Council of the Humanities

Chair

Gideon A. Rosen

Executive Director

Carol Rigolot

Executive Committee

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosophy, University Center for Human Values

Scott G. Burnham, Music

Su Friedrich, University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, Visual Arts

Thomas W. Hare, Comparative Literature

Chang-rae Lee, University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, Creative Writing

Leigh E. Schmidt, Religion

Susan Stewart, English

Christian Wildberg, Classics

Professor

Robert A. Freidin, also Linguistics

Adele E. Goldberg, also Linguistics

Alexander Nehamas, also Philosophy, Comparative Literature

Edwin S. Williams III, also Linguistics

Associate Professor

Marguerite Browning, also Linguistics

Long-Term Visiting Fellow

Ann Banfield

Annette Becker

Simon D. Goldhill

Paul Kalligas

Peter Kubelka

Abelardo Morell

Peter Nabokov

Hodder Fellow

Gabe Hudson

Daniel M. O’Brien

David H. Orr

Ferris Professor

Walt Bogdanich

Lisa R. Cohen

Barbara Demick

Michael W. Duffy

Nancy Gibbs

Greil G. Marcus

Martha Mendoza

T.R. Reid

Rose Tang

Robbins Professor

Mark Feeney

McGraw Professor in Writing

Julia Keller

Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts

Bianca Calabresi

Margot Canaday

Dominic Johnson, also Woodrow Wilson School

Christian Kaesser

Benjamin Kafka

Mendi Obadike

Miriam Petty

Andrew Quintman

Sarah Ross

Jennifer Rubenstein

Gayle Salamon

Andrea Schatz

Martin Scherzinger

Committee on Humanistic Studies

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosophy, University Center for Human Values

Scott G. Burnham, Music

Su Friedrich, University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, Visual Arts

Thomas W. Hare, Comparative Literature

Chang-rae Lee, University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, Creative Writing

Carol Rigolot, French and Italian, coordinator

Leigh E. Schmidt, Religion

Susan Stewart, English

Christian Wildberg, Classics

 

In 1953 the trustees and the faculty of Princeton University authorized the establishment of the Council of the Humanities as a means of fostering significant teaching and research in the humanities.

The Humanities Council consists of the chair of each humanities department, the directors and chairs of the programs and committees under the council’s aegis, the dean of the School of Architecture and of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and one representative from each of the other two divisions: the natural sciences and the social sciences. This group meets from time to time to discuss matters affecting the humanities at Princeton and to advise the chair, the deans, and the president on policy issues.

The ongoing missions of the council are carried out by several committees, which are overseen by an executive committee consisting of six faculty members from different departments and programs across a broad spectrum of the council’s activities. The dean of the faculty names this committee after consulting the chair of the council. The committee’s specific duties are to select the fellows of the council and to coordinate and supervise the various special programs and committees under Humanities Council auspices: American studies, Canadian studies, classical philosophy, European cultural studies, film studies, Gauss Seminars in Criticism, Hellenic studies, humanistic studies, Irish studies, Italian studies, Judaic studies, linguistics, medieval studies, political philosophy, the Program in the Ancient World, and Renaissance studies. The Humanities Council also sponsors a variety of faculty seminars taught by visitors, and it administers the Eberhard Faber Lectures, the Hodder Fellowship, the Behrman Fellowships, and the Program of Belknap Visitors in the Humanities. The Program of Old Dominion Faculty Fellows includes faculty from different divisions of the University. The Humanities Council is also the home of the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, in which postdoctoral fellows spend three years on campus, teaching and pursuing research.

Fellows of the Humanities Council are distinguished scholars, writers, and artists at the junior and senior faculty levels. Long-term fellows spend a term on campus, teaching and pursuing research. Short-term fellows come for an intensive one-week schedule of seminars, colloquiums, lectures, and other activities involving them in the University community. The faculty of the council consists of scholars, writers, and artists on shared appointments between a department and the council.

The Council of the Humanities is also the home of the Ferris Professorship of Journalism; the Harold W. McGraw Jr. Seminar in Writing and Publishing; and the Robbins Seminar in Writing, under whose auspices 8 to 10 journalists teach seminars each year. For more information on these courses, see the description under the Program in Humanistic Studies in the Undergraduate Announcement.

In all of its endeavors, the council’s goal is to encourage cooperation among departments, foster interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship, focus attention on problems common to all aspects of humanistic study, and administer the council endowment in a way that will best enhance teaching, scholarship, and faculty development in the humanities at Princeton.

For course offerings, see the listings under individual departments and programs, both graduate and undergraduate.

Committee for the Fund on Canadian Studies

Established through the generous support of Princeton’s Canadian alumni and the government of Canada to encourage and support expanded teaching and research on Canada at Princeton University, the Fund for Canadian Studies is administered by an advisory committee of interested faculty members under the auspices of the Council of the Humanities.

The fund serves as a resource for Canadian-focused academic activities, such as the development of new courses (including those of an interdisciplinary and comparative nature), individual research projects, conferences, guest lecturers, and speaker and seminar series.

The Advisory Committee on Canadian Studies includes the following faculty members: Jeremy Adelman, history; Gary Bass, Woodrow Wilson School; Jameson Doig, politics; Natasha Lee, French and Italian; Sarah-Jane Mathieu, history; Allen Patten, politics; Uwe Reinhardt, Woodrow Wilson School; Carol Rigolot, Council of the Humanities; and Thomas Spiro, chemistry.

Committee for the Fund for Irish Studies

The Fund for Irish Studies affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the drama, economics, history, languages, literatures, politics, and visual arts, not only of Ireland, but of “Ireland in the world.” The mission is twofold: to rationalize and expand existing courses taught by present members of the faculty; and to offer a series of public lectures, literary readings, conferences, exhibitions, screenings, and theatrical performances.

Advisory Committee for the Fund for Irish Studies: Nancy Bermeo, politics and European studies; Peter Brown, history; Michael Cadden, theater and dance; Linda Colley, history; Lawrence Danson, English; Maria DiBattista, English and comparative literature; Dennis Feeney, classics; Colum Hourihane, Index of Christian Art; Michael Mahoney, history; Norman McNatt, corporate and foundation relations; Paul Muldoon, creative writing (director); Philip Pettit, politics; Carol Rigolot, Council of the Humanities; Sean Wilentz, history and American studies; and Michael Wood, English.