Professorships and Fellowships

The Council is home to the Carpenter Professorship in the Humanities, a joint appointment in the Council and a humanities department.  The inaugural Carpenter Professor, Alexander Nehamas, is currently Professor in the Humanities Council, Philosophy, and Comparative Literature, emeritus. His books include Nietzsche: Life as Literature, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault, Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates, and Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art.

At Princeton, he has chaired the Council of the Humanities and directed the Program in Hellenic Studies, and he was the Founding Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.

This program is designed to provide additional research time for faculty members and to enhance the humanities community more broadly by providing a core group of senior faculty with time and resources to engage colleagues and students from across the university in sustained discussions of their work.  Old Dominion Professors are tenured professors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.

Old Dominion Professors are appointed for a term of one year, one semester of which would otherwise have been devoted to a regular sabbatical leave. The Professorship extends that leave to one full year.

Old Dominion Professors are expected to be in residence for the year and to engage in the intellectual life of the Humanities Council and the university. During their term, Old Dominion Professors are invited to share their research and participate in Council activities, whether leading workshops, speaking at the Annual Humanities Colloquium, participating in a series of conversations and lectures, or serving as Faculty Fellows in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.

Faculty interested in applying should visit the Research Professorships webpage for information about deadline and procedures.

2024-25 Old Dominion Professors

• Paul Frymer, Professor of Politics
  Project: To examine the historical policy development of agricultural laborers in the United States.
• Daniela Mairhofer, Associate Professor of Classics
  Project: Totum Nihil: Political and Social Critique in the Thirteenth Century
• Jan-Werner Müller, Professor of Social Sciences and Politics 
  Project: Christian Democracy: A New Intellectual History
• Sara S. Poor, Associate Professor of German
  Project: The Literary Agency of Medieval Women: Kunigund Niklasin (d. 1457) and the Library of St Catherine’s in Nuremberg

2023-24 Old Dominion Professors

• Bridget Alsdorf, Professor of Art and Archaeology
  Project: Shadowed: Intimacy and Collaboration in Modern Scandinavian Art
• Sandra Bermann, Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature
  Project: Poetry and War: Reading René Char’s Fureur et mystère; Poetry and War: Translating the Untranslatable
• Laura F. Edwards, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty
  Project: No Account:  Credit, Property, and Women’s Lives in the United States
• Sarah Rivett, Professor of English and American Studies
  Project: Raven’s Land: Placing the Indigenous Northwest Pacific in American Literature

Behrman Professors are faculty of tenured rank who are appointed for a three-year term to teach in the Program in Humanistic Studies and to ensure continuity in our academic program, and among our undergraduates. Each year, we appoint one dedicated faculty member in the humanities or the humanistic social sciences to take a leading role in the year-long Humanities Sequence, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture (HUM 216-219), and in the undergraduate interdisciplinary minor in Humanistic Studies.

This is a three-year appointment (for consecutive years), and there are three Behrman Professors at any given time. Behrman Professors help to enhance the appeal of the year-long interdisciplinary sequence and to raise the profile of the Program in Humanistic Studies.

Year 1

The new Behrman Professor will teach either during the fall or spring semester in HUM 216-219, as part of a six-member faculty team. If this is the Professor’s first time teaching the Western Humanities Sequence, they will receive a summer salary of $7500 for preparing a team-taught HUM course for the first time. If they have taught in the sequence previously, the summer salary is $5000.

Year 2

The Behrman Professor will direct and coordinate HUM 216-219 for the entire year, teaching in both fall and spring semesters. Because of the greater commitment in this year, the Professor will receive a 1/9th salary either the summer before or the summer after the second year.

Year 3

IIn the third year, the Behrman Professor will co-teach a capstone seminar for the minor in Humanistic Studies, with an additional $7500 course-development grant for a new team-taught course. The capstone seminar requires team teaching with another regular faculty member at Princeton from a different discipline/department. 

In recognition of this commitment of three continuous years to the Humanistic Studies Program, the Humanities Council will provide a guaranteed semester’s leave at the end of the three years; this leave can be banked to be used in conjunction with another semester leave when it becomes available from the home department.

How to Apply

The Humanities Council invites tenured Princeton faculty to apply for the Behrman Professorship in the Humanities, to begin in AY 2026-27. The deadline for applications is February 28, 2025. 

Inquiries may be sent to Esther Schor at eschor@princeton.edu, Humanities Council Chair and Director of the Program in Humanistic Studies.

Application information and web portal.

Current Behrman Professors

• Katie Chenoweth (French and Italian)
• Beatrice Kitzinger (Art & Archaeology)
• Michael Wachtel (Slavic Languages and Literatures)

Princeton faculty promoted to tenure in the humanities are invited to spend two years as Behrman Fellows. The program is designed to recognize exceptional humanists as they enter the ranks of the senior faculty and to provide a forum for conversation and collaboration across disciplines. Fellows receive summer support and come together monthly for lunch-time seminars.

See a list of the current Behrman Fellows.

The Council supports tenure-track professors in the Linguistics Program, in addition to several lecturers and postdoctoral fellows in Humanistic Studies, Digital Humanities, Linguistics, Religion, Sanskrit, Urban Studies, and American Studies.

Each year, distinguished writers, artists and scholars spend a semester visiting at Princeton, teaching one course. Nominations are invited from chairs of humanities departments and may be made jointly with interdisciplinary programs and committees under the Council’s umbrella.

Departments interested in nominating fellows should visit our Visiting Faculty page for information about deadlines and procedures.

During intensive three-to-five-day periods, these Fellows lecture and participate in classes, colloquia and informal discussions. The Program was created with a gift from Frank E. Taplin, Jr.’37 in honor of Whitney J. Oates, the distinguished classicist and founder of the Humanities Council. The Short-Term Fellows Program also hosts Belknap Fellows in Arts and Letters, Stewart Fellows in Religion, and Edward T. Cone ’39*42 Fellows, named in memory of the eminent composer, musicologist, professor and benefactor of the arts and humanities.

Departments interested in nominating fellows should visit our Visiting Faculty page for information about deadlines and procedures.

The Stewart Fellow for 2018-19 is Andrew Nicholson (Stony Brooks University).  Read more about the Stewart Fellow.

We welcome proposals from journalists and writers who wish to teach seminars in journalism as visiting Ferris Professors of Journalism, or seminars in other kinds of nonfiction related to journalism as visiting McGraw Professors of Writing. Visiting professors will join our Ferris Professors of Journalism in Residence: Joe Stephens, who spent two decades as an investigative projects reporter for The Washington Post, and John McPhee, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than 50 years. 

More information.

The Council supports several lecturers and postdoctoral fellows in Humanistic Studies, Digital Humanities, and Linguistics. The Council also supports fellows in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, which promotes innovative interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship and teaching. Each year, a new cohort of recent recipients of the Ph.D. in the humanities and humanistically-oriented social sciences are appointed for three-year terms of teaching and research. Meeting regularly for informal and formal discussion, seminars, lectures, and reading groups, the fellows pursue new knowledge within and across disciplines. The Society enjoys the support of the Humanities Council, with whom it shares the Joseph Henry House, a historic building at the center of campus named after its designer, the eminent scientist and Princeton professor, Joseph Henry (1797-1878).

The Council supports several lecturers in Humanistic Studies, Digital Humanities, Linguistics, Religion, South Asian Studies/Sanskrit, and American Studies.