In 2024, the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts celebrates its 25th anniversary. Since 1999, it has provided a unique space in contemporary academia, fostering vibrant and innovative interdisciplinary research, teaching and collaboration in the humanities and humanities-related social sciences. Over 25 years, the Society has welcomed 123 postdoctoral fellows to Princeton and included an even larger number of Princeton faculty members. To mark this special occasion, we will host a conversation with a panel of scholars whose interdisciplinary work has been inspiring to our community. 

Panelists

Nan Z. Da, Johns Hopkins University
Verity Platt, Cornell University
Ato Quayson, Stanford University
Matthew Reynolds, Oxford University
Moderator | Yelena Baraz, Director, Society of Fellows; Classics

Schedule 

10 am – 12:00 pm | Morning Session
Each panelist will discuss their current work in relation to the question of interdisciplinarity, followed by Q&A.

12:30 – 2:30 pm | Lunch

2:30 – 4:30 pm | Afternoon Session
An open discussion based on brief pre-circulated readings to be shared.

4:30 – 5:30 pm | Reception
 

Open to the University community. RSVP required.
For more information, contact Rhea Dexter at ext. 8-3690 or [email protected].

Biographies

Nan Z. Da
Nan Z. Da is an associate professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University. Da's teaching and scholarship focus on 19th-century American and trans-Atlantic literature and letters, modern Chinese literature and letters, literary and social theory, and the intersection of literary studies and data sciences. Her first book, Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange, was published by Columbia University Press in 2018. Her next book, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, will be out with Princeton University Press in 2025. She is currently wrapping up a monograph, On Disambiguation: Literature and Criticism from the Chinese Diaspora. Da’s work has appeared in Modern Philology, New Literary History, PMLA, American Literary History, Critical Inquiry, and Signs, as well as Public Books, LARB, n+1, and New York Magazine.
 

Verity Platt
Verity Platt, a professor of classics and history of art at Cornell University, specializes in Greek and Roman art, with a particular interest in the relationship between ancient visual and literary cultures. Her research spans ancient theories of the image, the history and theory of media, the historiography and reception of ancient art, post-classical Greek literature, and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (2011) and the forthcoming Epistemic Objects: Making and Mediating Classical Art and Text. As editor of the Classical Receptions Journal, she has a special interest in classical reception and has curated exhibitions featuring the work of contemporary artists.
 

Ato Quayson
Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English and inaugural Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. Prior to Stanford he taught in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, was inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, and also taught in the English Department at NYU. His research interests encompass African and African American literature, literary, narrative and cultural theory, urban studies, postcolonialism, diaspora and transnationalism, Shakespeare, critical race studies, and the role of the humanities more broadly. Quayson has published six monographs and ten edited volumes; his most recent book, Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (2021), won the Warren-Brooks Prize in Literary Criticism. Presently, he is completing a book on interdisciplinarity and interpretation. He is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and the British Academy. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.
 

Matthew Reynolds
Matthew Reynolds is professor of English and comparative criticism at the University of Oxford. He is interested in how literature germinates between and crosses languages, in translation as a creative process, especially as it involves Italian, French, Latin, ancient Greek and the many languages of English, in comparative and world literature, in writing about visual art, and in the practice of fiction. His most recent publication is the multimodal, multiplicitous and multi-authored volume Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages (2023), the culmination of the Prismatic Translation project which explored the power of translation to multiply and regenerate texts in different times and places. Besides several scholarly monographs, Reynolds has published various works of fiction. He is the founder and chair of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre.