2026-2027
- Crafting the Nation: Art, Materiality and Independence in the Post-Colony
Anna Arabindan-Kesson (African American Studies and Art & Archaeology) and Perrin Lathrop (Princeton University Art Museum)
This Fall 2026 team-taught graduate seminar will examine the development of arts and craft practices during independence movements in the former British Empire. This grant will support student engagement in workshops, site visits, and dialogues with artists and scholars through the Princeton University Art Museum, in preparation for a Spring 2027 public symposium where students will present their research.
- Minerality in Modern and Contemporary Art
Monica Bravo (Art & Archaeology)
An academic workshop in Spring 2027 on the minerality of modern and contemporary art will explore minerals as non-renewable resources central to global geopolitics and valued for aesthetic, chemical, and amalgamative capabilities. Princeton curators and scholars from around the country will convene at Princeton for the event, which will include discussion, resource sharing, and viewing of special collections at the Princeton University Art Museum, in preparation for drafting a peer-reviewed publication.
- Acoustic output and Lingual Articulation of Canadian French Vowels
Vincent Chanethom (French and Italian) and Florian Lionnet (Linguistics)
This grant supports a study comparing different versions of French language by investigating the relationship between acoustic output and lingual articulation in Canadian French vowels through ultrasound tongue imaging. Data analysis and training development will be integrated into an upper-level French phonetics course, “The French Sound System,” cross-listed in the Department of French and Italian and the Program in Linguistics.
- From Letterform to Literary Site: The Material Lives of Korean Textual Objects
Ksenia Chizhova (East Asian Studies)
Scholars and students of East Asian literature, art history, anthropology, book history, design studies, and media studies will gather in November 2026 for a conference at Princeton to examine the material dimensions of Korean textual culture, tracing how texts acquire meaning through their physical instantiation.
- Solitude, Singleness, Singularity
Beatriz Colomina (Architecture)
This collaborative project will examine the intersection of design, history, philosophy, and urban studies to critically address contemporary housing models and propose new models of dwelling that reflect the diversity of how people live today. This grant will support Princeton faculty and student participation in a conference in Brazil, hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, followed by a conference at Princeton in Spring 2027.
- Black Theater Making Initiative
Jane Cox (Theater and Irish Studies; Lewis Center for the Arts); Rhaisa Williams (Theater; Lewis Center for the Arts); Chesney Snow (Lewis Center for the Arts)
This initiative will bring theater faculty, students, alumni, and local partners together to build connections around the study of Black American theater and create a visible and generative hub for student education. The grant will support campus visits from guest artists and scholars, offer student trips to theaters, and embed students in internships with community partners.
- Archive for Queer and Trans Spatial Practice
S.E. Eisterer (Architecture)
The grant supports the establishment of the first US-based archive dedicated to the artistic and design practices of LGBTQIA+ identified planners and architects, collecting drawings, plans, photography, three-dimensional objects, models, and installations that document transnational practices. The project includes a physical archive, an online platform, and integration of “archive stories” into the curriculum of the course “Queer Spaces in the World.”
- Displacement Squared (Dialogical Video Opera)
Aleksandar Hemon (Creative Writing; Lewis Center for the Arts) and Aynsley Vandenbroucke (Dance; Lewis Center for the Arts)
This grant will support a collaborative production of a 30-minute dialogical video opera by writer Aleksandar Hemon, dancer and choreographer Aynsley Vandenbroucke, and independent video artist Zlatko Cosic. The project will investigate displacement as an evolutionally, corporally, and culturally transformative experience.
- Student Attendance at the United States Institute of Theatre Technology Annual Conference
Tess James (Theater; Lewis Center for the Arts) and Jane Cox (Theater and Irish Studies; Lewis Center for the Arts)
This grant will enable undergraduates to attend the United States Institute of Theatre Technology Annual Conference in March 2027, in Baltimore, Maryland. Students will visit the Stage Expo and engage in hands-on workshops, panel discussions, and networking sessions with industry leaders across design, production, engineering, and emerging technologies, in collaboration with Yoshi Tanokura, visiting associate professor of theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts.
- Sounding the Diaspora: Afrodiasporic Music Past, Present, Future
Nathalie Joachim (Music)
An interdisciplinary symposium in March 2027 at Princeton will examine cultural, socio-political, and aesthetic contributions of Afrodiasporic music across genres and generations. The symposium will bring together scholars, composers, performers and students, and feature moderated panels, public lectures, and live performances.
- Atlantis Workshop: Princeton Research Across Disciplines
Erika Kiss (University Center for Human Values)
The weeklong symposium in Santorini, Greece, in July 2026, will bring together Princeton faculty from geology, engineering, physics, politics, architecture, history, and art history to examine the Late Bronze Age eruption of Thera (now known as Santorini) and its social, cultural, and philosophical aftermath. A short research film will be created to document the event.
- The Poetry Press Project
Dagmara Kraus (German)
This interdisciplinary initiative unites faculty from German, English, and Creative Writing to establish a print-based poetry publishing platform. The project blends experimental practice, translation, and scholarly inquiry, offering hands-on experience in manuscript development, critique, type composition, editorial work, and text distribution. With the guidance of professional typographers, paper makers, librarians, and poets, faculty and students will produce ten distinct chapbooks.
- Textuality, Materiality and Reading Practices Workshop
Daniela Mairhofer (Classics) and AnneMarie Luijendijk (Religion)
A twice-monthly workshop series during the academic year will bring together faculty and graduate students from multiple disciplines to examine reading as a historically situated, materially embedded practice. This grant will fund works-in-progress lunches and dinners, with discussion focused on guest speakers’ research presentations.
- The Intellectual Legacy of Umberto Eco
Federico Marcon (East Asian Studies and History)
This grant supports the first international conference in the United States on the intellectual legacy of Umberto Eco, to be held at Princeton in Spring 2027. Participants will explore the innovative and diverse scope of Eco’s research and discuss his theoretical work on semiotics, semantics, the philosophy of language, epistemology, and literary studies. This event builds on lectures and workshops on semiotics at Princeton over the past two years.
- A Place Between: Space and Sound and Happening
Michael Meredith (Architecture) and Donnacha Dennehy (Music)
This grant funds the design and building of an experimental public stage at the Art Omi sculpture park in Ghent, NY. A team of Princeton faculty, graduate students, recent graduates, and others will collaborate on prototypes for a pavilion, while developing a musical performance to be performed in the new space. This work will begin with interdisciplinary workshops in Princeton in Summer 2026 and culminate with a public musical performance on the Art Omi stage in Spring 2027.
- Engineer / Architect Collaborations: Archives, Structure and Historiography
Guy Nordenson (Architecture)
This project builds a Princeton “teaching archive” for engineer/architect collaboration, embedding an archive practicum into courses in both architecture and engineering. Students will learn to produce histories that are verifiable, interdisciplinary, and teachable. Work will be carried out at Princeton University Library and in archives in Chicago, Mexico City, and Spain.
- Housing Transformed
Mónica Ponce de León (Architecture)
To explore the complexities of multi-unit housing and propose new models of dwelling, faculty from other institutions will be invited to Princeton in Summer 2026 for collaborative workshops with students and faculty. Following these workshops, a new exhibition, which expands on a current exhibit at Princeton, will travel to Chicago in Fall 2026 and Los Angeles in Spring 2027.
- Basquiat, the Blue Ribbon Paintings, and the Art of Reproduction
James Steward (Princeton University Art Museum)
The exhibition “Basquiat, the Blue Ribbon Paintings, and the Art of Reproduction,” will run from October 2026 through January 2027 in the Princeton University Art Museum’s special exhibitions gallery. The exhibit will illuminate Jean-Michel Basquiat’s engagement in printmaking. This grant supports interpretive materials and programming for faculty, students, and broader public audiences, exploring issues of identity, access, and power.
- Project Resonance: Instruments and Residency
Dan Trueman (Music)
In 2024, a matched quartet of Hardanger instruments was donated to the Music Department, affording new expressive and sonic possibilities for string players and composers. This grant will support the creation of a new Hardanger d’Amore quartet and a residency with the Bergamot Quartet. The project will include a Fall 2026 graduate seminar and two on-campus performances of new works composed by PhD composers and faculty in Spring 2027.
- Rhythms of Typography, Typographies of Rhythm: Literature and Textual Media in Early Modern and Modern China
Xiaoyu Xia (East Asian Studies)
An April 2027 workshop at Princeton will explore Chinese modernity and early modernity via rhythm and typography. Featuring interdisciplinary dialogue among international scholars of literature, media, and music, the workshop funded by this grant offers new perspectives on global book history.
- Environmental Anthropology: Renewals
Jerry Zee (Anthropology)
This grant funds a gathering at Princeton in Spring 2027 of environmental anthropologists, establishing new research agendas in the humanistic and empirical-speculative study of the environment. It will be organized by students, postdocs, and faculty in the newly created Landscape Lab, a collaborative project in the Department of Anthropology that gathers ethnographers focused on environmental challenges.
Course enrichment
- Reading ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’
Javier Guerrero (Spanish and Portuguese)
A Spring 2027 course will explore Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” This grant will support a course-embedded trip to Colombia, where undergraduates will visit cultural institutions and meet with scholars, journalists, filmmakers, politicians, and community members whose work intersects with the themes of the book. A special grant from the Humanities Council will also support an international symposium at Princeton celebrating the 60th anniversary of the publication.
- Disability in the Techno/scientific Imagination
Kelsey Henry (Society of Fellows, African American Studies, and Humanities Council)
This Spring 2027 course centers disabled people as subjects, rather than objects, of knowledge and explores how they have reconfigured the scientific method, disrupted medical norms, hacked and repurposed technology, and challenged eugenic imperatives in STEM. This grant will support class visits and interactive workshops with disabled scientists, medical researchers, technologists, and artists.
- Language to Be Looked At / Creativity and ASL (American Sign Language)
Irene Small (Art & Archaeology) and Peter Cook (Linguistics and American Sign Language)
This project supports cross-collaboration between “Language to be Looked At” and “Creativity and ASL,” two distinct, but linked, undergraduate courses, each of which will foreground experimental and aesthetic practices of signing, gesture, visual language and translation. The grant will support student programming in Spring 2027, and public events in the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Other New Projects in the Humanities
In addition to Magic awards, the Humanities Council supports faculty projects through:
