These English department faculty are among 23 faculty from 14 departments awarded grants from the 250th Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education in in May 2025 to develop a pedagogically innovative course or curricular project. The 250th Fund is the University’s principal resource for curricular innovation.

Children’s Literature

William A. Gleason, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of English and American Studies, together with Professor of English Meredith Martin, will renovate the long-standing course “Children’s Literature” as a fundamentals of humanities course for the age of AI, integrating broader questions about childhood and literature and more recent questions about the urgency of reading and understanding how books make meaning in the age of the chatbot.

The original course, created in the 1990s by Ulrich Knoepfelmacher, professor of English emeritus and the William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature, emeritus, author of two scholarly books on children's literature, as well as a children's book of his own, primarily covered British literature — fairy tales, fairy tale imitations, and Alice in Wonderland. Over the past decade, Gleason has revised the course, keeping Alice in Wonderland, devoting the first half of the course to children's literature from the 17th to 19th centuries, and in the second half of the course following the 20th-century theories of childhood development that accompanied new marketing and reading comprehension categories for young readers — ABC Books, picture books, middle-grade, YA.

The course regularly makes use of the Cotsen Children's Library — in whose development Knoepfelmacher was crucial — and Rare Books and Special Collections, and for several years, Gleason has experimented with digital humanities (DH) assignments and computational tracks. Gleason and Martin hope to solidify what a DH track of the course might look like, while still ensuring that each of the students establishes a baseline of humanistic skills. Working closely with the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning staff, Gleason and Martin will develop a learning assessment plan over the coming summer for any new assignments added to the syllabus, with a hope that children's literature begins to draw students into a variety of humanities majors by modeling how humanistic approaches are compatible with — in fact crucial to — success in other disciplines on campus. In addition to supporting this summer development, the 250th Anniversary Fund grant will support two academic years guest lecturers: current children's book authors, current experts in book publishing, and current developers working on education platforms for children.

Alaskan Art, Spirit, and Being: Healing Histories of Dispossession

Sarah Rivett, professor of English and American studies, together with Rachael Z. DeLue, the Christopher Binyon Sarofim '86 Professor in American Art, professor of art and archaeology and American studies, and director of the Princeton Humanities Initiative, will design, develop and co-teach the course “Alaskan Art, Spirit, and Being: Healing Histories of Dispossession,” which will draw on the hundreds of Tlingit belongings in the Princeton University Art Museum as a way to consider Alaskan colonization in relation to Tlingit cosmology, ecology, and oral literary tradition, with the aim of recontextualizing these material objects according to their ancestral forms of embodiment, land, and kinship, including through collaboration with Tlingit scholars and artists working today, and a week-long trip to the University of Alaska Southeast. The grant will support graduate student assistance with the project.

Additional support for class trip honoraria for community partners will be contributed by the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship (ProCES).

Plays and Politics on the Global Stage

Associate Professor of English Tamsen O. Wolff, together with Jane Cox, professor of the practice in theater, director of the Program in Theater and co-director of the Fund for Irish Studies, will design, develop and co-teach the course “Plays and Politics on the Global Stage.”  The grant will support three years of undergraduate student assistance and guest lecturers, and class trips in the first year.

Wolff and Cox note that neither the English department nor the theater program offer regular courses in world drama and performance, so the course fills a curricular gap that has existed since 2019. Beyond the English department and the Lewis Center, Wolff and Cox aim to establish connections with and between scholars and artistic groups on campus, as well as nationally and internationally. 

The course will engage plays, performances, and theater artists from around the world who take on various political crises (e.g., the war in Ukraine; the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; Chile under Pinochet; the Liberian civil war; refugee camps in Calais), work that is new or in development, and will also look at critical historical productions and theater groups, and may include relevant canonical plays, especially when productions are in the offing. Each time the course is offered it will center one specific geo-political region, hosting a theater artist who will direct the theater program’s fall show in the course “Theater Rehearsal and Performance” and a scholar (or scholars) from that area to work with the students in and out of the class. (Students may take one or both courses.)

Proposals for new or reimagined courses awarded 250th Anniversary Fund grants are selected for funding by the 250th Anniversary Fund committee (the dean and deputy dean of the college, the senior associate dean of the faculty, and the director of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning), following faculty committee review of applications, with recommendations based on how directly the proposed courses respond to University priorities.