies in nation-building, state formation, and the use of technology by experts. She has also been a pioneer in the field of text mining for historical research, where statistical and machine-learning approaches are hybridized with historical modes of inquiry to produce new knowledge. She is a former junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Guldi will be a Short-Term Old Dominion Fellow in the Humanities Council, the Department of History, and the Center for Digital Humanities in Spring 2024.
- John Durham Peters
María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and Chair of Film and Media Studies, Yale University
John Durham Peters, a media historian and theorist, is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and Liberal Tradition (2005), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), and most recently, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020), co-authored with the late Kenneth Cmiel, all from the University of Chicago Press. He has lectured in many countries and advised or co-advised 40 doctoral dissertations. Peters will serve as a Short-Term Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English in Fall 2023.
- Alessandro Schiesaro
Professor of Latin Literature and Deputy Director, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa
Alessandro Schiesaro is a scholar of Latin literature, literary theory, psychoanalysis and cultural history; he is especially fascinated by the interaction between poetry and philosophy and by the role of poetry as a form of knowledge. He has previously held chairs at Princeton, King’s College London, Sapienza University of Rome, where he was the Founding Director of the Sapienza School for Advanced Studies, and the William Hulme Chair of Classics at the University of Manchester, where he served as Head of the School of Arts, Languages and Literatures. Schiesaro will be a Short-Term Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Classics in Spring 2024.
- Julietta Singh
Stephanie Bennett-Smith Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Richmond
Julietta Singh is an academic and nonfiction writer whose work is rooted in decolonial feminisms and the ecological humanities. Her first academic book, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke UP, 2018), has emerged as a vital theoretical touchstone for global scholars and artists grappling with the politics of mastery that drive our professional, political, and personal pursuits. Her work has been published in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Women & Performance, Social Text, Cultural Critique, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Singh will be a Short-Term Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Effron Center for the Study of America in Spring 2024.
- Helen Steward
Professor of Mind and Action, University of Leeds
Helen Steward, a Fellow of the British Academy, has worked on a variety of philosophical topics, including free will, determinism, causation, emergence, supervenience, levels of explanation, the event/state distinction, and the concepts of process and power. She has also worked on animality and on understandings of the human being. Before arriving at Leeds, she was a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, for 14 years. She is the author of The Ontology of Mind: Events, States and Processes (1997) and A Metaphysics for Freedom, 2012. Currently, she is writing a book on causation. Steward will serve as a Short-Term Old Dominion Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Philosophy in Spring 2024.
- Robert Sullivan
Writer
Robert Sullivan is the author of numerous books, including Rats, The Meadowlands, A Whale Hunt, The Thoreau You Don’t Know and My American Revolution. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, A Public Space and Vogue. He is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and teaches creative writing at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. In April, FSG will publish his latest book, Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy O’Sullivan, America’s Most Mysterious War Photographer. He will be a Short-Term Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English in Spring 2024.
- Lawrence Zazzo
Senior Lecturer and Head of Performance, Newcastle University
Lawrence Zazzo is an internationally-recognized countertenor, where he continues to perform in concert halls and opera houses throughout the world. He has premiered new vocal works by Thomas Adès, Jonathan Dove, Missy Mazzoli, Iain Bell, Rolf Riehm, and Geoff Page, and has made over 25 recordings of rarely-performed Baroque vocal masterpieces. Recent and ongoing research and creative practice includes historical performance practice and opera libretto authorship recognition and an exploration of timbre, register, and embodied affect in creating emotion in both performer and listener. Zazzo will be a Short-Term Edward T. Cone Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of Music in Spring 2024.
- Alice Zeniter
Novelist, translator, screenwriter, and director
Alice Zeniter studied literature and theater at l’École Normale Supérieure and Sorbonne-Nouvelle University. She is the author of four novels and has won many awards for her work; Sombre dimanche (Albin Michel, 2013) won the Prix du Livre Inter, the Prix des lecteurs de l’Express and the Prix de la Closerie des Lilas; Juste avant l’oubli (Flammarion, 2015) won the Prix Renaudot des lycéens. Her novel The Art of Losing, which was translated into English by Frank Wynne and published by Picador in 2021, won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2022. Zeniter will be a Short-Term Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian in Fall 2023.
The Council’s Long-Term and Short-Term Visitors are made possible with support from the Belknap Visitors in the Humanities Fund, the Class of 1932 Visiting Lectureship Fund, the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project, the Eberhard L. Faber Class of 1915 Memorial Lecture Fund, the Edward T. Cone ’39 Humanities Fund, the Old Dominion Fellowship Fund, the Virginia and Richard Stewart Memorial Fund, and the Whitney J. Oates Fund for Scholarship in the Humanities.
