Princeton University’s Humanities Council has announced 28 new grants that have been awarded for innovative and collaborative projects that will take place in 2024-25. Lewis Center for the Arts professors Deana Lawson, Brian Herrera, and Stacy Wolf have received grants from the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project, and senior lecturer Martha Friedman has received a Collaborative Humanities Grant.
The 28 projects, led by 38 faculty from across 27 academic departments and programs at the University, will contribute to humanistic inquiry at Princeton and beyond. These new grants will generate original research within emerging fields of study, create and build new scholarly networks, engage with digital tools, and preserve archival materials.
The David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project, which supports ideas that have the potential to change how the humanities are conceived and taught, is funding the following projects or courses led by Lawson, Herrera, and Wolf:
“Photography as Poetic Document,” led by Lawson, will involve a two-day symposium in October 2024 and a concurrent photographic exhibition in the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Hurley Gallery that will gather photo-based artists, writers, curators, historians, and graduate and undergraduate students to explore photography’s instability, fallibility, and its “troubled relationship to the document.”
Herrera will develop a new spring 2025 theater course dedicated to the life, work, and legacy of Cuban-born playwright María Irene Fornés. With course activities, guest speakers, a playwriting intensive, a pop-up performance, and a theater-going trip to New York City, students will make theater and build creative community throughout the semester. This course will build upon a symposium focused on the life and legacy of Fornés that Herrera organized in 2018 at the Lewis Center in partnership with the Latinx Theatre Commons.
In “Musical Theatre and Fan Cultures,” Wolf and Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs Betsy Armstrong will explore why people love Broadway musicals. They are developing a new spring 2025 team-taught humanistic studies course that examines the social forms co-created by performers and audiences and the wider phenomenon of fan culture. Their Magic grant supports course enrichment, including guest lectures and course travel that will form the experiential and intellectual backbone of the seminar.
In addition to the Magic Projects, a new Collaborative Humanities Grant awarded to Friedman along with Professor of Classics Brooke Holmes will support the second phase of their project, “Elasticities,” which will include a summer 2024 workshop at the Princeton Athens Center. The workshop will examine scholarly work in classical reception studies, architectural theory, and art history, as well as transdisciplinary study of the ancient Mediterranean at the intersection of the academy and public-facing institutions. The first phase of their project launched in summer 2022 and was supported by the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project.
The Council is also continuing to support nine previously awarded multi-year initiatives, one of which is the “Climate Stories Incubator,” a collaborative project involving Lecturer in Visual Arts Tim Szetela along with scholars from the Effron Center, High Meadows Environmental Institute, and Department of Geosciences.
Read the full announcement on 2024-25 grants awarded by the Humanities Council.
