The Humanities Council will welcome fifteen new visitors in Spring 2026. These notable scholars, authors, artists, and practitioners will contribute to the Council’s mission and enrich the University’s humanities community with innovative ideas, teaching, and scholarship.
Five Long-Term Visiting Fellows join the Council this term. Each visitor will teach a course for the full semester. Interdisciplinary scholar Jennifer Bajorek will teach a course on photography, race, and restitution, and complete a manuscript on the materiality of photography in Africa. She is co-appointed in the Department of English. Rana Barakat, whose research interests include the history and historiography of colonialism, nationalism, and cultures of resistance, is co-appointed in the Department of Anthropology. She will teach the course “Colonialism on Display: Museums, Archives, and Memory in Palestine.” In the Lewis Center for the Arts, choreographer, and scholar Jay Pather will teach an undergraduate theater course on interdisciplinarity, curation and decoloniality. Co-appointed in the Department of Classics, Victoria Wohl will teach a multi-genre 400-level seminar spanning Greek literature, oratory, and philosophy. Her research focuses on the works and culture of classical Greece, spanning a variety of genres. Novelist, playwright, and director Alice Zeniter will teach a spring undergraduate course on texts written by daughters of immigrants. She is co-appointed in the Department of French and Italian.
The Council’s Program in Journalism welcomes five visiting professors in Spring 2026. National security correspondent Erin Banco will teach a course that explores investigative journalism in the era of “fake news.” Documentary filmmaker and editor Purcell Carson joins the program to teach a course titled “Environmental Justice Filmmaking in Trenton.” Vinson Cunningham, staff writer for The New Yorker, returns for his second year in the program to teach the McGraw Seminar in Writing. Also returning to the program is journalist, author and podcaster David Kushner, who will teach a seminar on narrative nonfiction writing and reporting. National affairs journalist and author Kevin Sack will teach “The Media in America: America in Black and White.”
The Council’s Fund for Canadian Studies welcomes Toronto-based scholar and organizer Shiri Pasternak as the Laurence G. Pathy ’56 Distinguished Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies. At Princeton, she will collaborate with students and scholars on subjects related to Canadian politics and history, and teach “The Long Arc of Fascism” for the Council’s Program in Humanistic Studies.
Three Short-Term Fellows will also visit campus this spring. 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 two visitors: theater and opera director Stéphane Braunschweig and author and translator Alberto Toscano. Scholar and nonfiction writer Julietta Singh will visit the Effron Center for the Study of America.
In collaboration with the PIIRS Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, the Council also provides support for the University’s Translator in Residence position. Julia Sanches, who translates in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish into English, will take on the role this spring.
To read more about all of the Council’s AY25-26 visitors, and find up-to-date information about events and funding deadlines, please visit the Humanities Council website.
