Department of English, Princeton University

This talk will discuss how a shared critique of interdisciplinarity and the “conjectural sciences” shaped the alliance between French psychoanalysts and Marxists in the run-up to May ’68, from its formation to its dissolution.

Kobe Keymeulen is a philosopher interested in the tension between the history of ideas and “anti-historicist” theoretical problems.

At Princeton, he is working as a Fulbright Scholar on a project investigating the ongoing relationship between American literary theory and contemporary continental philosophy. His main focus is the influence of an ontological or materialist turn in 21st-century philosophies on approaches to critical theory in the United States, pursuing shared points of reference (drawn from Marxism, psychoanalysis, et al) and methodological differences

“Lacan, Althusser and the ‘Very Pretty Dream’ of Interdisciplinarity”

Kobe Keymeulen
Ghent University Visiting Fellow, Department of English

April 21, 2026
4:30 – 6 pm
McCosh 40

Join Edward Jones-Imhotep, in conversation with Adriana Green, to discuss his newest book project, “The Black Androids,” and its adaptation into a graphic novel.

April 14 at 4:30 pm, East Pyne 010.

Currently in development with MIT Press, and drawing on five years of historical research, “The Black Androids: A Graphic Novel,” is a collaboration with six writer-illustrators exploring the Black technological underground in New York City between 1830 and 1930, set against the rise of the Black androids — actual historical machines, built in the form of Black humans.

Edward Jones-Imhotep received his Ph.D. in history of science from Harvard University and is professor and director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. He is co-editor, with Wiebe Bijker and Rebecca Slayton, of MIT Press’s Inside Technology series.

Sponsorship of an event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

The Department of English’s Victorian Colloquium had last summer invited Harvard Assistant Professor of English TaraMenon to campus to present her critical work. ​Her first academic monograph, “Speaking Parts: Conversation, Character, and Social Worlds,” will be published this September by Princeton University Press.

With Menon’s debut novel, “Under Water,” published two weeks (March 17 in the United States) before the confirmed colloquium date, Maria DiBattista, the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and professor of comparative literature, invited Menon also to discuss and celebrate the novel while in Princeton. With support from the Humanities Council, a lunchtime conversation was added to Menon’s schedule for this past Wednesday, April 1.

Link in bio to write-up of the two events, with larger photos to enjoy.

Professors Rachael Z. DeLue and Sarah Rivett led 15 students on a spring break trip to Alaska as part of their course, “Alaskan Art, Spirit, and Being: Healing Histories of Dispossession,” and an ongoing collaboration with the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS). The course reflects on the hundreds of Tlingit belongings — bentwood boxes, totems, woven baskets, and shaman masks — that made the arduous journey from southeastern Alaska to Princeton in the late 19th century. Now housed at the Princeton University Art Museum, these belongings reflect an ongoing condition of colonialism and broken knowledge. This course is an offering towards healing and reparation as we reflect on Alaskan colonization in relation to Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian cosmology, ecology, and oral tradition. Our aim is to begin a journey of recontextualizing these material objects according to their ancestral forms of embodiment, land, and kinship. Integral to this journey are the connections we have formed with Indigenous artists and UAS faculty, staff, and students. For their support, knowledge, and friendship, we are immensely grateful.

Photos 6 and 7 by Calvin Grover, A&A major on the Practice of Art track.

On Thursday, March 26, 2026 at 5 p.m., join us in McCosh Hall, Room 10, for “Exit & Exception,” the 2026 Edward W. Said ‘57 Memorial Lecture, to be delivered by Noura Erakat, Professor of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Erakat is the author of “Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine” (Stanford University Press, 2019), which narrates the Palestinian struggle for freedom as told through the relationship between international law and politics during five critical junctures between 1917-2017, to better understand the emancipatory potential of law and to consider possible horizons for the future. “Justice for Some” received the Palestine Book Award and the bronze medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs.

Erakat has also produced video documentaries, including “Gaza In Context” and “Black Palestinian Solidarity.” She completed a non-resident fellowship of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School as well as a Mahmoud Darwish Visiting Professorship at Brown University. In 2022, she was selected as a Freedom Fellow by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. In 2025, the University of Ghent awarded the Amnesty International Chair in recognition of her contribution to human rights and scholarship.

Inspired by the field-defining intellectual heritage of Edward W. Said ’57, author of “Orientalism” (1978) and “Culture and Imperialism” (1993), the Edward W. Said ‘57 Memorial Lecture is presented annually by the Department of English, with support from the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture Fund and the Princeton Committee on Palestine.

Sponsorship of an event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

Photo credit: United Nations photo by AFP. Noura Erakat photo courtesy of Noura Erakat.

Sarah Rivett, professor of English and American studies, is one 14 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars announced for 2026-27.

She is the author of “The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England” (2011), “Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation” (2017), and is currently completing “Raven’s Land: Indigenous Literature and the American Canon.” Her research explores how religion, archives, and ecologies shape American literature across time and place from 16th-century New England to 21st-century Alaska. Tracing intersections of European, African American, and Indigenous histories, Rivett’s scholarship and teaching seek to recover voices and stories of the past that have been obscured or forgotten in colonial archives. Drawing on a vast archive of oral and written literature, visual images, objects, and religious and scientific texts, Rivett’s research seeks to illuminate the significance of Indigenous traditions as they intersect with and shape American literary and cultural production.

Since 1956, the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Visiting Scholar Program has offered undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars. The purpose of the program is to contribute to the intellectual life of the institution by making possible an exchange of ideas between the Visiting Scholars and the resident faculty and students.

Each year, members of the Committee on the Visiting Scholar Program select top scholars in the liberal arts and sciences to visit universities and colleges where Phi Beta Kappa chapters are located. Visiting Scholars spend two days on each campus meeting informally with undergraduates, participating in classroom lectures and seminars, and giving one major lecture open to the academic community and general public.

The 2026-27 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars will make over 100 visits during the academic year, with the majority of them participating in the podcast Key Conversations with Phi Beta Kappa.

Photo by Danielle Capparella, Office of Communications.

Indeed, the pleasure of the text!

Join us at 12pm, Tuesday, Feb. 3 for the first Department of English public event of the spring 2026 semester!

In “The Barthes Fantastic,” John Lurz ’03 explores the intersection of literature and everyday life — and confronts some habits of literary study — through a reading of the work of Roland Barthes. An influential French theorist, Barthes wrote prolifically on the place of language and the play of signs in the ways we produce cultural and aesthetic meaning. Ranging across the entire sweep of Barthes’s varied career, Lurz shows how Barthes’s insights into signification and literature involve particular intellectual activities that impart significance to the world. Doing so allows him to develop an expanded understanding of the fantastic as a conceptual category — a way of thinking — in which the texts we read come to inform the texture of our real lives. Ultimately, “The Barthes Fantastic” enlarges our sense of what we learn as students of literature and gives us a new picture of a writer we thought we knew.

John Lurz’s research interests include: 19th- and 20th-century British fiction, especially James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; semiotics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology; media studies and the history of the book; Roland Barthes, and Marcel Proust.

Lunch provided. Link in bio to register. We look forward to seeing you!

With a January thaw warmly in effect, those in Princeton English returning to campus from the holidays this year found McCosh Court clear of all but sparse and small patches of December snow. It was remarked upon that recent winters had brought no substantial snows before the new year, and so, no January thaws.
In these first days, spring felt plausibly just around the corner through Johnson Arch. On McCosh Court, grass showed some regreening. Above the elm by Princeton University Chapel, a short V of geese flew with their purpose into Philip Larkin’s “deep blue air / that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

What an ecstatic dancer’s leap the elm makes into that deep blue air past walkways’ melt water shine! The elm is likely a Princeton cultivar, Google Images AI suggests upon not finding text about this exact specimen, and guiding your editor to the Wikipedia page for Ulmus americana ‘Princeton’ (do go).

One can readily surmise from the elm’s position and present height that the University planted it around the construction of the Princeton University Chapel (completed in 1928). Anyone visiting or passing by Princeton English, the Department of History, too, can admire it, splendid in any weather. Students, find yourself enrolled in a course that meets in McCosh 28 or 46, and on sunny days catch the elm shadow’s progress across the chapel stones, and its disappearance into and emergence from shadows of passing clouds.

Photo 6: Dec. 15, 2025, second day after first major snowfall of the winter.

Photo 7: View from McCosh Hall, Room 46.

Philip Larkin quote from Philip Larkin, “High Windows” from Collected Poems. Copyright © Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Photos by Sarah K. Malone, Department of English

A week that held this year’s peak color, here —

As in so many years, rain would determine when and how quickly the variegated spell on McCosh Court would pass. For some few days we walked through a quality of light much like that of the day before.

Monday, Oct. 27, 2025, stepping out from attending to the reasons to be there, or passing from one to the next.

At 5 p.m., Monday, Oct 20 in Rabinowitz A17, join Princeton Associate Professor of African American Studies and English Autumn Womack and Duke University Associate Professor of English Jarvis C. McInnis in conversation on McInnis’s new book “Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South” (2025, Columbia University Press).

In this, his first book-length monograph, McInnis charts an alternative cultural and intellectual genealogy of Black modernity by centering Booker T. Washington’s school, the Tuskegee Institute, as a crucible of black transnational and diasporic relations between southern African American and Caribbean writers, intellectuals, and cultures in the early 20th century.

A native of Gulfport, Mississippi, McInnis is a proud summa cm laude graduate of Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi, where he earned a B.A. in English, and Columbia University in the City of New York, where he earned a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature.

Presented by the Department of African American Studies and co-sponsored by the Department of English.

Sponsorship of an event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement
of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

The Public Table, toward Cannon Green, catching the golden hour, waiting for a friend.

Oct 1 at 5 p.m.

Be here now.