Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts

Director

Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and also a member of the associated faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton. A poet and critic, she teaches the history of poetry and the philosophy of literature. Her most recent books of criticism are The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making, forthcoming in November; Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism in 2003 from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2004; and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, a collection of her writings on contemporary art. Her most recent books of poetry are Red Rover, Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle award, and The Forest. Her translation, Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, appeared in 2009 with Princeton University Press. She also has translated Euripides' Andromache with Wesley Smith and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini. Her song cycle, "Songs for Adam," commissioned by the Chicago Symphony with music by the composer James Primosch, had its world premiere with baritone Brian Mulligan and the CSO, Sir Andrew Davis conducting, in October 2009. A former MacArthur Fellow, Professor Stewart has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and in the Spring of 2009 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Executive Director

Mary Harper received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a dissertation on Gérard de Nerval and the nineteenth-century European "voyage en Orient." Her current research projects include a study of women's memoirs in early nineteenth-century France; law and narrative in mid nineteenth-century France; and the accounts of nineteenth-century European travellers to the Middle East with particular focus on questions of gender, colonialism, and the interplay of ethnography and aesthetics. She has published articles on Gérard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient and "Temple d'Isis," Delacroix's "Femmes d'Alger," and nineteenth-century French literature and historiography. Her teaching at Princeton University has included courses on nineteenth-century European literature and culture, the modern French novel, and Orientalism.

Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellows  

New Fellows 2012-15

Jie Li holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University.  Her first book project, Utopian Ruins: A Memory Museum of the Maoist Era,explores contemporary cultural memories of the 1950s to the 1970s through textual, audiovisual, and material artifacts including police files, photographs, documentary films, and museums.  Her second book project, Cinematic Manchuria: A Transnational History, examines films produced under Japanese colonial rule in Manchuria and later cinematic representations of the region along with production and exhibition practices.  Li’s articles have appeared in the journals Public Culture, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, China Perspectives, and Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media.  She is currently editing a volume entitled Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution as well as contributing to forthcoming collections such as The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas and A New Literary History of Modern China.  Her research has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation.  As a College Fellow at Harvard, Li taught a wide range of self-designed courses in East Asian studies and film studies, from a general survey of East Asian cinema to a seminar on Shanghai’s cultural history.  At Princeton in the 2012-2013 academic year, she will teach a course on Contemporary Chinese Culture and Society in the fall and co-teach the spring semester sequence “East Asian Humanities.”  She has also made documentary films in China and Cameroon.

Kate Liszka completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, with a specialization in Egyptology and Egyptian Archaeology. Liszka has also taught at Loyola University and Roosevelt University in Chicago, and for the last ten years, she has been a lecturer with the International Classroom at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Liszka’s doctoral dissertation, upcoming book, and articles have focused on the question of an ancient Nubian people called the Medjay and an archaeological culture called the Pangrave people. She has grappled, moreover, with the question of how the Ancient Egyptian state incorporated different types of Nubians into their bureaucracy. While a fellow at Princeton, she will continue to work on these topics, examining how textual, artistic, and archaeological sources, as well as the intellectual backgrounds of researchers, influenced ancient expressions of ethnicity and scholarly perceptions of ancient ethnicity. Her future research at Princeton hopes to incorporate archaeological survey and excavation in Egypt through the study of the Pangrave archaeological culture, as well as to examine the concept of race as it has been applied in 19th and early 20th century Egyptian archaeology. At Princeton, she is teaching several courses on Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology as well as a class on the identity and ethnicity of “barbarians” in the ancient world.

Matthew M. McCarty (DPhil, Oxford) is a Classical archaeologist and ancient historian whose work focuses on the edges of the Roman Empire, ancient religion, and the relationships between material objects and knowledge. He is currently completing  a monograph based on his dissertation, Empire and Worship in Roman Africa (Cambridge UP), which focuses on the agency of Roman hegemony in re-shaping fundamental premises about the gods, society, ritual, and personhood in the ancient Maghreb.  McCarty's next book project, The Materiality of Religion in the Roman World, argues that because religious knowledge in the ancient world was not created and circulated by texts but instead by the manipulation of objects, images, and environments, a history of religion in the Roman world ought to start from the archaeological record.  Using Mithraism and site-based case-studies, this book will attempt to write such a material-based history of Roman religion. His published articles and chapters cover a range of themes from the cognitive dimensions of ritual practice to the problems with using the concept of "heritage" to shape archaeological agendas in North Africa. Prior to joining the Society of Fellows, he served as a Lecturer in Ancient History at Worcester College (Oxford), Lecturer in Classics & Ancient History at the University of Warwick, and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Yale.

Yulia Ryzhik received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in English from Harvard University.  Her dissertation, “Donne’s Spenser: A Problem in Literary History,” elucidates a hitherto unexamined relation between the poetry of John Donne (1572-1631) and that of his immediate predecessor, Edmund Spenser (1552-1599).  This relation, at once antagonistic and emulative, provides the basis for a new, broader conception of the history of Renaissance poetics and the crucial transition from allegory to metaphor as the dominant instrument of poetic thinking.  In this difficult transition, precipitated by the intellectual paradigm shifts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, we can see the emerging terms of creative expression in the modern world.  Ryzhik’s graduate studies were supported by several fellowships, including the Mellon, Paul and Daisy Soros, and Whiting.  She also spent a semester as a Reader at the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti (Florence, Italy).  Her publications include two articles, “Books, Fans, and Mallarmé’s Butterfly” (PMLA, May 2011) and “Chastening Pictures: Donne and Aretino” (forthcoming in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, Olschki, 2012).  At Princeton she will revise her dissertation for publication and begin research on a new book project on the culture of satire, anchored in the Renaissance (classical and continental influences on English satire; Shakespeare as a satirist), but also examining more generally the philosophical status of satirical hyperbole and the capacity of satire to generate reform.  In 2012-2013 she will offer an upper-level English seminar on satire and will participate in the second half of the Humanistic Studies sequence, covering material from the Renaissance to Modernity.

Daniel Sheffield holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, where he specialized in Iranian and Persian Studies. His dissertation, entitled In the Path of the Prophet: Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of the Life of Zarathustra in Islamic Iran and Western India, is a historical study of the discursive practices by which Zoroastrians in Iran and India struggled to define their communal identity through constructions of the life of Zarathustra, the central figure of their religion. His dissertation explores themes of cosmopolitanism, orthodoxy, religious syncretism, vernacularization, and colonialism, and examines how Zoroastrian thinkers adopted cosmopolitan religious vocabularies from the Islamicate and Sanskritic literary traditions around them in order to create new discursive spaces for a world in which Zoroastrians were no longer a dominant political force. Daniel's recent and forthcoming publications appear in The Bulletin of the Asia Institute, The Journal of the K. R. Cama Oriental Insitute, The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Zoroastrianism (ed. Stausberg and Vevaina), and On the Wonders of Land and Sea: Persianate Travel Writing (ed. Sharma and Micallef). At Harvard, Daniel was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award in 2008-2009 to investigate Pahlavi, Persian, and Gujarati manuscripts at the First Dastoor Meherjirana Library, Navsari and the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute, Mumbai. At Princeton, he will prepare his dissertation for publication and pursue research on a second book project tentatively entitled The Parsis and the Colonial Construction of Zoroastrianism. In the 2012-2013 academic term, he will offer an introductory course on Zoroastrianism as well as a freshman seminar entitled From the Arabian Nights to the Prince of Persia: Orientalism in Literature and Film.

2011-14

Hannah Freed-Thall holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California-Berkeley. She is currently at work on a book manuscript—a study of the afterlife of aesthetic beauty in 20^th-century French literature and theory. The project identifies four experimental aesthetic concepts that spoil distinctions of taste: Marcel Proust’s “quelconque” (or “whatever”), Roland Barthes’ “nuance,” Francis Ponge’s “imperfection,” and Nathalie Sarraute’s “douceâtre” (or “sickly sweet”). She is also pursuing research on a second book project, tentatively titled “‘C’est vraiment dégueulasse’: The Rhetoric of Revulsion in 20^th-century France.” Freed-Thall’s articles have appeared in New Literary History, Modern Language Notes, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. At Berkeley, she taught a wide range of courses in French and Comparative Literature, from “Shakespeare in the World” to “Adventures in the Contemporary French Novel.” This year at Princeton she will offer a fall course in the French department on taste and disgust, and in the spring will participate as a member of the faculty team in Humanistic Studies 217-218, a course which explores inter-disciplinary approaches to Western culture since the Renaissance. Freed-Thall is also the Resident Faculty Fellow of Whitman College.

Douglas A. Jones, Jr. holds a joint Ph.D. in Drama and Humanities from Stanford University, where his dissertation, “The ‘Common Sense’ of Slavery: Race, Performance, and a ‘Peculiar’ America, 1817-1861,” won the Wendell Cole Memorial Prize for Distinguished Dissertation. This study forms the core of his book manuscript, which considers how proslavery ideology conditioned the social, political, and cultural landscapes of the post-slavery north in the decades before the Civil War. This project reflects Jones’ broader research interests, namely, the cultural and literary history of the early national and antebellum United States, 19th and 20th century African American literature, the cultural history and historiography of slavery, publics, and theories of race and performance. In these areas, he has published a number of journal articles, reviews, and essays in edited collections. His most recent publication, “An Ambivalent Beginning: Slavery, Performance, and the Design of African American Theatre,” is the opening essay in the forthcoming collection, The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre (Harvey Young, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2012). Jones has delivered a wide range of scholarly talks at national and regional conferences as well as given invited lectures at a number of universities. At Stanford, he earned several fellowships and grants for his scholarly work and his teaching and mentorship there was recognized with a Service Award to Undergraduate Life. In 2011-2012, he will teach an upper-level seminar in the fall, “The Drama of Making America: Staging Race from the Revolution to the Civil War,” and a Freshman Seminar in the spring, “Slavery and American Culture.” Jones is also the Resident Faculty Fellow of Wilson College at Princeton.

Joel Lande completed his Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Chicago in the Department of Germanic Studies. His dissertation, “Nomadic Stages: On the Emergency of Literary Drama in the Age of Enlightenment,“ explores the lines of filiation that run from the itinerant stage of the Early Modern period to the seminal achievements of Lessing, Lenz, and Goethe. This study analyzes the medial and generic dimensions of the Enlightenment project to alter the cultural locus of the theater. Lande has won numerous grants to support his studies at the University of Chicago, including the Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. His extensive teaching experience includes courses at all levels of the curriculum in both German language and literature, among these a number of self-designed courses on drama in the Enlightenment period. Lande has published articles in the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte as well as in essay collections on Karl Philipp Moritz and K.W.F. Solger. Two projects currently underway are a conference volume that treats the notion of figura in the 17th century, and an examination of folk-theatrical forms in the postwar Viennese avant-garde. In the course of his studies, Lande spent extended periods of time in Basel, Berlin, and Konstanz. At Princeton, Lande will coordinate and lecture in the two-semester sequence, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture: Antiquity to the Modern Period (HUM 216-219), a course that fits particularly well with his interest in the semantics of classical literary forms in the modern period.    At Princeton Lande will also be the Resident Faculty Fellow of Forbes College.

Ellen Lockhart has recently finished a PhD in Musicology at Cornell University. Her dissertation, entitled "Moving Statues: The Rise and Fall of Pygmalion, 1770-1815," charted the development of an aesthetic of animation within opera, dance, and music theory on the Italian peninsula. This research has been published in the form of articles in Eighteenth-Century Music and the Cambridge Opera Journal. While at Cornell, Ellen organized a conference on musical travels and the eighteenth-century musicologist Charles Burney, which featured a complete staging of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's opera The Cunning Man (arr. Burney). Her critical edition of Donizetti's Betly for Ricordi was published by Recordi in 2011, and she is currently reconstructing an early version of Puccini's La fanciulla del West for a 2012 performance conducted by Riccardo Chailly (with a complete critical edition to follow). Ellen recently completed a DAAD Fellowship on "Media (Theory), Performance (Theory), and Mise-en-Scene," led by David Levin at the University of Chicago. At Princeton, she will study theories of operatic media and performance in the first half of the nineteenth century, and lead seminars on editing opera (with Wendy Heller) and French and Italian opera industries of the eighteenth century. Ellen is also the Resident Faculty Fellow of Butler College at Princeton.

Tey Meadow holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University and a Juris Doctor from Fordham University School of Law. Her work examines the ways social institutions such as law, politics and the family respond to challenges to gender and sexual classifications.  Her dissertation, entitled “Bringing Up the Transgender Child: Parents, Activism and the New Gender Stories,” won the Martin P. Levine Memorial Dissertation Fellowship from the American Sociological Association for the best dissertation proposal in gender and sexualities. In it, she utilizes the responses of parents, physicians and educators to extreme gender atypicality in children to depict the rapid expansion of a cultural lexicon for gender over the last decade. Previous projects include a study of how U.S. courts cope with transgender individuals who seek to alter their legal gender, and a comparative historical analysis of the law and politics of same sex marriage in South Africa and the United States. Tey’s work has received support from the American Sociological Association, The Social Science Research Council, The Institute for Public Knowledge, and New York University. Tey maintains an active commitment to public sociology, holding a Bennett Fellowship at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, contributing to reports on LGBT youth for the National Institutes of Health and serving on the board of directors of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the Ettelbrick Project at the Stonewall Community Foundation. At Princeton, Tey is completing a book manuscript based on her dissertation research, which will be published by the University of California Press. During the 2012-2013 academic year, she will teach a lecture course in Sociology called “Sex, Gender, Sexuality."
 

2010-2013
 

Simon Grote completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he focused on early modern European and late antique intellectual history. He also holds an A.B. in History (Harvard College) and an M.Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History (Cambridge University). In the book he is now preparing, provisionally entitled The Origins of Modern Aesthetic Theory, he aims to rewrite the early history of modern aesthetic theory in Scotland and Germany by situating its origins in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century theology, moral philosophy, and natural law theory. While working on this book, he plans to expand his focus to include early eighteenth-century Swiss aesthetic theories against the background of Swiss Pietism. His research in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany has been supported by Jacob Javits, Gates-Cambridge, Fritz Thyssen, and DAAD Fellowships, among other awards. He has published articles on the moral theories of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, the German Pietist background of Alexander Baumgarten’s aesthetics, the fourth-century Brevarium of Festus, and the career of George Santayana at Harvard University. His teaching experience at Berkeley included undergraduate seminars on Augustine and his modern intellectual legacy, and on Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment. At Princeton, he has taught a seminar on the Enlightenment, and collaborated in the team-taught Humanistic Studies course exploring interdisciplinary approaches to Western culture from Antiquity to the Renaissance.  His teaching in 2011-12 includes a lecture course on German history from Martin Luther to Napoleon, and the latter half of the team-taught Humanistic Studies course from the Renaissance to Modernity.  He is also Associate Director of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows.

Christina Halperin holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation, “Materiality, Bodies, and Practice: The Political Economy of Late Classic Figurines from Motul de San José, Petén, Guatemala,” examines Late Classic (ca. A.D. 600-900) Maya state and household relations through the production, circulation, imagery and use of ceramic figurines. Her dissertation research, supported by Wenner-Gren, NSF and Fulbright fellowships among other awards, calls attention to the ritual participation of common peoples, women, and children in the production of both household and state. She has published extensively on topics such as Classic Maya Textile Production, Polychrome Pottery Production, Ancient Maya Water Ideology, Social Power and Sacred Space, and has recently co-edited a book on “Mesoamerican Figurines: Small-Scale Indices of Large-Scale Social Phenomena” (2009), which was awarded a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. In addition she has conducted excavations and cave surveys at numerous sites in Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize. As a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois and Lecturer at UC Riverside, Halperin taught a wide range of courses including "Archaeological Theory,” “Ritual Economy,” "Introduction to World Prehistory" and “Gender and Archaeology.” At Princeton in 2011-12 she will teach a seminar on Pre-Columbian Maya Art, which will involve a student trip to Guatemala, and a Freshman Seminar on Ancient Pottery.

Janet Vertesi received her Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University in 2009, where her dissertation analyzed the use of images to both conduct scientific investigations of Mars and plan robotic operations on its surface, demonstrating how interactions with and around Mars Rover images create a social space that is both public and political. She holds a B.A. in Religion, Literature and the Arts from the University of British Columbia, and an M.Phil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. She has won many awards for her undergraduate and graduate work, including NSF, Mellon, Sage, SSHRC, and History of Science Society/NASA History Office Fellowships; and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Irvine's Informatics Department. Her numerous publications cover a variety of topics in the history and sociology of science, technology, and visual studies, including “Picturing the Moon: Hevelius and Riccioli’s Visual Debate” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, “Pygmalion’s Legacy: Cyborg Women in Science Fiction,” and an award-winning article published in Social Studies of Science (2008): “’Mind the Gap’: The London Underground Map and Users’ Experience of Urban Space.” At Princeton Vertesi is completing her manuscript, Seeing Like a Rover: Images in Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, and co-editing a new volume of the classic Representation in Scientific Practice. She is also conducting a second interdisciplinary research project, “The Social Life of Spacecraft,” funded by an NSF Social Computational Systems grant, which introduces a comparative ethnographic aspect (a study of the Cassini mission to Saturn) to her analysis of the socio-technical organization of space missions. She continues her work in interdisciplinary studies in informatics with current publications at CHI focusing on technologies in transnational contexts. Her teaching experience as a graduate student included such courses as the history of computers, science in the public arena, and the sociology of science, as well as a Freshman seminar she designed on the relationships between science and art. At Princeton she is teaching courses on The Sociology of Technology and Critical Approaches to Human-Computer Interaction.

Current Faculty Fellows
 

Miguel A Centeno is Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, with a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School. From 2003 to 2007, he served as the founding Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.  From 1997-2004 he also served as Master of Wilson College at Princeton. He has published many books as author or editor including Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico (2nd. 1997), Blood and Debt: War and Statemaking in Latin America (2002), The Other Mirror: Grand Theory and Latin America (2000), Discrimination in an Unequal World (2010) and Global Capitalism (2010). He is currently working on several book projects including: Paper Leviathans: State Building in the Iberian World and War and Society, as well as an essay on the rise and fall of neoliberalism. Through the Mapping Globalization project, he has worked on improving the quantitative scholarship available on globalization. In 2000, he founded the Princeton University Preparatory Program, which provides intensive supplemental training for lower-income students in three local high schools.  For this work, he was recently awarded the Jefferson Award for Public Service and the Bonner Foundation Award. From 1980 to 1985 he worked in advertising and private marketing consulting, dealing with the US Hispanic Market.

Caryl Emerson received her B.A. in Russian Literature from Cornell University, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin.   Her research interests include Russian 19th-century prose (especially Dostoevsky and Tolstoy); the Russian critical tradition (especially Bakhtin); Pushkin; Russian music and opera; Eastern and Central European prose; and most recently Russian drama, Soviet-era criticism of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw, and the adaptation of 19th-century classics to the Stalinist stage. Emerson has taught undergraduate courses on Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Russians and the Devil; the 19th-c. Russian novel and short story, the 20th-c. Eastern European novel, and graduate courses on Russian Approaches to Literature and Culture (Formalists, Bakhtin, Cultural Semiotics); Tolstoy; Readings in Russian Philosophy, and Soviet-era theater. She is author of The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (1997), The Life of Musorgsky (1999), The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature (2008), and most recently All the Same the Words Don't Go Away: Essays on Authors, Heroes, Aesthetics, and Stage Adaptations from the Russian Tradition, a collection of her essays from 1985-2010. Her current research centers on the 20th-c. Russian modernist prose-writer, playwright and philosopher of theater, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.

Denis Feeney works on Latin literature and Roman culture more broadly, including especially Roman religion and time. After earning his first degree at Auckland University, New Zealand, he received a D.Phil. from Oxford University (1982), and came to Princeton in 2000. In addition to articles on Latin literature (particularly on his favorite Latin poets, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid), he has written three books. The Gods in Epic (Oxford, 1991) investigated the problem of how gods were represented in (especially Latin) epic, focusing on the problems of fiction involved in negotiating the boundaries between Roman religion and epic forms of representation. His second book, Literature and Religion at Rome (Cambridge, 1998), looked more broadly at the problem of the interaction between the literary and religious systems of Rome, framing the issues in terms of a dialogue between the way scholars tend to read Greek culture and Roman culture more generally. His third book, Caesar’s Calendar (California, 2007), based on his Sather Classical Lectures of 2004, examined Roman constructions of time, in terms of synchronism, historical vs. mythical time, and calendrical time. He is currently working on a book, tentatively entitled Roman Horizons, about why Rome developed a literature in Latin when it shouldn’t really have done so.

Michael Gordin specializes in the history of the modern physical sciences and Russian history, and currently serves as the director of the Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies. He came to Princeton in 2003 after earning his A.B. (1996) and his Ph.D. (2001) from Harvard University, and serving a term at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He has published articles on a variety of topics, such as the introduction of science into Russia in the early 18th century, the history of biological warfare in the late Soviet period, the relations between Russian literature and science, as well as a series of studies on the life and chemistry of Dmitrii I. Mendeleev, formulator of the periodic system of chemical elements. His first book is a cultural history of Mendeleev in the context of Imperial St. Petersburg, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (Basic Books, 2004). He has also worked extensively in the early history of nuclear weapons, and is the author of Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War(Princeton, 2007), a history of the atomic bombings of Japan during World War II, an international history of nuclear intelligence, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (FSG, 2009), and a history of the controversies surrounding the boundary between science and pseudoscience focusing on the career of Immanuel Velikovsky, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2012).  He has also co-edited the four-volume Routledge History of the Modern Physical Sciences (2001), with Peter Galison and David Kaiser, Intelligentsia Science:  The Russian Century, 1860-1960 (2008), with Karl Hall and Alexei Kojevnikov, and Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility (Princeton, 2010), with Helen Tilley and Gyan Prakash. In 2011 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

Professor Gordin is currently working on a book project concerning the history of "scientific languages": that subset of international languages which dominate international communication in the natural sciences.  He teaches lecture courses in the history of modern science (History 292), technology and society (Engineering/Sociology/History 277), and translation in the history of science (History 397), and seminars on nuclear-weapons history, the history of pseudoscience, the Soviet science system, and biography.

Molly Greene studies the history of the Mediterranean Basin, the Ottoman Empire, and the Greek world. Her interests include the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire, the experience of Greeks under Ottoman rule, Mediterranean piracy, and the institution of the market. After earning a B.A. in political science at Tufts University (1981), Professor Greene spent several years living in Greece and then completed a Ph.D. in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton (1993), where she studied Ottoman history. Upon graduating she joined the Princeton faculty with a joint appointment in the History Department and the Program in Hellenic Studies. Her first book, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2000), examines the transition from Venetian to Ottoman rule on the island of Crete, which the Ottomans conquered in 1669. Challenging the assumption of a radical rupture with the arrival of the Ottomans, Greene shows that the population of Crete had been drawn into the Ottoman world long before the conquest and that important continuities linked the Venetian and the Ottoman periods. Greene also challenges a simple model of Christian-Muslim antagonism in the eastern Mediterranean and argues that the tension between Latin and Orthodox Christianity was just as important in shaping the history of the region.  Her book Catholic Corsairs and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 1450-1700, has just been published with Princeton University Press. Her next project is a history of the Greeks and the Greek world under Ottoman rule for a multi-volume series being published by Edinburgh University Press. 

Professor Greene has taught courses on Mediterranean history (16th century to 20th century); early modern commerce in the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean; nationalism in the Balkans; a survey of Greek history from Late Antiquity to the present day and Ottoman history.

AnneMarie Luijendijk  joined the Princeton faculty in 2006 after receiving her doctorate from Harvard Divinity School.   At Princeton she is the Melancthon W. Jacobus University Preceptor in Religion (2009-2012).  A scholar of New Testament and Early Christianity and a papyrologist, Luijendijk is interested in the social history of early Christianity, using both literary texts and documentary sources. Her book Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Harvard University Press, 2008) investigates papyrus letters and documents pertaining to Christians in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in the pre-Constantinian period.  She currently is at work on two books.  One, provisionally entitled Forbidden Oracles? The Gospel of the Lots of Mary, entails the publication of a 5th- or 6th-century Coptic manuscript containing Christian oracular answers.  The other is a book on Christian manuscripts, the development of the New Testament canon and material culture.

Carolyn Rouse (www.uncertainsuffering.com) is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on why people accept systems of inequality.  Her work on race and inequality examines the discourses and practices that are used to rationalize forms of suffering as well as to negate them. Rouse’s fieldwork focuses on four domains; religion, medicine, education and development. Each of these domains provides different cultural strategies for social transformation. For African American Muslims, Qur’anic exegesis becomes a tool for negotiating within the ummah and for imagining new social and personal possibilities. In biomedicine, scientific authority and operationalized treatment protocols are used to legitimate suffering and to redirect health care resources.  Education and development are tools for shaping the subjectivity and sociality of the poor. Rouse is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (2004) and Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease (2009). She is finishing a co-written book entitled Televised Redemption: The Media Production of Black Jews, Christians and Muslims. Her current book project, Development Hubris: Adventures Trying to Save the World, examines discourses of charity and development and is tied to her project building a school in a fishing village in Ghana. In addition to being an anthropologist, Rouse is also a filmmaker. She has produced, directed, and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), a film about a lesbian wedding; and Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998).

François Rigolot has published critical studies, edited literary texts, and directed Ph.D. dissertations in the field of French and Comparative Literature of the Renaissance. A native of France, Professor Rigolot earned his Ph.D. in French literature from the University of Wisconsin (1969) and taught at the University of Michigan until 1974 when he joined the Princeton faculty. Professor Rigolot’s primary interests involve the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. He has pursued them through investigations into such diverse topics as rhetoric, stylistics and poetics. He is the author of a dozen books, including Les Langages de Rabelais (1972, 1996), Poétique et onomastique (1977), Le Texte de la Renaissance (1983), Les Métamorphoses de Montaigne (1988) ; Louise Labé Lyonnaise ou la Renaissance au féminin (1997) ; L’Erreur de la Renaissance (2002) ; Poésie et Renaissance (2003). He is the editor of Louise Labé’s Complete Works (1986), Montaigne's Journal de voyage (1992) ; Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries sur Montaigne (2004), and Clément Marot’s Œuvres complètes (2 volumes, 2007-2008).  Professor Rigolot has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1979-80) and the Guggengeim Foundation (1982-83). He has received numerous honors and awards including the James Russell Lowell Prize in the Humanities from the Modern Language Association (1990), the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities (1993), the Palmes académiques (chevalier 1987, officier 1993), and the Ordre National du Mérite from the French Government (2002). In 2008 fifteen of his former students edited a Festschrift in his honor, Esprit généreux, esprit pantagruélique. Professor Rigolot is currently writing on Montaigne's views of Italy, Rabelais’s concept of hybridity, post-modern views of the Pléiade, and the poetry written by Mary Queen of Scots. His long-term project is a book examining the relationship between magic and poetry in early modern Europe. 

Michael Wood, B.A., M.A., Ph.D 1957, 1961, 1962 Cambridge University.   His interests include Twentieth-Century Literature, Film, Literary Theory, History of Criticism. 

Selected Publications: Stendhal (1971); America in the Movies (1975, 1989); The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (1994); Children of Silence: on Contemporary Fiction (1998); The Road to Delphi: the Life and Afterlife of Oracles (2003); Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (2005) and Yeats and Violence (2010).

Carol Rigolot  (Ph.D. University of Michigan), Executive Director of the Humanities Council, is a member of the French and Italian department. She has published five books about the Nobel Prize-winning French poet-diplomat Saint-John Perse and about the literary figures who surrounded him, including T.S. Eliot. With John McPhee, she has co-edited two volumes of favorite writings by distinguished writers who have taught at Princeton. The most recent is  The Princeton Reader (Princeton University Press, 2010).  

Gideon Rosen  (Ph.D., Princeton, 1992) joined the faculty in 1993, having taught previously at the University of Michigan. His areas of research include metaphysics, epistemology and moral philosophy. He is the author (with John Burgess) of  A Subject With No Object  (Oxford, 1997). Gideon Rosen is Chair of the  Council of the Humanities  and  Director of the Program in Linguistics.

Old Dominion Faculty Fellows in the Society of Fellows

This program offers faculty members the opportunity to spend a year of academic leave in the Humanities Council, pursuing research and participating in the Society of Fellows.

João Biehl is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Woodrow Wilson School Faculty Associate at Princeton University.  Biehl is the Co-Director of Princeton’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy.  In recent years, he authored Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (University of California Press) and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (Princeton University Press). These books are ethnographic studies of the experience and treatment of mental illness and AIDS respectively. Both Vita and Will to Live explore new geographies of access and marginalization that have emerged alongside pharmaceutical globalization. They also elaborate on networks of care that poor urban patients create in their daily struggles to survive. Biehl is the co-editor of Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (University of California Press).  Vita garnered six major book awards, including the Margaret Mead Award of the American Anthropological Association. Will to Live received the Wellcome Medal of Britain's Royal Anthropological Society and the Diana Forsythe Prize of the American Anthropological Association. Biehl received the Rudolph Virchow Award for his articles "The Activist State" and "Pharmaceuticalization." 

Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2001, Biehl was a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine (1998–2000). He earned a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1999) and a doctorate in Religion from the Graduate Theological Union (1996). He received a master's degree in philosophy and undergraduate degrees in theology and journalism from academic institutions in Brazil.  Biehl is currently writing the history of a religious war—the Mucker war—that took place among German immigrants in 19th century Brazil. He is also co-editing When People Come First, a book on evidence, theory, and advocacy in global health. His current research explores the social impact of large-scale treatment programs in resource-poor settings and the role of the judiciary in administering public health.

Alexander Nehamas received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1971, and joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1990.  He is Professor in Philosophy, Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Comparative Literature.  His interests include Greek philosophy, philosophy of art, European philosophy and literary theory.  His books include: Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2007);  Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (1999);  The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (1998);  Plato's "Phaedrus" (1995) and Plato's "Symposium"(1989) (translations and commentaries, with Paul Woodruff);  Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985).  In 2001 Nehamas was awarded the Mellon Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities Award and the International Nietzsche Prize, and he has been the recipient of Guggenheim and NEH fellowships among others.  In 1992-93 he was invited to deliver the Sather Classical Lectures at UC Berkeley, and in 2008 the Gifford lectures at the University of Edinburgh.  He has served as President of the American Philosophical Association, and he received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2011.

Nigel Smith is William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature and currently Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton University. He came to Princeton from the University of Oxford, England, in 1999. He has published mostly on early modern literature, especially the seventeenth century; his work is interdisciplinary by inclination and training. His interests have included poetry; poetic theory; the social role of literature; literature, politics and religion; literature and visual art; heresy and heterodoxy; radical literature; early prose fiction; women's writing; journalism; censorship; the early modern public sphere; travel; the history of linguistic ideas. The authors he has covered include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Marvell. He is joint leader of an Oxford-Princeton Marvell research project. His major works are Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (Yale UP, 2010), a TLS 'Book of the Year' for 2010, Is Milton better than Shakespeare? (Harvard UP, 2008), the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Andrew Marvell's Poems, a TLS 'Book of the Year' for 2003, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (Yale UP, 1994) and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 (Oxford UP, 1989). He has also edited the Journal of George Fox (1998), and the Ranter pamphlets (1983; revised edn. 2012), and co-edited with Nicholas McDowell the Oxford Handbook to Milton (Oxford UP, 2009). His new work, The State and Literary Production in Early Modern Europe, involves the comparison of English with literatures in other European (especially Dutch, German, French and Spanish) and some oriental vernaculars in the context of political and scientific transformation between 1500 and 1800. With Sara Poor he is editing Mysticism and Reform (Notre Dame UP), a collection of essays mapping the passage of mysticism from the medieval to the early modern worlds.  He is also writing a study of the relationship between words and music, which grows in part from his work with Rackett (2004-2010), which he founded with Paul Muldoon, and Wayside Shrines, a new collaboration with Muldoon, Chris Harford and Ila Couch.