2025-2026
- Human-Centered Automation for Resilient and Inclusive Built Environments
Arash Adel (Architecture)
This grant will support a Spring 2025 exhibition featuring a virtual, immersive, and interactive experience to explore the potential of human-robot collaboration for building more inclusively, efficiently, and sustainably. The exhibit will contain a physical display of prototypes and artifacts and include teaching materials and a mini-lecture series.
- No One is Forgotten (Live)
Elena Araoz (Lewis Center for the Arts)
This grant supports an operatic theater work, directed by Elena Araoz (Lewis Center for the Arts) which will open in February 2026 at the Wallace Black Box Theater. The show, a story of a journalist and aid worker held captive, applies psychoacoustic techniques using newly invented sound technology. An interdisciplinary community conversation on art and journalism will be moderated by Eliza Griswold (Journalism).
- The Harlem Walks Project
Wallace Best (Religion)
This project invites scholars, activists, urbanists, artists, and politicians to walk with Wallace Best (Religion) through the streets of Harlem, recording their impressions, reactions, observations and insights. A day-long conference in Fall 2025 will also be recorded. This video archive of Harlem history will be made available at Princeton University Library and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
- Caravan Archive Project
Amelia Frank-Vitale (Anthropology) and Grazzia Grimaldi (Latin American Studies)
Princeton affiliates from the Program in Latin American Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and Princeton University Library will work with external anthropologists, activists, and historians to produce a first-of-its-kind archive of migrant caravans. The team will conduct interviews in four countries with caravan participants and organizers and build and launch a public archive housed in PUL’s Digital Collections.
- Black in the World Archive and Lecture Series
Lorgia García Peña (Effron Center and African American Studies) and Medhin Paolos (Lewis Center for the Arts)
This grant supports a collaborative, transnational, multilingual digital humanities archive on Black experiences in the world, created in collaboration with both graduate and undergraduate students. This archive will be unveiled in May 2026 with a roundtable, a performance, and a conversation, in which Black scholars and artists from Africa, Europe, and Latin America will address alternative archive-making in their own work.
- Architecture Amid the Elements
Sylvia Lavin (Architecture)
This Venice Biennale exhibit includes a special collection of historical books that attest to architecture’s long neglected engagement with matters of environmental concern, and a gallery of architectural models that will operate as spatial and material manicules to bring these urgent environmentalities into the present. The grant will support the participation of University faculty and graduate students in the exhibit installation and opening in May 2026.
- Underrepresented Coin Finds from the Late Antique Heartland in the FLAME Database
Alan Stahl (Classics and Princeton University Library)
The understanding of the late antique economy suffers from a major gap in the territory of Greece and Turkey, where the reporting of physical finds of coins are limited. This grant will support the Library’s FLAME Project to establish two teams of graduate student researchers covering Greece and Turkey to help ameliorate this underrepresentation. Each team will include two students from the respective country, as well as a graduate student coordinator from Princeton.The project will conclude with a public meeting in Princeton in May 2026.
- Clay Has Memory: Generational Knowledge from Africa
James Steward (Princeton University Art Museum)
Organized by Assistant Curator of African Art Perrin Lathrop, the exhibit “Clay Has Memory” will be on view in the new PUAM’s first floor welcome gallery from July 2026-July 2027. It will trouble the boundaries between art and craft, centering the contributions of Black artists, especially Black women, and inviting inquiry into the hierarchies that have historically relegated their creative labor to the realm of the anonymous and the undervalued. This grant will provide support for the exhibition as well as interdisciplinary opportunities and hands-on, pedagogy-driven workshops for faculty across arts and sciences.
Courses
- Salzburg Seminar on Opera, Politics and Cultural Diplomacy
Rubén Gallo (Spanish and Portuguese)
This grant will support a 10-day faculty-led trip to Austria, where undergraduate students will participate in the Saltzburg Summer Festival by attending opera performances, meeting with directors and performers, and discussing their experience of opera as a forum to discuss contemporary events and politics in a panel at the Salzburg Forum.
- Recentering Jordan in the Anthropology of the Modern Middle East
Timothy Loh (Society of Fellows, Humanities Council, and Anthropology)
As part of the undergraduate course “The Science of the Human,” students will travel to Jordan during spring break. Through discussions with local experts and visits to grassroots organizations, students will learn about key issues in and out of Jordan, developing a comparative lens to understand how such issues affect not only Jordan and the Middle East but other regions of the world.
- Immersive Realities in Architecture: Pioneering New Ways of World-Making
Daniela Mitterberger (Architecture)
A new Fall 2025 undergraduate course will integrate extended reality (XR) and immersive design into the architecture curriculum via tutorials, documentation and exhibition of student work, and support the purchase of XR technologies for hands-on learning. A one-day trip to New York City. Students will use game engines to design immersive spaces, simulate architectural environments, and craft virtual atmospheres.
- Technology for African Languages in the Digital Age (PIIRS Global Seminar)
Mahiri Mwita (PIIRS) and Happy Buzaaba (PIIRS)
This project will provide stipends, transportation, and accommodation for Kenyan students and supervisors to enhance a Summer 2026 PIIRS Global Seminar in Kenya. The seminar will bring together instructors, Princeton students, and local Kenyan students to enhance the representation of African languages in emerging language technologies. Participants will collect image, audio, and text data in six Kenyan languages.
- The Princeton Electronic Music Festival
Jeff Snyder (Music)
To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), this grant will support an Electronic Music Festival that will offer a year-long series of events showcasing different aspects of electronic music. Each of the four mini-symposiums will bring guests to campus to interact with students through workshops and for a public-facing event that combines music performances and conversations with Princeton-affiliated musicians and researchers.
Other New Projects in the Humanities
In addition to Magic awards, the Humanities Council supports faculty projects through:
