Collaborative Humanities Grants

These grants help to spark new collaborations at Princeton and to develop multi-institutional collaborations and scholarly networks across South East Asia, Africa, Europe, China, Russia and Eastern Europe, and North and South America.

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, 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.

2021-22
  • 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.

  • 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.

2020-21
  • Organizing Stories: Toward a Scholarly-Activist Praxis
    Autumn M. Womack (African American Studies), Monica Huerta (English, American Studies)

A student-driven project that will investigate the long history of anti-racist activism, racial justice organizing, and coalition-building as it relates to questions of narrative, storytelling, and humanistic study more broadly.

2019-20
  • African American Religious Studies Workshop
    Judith Weisenfeld (Religion)

This workshop will bring together faculty and graduate students in African American religious studies to develop collaborative research projects, produce resources for teaching, mentor junior faculty and graduate students, and offer training and support for public scholarship and engagement. The project will create opportunities for scholarly engagement and collaboration across institutions and disciplines. Supported by the Humanities Council’s Stewart Fund for Religion

  • Bodies of Knowledge
    Elena Fratto (Slavic) and Natalie Prizel (English, Society of Fellows)

A new phase in the Bodies of Knowledge workshop will enable interdisciplinary teaching and research initiatives in three new directions: environmental studies, visual arts, and disability studies. The project includes a conference on environmental studies and the body in a global context, considering Russia, Japan, and beyond. Supported by a Humanities Council David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant

  • Language, Power and Identity: A Community of Learning Project 
    Christine Sagnier (Department of French and Italian)

In a collaboration with the University of Aix-en-Provence, undergraduates at Princeton and in France will discuss issues related to language in society via on line video. Both groups will enroll in an introduction to sociolinguistics in their respective institutions. The curriculum will include interviews and collaborative tasks, enabling students to gather data and present findings to other members of the “community,” benefiting from intercultural exchanges. Supported by a Humanities Council David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant

  • Digital Humanities and Visual Resources: The Material and Digital Lives of Eastern European and Russian Artifacts
    Thomas Keenan (Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Library); Katherine Reischl (Slavic); and Natalie Ermolaev (Center for Digital Humanities)

This September 2019 gathering at Princeton is a collaboration with the Herder Institute in Margburg, Germany and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Combining short instructional sessions, keynote lectures, and works-in-progress presentations, the project will expand networks of scholarly exchange to include partners from American institutions and elsewhere in Europe (Russia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic). Supported by a Humanities Council David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant

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