2022-2023
- Creative Ecologies
Allison Carruth (American Studies, High Mountain Environmental Institute)
This grant will support the inaugural activities of an “Environmental Art and Media Lab,” which will foster art and storytelling experiments aimed at sparking new understanding of and solutions to the most pressing environmental crises of our present.
- Dirty Books: Chemical Analysis of Stains on Papyri from Oxyrhynchus
AnneMarie Luijendijk (Religion)
This project will chemically analyze – for the first time – the dirt accrued to Greco-Roman papyri in their lifespan to understand more fully how books in antiquity were handled and preserved, and how they were discarded.
- Environmental History Lab (EHL) of the Program in Medieval Studies
Helmut Reimitz (History, Program in Medieval Studies); Janet Kay (Art & Archaeology)
This three-year grant will enhance the Environmental History Lab (EHL), an initiative from the Program in Medieval Studies. The EHL will host seminars and undergraduate workshops, as well as related courses and activities that emphasize the importance of environmental history for understanding the medieval past.
- Food Studies Forum
Anne Cheng (English); Allison Carruth (American Studies, High Meadows Environmental Institute); Andrew Chignell (Religion, University Center for Human Values); Tessa L. Desmond (American Studies); Hanna Garth (Anthropology); Daniel Rubenstein (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology); Shamus Khan (Sociology, American Studies)
This project brings innovative and inspiring scholars, artists, activists, and thought leaders to explore, imagine, and think critically about food studies. This grant will support a constellation of events including guest speakers, a spring public lecture, and a farm-to-table dinner.
- High-Water Mark
Carolyn Rouse (Anthropology); Jeff Whetstone (Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Visual Arts); Jeff Himpele (Anthropology)
This grant will support a series of guest lectures, which aim to introduce local New Jersey preservationists and community leaders to exceptional scholars, artists, and architects, and provide a new vocabulary and way of thinking about change and preservation.
- Humanities + Data Science Summer Institute
Meredith Martin (English, Center for Digital Humanities)
The Humanities + Data Science Summer Institute, run by the Center for Digital Humanities, will empower scholars from the humanities and humanities-adjacent social sciences to engage with the conceptual, practical, and ethical aspects of data science.
- Sick Architecture
Beatriz Colomina (Architecture)
This collaborative project, which allows graduate students to investigate a wide range of intersections between medicine and architecture, was developed from an ongoing interdisciplinary seminar. This grant will support expanded research exhibitions in Princeton and at the Centre International pour la Ville, l’Architecture et le Paysage (CIVA) in Brussels.
- Sites of Memory: Practice, Performance, Perception
Autumn Womack (African American Studies, English); Kinohi Nishikawa (English, African American Studies)
This interdisciplinary symposium will examine the method and meaning of Toni Morrison’s archival practice in relation to her writing, teaching, and public intellectual work. The symposium complements the Spring 2023 Princeton University Library exhibition, “Sites of Memory: The Archival World of Toni Morrison.
- Technology Infrastructure to Broaden Museum Accessibility and Engagement
James Steward (Princeton University Art Museum)
This grant will support the development of “VirtualWalk,” a web-based 360-degree virtual tour of the Princeton University Art Museum that provides off-site users with a full view of installations, and contributing to the Museum’s commitment to openness, connectivity, and accessibility.
Courses
- Counterworlds: Innovation and Rupture in Communities of Artistic Practice
Brigid Doherty (German, Art & Archaeology); Josephine Meckseper (Humanities Council, Art & Archaeology)
This Fall 2022 course explores utopian and dystopian ideas and the dynamics of creative collaboration. The grant will support course enhancements, including seminars from distinguished guests, materials for a potential student exhibition, and studio visits to New York City.
- The French Revolution: Political Theory and Culture
Flora Champy (French and Italian); Greg Conti (Politics)
This grant supports the development of a Summer 2022 intensive, study-abroad, interdisciplinary course taught in Paris which will introduce undergraduates to the ideas at the core of the French Revolution. The course will be innovative in its cross-disciplinary nature, associating methods from the humanities and political science to grasp a watershed moment of modernity.
- Historical Structures: ancient architecture, materials, construction techniques, and engineering problems
Michael Koortbojian (Art & Archaeology); Branko Glisic (Civil Engineering)
In this new HUM course “Historical Structures: ancient architecture, materials, construction techniques, and engineering problems,” students will explore the intersection of Art and Archaeology and Civil Engineering. This grant supports a fall break trip to Rome for students to study monuments in person.
- Land and Story in Native America
Tessa L. Desmond (American Studies); Sarah Rivett (English, American Studies)
This Spring 2023 AMS course will explore the relationship between land and story, emphasizing seeds as sources of sovereignty and repositories of knowledge across generations. The course will invite guest speakers, and work directly with the Munsee Three Sisters Farm and other community partners, as well as conduct archival research on seeds for Princeton’s Seed Farm.
- Making the Viking Age
Matthew Delvaux (History)
This grant will support an interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies course, “Making the Viking World,” in Spring 2023. Students will examine the developments of the Viking Age, ca. 700–1100, through a combination of experimental, experiential, and hands-on learning, including a spring break course trip to Denmark.
- Musical Theatre and Fan Cultures
Stacy Wolf (Theater, American Studies); Betsy Armstrong (Sociology, SPIA)
Why do people love Broadway musicals? This Fall 2022 team-taught HUM course “Musical Theatre and Fan Cultures” examines the wider phenomenon of fan culture. This grant supports course enrichment, including guest lectures and course travel to form the experiential and intellectual backbone of the seminar.
- Musical Theater and Storytelling in Italy
Stacy Wolf (Theater, American Studies); Cara Reichel (’96); Peter Mills (‘95)
This grant will enrich the PIIRS Global Seminar “Musical Theater and Storytelling in Southern Italy,” where students will study history, culture and language in Gesualdo, Italy, in Summer 2022. This includes a student collaboration with professional artists from New York City and the Irpinia region of Italy.
- Poetry and War: Translating the Untranslatable
Sandra L. Bermann (Comparative Literature)
Through a two-year research project, an online conference, and a Spring 2023 course in Humanistic Studies, “Poetry and War: Translating the Untranslatable” featuring a spring break trip to France, this Magic Grant supports interdisciplinary teaching and research to enhance understanding of the French Resistance through poetry and translation.
- Siegecraft: Architecture, Warfare, and Media
Carolyn Yerkes (Art & Archaeology)
This grant supports a symposium or lecture series as well as a new Spring 2023 ART undergraduate course entitled “Siegecraft: Architecture, Warfare, and Media,” which will consider the ways that early modern media represented, responded to, and reshaped the narratives surrounding the art of siegecraft.
2021-2022
Architecture Arboretum: Archival Exposé
Sylvia Lavin (Architecture)
This project will invent new ways of documenting the architectural arboretum and the ways in which it has and will continue to design the global habitat. Using design methodologies, machine learning, and crowdsourcing to extract trees from architectural drawings, the project will produce data to be investigated by graduate students in a Fall 2021 seminar and to be discussed at a virtual and cross-disciplinary conference on the Design of Trees.
Art Hx: Visualizing the Medical Legacies of British Colonialism
Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Art and Archaeology, African American Studies)
Art Hx explores the historical, and ongoing, entanglements of art, race and colonial medicine through the curation of a digital database and research platform that brings artists, writers, health professionals and scholars into dynamic conversations around archival objects and art works. More information.
Graduate Fellowships in Data Science and Humanities Data
Meredith Martin (English, Center for Digital Humanities) and Peter Ramadge (Electrical Engineering, Center for Statistics and Machine Learning)
This two-part pilot program will train up to eight graduate students in developing curricular materials and modules for humanities computing. Three “Data Science Fellows” will develop humanistic modules for the popular course “Introduction to Data Sciences” (SML 201) in the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning, with an eye toward eventually being able to lead their own precepts as AIs. Five “Humanities Data Fellows” will develop models for integrating humanistic approaches, datasets, or questions into the curriculum.
Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton (NAISIP)
Sarah Rivett (English, American Studies)
This Exploratory Grant supports a new Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton (NAISIP), beginning with the formation of a working group consisting of faculty, staff, and students from across the disciplines and the University, while working to establish and maintain partnerships with Indigenous communities. The collaboration will host a lecture series for the 2021–2022 academic year, a Lenape/Lunape language symposium, an Indigenous Pedagogy workshop, and a conference on storytelling and environmental change in Siberia and the American Arctic. More information.
REACTIVATING MEMORY – Shuffle Along and the Tulsa Race Massacre: A Centennial Symposium
Stacy Wolf (Lewis Center for the Arts) and Catherine M. Young (Lewis Center for the Arts)
A virtual Fall 2021 symposium will mark the centennials of two neglected but pivotal events in US history: (1) the successful, black-created 1921 musical comedy Shuffle Along, which faced racism on Broadway and beyond; and (2) the Tulsa Race Massacre, the burning of the neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street,” which happened one week after Shuffle Along opened. Considering these events in tandem, the symposium will consider Black entrepreneurship, racial capitalism, Jazz Age cultural expression, contemporary journalism, and archival gaps.
2020-2021
The Seminars of Jacques Derrida: An Online Archive
Katie Chenoweth (French and Italian)
This project will produce an online archive featuring the complete teaching materials of one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers. The digital archive, consisting of Derrida’s fully written-out lecture courses delivered at universities in Europe and the United States between 1960 and 2003, will provide open access to over forty years of previously unpublished writing.
Interrogating History: The Classical Black Theater Canon
Program in Theater (Lewis Center for the Arts)
Aiming to expand the classical canon by investigating lesser-known plays by Black writers, this project engages students and professors across disciplines in play readings and dynamic discussions with the theater makers of New York City-based collective CLASSIX. The collaboration’s 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.
Computational Environmental History in Namibia
Emmanuel Kreike (History) and Tsering Shawa (Princeton School of Public and International Affairs)
The project will develop a spatial digital dataset for the computational history of an area in northern Namibia. Combining satellite and aerial photography, orthographic mapping, and experiments with 2D and 3D historical computer simulations, a transect of half a century of dynamic interaction between society and environment will be produced for analysis.
Textual Materiality in Korea: Premodern to Postmodern
Ksenia Chizhova (East Asian Studies)
Foregrounding textual materiality, this workshop offers an interdisciplinary, collaborative platform for scholars working on Korea-related topics. The workshop will result in a special issue, co-edited by the organizers of the Journal of Korean Studies.
Afro-Asian Lives and Cultures in Latin America (Public Virtual Workshop)
Christina Lee (Spanish and Portuguese)
A Fall 2021 symposium on Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America will investigate national and religious identities in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies through concepts of mestizaje (racial mixing), focusing on personal and communal bonds forged between subjects of African and Asian descent from the mid-nineteenth century onwards in Latin America.
Robotic Lacing
Stefana Parascho (Architecture) and Basile Baudez (Art and Archaeology)
Transposing the traditional craft of bobbin lacing into a robotic fabrication process, the project will not only automate the complex process of lace-making but also explore the design potential of a new lacing method and exploit its three-dimensionality for load-bearing applications. Ultimately, the developed technique will be implemented in a large-scale architectural prototype to test and showcase new applications for textile craft.
Team-Teaching Grants in Humanistic Studies
Language To Be Looked At
Joshua Kotin (English); Irene Small (Art and Archaeology)
This seminar focuses on the intersection of language and visual art in the twentieth-century. We begin by examining modernist and avant-garde experiments in word and image and then investigate the global rise of concrete and visual poetry and text-based art movements after World War II.
Ancient Plots, Modern Twists
Yelena Baraz (Classics); Jhumpa Lahiri (Creative Writing)
This team-taught capstone seminar will examine ancient plots as generative forces for new creative work. We will ask how ancient Greek and Roman plots are appropriated, reused, and reimagined by modern and contemporary writers.
Curricular Innovation
The Classics and Activism
Dan-El Padilla Peralta (Classics) and Brooke Holmes (Classics)
This new graduate seminar will bring together two lines of inquiry not traditionally put in conversation: first, the history and practice of activism as a force for reconfiguring academic knowledge; second, primary texts from Greco-Roman antiquity. By introducing activists as seminar co-teachers and by disseminating the seminar beyond Princeton, the seminar aims to incubate new modes of practicing knowledge of “the classics” as a public good.
Reckoning: Complicated Histories and Collective Identities
Tiffany C. Cain (Humanities Council; Anthropology; Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts)
Through field experiences in a Fall 2021, Anthropology and Humanistic Studies seminar students will grapple with violent pasts through investigations of the cultural media surrounding memorials, monuments, museums, and collaborative heritage.
A History of Words: Technologies of Communication from Cuneiform to Coding
Melissa Reynolds (Humanities Council; History; Humanistic Studies; Society of Fellows)
The new course considers how we communicate–via inscription, graffito, letter, or blog post–affects the structures of our culture. Students will trace the evolution of written communication from ancient Sumeria to modern-day America. Through complementary “digital labs,” students will engage with primary sources representative of cultural shifts and develop criteria for analyzing digital archives.
Korean Language Learning in Virtual Environments: Exploring and Navigating the Metropolitan City of Seoul
Ho Jung Choi (East Asian Studies)
In a collaboration with Yonsei University in Seoul, a virtual reality pedagogy will be created for Princeton’s Korean language courses, using VR 360 video footages.
Multi-Year Projects and Global Initiatives
Borobudur: A Research and Teaching Project for Faculty and Students
Jonathan Gold (Religion)
Integrating research and teaching around the famous Buddhist monument of Borobudur near Yogyakarta, Indonesia, this project supports Princeton faculty, graduate students and undergraduates in solidifying networks and developing research projects both at Princeton and in Southeast Asia. There will be a team-taught undergraduate course and conferences in Indonesia (Summer 2021) and Princeton (Fall 2021).
Past, Present, and Future of Incarceration
Matthew Larsen (Religion; Society of Fellows); Wendy Warren (History)
Expanding the history of incarceration beyond the prison-industrial complex, this project includes a team-taught courses in Humanistic Studies, “Incarceration in Roman Antiquity” (Fall 2019) and a new Carceral Studies reading group, culminating in an interdisciplinary conference.
Tang-Song Transition Workshop
Anna Shields (East Asian Studies)
In its third year, the workshop uses resources in Princeton University Art Museum, Marquand Library, and Gest Library to take an interdisciplinary approach to an epochal shift in Chinese history, from China’s medieval to early modern period.
Piranesi on the Page
Carolyn Yerkes (Art and Archaeology)
Known as an artist, etcher, and architect, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) was also a maker of bound books. An exhibit in Firestone Library’s new galleries will demonstrate vividly how he combined his creative obsessions.
2019-20
The Power of LIFE: LIFE Magazine and American Photography, 1936–1972
James Steward and Katherine Bussard (Princeton University Art Museum)
On view at the Princeton University Art Museum from February to June, 2020, this exhibit considers how the iconic magazine LIFE shaped the modern idea of photography and Americans’ idea of themselves and their modern history. Co-organized with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
African Spirituality in Global Consciousness: Magic, Vision, Truth
Lauren Coyle Rosen (Anthropology)
A year of workshops and lectures explores the histories of “traditional” African spirituality in Africa and the diaspora, generating insights about “magical” aspects of humanistic knowing and being from a range of disciplines–theology, anthropology, history, literature, sociology, art, and philosophy.
50th Anniversary of Co-Education at Princeton
Jane Cox (Theater, Lewis Center for the Arts)
Journalistic research by three generations of Princeton women—current students, professional artist alumnae, and the first generation of graduating women—will culminate in a Lewis Center for the Arts theatrical event exploring the experiences of women at Princeton.
Paris, Modern: Workshop Series
Joshua Kotin (English); Effie Rentzou (French and Italian)
Four workshops related to a team-taught graduate course, “Paris, Modern” (Fall 2019) will feature works-in-progress by well-known scholars of the artistic, literary, and intellectual culture in Paris between 1905 and 1940.
Atmospheric Perspective
Sylvia Lavin (Architecture)
Seminars on the environmental historiography of architecture will cross with histories of drawing, representation, architecture, and the environmental humanities, working with source materials and developing skills in collaborative research and curatorial techniques.
Team Teaching Grants in Humanistic Studies
Poetry and the Digital World
Brian Kernighan (Computer Science); Effie Rentzou (French and Italian)
A new capstone seminar in Humanistic Studies will bring together humanities and applied sciences, addressing questions of literacy, media, and modes of knowledge. Organized around two poles, poetry and digital technology, the course will explore each as a mode of understanding the real, but also as modes and media of distributing knowledge. The course will use geolocation, image recognition, and augmented reality to create a new interface for poetry–lifting it off the page.
Building Medieval Worlds
Sarah M. Anderson (English); Janet E. Kay (History; Society of Fellows)
This new Humanistic Studies team-taught course (Spring 2020) will investigate how peoples in the early medieval period (400-1100 CE) constructed their cultural identities and negotiated their places within cultural and physical landscapes. Funds will support a class tour and gallery talk at the Morgan Library and at the Cloisters, as well as in-class workshops.
Curricular Innovation
Ancient Greek Religion: Place, Matter, Text
Joshua Billings (Classics); Michael Flower (Classics)
Graduate students will explore theoretical approaches to space, landscape, material culture, ritual, magic, belief, and text, and visit case studies in Athens, Delphi, Olympia, and Eleusis. The course combines the literary-critical analysis of ancient texts with an exploration of the relevant material and archaeological evidence.
Art, Culture and History in Poland (1050-1950)
Thomas Kaufmann (Art and Archaeology)
In a new course, “From Nation-Building to Nationalisms in Central Europe,” students will travel to distinctive geographical regions in Poland: Warsaw, Wrocław (Breslau), Silesia, and Krakow. The trip will introduce students to the multi-cultural and multi-religious character of Polish cultural history, and present little seen masterpieces by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci.
Moscow on the Hudson: Fall Break Trip to Moscow
Katherine Reischl (Slavic); Aaron Shkuda (Princeton-Mellon Initiative)
This course explores literary and cultural studies in an urban studies context, at two seemingly disparate sites, from Central Park to Gorky Park. Students will experience the physical construct of sites, locations, and expressions of cultural identity in both Moscow and New York City.
The Science of Roman History
Caroline Cheung (Classics)
Methods from history, archaeology, chemistry, biology, and mathematics will shed light on understudied and neglected aspects of ancient history, through case studies and hands-on experiences. Also supported by the 250th Anniversary Fund and the Council for Science and Technology
Understor(e)y
Rebecca Lazier (Dance, Lewis Center for the Arts); Sigrid Adriaenssens (Civil and Environmental Engineering)
The grant will support reflections on a collaborative art and engineering project at the Lewis Center for the Arts, designed to bridge the humanities and engineering through the creation of interdisciplinary choreographic sculptures and interactive tensile structures. The grant will also support a culminating festival of talks, performances, and long-table discussions.
Yakutsk, Siberia
Simon Morrison (Music)
In an new component to an established PIIRS Global Seminar, students will travel from Moscow to Yakutsk, Siberia, to study the effects of climate change in the region, learn about the Indigenous culture, examine the history of the GULAG prison camp system, and explore the natural environment (cave complexes and waterways).
2018-19
Alphabetographies
Eduardo Cadava (English)
The Humanities Council’s Long-Term Visiting Belknap Fellow, Susan Meiselas, renowned photographer and storyteller in images, will team teach a course in the the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in the Humanities (IHUM), Alphabetographies with Eduardo Cadava. Examining the roots of visuality and literacy, the course also considers collaborations between writers and photographers. Their Magic Project award will support enrichment of the course through class trips to regional photography exhibitions and visits to the course by photographers such as Jim Goldberg, Latoya Ruby Frazier, and Fazal Sheikh. The project culminates in a one day workshop that weaves together these exposures and discussions.
Exposure: Utah and the Bears Ears Monument
Michael Celia (Director, Princeton Environmental Institute and Civil and Environmental Engineering); Fazal Sheikh (photographer)
A Magic Grant will provide partial support for the Princeton Environmental Institute’s Barron Visiting Professor Fazal Sheikh to enrich his Environmental Humanities course with a Spring 2019 break trip to Utah. As part of this project, entitled Exposure: Utah and the Bears Ears Monument, undergraduates will meet with policy makers and with individuals impacted, not least members of the Navajo nation, which communally holds the lands as sacred, while also contextualizing the role of extractive industries in the state. The course interacts with other PEI-sponsored events throughout the semester, including a late-spring conference, a web presence, and a museum exhibition based on the project’s studies.
How to Read the Archive? Responses to Jacques Derrida’s Geschlecht III
Katie Chenoweth (French and Italian)
How to Read the Archive? Responses to Jacques Derrida’s Geschlecht III will use support to explore new methodologies for reading archival materials and creating dialogue across archival collections. Geschlecht III is a major archival discovery that offers a powerful deconstruction of nationalism via Jacques Derrida’s close reading of an essay by Martin Heidegger. Katie Chenoweth in the Department of French and Italian will gather scholars for a two-day conference (October 12-13, 2018), inviting them to respond to this recently unearthed text and to put it in dialogue with the philosopher’s personal library, housed at Princeton University Library.
Loosening the Bauhaus
Beatriz Colomina (Architecture)
This unique project, beyond the usual limits of the School of Architecture, is a catalyst to transform teaching within the school. For 100 years, design pedagogy has adopted and responded to techniques developed at the Bauhaus. With Loosening the Bauhaus Professor Colomina will use Magic Project funds to generate new research at Princeton and play a leadership role in establishing a multi-disciplinary “Floating University” in Berlin in August 2018. Princeton will be one of four international university partners (HFBK (Hamburg), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Columbia, and Princeton) in a 4-day Werkstatt: Technik-Fortschritt, a workshop as an educational experiment that will develop critical positions regarding the Bauhaus legacy.
Community Engagement, Educational Justice, and the Humanities
Jessica Delgado (Religion)
Jessica Delgado (Religion) plans a two-and-a-half-day conference, Community Engagement, Educational Justice, and the Humanities, convening engaged university faculty, community organizers, activists, artists, innovators, and scholars in the fields of critical pedagogy and educational justice. Cognizant that effective community engagement is not just a matter of declaring and resourcing initiatives, but also of reaching out to make decisions defining priorities inclusively with off-campus partners, the meeting will privilege examination of practices and question whether institutional aims create paradoxes that may diminish the effectiveness of universities’ inclusionary and solidarity-building community work. Building on the conference, members of the Third Space collective of scholars and activists and invited community workers will reflect, discuss, and set out reconsidered plans for their educational justice and community engagement work.
Battle Lab: The Battle of Princeton
Rachael DeLue (Art and Archaeology); Nathan Arrington (Art and Archaeology)
Breaking new ground in Princeton’s archaeology curriculum, the interdisciplinary Program in Humanistic Studies will bring the the first course in non-classical archaeological field research to its classroom. Led by Rachael DeLue and Nathan Arrington, Battle Lab: The Battle of Princeton, will offer students the unique opportunity to participate in the archaeological investigation of the Princeton Battlefield, the site of conflict between American and British forces in early 1777. Students will be exposed to the cross-disciplinary methods that define current archaeological practice, from archival research to application of ground-penetrating radar. The course will also confront dialogues about Revolutionary War legacies, including how sites may be preserved or their memory may change with new uses.
Read the PAW article.
Jesus and Buddha
Jonathan Gold (Religion); Elaine Pagels (Religion)
Based in the Program in Humanistic Studies, a new, large, introductory course, Jesus and Buddha, team taught by Jonathan Gold and Elaine Pagels, will expand the usual offerings in Princeton’s Department of Religion to offer, for the first time, a broad-ranging introductory course in comparative religion. Gold and Pagels bring mastery of the languages, texts, and scholarship of Buddhism and Christianity, respectively, to a thematically unified weekly session. The beliefs and observances of birth, death, ritual, and revelation, among several topics, in each tradition will be drawn into comparison through a space for conversation in the classroom to illuminate the humanity shared across cultures.
Gustavo Dudamel at Princeton: Music Across Disciplines
Wendy Heller (Music)
The Department of Music will host a three-visit residency from renowned conductor Gustavo Dudamel with Princeton University Concerts in the 2018-19 season. Magic Project funds will support Gustavo Dudamel at Princeton: Music Across Disciplines, activities that coalesce Dudamel’s interest in exploring music’s social, humanistic, and interdisciplinary relevance intimately connected to musical performance. Scheduled programs are, “Music & the Americas,” (December 2) “Art & Faith,” (January 8), “Art & Nature” (April 23) and “Art & Politics” (April 26-27). Post-concert multi-disciplinary panel discussions will explore the connections suggested by the programming. At the close of his residency Maestro Dudamel will conduct the Princeton University Orchestra and Glee Club in a program celebrating music’s relationship with literature.
Theater and Society Now
Brian Herrera (Lewis Center for the Arts)
Brian Herrera’s new course in the Program in Theater, Theater and Society Now, asks what contemporary American theater is and is not saying about the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society. With Magic Project funds students will see and do more, attending performances and venue-based discussions of some of the most intensive, engaged productions now on stage. Herrera will also use the resources to host leading theatermakers in class. Aiming to make students conversant in the social, economic, political, artistic and cultural structures that undergird how we see what we see on American stages of all kinds, the course will culminate with a late-semester “work demo” that reflects its synthesis of arts praxis, humanistic tools, and social impact.
Archaeology As History: Studying the Past by Digging in the Dirt
Janet Kay (Society of Fellows and History)
The Freshman Seminar recruits students’ critical thinking skills by asking how practitioners of different techniques learn from each other, in this case how History learns from the interpretative practices of Archaeology. Kay and her students will work with specially prepared data collected from excavation archives of Roman sites in Oxfordshire. Kay worked with colleagues Kathleen Downey (Department of Anthropology, Ohio State University) and Rebecca Mountain (School of Anthropology, University of Arizona), who assessed and completed 3D-scans of the skeletal material. Using 3D-printed replicas of human skeletons and digital records of accompanying burial finds, members of Kay’s course will piece together an interpretation and ‘publish’ the burial. Students will encounter how STEM methods are integrated into archaeology and the questions facing working excavation teams prior to, during, and after fieldwork. As they work on their own interpretations, they will need to address how Historians work with these material remains.
Mapping the Empire’s Watery Ways: The Chinese Grand Canal in History, Literature, and Art,
Paize Keulemans (East Asian Studies)
Second in renown among imperial structures to China’s Great Wall, its Grand Canal was arguably more important and undoubtedly more successful. Paize Keulemans will use Magic Project funds to sponsor a research project, Mapping the Empire’s Watery Ways: The Chinese Grand Canal in History, Literature, and Art, leading to a multi-disciplinary workshop dedicated to investigating the Grand Canal as a single “structure” crucial to Chinese history through the last two millennia. As a manifestation of interconnection and network, the Grand Canal will also act as a metaphor that addresses the legacy of monumental infrastructural investments as means of integration by the Chinese state over its history.
Antioch from the Seleucids to Late Antiquity
AnneMarie Luijendijk (Religion)
This Magic Project grant will support course travel for Anne Marie Luijendijk’s Department of Religion course, concentrating on the city of Antioch, at the northeast corner of the Mediterranean, the trips will allow students to make a close study of objects in the collections of Dumbarton Oaks, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, in addition to Princeton’s resources. Students will create a virtual exhibit drawing together material remains from Antioch over three quarters of a millennium.
Dancing with and around Neurological Motor Challenges: An Interdisciplinary Working Group
Susan Marshall (Lewis Center for the Arts); Sabine Kastner (Psychology); Naomi Leonard (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering); Brian Herrera (Lewis Center for the Arts)
How can we make environments that are inclusive and accessible for neuro-divergent individuals? Concentrating on people with motor, attention and regulation dysfunction (e.g. autism, DCD), the group will gather perspectives from art, neurology, and engineering, and will include Princeton graduate students, professional dancers, neuro-divergent individuals and their advocates, and external consultant Henny Admoni. Meetings, starting in summer 2018, will prepare for a conference in at the end of 2018 and subsequent follow up with applied artistic creation, scientific research, tool and system innovation.
Others
Florent Masse (French and Italian)
A Magic Project grant will support preparation of a new team-taught course, Others, in the Department of French and Italian and Humanistic Studies, taught by Florent Masse and Visiting Belknap Fellow in the Humanities Council, Pascal Rambert, an acclaimed playwright, director, choreographer, and impresario. Incorporating Rambert’s creative process into the course plan, students will work entirely in French to write, produce and, perform a Princeton-specific production of Rambert’s play, A [micro] history of world economics, danced.
BiM Incubator of Architechnopoetics
Mitch McEwen (Architecture); Autumn M. Womack (English; African American Studies); Nijah Cunningham (Society of Fellows; African American Studies; English)
Magic Project funds will support a collaboration between faculty in Architecture and African-American Studies. Drawing together three preparatory workshops to produce a performance in the Architectural Laboratory, the project is led by V. Mitch McEwen, Autumn M. Womack, and Nijah Cunningham. What do the imaginative layers of the fiction of race, spatial determination, and architecture provide to the exploration of difference and the production of blackness? Assembling scholars, architects, technologists, hackers, artists, and students, the project will synthesize the technological and social, imaginative and robotic.
Indigenous/Settler
Sarah Rivett (English; American Studies)
In 1970, Princeton University hosted the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars. It was a seminal gathering that accelerated American Indian Studies as a scholarly discipline in the United States. Sarah Rivett will use her Magic Project award to conduct Indigenous/Settler, a major two-day conference April 4-6, 2019 in the fields of American Indian, Indigenous and Settler Colonial studies. These interconnected areas of study are taking off in new directions framed by comparative, global, and interdisciplinary perspectives. The meeting will convene an inclusive slate of invitees, for a conference that aims to provide a platform for innovative discussions across the fields.
The Workshop on Tang-Song Transitions
Anna Shields (East Asian Studies)
Recently Princeton has gathered a strong cohort of scholars concentrating on “middle period” China (ca. 800-1400), a group among the strongest outside East Asia. The Workshop will capitalize on faculty, graduate students, and extensive material resources in Princeton University Art Museum, Marquand Library, and Gest Library collections. The workshop will take an interdisciplinary approach to one of the eras of epochal shift in Chinese history, which saw change in many areas of life, effecting a shift from what historians deem China’s medieval to its early modern period. The group will follow up with a conference in spring 2021 and a summer 2021 workshop to produce a conference volume.
Sound Knowledges
Gavin Steingo (Music)
Sound studies examines media and society as an alternative account to the visual. This burgeoning field has grown rapidly in recent years, but considerable work remains to done to realize its potential. Gavin Steingo takes aim at these gaps. Magic Project funding will be used to develop a forum to foster cross-disciplinary investment in sonic knowledge. This will take the form of a yearlong 2018-19 series of talks, performances, and events, along with a 2019-20 workshop that will gather scholars and artists from Princeton and beyond. Steingo will also integrate elements of the project with his undergraduate and graduate teaching.
2017-18
Course Development Grants for Team Teaching
These faculty will develop team-taught undergraduate courses that reach beyond a single department/unit and are explicitly interdisciplinary in their conception. These courses will be cross-listed in Humanistic Studies and fulfill a requirement for the undergraduate certificate program. Examining larger questions and major texts, these courses build bridges either within the arts and humanities, or across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Medical Story-Worlds
Elena Fratto (Slavic Languages and Literatures); Tala Khanmalek (Gender and Sexuality Studies)
This team-taught seminar will explore questions of illness, health, and the body through a wide range of literary texts from all over the world, using storytelling as an entry point to these fundamental human experiences. The seminar will be interactive and highly collaborative, featuring guest lecturers from Global Health, the Lewis Center, the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories, and a Theater of the Oppressed group, who will each teach a class in their own institutional “space.” As students move from the classroom to a theater, from a lab to a dance studio, concepts and definitions are continuously reassessed and reframed.
Read the University homepage feature.
How the Past Became History, from East Asia to the Ancient Mediterranean
Nino Luraghi (Classics); Federico Marcon (History; East Asian Studies)
This is an interdisciplinary capstone course for Humanities Studies in the fall of 2017, considers Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Roman historiography, traditions of history writing, and problems of historical method and historical theory. With a strong focus on in-class discussion, the course will offer students an opportunity to engage in several different kinds of activity.
Witness
Marni Sandweiss (History) and Esther Schor (English)
This team-taught course Witness will be an interdisciplinary capstone course for Humanities Studies in the spring of 2018. What is a witness? What does it mean to witness? Who witnesses, and what does a witness do? A collaborative effort to define the term “witness” and an introduction to the many contexts in which the act of witnessing is crucial. We’ll relate the idea of witness to testimony and evidence – also key terms in this course. A look at “testimony” in various media – legal testimony, prints, photographs, journalistic accounts, memoir- to discuss the challenges posed by different media.
Who Owns This Sentence? Copyright Culture From The Romantic Era To The Age Of The Internet
David Bellos (Comparative Literature); Alexandre Montagu (Class of 1987, property lawyer)
Magic funds will support the preparation for a new course Who Owns This Sentence? Copyright Culture From The Romantic Era To The Age Of The Internet; course with broad appeal for undergraduate students of literature, media, and history, and one of lasting relevance for eventual careers in the humanities, law, and the performing arts.
Defining Gender in Early Modern Iberia
Marina Brownlee (Spanish and Portuguese)
This Magic grant will support a one-day workshop to explore cultural attitudes and institutions by bringing together scholars known for their contributions to the definitions of gender.
Asia Theory Visuality
Steven Chung (East Asian Studies); Erin Huang (Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies); Franz Prichard (East Asian Studies)
The conference funded by a Magic Grant will develop a forum for comparative and interdisciplinary scholarship on modern and contemporary Asia(s) at Princeton.
Thinking Cinema
Committee for Film Studies
“Thinking Cinema” will be a year-long lecture series that structures vibrant encounters between leading film scholars and the Princeton community. At its core will be the work of historians and theorists whose research interests span temporal and regional frames but who share a commitment to critical film and media analysis.
Read about the lecture series.
The Story of Slag: Creating a Chronology of Copper Smelting for Japan 700-2000
Thomas Conlan (East Asian Studies; History); Howard Stone (Mechanical Aerospace Engineering); Nan Yao (Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials, PRISM)
The funds will be used for the chemical and electron microscope analysis of slag samples so as to ascertain changes in smelting over these centuries.
Story telling with Technology for Performance
Jane Cox (Theater)
The Magic fund supports guest artists and engineers for a new course “Story telling with Technology for Performance,” created by Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Theater and the Council on Science and Technology. Students will learn about tools and techniques from design professionals across several fields, and will engage directly and collaboratively with technology to design experiences focused around live performance.
Learning by the Book: Manuals in the History of Knowledge
Angela Creager (History)
Magic funds supports a graduate workshop, a working group of interdisciplinary scholars who are examining the role of such texts in different countries and regions, and in periods from antiquity to the present.
La Patrona Collective
Jessica Delgado (Religion)
This summer, a Magic grant will fund a research trip to Rome for La Patrona Collective for Colonial Latin American Scholarship. While in Rome, members of the Collective and graduate students will spend a week in the Vatican archives and workshops to support collaborative projects as well as student’s individual work.
Poisonous Flowers: Radical Women in Latin America
Javier Guerrero (Spanish and Portuguese)
This Magic grant funds a fall trip to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles where students will explore Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, an art exhibition that reevaluates the contribution of Latin American, Latina, and Chicana women artists to contemporary art. The trip is for the course Poisonous Flowers: Radical Women in Latin America.
Read the Council homepage story.
The History of New Orleans: Invention and Reinvention in an American City
Joshua Guild (African American Studies; History)
Magic funds will support a spring break trip to New Orleans for students taking the course, “The History of New Orleans: Invention and Reinvention in an American City.”
Inca Art and Architecture
Andrew Hamilton (Art and Archaeology)
Magic funds support the spring break excursion to Cusco, Machu Picchu, and Lima for the Inca Art and Architecture undergraduate seminar. The excursion is designed as an “art history laboratory” where students collaboratively explore ideas and advance each other’s research.
Venice and the East
Wendy Heller (Music); Jamie Reuland (Music)
Magic funds a spring break trip to Venice for an undergraduate seminar, Venice and the East, giving students the opportunity to explore Venice’s unique topography, its ceremonial spaces, and how life was experienced in the Venetian Republic. The trip will include visits to archives and museums.
Read the University homepage feature.
Journalism Initiative
The Princeton Journalism Initiative will function as a laboratory and incubator for path-breaking ventures aimed at expanding news literacy among citizens, increasing the amount and quality of accountability journalism, and exploring new models for funding serious, impactful journalism.
Shakespeare and Company Lending Library
Joshua Kotin (English)
This Magic grant will support the hiring of graduate students to recreate the Shakespeare and Company lending library. Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1919, and closed its doors to the public in 1941, during the Nazi occupation of France. Princeton’s Firestone Library holds Beach’s papers, which document the lending library’s inventory as well as its growth.
The Intellectual Lives of Hugo Grotius
Russ Leo (English)
Magic funds support the conference “The Intellectual Lives of Hugo Grotius.” Drawing together scholars of philosophy, political theory, theology and literature, this conference aims to explore Grotius’ various projects and to place his work in conversation with contemporaries at a crucial transitional moment in European intellectual history.
Recovering the Archive of the World’s Earliest Voice Mail (1905–1907)
Thomas Levin (German); Adam Finkelstein (Computer Science)
Magic grants funds a two-year project Recovering the Archive of the World’s Earliest Voice Mail (1905–1907), a new project aims to finally read a long lost chapter of media history, postcards known as Sonorines.
Read the University homepage feature.
Sarajevo Chamber Music Festival
Anna Lim (Music)
This Magic grant will fund the travel for an undergraduate string quartet to participate in the Sarajevo Chamber Music Festival, workshops, master classes and concerts in Sarajevo and nearby cities in August 2017.
Read the Council homepage story.
The Analysing Engine
Andrew Lovett (Music)
A Magic grant will fund the performance of a new comic-opera, The Analysing Engine by Andrew Lovett, and a one-day conference examining the state of small-scale opera.
L’Avant-Scène
Florent Masse (French and Italian)
This Magic grant will offer students the chance to travel to and explore new territories in Asia supporting a new enriching L’Avant-Scène international program to Japan next fall break 2017.
Surrealism: From France to the World
Efthymia Rentzou (French and Italian)
Magic funds support an international conference, Surrealism: From France to the World that will be held at Princeton University in March 2018, unifying the scholarly field of Surrealism studies in the arts and humanities, beginning with Anglo-American and French academia.
Jamie Reuland (Music)
Magic funds will support the redesign of Music 270 course into music performance and music history course.
The Princeton & Slavery Project
Marni Sandweiss (History)
Magic grants will support the launch of The Princeton & Slavery Project, bringing scholarly humanistic research to a broad public on the campus and beyond.
Read about the project on the University homepage and in The New York Times.
Eighth Blackbird
Dan Trueman (Music) and Paul Muldoon (Lewis Center for the Arts)
Magic funds will support an eight-day residency of Eighth Blackbird, a Grammy award-winning contemporary music ensemble in February 2018.
Read more on the Music homepage.
Religion and the American Normal
Judith Weisenfeld (Religion)
Magic funds will support the Religion and the American Normal conference, exploring the intersections of religion and constructions of the normal in twentieth and twenty-first-century American life.
Beyond Bollywood
Zahid Chaudhary (English)
Zahid Chaudhary was awarded a Magic grant to support guest speakers and activities related to a new course, “Beyond Bollywood.” The course focuses on the cinema’s global reach, visual pleasure, mix of traditions and genres, relationship to the popular and to “third cinema,” and its checkered history across decolonization, the cold war, globalization, and the age of terror.
Read about the 2022-23 Magic Projects
