Princeton University’s Humanities Council has announced 28 new grants for innovative and collaborative projects that will take place in 2025-26. Lewis Center for the Arts faculty members, including Senior Lecturer in Theater Elena Araoz, Professor of the Practice and Director of the Program in Theater & Music Theater Jane Cox, Professional Specialist in Visual Arts Medhin Paolos, and Lecturer in Theater and Music Solon Snider Sway, have received support for their projects.
The 28 projects, led by 36 faculty from across 28 academic departments and programs at the University, will contribute to humanistic inquiry at Princeton and beyond. These new grants will generate pioneering research within emerging fields of study, utilize cutting-edge technologies, establish global scholarly networks, and preserve materials and languages.
Magic Grants
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 led by Elena Araoz, Jane Cox, and Medhin Paolos:
Araoz will direct the live, operatic theater work No One is Forgotten, premiering in February 2026 in the Wallace Theater at the Lewis Arts complex. The show, a story of a journalist and aid worker held captive, applies psychoacoustic techniques using newly invented sound technology. An interdisciplinary community conversation on art and journalism will be moderated by Director of the Program in Journalism Eliza Griswold.
As Princeton University reflects on the role of public humanities, The Trenton/Princeton Oral History Play Project aims to think about the necessity of discovering and sustaining productive connections between the University and the city of Trenton. A series of workshops, classes, and research-related public events, facilitated by Cox and Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Religion Andrew Chignell, will take place in collaboration with Princeton students, Rider University, and artists from Trenton’s Passage Theater.
Black in the World Archive and Lecture Series, led by Paolos and Director of the Program in Latino Studies Lorgia García Peña, seeks to form a collaborative, transnational, multilingual digital humanities archive on Black experiences in the world, created in collaboration with both graduate and undergraduate students. This archive will be unveiled in May 2026 with a roundtable, a performance, and a conversation, in which Black scholars and artists from Africa, Europe, and Latin America will address alternative archive-making in their own work.
Collaborative Humanities Grants
New Collaborative Humanities Grants help faculty develop mutual areas of focus and to generate research or teaching in promising and underrepresented fields in the humanities.
This grant will support a new National Museum of African Art Student Exchange, a collaboration between the Smithsonian Museum of African Art and Princeton University, organized by Jane Cox. University of Cape Town professor Jay Pather, a Spring 2026 Belknap Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Lewis Center, will teach for the Program in Theater & Music Theater an undergraduate course on interdisciplinarity, curation and decoloniality. Led by Pather, students in the course will collaborate with the Smithsonian to curate their AfricanLive Arts series, The Earth Still Shakes!, and to explore the artistic, curation and scholarly practices in the field by engaging with Smithsonian partners at Princeton and in D.C.
Special Grants
The Humanities Council has additionally awarded special grants for initiatives, conferences, and workshops related to literature, music, and art, including a recording project led by Jane Cox and Solon Snider Sway. The Princeton Playhouse Ensembles, directed by Snider Sway, will undertake its first effort to record, produce, release, and distribute four student-written compositions. The grant will support recordings and post-production work that will take place in the Lee Music Room at the Lewis Arts complex and remotely between May and September 2025. Distribution and release is planned for early in the fall 2025 semester as the student-led group plans its future concerts, repertoire, and sound.
Read the full announcement on 2025-26 grants awarded by the Humanities Council.
