The Humanities Council will welcome 12 visiting fellows in the 2025-26 academic year. These distinguished scholars, artists, writers, and practitioners will enrich the University community through their work in and beyond the classroom. Visiting fellows are nominated by chairs of humanities departments with support from directors of interdisciplinary programs in the humanities.
Six Long-Term Fellows, who are “in residence” at the University, will each teach or co-teach a course for a full semester. Courses will explore topics including trade and material culture in the ancient and medieval world, colonialism and memory, and the intersection of photography, race, and restitution.
In addition, the Council welcomes six Short-Term Fellows, who will visit campus for three to five days. During that time, they will lecture and participate in class discussions, colloquia, performances, or other informal events within their nominating departments.
Long-Term Visiting Fellows
Jennifer Bajorek is a professor of comparative literature and visual studies at Hampshire College and a senior research associate at the University of Johannesburg. She is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in photography, art, and literature. Her work includes 20 years of collaborations in West African collections encompassing research, policy work, and conservation and restitution initiatives, and has been supported or recognized by numerous grants and awards, including a 2024 Arthur Rubin Outstanding Publication Award, for Unfixed (2020).
Bajorek will be a Belknap Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English in Spring 2026. At Princeton, she will complete a manuscript on the materiality of photography in Africa and teach a course on photography, race, and restitution.
Rana Barakat is an associate professor of history at Birzeit University and director of the Birzeit University Museum in Palestine. Her research interests include the history and historiography of colonialism, nationalism, and cultures of resistance. She has published in notable venues including the Journal of Palestine Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly, Settler Colonial Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her forthcoming book, Ongoing Return: Storytelling as a Map of Return to Lifta and Palestine, advances an Indigenous understanding of time, space, and memory in Palestine.
Barakat will be a Belknap Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Anthropology in Fall 2025. She will teach the course “Colonialism on Display: Museums, Archives, and Memory in Palestine.”
Elizabeth Lambourn is a professor of material histories at De Montfort University. She is a historian of the Indian Ocean world, committed to the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of medieval history. She has held fellowships at Harvard and Stanford, and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. She is the author of the research monograph Abraham’s Luggage. A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (2018) and editor of the volumes Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe (2017) and A Cultural History of the Sea in the Medieval Age (2021).
Lambourn will be a Stewart Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of History in Fall 2025. She will co-teach a graduate seminar with Marina Rustow (Near Eastern Studies) on trade and the circulation of objects in the ancient and medieval Indian Ocean world.
Jay Pather is a curator, choreographer and an academic. He is a professor at the University of Cape Town and directs the Institute for Creative Arts. He curates the Infecting the City Public Art Festival and the ICA Live Art Festival in Cape Town. He also curates for the Afrovibes Festival in Amsterdam. Publications include Acts of Transgressions, Live Art in South Africa (2019) and Restless Infections, Public Art for a Transforming City (2025). Pather served as juror for the International Award for Public Art and was appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government.
Pather will be a Belknap Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Lewis Center for the Arts in Spring 2026. He will teach an undergraduate theater course on interdisciplinarity, curation and decoloniality.
Victoria Wohl is the Distinguished Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of classical Greece, spanning a variety of genres and discourses. She is the author of Love Among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens (2002), Law’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (2010), and Euripides and the Politics of Form (2015), and editor of the volume Probabilities, Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek Thought (2014). Her latest book is The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy (2025).
Wohl will be a Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of Classics in Spring 2026. She will teach a multi-genre 400-level seminar spanning Greek literature, oratory, and philosophy.
Alice Zeniter is a novelist, playwright, scriptwriter and director whose works, translated worldwide, have won numerous prizes including the Prix du Livre Inter (2013), the Prix Goncourt des lycéens (2017) and the Dublin Literary Award (2022). She is French, of Algerian descent, and her work intertwines French colonial history and family stories, often focusing on female characters both in the past and in the contemporary world. Her novel The Art of Losing appeared in the Best Historical Fiction of 2021 list from The New-York Times.
Zeniter will be a Belknap Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of French and Italian in Spring 2026. At Princeton, she will teach an undergraduate course on texts written by daughters of immigrants.
Short-Term Visiting Fellows
Ali Behdad is professor of English and Comparative Literature, the John Charles Hillis Chair in Literature, and the Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA. He was the President of American Comparative Literature Association during 2014-2015. He has published widely on issues of travel, immigration, Orientalism, photography, and postcolonial theory. He has co-edited A Companion to Comparative Literature (Blackwell, 2011) and Photography’s Orientalism (Getty Research Institute, 2013. He is currently completing a book on French colonial postcards of North Africa.
Behdad will serve as a Class of 1932 Short-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Comparative Literature.
Stéphane Braunschweig is a theater and opera director, scenographer, author, and translator. He has led major institutions including the Centre dramatique national/Orléans-Loiret-Centre (1993-1998), the Théâtre national de Strasbourg (2000-2008), Théâtre national de la Colline (2010-2015), and the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe (2016-2024). With his new company Pour un moment, he is preparing Chekhov’s The Seagull and Arne Lygre’s À notre place. In 2025, he will stage Mozart’s The Magic Flute in Stockholm, Cimarosa’s The Secret Wedding at the San Carlo Opera in Naples, and Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta at the Bordeaux Opera.
Braunschweig will be a Belknap Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian.
Jerry Brotton is a writer, broadcaster and curator. He is a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London. His many books include The Sale of the Late King’s Goods (2006), the bestselling A History of the World in Twelve Maps (2012) and This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (2016). He is a BBC TV and radio presenter, podcaster, and curator of exhibitions including “Talking Maps” (2019-2020), and a Tudor exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum (forthcoming 2028-29). His latest book is Four Points of the Compass (2024).
Brotton will serve as a Class of 1932 Short-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English.
Robert Pogue Harrison is the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He is the author of several books, among them The Body of Beatrice (1989); Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992); The Dominion of the Dead (2004), Gardens: The Shadow of Civilization (2008); and Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age (2014). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014, he was knighted “Chevalier” by the French Republic. Since 2005, he has hosted the radio show and podcast “Entitled Opinions.”
Harrison will be a Class of 1932 Short-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian.
Winnie Holzman is a writer and actress. She wrote, with renowned songwriter Stephen Schwartz, of the hit musical Wicked; she also co-wrote both screenplays for the screen adaptation. She’s a graduate of Princeton and the NYU Musical Theatre Program. Her thesis musical, Birds of Paradise, was produced off-Broadway. She segued to television, writing for the groundbreaking series thirtysomething, and went on to create another memorable television series– My So-Called Life. Her (non-musical) plays include Choice, and two plays co-written with her husband, Paul Dooley: Post-its: Notes on a Marriage, and Assisted Living.
Holzman will serve as a Belknap Short-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Lewis Center of the Arts.
Alberto Toscano is an author, translator, and editor. He has written several books, including La abstracción real (2020), Terms of Disorder (2023), Late Fascism (2023) and Communism in Philosophy (2025). He is the co-editor of Georges Bataille’s Critical Essays, vols I and II (with B. Noys, 2023/2025). He is the series editor of Seagull Essays and The Italian List for Seagull Books, and a columnist for the magazine In These Times. He has translated works by Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Franco Fortini, and Furio Jesi.
Toscano will be a Belknap Short-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian.
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. For more information, visit the Humanities Council website.
