Collaborations
Co-directed by English and Comparative Literature Professors Maria DiBattista (Princeton) and Barry McCrea (Notre Dame), the International Network for the Comparative Humanities (INCH) is an international consortium that promotes interdisciplinary exchange between Princeton and Notre Dame faculty and graduate students with their counterparts overseas. INCH is aimed at developing a new model for “networking” in the humanities, one that stresses the importance of collaboration across generational as well as national and institutional boundaries.
For more than a decade Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative (PTI) has been offering accredited college courses to passionate, insightful, incarcerated students, many of whom have earned their Associate of Arts degree, and some of whom have since gone on to Bachelors and graduate work. Graduate students from the English Department have been vital members of PTI, teaching courses on composition, women’s and gender studies, translation and poetry, and world literatures.
Claudia L. Johnson recently initiated a letterpress workshop with printer David Sellers at Pied Oxen Printers in Hopewell, New Jersey. A brave band of graduate students—Hope Rogers, Miranda Marraccini, Jessica Terekhov, and Cameron VanSant—along with Sarah M. Anderson and John Orluk Lacombe joined Johnson in a series of seven 3-hour workshops with Sellers designed around an ambitious goal: to design, handset, proof, print, gather, and sew a chapbook of poems contributed by six faculty and graduate student poets.
A group of seven Chinese poets and poetry scholars visited the Princeton campus to participate in a week-long seminar (March 26-31) organized by Professor Susan Stewart and devoted to “A Dialogue in Chinese and English Poetics.” Professor Lei Yanni from Sun-Yat Sen University, Professors Chen Xiaohong and Li Zhimin from Guangzhou University, Professor Wang Zhou from Shandong Normal University, Professor Qingji He from Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Professor Dong Feng from Qingdao University, and the poet Yixiao Wang joined Princeton faculty in discussing traditional
Sophie Gee and Sarah Rivett, co-winners of a $50,000 Innovation Grant for New Ideas in the Humanities, are collaborating on a project called “The Global Enlightenment.” This project takes a new look at the idea of "Enlightenment" by emphasizing its role as a complex global phenomenon. Scholars understand the 18th Century to be the era in which the Western world turned secular, as intellectual, cultural, and political institutions were liberated from Christianity. But the Enlightenment is not just applicable to Western history and civilization.
In their new book, "At Home in the World: Women Writers and Public Life, from Austen to the Present," Princeton professors Maria DiBattista and Deborah Nord re-evaluate the past two centuries of female novelists as their characters leave the threshold of home. The scholars turn their attention to how these characters engage with the most pressing issues of public life: economic and social justice, slavery, warfare, democratic reforms, globalization, and the clash of cultures.