The Humanities Council has named Eduardo Cadava (English), Elena Fratto (Slavic Languages and Literatures), Eric Gregory (Religion), and Effie Rentzou (French and Italian) as 2025-26 Old Dominion Research Professors. The yearlong program provides additional research time for Princeton faculty and seeks to enhance the University humanities community more broadly.
Old Dominion Research Professors engage in and contribute to the intellectual life of the Humanities Council throughout the academic year. They are invited to share their research through talks, workshops, and lunch conversations, and to participate in Council activities, initiatives, and cross-disciplinary programs. The cohort also serves as Faculty Fellows in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.
“We’re delighted to welcome four new Old Dominion Professors to the Humanities Council,” said Esther Schor (English), chair of the Humanities Council and John J.F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor. “We hope they’ll find that spending a year of leave in the orbit of the Council and the Society of Fellows will be conducive to new ideas and collaborations.”
Eduardo Cadava is Philip Mayhew Professor of English. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, Paper Graveyards, and, with Sara Nadal-Melsió, Politically Red. He has co-edited Who Comes After the Subject?, Cities Without Citizens, and The Itinerant Languages of Photography. He has also, with Liana Theodoratou, translated Nadar’s memoir, When I Was a Photographer. He has curated installations and exhibitions at the MAXXI Museum, the Slought Foundation, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Al-Ma’mal Center for Contemporary Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum. Cadava’s Old Dominion Research Professorship will support a book on Fazal Sheikh’s three-volume photobook, The Erasure Trilogy.
Elena Fratto is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her research focuses on health and environmental humanities, narrative theory, and the rhetorical intersections of literature and science in late-19th and early-20th century Russophone literature and visual arts. She is the author of Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century and co-editor of Russian Literature of the Anthropocene. As an Old Dominion Professor, Fratto will focus on her in-progress book, Metabolic Modernities, which investigates the concept of “metabolism” as energy transformation in Russophone literature and culture at the turn of the 20th century.
Eric Gregory is a professor in the Department of Religion and former chair of the Humanities Council. His research and teaching focus on religious and philosophical ethics, theology, political theory, law and religion, and the role of religion in public life. He is the author of Politics & the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship, and recent articles on myth and politics, the philosophy of history, secularity, and moral supererogation. In 2007, he was awarded Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. Gregory’s project as Old Dominion Professor, The In-Gathering of Strangers: Global Justice and Political Theology, examines secular and religious perspectives on what human beings owe one another in a global age.
Effie Rentzou is a professor in the Department of French and Italian. Her research and teaching focus on modernism and the avant-garde. Her publications include Concepts of the World: The French Avant-Garde and the Idea of the International, 1910-1940, the edited volume 1913: The Year of French Modernism, and many articles and book chapters on surrealism, the avant-garde, and poetry. In addition to contributions to exhibition catalogues for the Metropolitan Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Guggenheim, she co-curated the exhibition “Objets en question” at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Her Old Dominion Research Professorship will support work on Surrealism Against Fascism, a book examining the surrealist movement’s antifascist action and works in France between 1930 and the end of WWII.
Old Dominion Research Professors are tenured professors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences appointed for a term of one year, one semester of which would otherwise have been devoted to a regular sabbatical leave. The professorship extends that leave to one full year.
Learn more about the Old Dominion Research Professorship on the Council’s website.
