Several large-scale research and teaching collaborations receive support from the Humanities Council to spark and develop new collaborations at Princeton and to develop multi-institutional collaborations and scholarly networks across the globe.
Learn more about Collaborative Humanities Grants and Global Initiatives, as well as the Council’s other major funding opportunities.
Collaborative Humanities
2024-25
- Derrida Seminars Translation Project
Eduardo Cadava (English); Katie Chenoweth (French and Italian); Karen Emmerich (Comparative Literature; Translation and Intercultural Communication)
This three-year grant will support a new research partnership between students and faculty from Princeton, Brown, and Emory. The project will host translation workshops in Caen, France, each July to exchange ideas on translation and provide intensive training for graduate students in close reading, textual analysis, and translation of philosophical texts. The grant also supports the inaugural event, an October 2024 symposium entitled “Derrida’s Futures: Secrets from the Archive.”
- Cortona Colloquia on Latin Literatures
Andrew Feldherr (Classics)
The Cortona Colloquia are a series of conferences for faculty and graduate students from Princeton and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa held every year during the University’s spring break. The conference pursues the collective, sequential close-reading of a single work, and provides a distinctive opportunity for literary analysis as well a long-term network of Latinist scholars internationally. This three-year grant will support the travel, lodging, and board for the two-and-a-half-day conference, held at Palazzone di Corona.
- Elasticities (Phase 2)
Brooke Holmes (Classics); Martha Friedman (Lewis Center for the Arts)
This grant supports the second phase of “Elasticities,” which will include a Summer 2024 workshop at the Princeton Athens Center. The workshop will examine scholarly work in classical reception studies, architectural theory, and art history, as well as transdisciplinary study of the ancient Mediterranean at the intersection of the academy and public-facing institutions. The launch of the project in Summer 2022 was also supported by the Magic Project.
- Princeton-LMU Munich Summer Seminar
Joel Lande (German)
This two-year grant will support two four-day summer graduate conferences in Munich, appealing to graduate students from across the humanities and social sciences. The first of these seminars, titled “Dissent and Discord: Practices, Politics, and Poetics” will take place in June 2024 and will examine different ways that cultures regulate the expression of discord as well as the vital and precarious role that controversy plays in the creation and sustenance of social order.
- SOVMODE: Reconsidering Modernity & Socialism: A series of annual workshops
Serguei Oushakine (Anthropology; Slavic Languages and Literatures)
With collaborator Alexey Golubev (University of Houston), this three-year project aims to rebuild intellectual networks and to reconfigure approaches to the Soviet past by hosting annual two-day fall workshops that would place experts on socialism and modernity from the US and elsewhere in dialogue with Princeton faculty and students specializing in socialist and post-socialist societies.
2023-24
- Climate Stories Incubator
Allison Carruth (Effron Center and High Meadows Environmental Institute); Barron Bixler (High Meadows Environmental Institute); John Higgins (Geosciences); Tim Szetela (Lewis Center for the Arts)
Led by Allison Carruth’s Blue Lab, the Climate Stories Incubator is a research-driven creative experiment to take stock of and narrate lived experiences of both climate change and climate action. This Collaborative Humanities Grant will support four major projects over two years, which include audio documentary, longform science reporting, creative nonfiction and still photography as well as digital animation, story mapping and data visualization. This project is also supported by the Dean for Research Innovation Funds.
- Princeton Food Project Phase II
Tessa Lowinske Desmond (Effron Center); Anne Cheng (English); Andrew Chignell (Religion); Hanna Garth (Anthropology); Daniel Rubenstein (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology); Shana Weber (Office of Sustainability)
Initially supported by a Magic Grant, the Princeton Food Project brings together scholars, activists, and thought leaders to explore, imagine, and think critically about food studies. This new, three-year Collaborative Humanities Grant will support lunchtime workshops on a range of innovative topics, co-sponsored events throughout the year, including a daylong symposium on food ethics.
- Aristotle in the Americas
Hendrik Lorenz (Philosophy)
This three-year project will build on existing links with institutions in Latin America by establishing a collaborative framework that includes faculty members and graduate students at Princeton, and in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. The Collaborative Humanities Grant will support a number of short-term graduate student researchers, as well as three workshops to be held in consecutive years in Princeton, São Paulo, and Mexico City.
2022-23
- Art Hx: The Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism
Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Art & Archaeology and African American Studies)
This two-year grant will support artists-in-residence, fellows, and community-focused programing for Art Hx, an ongoing project that explores the historical, and ongoing, entanglements of art, race, and colonial medicine through the curation of a digital database and research platform.
- LUDUS
Beatrice Kitzinger (Art & Archaeology); Jamie Reuland (Music)
This three-year project, which was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, develops an interdisciplinary working group devoted to the study of the Middle Ages. It will foster collaboration between scholars and artists and promote the visibility of Medieval Studies through programming in the performing arts.
- Organizing Stories: Toward a Scholarly-Activist Praxis
Autumn M. Womack (African American Studies); Monica Huerta (English, American Studies)
This ongoing student-driven project investigates the long history of anti-racist activism, racial justice organizing, and coalition-building as it relates to questions of narrative, storytelling, and humanistic study. By creating new avenues of exchange between Princeton University and community-based social justice work, students and activists will imagine new ways to support and amplify a scholarly-activist praxis.
- Waldemar Cordeiro: Bits of the Planet
Rachel Price (Spanish and Portuguese)
This digital exhibition focuses on the pioneering paintings and sculpture, media theory, early computer art, and landscape architecture of Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro (Rome 1925—São Paulo 1973). This grant will support an artist to innovate the infrastructure for the exhibition.
Global Initiatives
2023-24
- International Network for Comparative Humanities
Maria DiBattista (English and Comparative Literature)
This initiative supports a working group of literary scholars from both sides of the Atlantic dedicated to promoting the comparative study of humanities. The ongoing grant will support the further consolidation and expansion of INCH, including workshops to be held at the Princeton Athens Center, in collaboration with the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies.
- Rome Archive and Library Seminar
Anthony Grafton (History)
This renewed three-year Global Initiative provides partial support for a summer graduate seminar held in Rome, in partnership with the University of Notre Dame, where students will study archives in the Vatican Library, the National Library, and the Jesuit Archive, and allow curators and scholars to share their experience working with these materials.
2022-23
- Land, Language and Art
Sarah Rivett (English, American Studies) with Simon Morrison (Music, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Fund for Canadian Studies); Bryan Just (Art & Archaeology); Laura Kalin (Linguistics, Humanities Council); Tessa Desmond (American Studies); Daniel Rubenstein (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)
This new three-year project, from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton, supports initiatives to foster new methodologies and modes of knowledge production in three areas of research and learning that are central to Indigenous Studies: land, language, and art.
- Rome Archive and Library Seminar
Anthony Grafton (History)
This three-year grant provides partial support for a summer graduate seminar held in Rome, in partnership with the University of Notre Dame, where students will study archives in the Vatican Library and Archive, the National Library, and the Jesuit Archive, and allow curators and scholars to share their experience working with these materials.
