The Humanities Council is pleased to welcome four Long-Term and nine Short-Term Visiting Fellows to the University for the academic year 2021-22.
Visiting fellows are distinguished writers, artists, and scholars from around the world, nominated by chairs of humanities departments with support from directors of interdisciplinary programs in the humanities.
Long-Term Fellows will spend the semester at Princeton, teaching a course for a full semester. Short-Term Fellows lecture and participate in classes, colloquia, and informal discussions during intensive three-to-five-day visits on campus.
Long-Term Visiting Fellows
Fall 2021
Branka Arsić
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Course: Literary and Cultural Theory: Ecological Poetics of the 19th C. Americas (ENG 571/COM 574)
Professor Arsić will be a Class of 1932 Visiting Fellow in thee Humanities Council and the Department of English. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, Early American literature, sixteenth- to eighteenth-century European philosophy, contemporary continental philosophy, and the philosophy of literature.
Carlos Spoerhase
Professor of German Literature, Bielefeld University
Course: Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory: From Minimalism to Maximalism: Scale in Literature, the Arts, & Media, co-taught with Nikolaus Wegmann (GER 520)
Professor Spoerhase will be a Class of 1932 Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of German. He is a German literary theorist who regularly writes on contemporary literature and the current state of the humanities.
Miranda Fricker
Presidential Professor, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Course: Ethics: Moral Philosophy, co-taught with Victoria McGeer (PHI 525)
Professor Fricker will be a Class of 1932 Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Philosophy. Her main areas of research are Moral Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, and Social Epistemology. Her recent work is on blame and forgiveness.
Spring 2022
Robyn Wiegman
Professor, Program in Literature, Duke University
Professor Wiegman will be a Class of 1932 Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English. Her research interests include feminist theory, queer theory, American Studies, critical race theory, and film and media studies.
Short-Term Visiting Fellows
Fall 2021
Patrick Chamoiseau
French Author from Martinique
Chamoiseau will be a Belknap Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian. His work spans a variety of forms and genres, including novels, essays, children’s books, screenplays, theatre and comics. His novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992.
José Medina
Walter Hill Scott Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University
Professor Medina will be a Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Philosophy. He is a member of the American Philosophical Association, the British Wittgenstein Society, the North American Wittgenstein Society, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Tennessee Philosophical Association.
Hindy Najman
Oriel and Laing Professor, Religious Studies, Oxford University
Najman will be a Stewart Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of Religion and Program in Judaic Studies. She is an American academic specializing in Jewish studies and the Hebrew Bible. From 2008 to 2012, she was Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. From 2012 to 2015, she was Professor of Religious Studies and Classics at Yale University.
Matteo Pericoli
Architect, Illustrator, Writer and Teacher
Pericoli will be a Class of 1932 Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian. He is the author of several illustrated books — including Manhattan Unfurled, The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York and Windows on the World: 50 Writers, 50 Views. His drawings have appeared in various newspapers and magazines, both in the US and in Europe — including, among others, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Observer, The Paris Review Daily and La Stampa. In 2010 he founded the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, a cross-disciplinary exploration of literature as architecture.
Miriam Schoenfeld
Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin
Professor Schoenfeld will be a Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Philosophy. She is a rising-star epistemologist and has written influential and prize-winning papers on issues relating to disagreement, accuracy, and irrelevant influences on one’s beliefs. One of the basic issues that motivates her research goes back at least as far as Al Ghazali’s (1116) “Deliverance from Error”. Her essay “Meditations on Beliefs Formed Arbitrarily” was the winner of the Marc Sanders Prize in Epistemology, and she was the winner of the 2017 Young Epistemologist Prize.
Spring 2022
Audrey Bonnet
French Artist/Personality
Bonnet will be a Belknap Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of French and Italian. She is a renowned French stage actress and trained at Cours Florent before joining the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art . From 2003 to 2006 she was a resident of the Comédie-Française. She won the prize for the best actress of the 2013 3 theater charts for the play Clôture de l’Amour by Pascal Rambert, in which she plays alongside Stanislas Nordey.
Vincenzo De Risi
Professor, French National Centre for Scientific Research, Sciences
Professor De Risi specializes in the history of philosophy and has brought the geometrical work of Leibniz to new clarity and significance. His sojourn at Princeton as a Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Philosophy will feature his work on the space of Euclidian geometry, as well as his history of the idea of space itself as an object of geometry and scientific study.
Soraya Nadia McDonald
Art Journalist and Culture Critic
McDonald will be a Belknap Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Lewis Center for the Arts. She is an American writer and culture critic. She was previously a reporter at The Washington Post, and has been the culture critic for The Undefeated since 2016. McDonald was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Amira Mittermaier
Professor of Religion and Anthropology, University of Toronto
Professor Mittermaier will be a Class of 1932 Short-Term Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Religion. Bringing together textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, her research to date has focused on modern Islam in Egypt. Her first book, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination, explores Muslim practices of dream interpretation, as they are inflected by Islamic reformism, Western psychology, and mass mediation. Her more recent book, Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times, describes a religious ethics of giving in which believers engage with God by way of giving to the poor.
