Joshua Katz
Classics
153 East Pyne Bldg.
jtkatz@princeton.edu
8-3954
Joshua Katz has taught at Princeton since 1998 and has been almost from the start a committed Faculty Adviser and Fellow (once upon a time also Senior Fellow) at Forbes. A linguist by training (with degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Harvard), he is Professor of Classics and a member (and former Director) of the Program in Linguistics, as well as a member of the Executive Committees of the Program in Teacher Preparation and the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. The only Princeton professor to be included in The Best 300 Professors (Random House, 2012) — though by no means the only one who should have been included! — Katz is the winner of many awards for his teaching and research, among them a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2010) and, at Princeton, the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (2003) and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award (2008). His courses consider such varied subjects as “Ancient Egypt and its Hieroglyphs,” “Origins and Nature of English Vocabulary,” and “Ancient Greek: An Intensive Introduction,” the last of which regularly attracts remarkable students who are not daunted by its reputation for being “harder than orgo.” In 2012-13 he will be offering FRS 123 “Wordplay: A Wry Plod from Babel to Scrabble”; CLA 336/LIN 336 “Introduction to Indo-European”; a new 300-level HIS/TRA/ECS course titled “Invented Languages," which he will be teaching together with Michael Gordin (History); and “Style and Rule,” a new 500-level HUM seminar for which his partner in crime is Jeff Dolven (English). Among his other roles on campus, he is President of the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (Beta of New Jersey), a Faculty Adviser for the Marshall and Rhodes Scholarships, the Co-organizer of the annual Creative Arts & Humanities Symposium for high-school seniors, and a Faculty Columnist for the Daily Princetonian; he founded and recently stepped down as Director of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows. He has a thing about badgers.