Martin Kern and Chika Okeke-Agulu receive Behrman Award for the Humanities

Princeton professors Martin Kern and Chika Okeke-Agulu have received the University’s Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, which “recognizes extraordinary faculty distinction in humanities and publication; in teaching and advising; and in humanities-related University service.”

Martin Kern

Martin Kern is the Joanna and Greg Zeluck ’84 P13 P18 Professor in Asian Studies. His research centers on the textual culture of early China, which covers the first millennium before the common era. He joined the Princeton faculty in 2000 and served as chair of the Department of East Asian Studies from 2013 to 2020.

“Martin is simply one of the most influential, active, productive, creative and interdisciplinary scholars of East Asia in the world,” wrote one colleague who nominated Kern for the Behrman Award. “[His] lifework embodies at its fullest the ideals of humanistic study, research, and pedagogy.”

Kern has written on virtually every major text from Chinese antiquity and in all genres. He is considered the world’s leading scholar on the ancient “Classic of Poetry,” the fountainhead of the Chinese poetic tradition.

Another colleague captured the nature of Kern’s exceptional mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students over decades, observing that at the 2024 meeting of the American Society for Premodern Asia (founded in 1842 and until recently called the American Oriental Society), where Kern served as president in 2023-24, roughly 75 percent of the presenting scholars in the premodern China field were Kern’s former students. The colleague noted this is “ample evidence of the lively future of the field, thanks to his mentorship.” 

Kern is “a force of nature,” wrote one colleague, referring to his extensive collaborations on campus and around the world. These projects and programs, which another colleague said “open new pathways for understanding across disciplines,” include co-directing the Venice-Princeton Summer School in Classical Chinese and Classical Japanese/Kanbun and directing the International Center for the Study of Ancient Text Cultures at Renmin University of China in Beijing, among many others. He also led the Humanities Council’s interdisciplinary, multi-year “Comparative Antiquity” initiative, which involved over 100 faculty members and students across 10 departments, from 2018 to 2022.

A recipient of many honors and fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study, Kern has also delivered prestigious named lectures at universities and institutions throughout East Asia and the U.S. In 2015, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society, the oldest American academy, founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin. In June 2025, Kern received the Special Book Award of China.

His expansive scholarship includes well over a hundred articles in both English and Chinese and more than a dozen books, reflecting “his vast knowledge of the languages and literatures of the Far East,” wrote one of Kern’s colleagues, and his “brilliant ability to integrate deep learning and clear thinking.”

He has eight books and textbooks slated for publication in 2026 and 2027, including “Philological Practices: A Comparative Historical Lexicon,” co-edited with Glenn W. Most, an eight-year international project with approximately 400 authors, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. 

At Princeton, his undergraduate courses and graduate seminars span Chinese poetry, translation studies, ancient manuscripts and historiography. In 2005, he helped initiate the yearlong, team-taught East Asian Humanities sequence, and it has been taught ever since.

Kern spent two years as an exchange student at Peking University, supported by the German Academic Exchange Service, before earning his M.A. and Ph.D. in Sinology, German literature and art history from Cologne University in Germany.

Chika Okeke-Agulu

Chika Okeke-Agulu, the Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies and the founding director of Princeton’s Africa World Initiative, joined the faculty in 2008. 

An art historian, art critic, published poet, curator and practicing artist from Nigeria whose works are held in museum collections in the U.S., Germany and Nigeria, Okeke-Agulu’s research focuses on indigenous, modern and contemporary African and African diaspora art history. 

“Chika is a luminary,” wrote one colleague who nominated Okeke-Agulu for the Behrman Award. “[He] has transformed the way [the University] approaches an entire continent. Through a rich array of courses, outstanding scholarship and visionary leadership, Chika has made Princeton into a premier place for engaging with the history, culture, arts and peoples of Africa.”

Another colleague lauded his leadership of the Africa World Initiative — which gathers leading scholars, artists, thinkers and policymakers from Africa and its diasporas to create public conversations, events and programs — as “field-changing for the region, for academic scholarship and for Princeton.”

Okeke-Agulu has curated exhibitions at Princeton University Art Museum and at museums around the world, including in Berlin, Johannesburg, London and Munich. He served as a member of the international jury of the Venice Biennale in 2024 and is currently curating the exhibition “El Anatsui: Print and Play,” opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in December.

A teacher, mentor and leader with “bold vision,” wrote one colleague, Okeke-Agulu has taught nearly two dozen different courses on modern and contemporary African art and historiography, and served as director of the Program in African Studies from 2021 to 2024.

Other colleagues celebrated his scholarship and accomplishments, calling him “a tireless advocate for the production of knowledge from and about Africa and the Global South” and “a model for the humanities at work in the world,” noting that he has “radically expanded the impact that the humanities — and art history in particular — can have in, and beyond, the academy.” 

Okeke-Agulu has written extensively on contemporary African art and artists, including eminent books on the artists El Anatsui, Yusuf Grillo and Obiora Udechukwu. He is also the author of “Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria” and co-author of “Contemporary African Art Since 1980,” among others. He is the editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, considered the leading journal in the field.

His fellowships, awards and honors include the Herskovits Award from the African Studies Association, the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism and the Arnold Rubin Award, among many others. In 2022, he was elected corresponding fellow of the British Academy. In 2023, he served as Slade Professor of Art at the University of Oxford, the first African and Black scholar to hold this position since the chair was endowed in 1870.

Okeke-Agulu earned a bachelor’s and MFA in painting from the University of Nigeria, a master’s in art history from the University of South Florida-Tampa and his Ph.D. from Emory University.