The Humanities Council is pleased to welcome new faculty, scholars, staff, and visitors to the University for the 2024-25 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.
Humanities Council Faculty, Lecturers, and Postdoctoral Fellows
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, translator, and poet Eliza Griswold joined the Council’s Program in Journalism this fall as director and Ferris Professor of Journalism. She has been a contributing writer for The New Yorker for more than two decades, where she has extensively covered religion, politics, and the environment. Griswold’s undergraduate course, “The Media in America: Witnessing History,” introduces students to the challenges facing democracy in the 2024 election year.
The Council’s Program in Linguistics welcomes four new members this year. Nicholas Rolle joins the program as an assistant professor. His interests are in phonology, morphology, and their interface with other components of grammar, with an empirical commitment to the languages of Africa – in particular Sierra Leone and Nigeria.
Renowned Deaf performing artist Peter S. Cook was appointed as a senior lecturer in American Sign Language (ASL). Cook’s work incorporates ASL, pantomime, storytelling, acting, and movement. He will teach courses within Princeton’s ASL sequence, which includes introductory and intermediate courses and fulfills the University’s A.B. language requirement for undergraduate students.
Stefanie Amiruzzaman will also join the program as a lecturer. She will teach beginner and intermediate courses in ASL. She previously taught in the ASL/Deaf Studies program at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. Rebecca Paterson was appointed as an associate research scholar and lecturer in the Council and linguistics. Her research interests include African languages, morphosyntax and language description and documentation. She will teach “Linguistic Universals and Language Diversity” this fall.
The Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts welcomes five new scholars as 2024-2027 Cotsen postdoctoral fellows. Fellows hold appointments as lecturers in their academic host departments and in the Council, teaching half-time while conducting their own research over a period of three years.
Political philosophy scholar Dimitrios Halikias will teach the seminar “Capitalism and its Critics” and conduct research for a book project on the reinterpretations of medieval feudalism that were deployed by nineteenth-century critics of liberalism and capitalism. Kelsey Henry will develop her first book project, “Racing the Life Course: Black Histories of Child Development Science, 1830s – 1980s.” In the fall, she will teach a topics course called “Black Disability Studies, Black Disability Histories.”
Chloe Howe Haralambous, a scholar of comparative literature who studies mobility and revolution at sea, will also work on her first book, provisionally titled, “The Rescue Plot: Politics, Policing and Subterfuge in the Mediterranean Migrant Corridor.” She will teach “Refugees, Migrants and the Making of Contemporary Europe.” Historian Sara Kang will teach “Women and War in Asia/America” in the fall. At Princeton, she will work on her book, “Operation Relax: Empires of Sex in Japan, South Korea, and the Asia-Pacific (1945-1995).”
Anthropologist Timothy Y. Loh will teach “Differences: The Anthropology of Disability” this fall and work on his current book project, provisionally titled “Assistive Modernity: Deafness and Technology in Contemporary Jordan.”
Visiting Scholars and Practitioners
The Council has appointed six Long-Term Visiting Fellows for 2024-25, who will each teach or co-teach a course for a full semester.
In the fall, poet and novelist Patrick Chamoiseau, co-appointed in the Department of French and Italian, will co-teach a graduate seminar with Thomas Trezise (French and Italian) on the literature and culture of the Caribbean. In the Department of Music, author and producer Adam Gidwitz will co-teach an undergraduate course with Steven Mackey (Music), titled “Opera without the Singing: Fables, Fairy Tales and Narrated Musical Theater.” Damani J. Partridge, co-appointed in the Department of Anthropology, will teach the undergraduate seminar “Filming the Future of Liberation.” He joins Princeton from the University of Michigan.
In Spring 2025, Branka Arsić, who specializes in literatures of the 19th century Americas, will co-teach an undergraduate course with Sarah Rivett (English and American Studies) on Indigenous cosmologies. She is co-appointed in the Effron Center for the Study of America. In the Department of Classics, Peter Heslin will teach a graduate seminar on Horace. His research interests include Classical Latin poetry, Roman art and topography, and the digital humanities. Cultural theorist C. Riley Snorton, co-appointed in the Department of English, will teach an undergraduate seminar on genre theory and gender.
Five Short-Term Fellows will visit campus this fall. 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 French and Italian will host Nicolas Bouchard, a renowned French stage actor. Writer Max Haiven, who serves as the Research Chair in the Radical Imagination for the Government of Canada, will contribute to the Department of English. The Lewis Center for the Arts will host art historian Carolin Meister.
British philosopher Helen Steward will contribute to the Department of Philosophy. Julietta Singh, a nonfiction writer whose work is rooted in postcolonial feminisms, will visit the Effron Center for the Study of America.
The Program in Journalism at Princeton University will welcome four distinguished journalists as visiting professors in the 2024-25 academic year. They 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.
In the fall, national and international news correspondent Ron Allen will examine public trust in the media through a course, titled “The Challenges Covering an Increasingly Diverse Multicultural Nation.” May Jeong, staff writer for Vanity Fair, will explore the fundamental tenets of journalistic objectivity in her course, “The Media and Social Issues: Reporting from the Margins.”
Next spring, journalist, author, and podcast host Andrea Bernstein will teach an undergraduate seminar on investigative journalism. Vinson Cunningham, critic and staff writer for The New Yorker, will teach a McGraw Seminar in Writing.
Humanities Council Staff
Jeannine Matt Pitarresi has been named the program manager for the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. She will continue to manage various initiatives within the Council, as well as the Gauss Seminars in Criticism.
Chrisoula Manoussakis joins the council as the program manager for the Program in the Ancient World, the Committee for Early Modern and Renaissance Studies, and the Program in Italian Studies, while also supporting Council faculty initiatives, such as the Behrman Faculty Fellows.
Acting Program Directors
The Council is pleased to announce new acting program directors and committee chairs, who will begin their service in the 2024-25 academic year.
Laura Kalin (Humanities Council and Linguistics) will serve as the acting director of the Council’s Program in Linguistics this year. She specializes in the syntax and morphology of understudied, and often endangered, languages, with a current focus on Neo-Aramaic languages. Christina Lee (Spanish and Portuguese) has been named acting director of the Committee on Renaissance and Early Medieval Studies. Her research focuses on the literary, social, and cultural productions of Iberian Spain and the Spanish Transpacific during the early modern period. In the spring, Elizabeth Davis (Anthropology) will serve as acting director of the Council’s Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows, a monthly enrichment and community-building program for students pursuing the minor in humanistic studies. Davis’ research and writing focuses on the intersections of psyche, body, history, and power.
Old Dominion Research Professors
The Council named Paul Frymer (Politics), Daniela Mairhofer (Classics), Jan-Werner Müller (Politics), and Sara S. Poor (German) as 2024-25 Old Dominion Research Professors. They will join the yearlong program designed to provide additional research time and to enhance the humanities community more broadly.
Over the course of the academic year, Old Dominion Research Professors engage in the intellectual life of the Council and contribute to cross-disciplinary programs and events. 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 11 new members, including Basile Baudez (Art & Archaeology), Michael Blaakman (History), Flora Champy (French and Italian), Divya Cherian (History), Katie Farris (Lewis Center for the Arts), Elena Fratto (Slavic Languages and Literatures), Mirjam Kotwick (Classics), Nicolás Pereda (Lewis Center for the Arts), Kirstin Valdez Quade (Lewis Center for the Arts), Johannes Wankhammer (German), Xin Wen (East Asian Studies and History), Natasha Wheatley (History), and Peter Wirzbicki (History).
Campus Partnerships
The Council is also pleased to provide substantial support for visitors across campus, in collaboration with University partners.
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 2024-25 academic year, with additional funding from the Council. In the fall, the program will welcome writer, translator, and critic Lily Meyer; Arabic translator Sawad Hussain will arrive in the spring. During their tenure, Translators in Residence share their experiences of life and work with the program’s students and the broader Princeton University community.
The Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities appointed Caitlin Blanchfield and Jennifer Strtak as Princeton-Mellon Fellows, with additional support from the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Council. Blanchfield, a historian of architecture and landscape, will teach the graduate seminar “Against the Settler Colonial City” this fall. Strtak, whose research interests include early modern studies, transportation, and urban development, will teach a course on global early modern city-building in the spring.
