The Humanities Council strategically incubates projects that examine systemic racism, and the inequality and injustice it engenders.
In line with our mission to engage diverse perspectives, we support initiatives that encompass a wide range of voices and broaden the scope of humanistic inquiry. Many of these projects are informed by contemporary challenges, including COVID-19, police violence, educational disparities, and climate change.
Bringing humanities scholars into innovative collaboration with artists, activists, scientists, and journalists, the following projects—supported by our rapid response, innovation, and collaboration funding streams—seek to deepen understanding, foster difficult conversations, and serve as a catalyst for structural change.
New Council-Funded Initiatives
2021–2022
Afro-Asian Lives and Cultures in Latin America (Public Virtual Workshop)
Christina Lee (Spanish and Portuguese)
A symposium traces national and religious identities in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies to racial mixing, illuminated by bonds between Latin Americans of African and Asian descent.
Archival Silences
Emma Sarconi (Reference Librarian, Special Collections), Kinohi Nishikawa (English, African American Studies)
A series of public webinars is investigating inherent biases in archival practice while recovering lost voices through reckonings over structural racism, policing, and militarization.
Art Hx: Visualizing the Medical Legacies of British Colonialism
Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Art and Archaeology, African American Studies)
This collaboration explores the historical, and ongoing, entanglements of art, race, and colonial medicine. The curation of a digital database and research platform will bring artists, writers, health professionals, and scholars into dynamic conversations around archival objects and art works.
Black Artists Lab
Tracy K. Smith (Lewis Center for the Arts), Imani Perry (African American Studies)
Featuring panels, screenings, and performances, a conference is leveraging creative and critical perspectives on blackness in art to reach a new sense of what is possible in American cultural and civic life.
Black Beckett
Maria DiBattista (English, Comparative Literature)
A conference is inviting authors, scholars, and students from underrepresented communities to explore Samuel Beckett’s perspectives on American race laws, slavery, and segregation.
Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton (NAISIP)
Sarah Rivett (English, American Studies)
A working group of faculty, staff, and students is highlighting and strengthening ties with Indigenous Communities to advance related scholarship at Princeton University.
Organizing Stories: Toward a Scholarly-Activist Praxis
Autumn Womack (African American Studies, English), Monica Huerta (English, American Studies)
Through virtual workshops, veteran organizers of social justice movements are teaching students to craft narratives that propel anti-racist activism. Relevant interviews, essays, bibliographies, and other resources, amassed by undergraduate research assistants, will appear on a new site called “The Organizers’ Library.”
The Princeton Project on the Ethiopian Miracles of the Virgin Mary (PEMM)
Wendy Laura Belcher (Comparative Literature, African American Studies)
This international research collaboration translates and digitizes what Belcher called “eight centuries of criminally understudied African written texts” from the ancient African language of Gəˁəz also known as classical Ethiopic.
Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Middle Ages and Medieval Studies
Program in Medieval Studies
Researchers based in North America and Europe are diving into seminars on race, race-thinking, and racialization in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Paradigms for social categorization are emerging beyond simplistic either-or binaries like race vs. not race, race vs. ethnicity, and the United States vs. Europe.
REACTIVATING MEMORY – Shuffle Along and the Tulsa Race Massacre: A Centennial Symposium
Stacy Wolf (Lewis Center for the Arts), Catherine M. Young (Lewis Center for the Arts)
A virtual conference marked the hundredth anniversaries of two neglected but pivotal events in US history: 1) the 1921 debut of the all-Black musical Shuffle Along, which faced racism on Broadway and beyond; and 2) the Tulsa Race Massacre, involving the burning of the neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street” one week after Shuffle Along opened. Connecting these phenomena, the symposium considered Black entrepreneurship, racial capitalism, Jazz Age cultural expression, contemporary journalism, and archival gaps.
2020-2021
Africa and Digital Humanities
Simon Gikandi (English)
The 4th Annual Princeton African Humanities Colloquium (PAHC) promoted the study of Africa in existing and future research projects.
American Contact: Intercultural Encounter and the History of the Book, Phase II
Rhae Lynn Barnes (History)
A published volume, case studies, digital multimedia, and web resources for K–12 and university classrooms examine the roles of material texts in cross-cultural encounters throughout the Americas.
Black History Month
Humanities Council, Arts Council of Princeton
To honor the cultural impact of Black Americans, an exhibit presented legendary Black artists, a local artist taught a workshop on making collages in light of the Harlem Renaissance, and a black and white adaptation of the United States flag waved.
Comparative Antiquity
Martin Kern (East Asian Studies)
Aiming for wide geographical and chronological scope as well as disciplinary participation and methodologies, this global research and teaching collaboration included courses on how race has shaped the humanities and on the Afroasiatic roots of Classical Civilization.
Fugitive Sounds
Rhae Lynn Barnes (History)
Compiling a database about enslaved musicians in antebellum America, history and music students recreated their songs, then played the pieces for audiences in the Delta such as descendants of the original performers.
Gas Exchanges and the Right to Breathe
Eduardo Cadava (English), Jonathan Aguirre (Spanish and Portuguese), Zulaikha Ayub (Architecture), Daniela Gandorfer (Comparative Literature)
Responding to COVID-19, the new Loφ Lab produced multimedia for the general public on gendered and racialized inequalities surrounding air pollution, along with the choking of Eric Garner and George Floyd.
Freedoms/Liberdades: Storying Images of Slavery and Post-Abolition in Brazil
Miqueias Mugge (Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies), Isadora Moura Mota (History), João Biehl (Anthropology)
Extracting visual materials on slavery from Brazil, an interdisciplinary group of Princeton and Brazilian scholars launched an online symposium, as well as a website in both Portuguese and English.
Imagining a Higher Education Career in African American Studies
Dannelle Gutarra Cordero (African American Studies)
Ten AAS-affiliated undergraduate research assistants received coaching to advocate for underrepresented populations in academia, as they prepared an article for a peer-reviewed journal about higher education.
Increasing Access: Engaging Spanish-speaking Communities with Digital Museum Programming
James Steward (Art Museum)
Translation/captioning services and custom marketing are attracting Spanish speakers to programming at the Princeton University Art Museum.
Interrogating History: The Classical Black Theater Canon
Program in Theater (Lewis Center for the Arts)
Seeking to expand the classical canon by investigating lesser-known plays by Black writers, this project connected students and professors with theater makers from the New York City collective CLASSIX. The first event featured recorded readings, by professional actors, of play excerpts written by Black people in the Federal Theater Project’s Negro Units of the New Deal era.
Launching the Philly Community Wireless Project
Grant Wythoff (Center for Digital Humanities), Devren Washington (Movement Alliance Project)
Student interns supported the building of broadband networks for Black and Latinx Philadelphia residents, whose disproportionate lack of Internet access bars them from services that have moved online during the pandemic.
Literature in the Time of Covid
Rebecca Rainof (English), Tamsen Wolff (English)
The Department of English launched a new podcast show and literary review to share work done by students during the pandemic, as well as a website that gathers writing for the public about topics like racism.
Medical Anthropology in the Time of COVID-19
João Biehl (Anthropology), Onur Günay (School of Public and International Affairs)
A website is critically analyzing how structural violence exacerbates vulnerability, mortality, and disparities in care for COVID-19 patients along the lines of age, class, race, gender, and geography.
Multicultural London: The Literature of Migrants and Immigrants
Esther Schor (English)
Training students in the tools of archival digitization—including mapping, timelines, and annotation—this project provided a “virtual London” experience for students prevented by COVID-19 from studying abroad.
The Pandemic Portal: Examining the Racial Dimensions of the COVID-19 Crisis
Ruha Benjamin (African American Studies)
With contributions from undergraduates and recent alumni, a “Pandemic Portal” synthesized public health reports, news coverage, and social media discourse to show how Black communities responded to COVID-19.
Past, Present, and Future of Incarceration
Matthew Larsen (Religion, Society of Fellows), Wendy Warren (History)
Faculty and graduate students unearthed overlooked aspects of the history of incarceration to spotlight carceral practices and geographies.
Pathologies of Difference: Mapping the Art of Colonial Medicine
Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Art and Archaeology, African American Studies)
A digital database maps geographical intersections of colonialism, art, and medicine across the British Empire in Australia, South Asia, and the Caribbean, dismantling the historical structures of racism and violence that continue to shape our present.
Performance and American Cultures: Summer Manuscript Intensive
Brian Herrera (Lewis Center for the Arts)
Receiving feedback from more senior scholars, six first-time book authors workshopped their forthcoming monographs that could help transform American Studies and Performance Studies, including regarding race.
Promoting Cross-Cultural Understanding through Exposure to (Online) Intercultural Spoken Interaction
Adriana Merino (Spanish and Portuguese)
Recorded, transcribed, authentic, and unscripted conversations among native Spanish speakers and Spanish learners of varying proficiencies are generating material for later listeners to develop their oral comprehension, conversational strategies, and intercultural communication.
The Public Transcriptions Project
Martha Sandweiss (History), Gabriel Swift (Librarian for Academic Programs, Special Collections)
Five History graduate students transcribed, edited, annotated, and made online exhibitions on rare 19th-century manuscript materials from Special Collections about Western American History, Mormonism, the Civil War, and the American Colonization Society.
resilient-distant-creative
Argyro Nicolaou (Hellenic Studies)
Bridging Princetonians around the globe, workshops on online tools for producing art and a collaborative online performance explored resilience and distance, as experienced amid migration along with the global pandemic.
Rupturing Tradition: The Classics and Activism
Brooke Holmes (Classics), Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Classics)
Activists reconfigured scholarship on Greco-Roman antiquity to present “the classics” as a public good, including through a new graduate seminar.
Sick Architecture
Beatriz Colomina (Architecture)
Working with e-flux architecture, a publishing platform, this project equipped nine Princeton graduate students to collaborate with international scholars and scientists; write short essays on the question of illnesses, pandemics, and architecture; and present their work to an international audience of 70,000 subscribers. Five invited scholars also contributed.
Tigers in Translation
Shawn Gonzalez (Writing Program)
Celebrating the diversity of language backgrounds among Princeton undergraduates, a podcast built community by sharing students’ stories about code switching, English as a Second Language classes, and other navigations of linguistic identity.
New Council-Funded Courses
2021–2022
Creative Non-Fiction
Helen Thorpe (Humanities Council, Journalism)
While improving their own prose, students will examine how much authors who cover social inequality can create empathy for their subjects.
A Global History of Monsters
Federico Marcon (East Asian Studies, History)
As negative objectifications of fundamental social structures and conceptions, monsters illuminate the cultures that engender them, showing how a society constructs the Other, the deviant, the enemy, the minorities, and the repressed.
Identity in the Spanish-Speaking World
Christina Lee (Spanish and Portuguese)
By analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions since the dawn of the Spanish empire, students will investigate ideas of belonging to the body politic in Spain, Latin America, and Spanish-speaking parts of the United States.
International News: Migration Reporting
Deborah Amos (Humanities Council, Journalism)
Students will examine the polarization around migration and determinations of who can become an American, while conducting interviews with local sources and producing original reporting in various journalistic forms, including news, profiles, and features.
Mapping Gentrification
Aaron Shkuda (Architecture)
Using Geographic Information Systems software, readings, films, and site visits, the course will examine the interplay between urban change and racial landscapes of gentrification, culture, and politics.
South Asian Migrations
Shoshana Goldstein (Architecture)
This course will explore the history, politics, and social dynamics of urban migration on the Indian subcontinent, delving into subtopics like partition and refugee resettlement, indentured and imported labor, and South Asian diasporas in the United States.
Topics in Global Race and Ethnicity: Scientific Racism: Then and Now
Dannelle Gutarra Cordero (Gender and Sexuality Studies, African American Studies)
Reading primary sources from the history of science, each session will trace the reverberations of scientific racism in media, education, politics, law, and global health.
Urban Studies Research Seminar
Aaron Shkuda (Architecture)
Focused on communities and landmarks represented in historical accounts, literary works, art, and film, participants will travel through cityscapes as cultural and mythological spaces.
2020–2021
A Global History of Monsters
Federico Marcon (East Asian Studies, History)
As negative objectifications of fundamental social structures and conceptions, monsters illuminate the cultures that engender them, showing how a society constructs the Other, the deviant, the enemy, the minorities, and the repressed.
Arts in the Invisible City: Race, Policy, Performance
Nathan Davis (Theater, Lewis Center for the Arts), Donald Vance Smith (English)
Tracing how racism has shaped Trenton, students worked with dramatists to consider a new play, about a community-organized sculpture removed over concerns around “gang” culture.
International News: Migration Reporting
Deborah Amos (Humanities Council, Journalism)
As captured by narrative reporting, historical studies, immigration policy, and data analysis, the migration crisis shifted amid the turmoil of a worldwide pandemic, a looming economic crisis, and social upheaval over systemic racism.
Reporting on Policing, Race and Inequality
Kimbriell Kelly (Humanities Council, Journalism)
Kelly shared her expertise from serving on the team that launched The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series on shootings by police.
Rupturing Tradition: Ancient Past, Contemporary Praxis
Brooke Holmes (Classics), Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Classics)
This graduate seminar delved into the contributions that ancient Greco-Roman texts might make to contemporary social and political problems, with a view to activism.
Service and Social Justice in the Western Humanities Sequence
Beatrice Kitzinger (Art and Archaeology), Benjamin Morison (Philosophy), Trisha Thorme (Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship)
A new discussion feature tied the syllabus’s ancient and medieval texts to contemporary social justice, motivating students to harness their studies for the good of their communities.
South Asian Migrations
Shoshana Goldstein (Architecture)
This course explored the history, politics, and social dynamics of urban migration on the Indian subcontinent, delving into subtopics like partition and refugee resettlement, internal migration, and indentured and imported labor.
What to Read and Believe in the Age of Covid
Joe Stephens (Humanities Council, Journalism)
Equipping undergraduates to consume news during the rapidly evolving “infodemic,” this class considered the sudden tsunami of conflicting information about the pandemic, social justice protests, and myriad other topics.
New Council-Funded Events
2021–2022
The Affects of Manumission: Racial Melancholy and Roman Freedpersons
Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Classics)
This session launched the 2021–2022 edition of the “Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Middle Ages and Medieval Studies” online seminar series of the Program in Medieval Studies.
Afro-Asian Lives and Cultures in Latin America (Public Virtual Workshop)
Christina Lee (Spanish and Portuguese)
Attendees challenged established notions of identity in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, examining the complex bonds between subjects of African and Asian descent.
Archival Silences Working Group: Building the Archive
Amy Hildreth Chen (author), Ryan Flahive (Institute of American Indian Arts), Rebecca Romney (Type Punch Matrix), Rachel Winston (University of Texas at Austin)
Participants interrogated issues of bias, value, and access that accompany collecting for the archive.
Archival Silences Working Group: Language In/Of the Archive
Humanities Council
With catalogers, archivists, and curators, attendees will discuss how we use language in the archival apparatus, the consequences of that use, and the future of archival description.
Black Bodies, White Gold – Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World
Anna Arabindan-Kesson (African American Studies, Art and Archaeology), Chika Okeke-Agulu (Art and Archaeology, African American Studies)
The speakers focused on cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade, to interpret the intertwining of art, commerce, and colonialism in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages
Matthew X. Vernon (University of California, Davis)
Graduate students met for a Race Before Modernity Book Club session about how scholars have used medieval texts to shape African-American thought.
“He was running it like a plantation”: Psychiatric spaces and social death in the Jim Crow South
Kylie Smith (Emory University)
Scrutinizing state psychiatric hospitals in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi during the twentieth century, Smith argued that Black patients suffered in little more than the plantation reimagined: spaces aimed at containment, not cure.
Journalism at Borders: Covering Mexico in a Time of Pandemic, Migration and Violence
Adela Navarro Bello (Semanario Zeta), Mary Beth Sheridan (The Washington Post), Adriana Zehbrauskas (photojournalist and documentary photographer), Julia Preston (The Marshall Project)
Three winners of the 2021 Maria Moors Cabot Prizes, for distinguished careers covering Latin America, shared how they have reported on Mexico despite many difficulties.
Medical Bondage, Mobility, and Fugitive Logic: Revisiting Harriet Tubman as an Intellectual Figure
Deirdre Cooper Owens (University of Nebraska–Lincoln)
To reveal Harriet Tubman as more than a courageous freedom fighter, Owens probed her contributions in entrepreneurship, abolitionism, herbalism, and institution building.
Protest, Silencing, and Solidarity
Jose Medina (Northwestern University)
As Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Philosophy, Medina analyzed the expressive power of street protests and how to resist their silencing through what he called epistemic activism.
REACTIVATING MEMORY – Shuffle Along and the Tulsa Race Massacre: A Centennial Symposium
Awoye Timpo (CLASSIX), Stacy Wolf (Lewis Center for the Arts), Catherine M. Young (Writing Program)
Panels and performances traced the history of a murderous anti-Black attack in connection with the debut of an all-Black Broadway musical.
2020–2021
Archival Silences Working Group: Archival Silences in the Present Moment
Dorothy Berry (Houghton Library, Harvard University), Ashley D. Farmer (University of Texas at Austin), Edgar Garcia (University of Chicago), Ashton Wingate (NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund)
A webinar series about inherent biases in archival practices, past and present, began its second year with this session.
Archival Silences Working Group: Decolonizing Knowledges
Matt Cohen (University of Nebraska), Lincoln Athena Jackson (University of California, Los Angeles), N. S. ‘Ilaheva Tua’one (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs), Joyce Pualani Warren (University of Hawai’i, Mānoa)
Roundtable speakers reflected on knowledge hierarchies and how the exclusion of certain forms of expression from institutional archives has produced gaps in our understanding of the past.
Archival Silences Working Group: Fictioning Archives
John Keene (Rutgers University, Newark), TaraShea Nesbit (Miami University), Namwali Serpell (Harvard University)
Harnessing their own stories as examples, creative writers pondered how fiction can represent and compensate for gaps in the archive.
Black History Month: Harlem Renaissance and the Art of Collage
Kenneth Lewis Jr. (artist)
Lewis led a virtual workshop celebrating the art, history, and the possibilities of creative self-expression through making collages, modeled off those of Harlem Renaissance contributor Romare Bearden.
Black History Month: “UNTITLED 2017 (FEAR EATS THE SOUL) (WHITE FLAG)” Art Installation
Arts Council of Princeton, Humanities Council
The Paul Robeson Center for the Arts displayed a flag by Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija that references a German film opposing racism and xenophobia.
Contact, Colonialism, and Comparison
Antiquity in the Americas, Department of Classics, Humanities Council, Comparative Antiquity
This conference delved into topics like creole subjectivity, relationships between colonizers and indigenous guides, communal ownership under colonial administrations, and a poem that combines racist and anti-racist ideas.
Critical Approaches to Race and Ethnicity: Premodern Identities and the Trans-Atlantic Politics of Scholarship
Cord Whitaker (Wellesley College), Walter Pohl (University of Vienna)
Michelle M. Sauer (University of North Dakota) moderated this session of the online seminar series “Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Middle Ages and Medieval Studies,” hosted by the Program in Medieval Studies.
Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitism
Sara Lipton (State University of New York, Stony Brook)
For the Race Before Modernity Book Club, graduate students inspected the emergence of stereotypes against Jews in the iconography of some Christian artists.
Disturbing Times: Medieval Pasts, Reimagined Futures
Catherine E. Karkov (University of Leeds), Anna Kłosowska (Miami University), Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (punctum books)
The Race Before Modernity Book Club convened graduate students to inspect how various ideologies shape educational institutions, museums, universities, and individuals in research, collecting, and teaching.
Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science
Terence Keel (University of California, Los Angeles)
Graduate students convened for the Race Before Modernity Book Club, led by Earnestine Qiu and Justin Willson from the Department of Art and Archaeology, with a view to writing socially engaged scholarship.
Empires and Racialization: The Myth of the Martial Race
Nino Luraghi (Oxford University)
Walter Pohl (University of Vienna) moderated this session of the online seminar series “Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Middle Ages and Medieval Studies,” hosted by the Program in Medieval Studies.
Encumbrance
Cameron Rowland (artist)
In this Eberhard L. Faber IV Lecture of the Humanities Council, Rowland discussed the enslaved in relation to chattel, real estate, plantation mortgages, the land they had to labor on, and the houses they had to maintain.
Language and Migration: Experience and Memory
Esther Schor (English), Humphrey Tonkin (Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems)
This interdisciplinary symposium convened humanists and social scientists, field-workers and policy-makers, artists and writers, to think together about migrants as resourceful users, interpreters, and creators of language.
Legends of the Arts: A Black History Month Exhibit
Arts Council of Princeton, Humanities Council
Visitors strolled through decades of culture and excellence linked to legendary figures such as poet and author Langston Hughes; actor and singer Paul Robeson; and the Motown singing sensations known as The Supremes.
Mellon Forum: The Geography of the Post-Pandemic City
Cindi Katz (City University of New York), Sara Carr (Northeastern University), Kirti Das (Civil and Environmental Engineering), Jay Pitter (author and placemaker), Ashish Rao-Ghorpade (ICLEI), Craig Wilkins (University of Michigan), Anu Ramaswami (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
This panel investigated COVID-19’s impacts on the human geography of the city, as seen from social, economic, racial, architectural, and public health perspectives.
Mellon Forum // RESISTANCE: Black Women and the Land Grab
Sarah Broom (author), Carroll Fife (Oakland City Council), Keisha-Khan Perry (Brown University), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (African American Studies)
This colloquium, whose title related to Perry’s new ethnographic study of black women’s activism in Brazilian cities, delved into the urban environment.
Nationalists, Refugees and Artists: A Decade Reporting from Europe
Rachel Donadio (Journalism), David Bellos (Department of French and Italian)
The speakers focused on Donadio’s expertise as a Paris-based contributing writer at The Atlantic who covers politics and culture across Europe.
Organizing Stories: Community Organizing 101
Darren “Freedom” Green (Trenton activist and organizer)
Green led a workshop about the ins-and-outs of local organizing and the integral role of storytelling in his community outreach.
Organizing Stories: Making|Future|Making with Ni’Ja Whitson
Ni’Ja Whitson (artist, performer, and writer)
This student-faculty activist workshop examined the myriad bonds between embodiment and politics, including with regard to futurity technologics.
Organizing Stories: Mythography, Digital Storytelling and Counter-Colonizing the Heteropatriarchal Gaze
Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri (multidisciplinary artist and social justice advocate)
Pal-Chaudhuri invited audiences to collaborate in a student-faculty activist workshop on participatory visual and digital storytelling.
Organizing Stories: Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis
Liz Theoharis (Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival)
Theoharis drew on her expertise as the co-chair of a movement that builds on the legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Organizing Stories: What is a Story Circle? — and How to Use It in Cultural Organizing
Southerners on New Ground (S.O.N.G.)
This workshop taught how “story circles,” circles of people sitting and sharing their stories, can promote conflict resolution and activism across demographic lines.
A Past Becomes a Heritage: The Negro Units of the Federal Theater Project
Autumn Womack (African American Studies, English), Kinohi Nishikawa (English, African American Studies), Arminda Thomas (CLASSIX), Michael Dinwiddie (New York University)
Panelists discussed Black and theatrical history in light of readings, recorded by professional actors, of excerpts of plays written in the so-called Negro Units during the New Deal era.
Race, Racecraft and Necropolitics in Greek Epic
Jackie Murray (University of Kentucky)
Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Institute for Advanced Study) moderated this session of the online seminar series “Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Middle Ages and Medieval Studies,” hosted by the Program in Medieval Studies.
Race is about Politics: Lessons from History
Jean-Frédéric Schaub (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, New York University)
Graduate students in the Race Before Modernity Book Club discussed Schaub’s tracing of racial division back to discrimination against Christians of Jewish and Muslim origin.
Racialization in Late Antique Italy and Italian Historiography
Nicole Lopez-Jantzen (City University of New York)
This lecture launched the online seminar series “Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Middle Ages and Medieval Studies,” hosted by the Program in Medieval Studies.
Racist research: What does respect for researchers require? What should academic freedom allow?
Elizabeth Harman (Philosophy, The University Center for Human Values)
The Council’s 2020–2021 Old Dominion Series opened with this lecture for University faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students.
(Re-)Imagine all the peoples. Exegesis and ethnicity in the late Antique West
Gerda Heydemann (Freie Universität Berlin)
Researchers in North America and Europe virtually convened for this session of “Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Middle Ages and Medieval Studies,” an online seminar series by the Program in Medieval Studies.
Reckoning: Complicated Histories and Collective Identities
Tiffany Cain (Anthropology)
Through field experiences in an Anthropology and Humanistic Studies seminar, students grappled with violent pasts as they investigated cultural media surrounding memorials, monuments, museums, and heritage.
Things as They Should be? A Question for the Humanities
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (African American Studies), Barbara Graziosi (Classics), Jhumpa Lahiri (Creative Writing), Melissa Lane (Politics)
For the Council’s 14th Annual Humanities Colloquium, distinguished faculty reflected on normativity, including in the case of racial injustice.
To Be Known and Heard: Systemic Racism and Princeton University Virtual Gallery and Roundtable Discussion
Brian Eugenio Herrera (Lewis Center for the Arts), Tera Hunter (African American Studies, History), Beth Lew-Williams (History), Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Classics)
A faculty discussion launched an online display of key moments and people in the University’s racial history.
What Migration Sounds Like: Reporting on Refugees in Europe for NPR
Joanna Kakissis (Journalism), Karen Emmerich (Comparative Literature)
A contributing international correspondent for National Public Radio and a contributor to This American Life, Kakissis relayed insights from her dispatches on the forces straining European unity.
