Annual Report / 2020-21
Iliyah Coles
writers we study. I also would like to consider key questions about the relationship between the life cycle and authorship: How much of an advantage, in literary terms, is a long life? Does publishing early matter, and how early is early? How closely connected is class background to choice of genre? I would welcome it if those engaged in overlapping work, either in early modernity or in another period, would get in touch.
Current Concentrators Samuel Himmelfarb
Cammie Lee
Iliyah Coles (A.B. ’22) I’m currently working on my senior thesis: a creative short story collection about Black families. For my junior paper, I conducted research on fictions of Blackness, using Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys” and Saidiya Hartman’s “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” as focus texts. Over the summer, I did an internship for the Shakespeare and Company Project led by professor Joshua Kotin. My task was to go through and edit the Shakespeare and Company logbooks, structuring and presenting them in a way that would be easily accessible to researchers. I currently work at Mudd Manuscript Library, assisting with research and writing blogs about Princeton’s history for the website. “Hartman’s ‘Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments’ and Whitehead’s ‘The Nickel Boys’ ... recapitulate the Black past by counteracting the few and false narratives that exist in the archives, also by creating narratives that have enough depth and complexity that one cannot
help but assume the truth in them. Through texts like these — through the change in Black labeling from words like ‘criminal’ to ‘wayward’ — writers like Hartman and Whitehead are attempting to reconstruct the meaning of Blackness both historically and contemporarily. ... In that sense, recapitulation becomes a method in which all of us should encounter the past, not only through the acknowledgement of the falsities present in the archival representation of Black lives, but also through the recognition of the various fictions of Blackness that exist within the Black community — perspectives that embolden, complicate and beautify the Black narratives that once just barely existed.” — An excerpt from Iliyah Coles’ junior paper
Samuel Himmelfarb (A.B. ’23) I’m currently working as a research assistant for professor Joshua Kotin on the Shakespeare and Company Project. The project uses the papers from the Sylvia Beach Collection to explore the trends and habits of the lending library’s membership. I’ve also gotten into the study of languages this past year, studying Latin over the summer and continuing with Hebrew and French this semester. My other classes are poetry related; this semester is my first foray into verse, having thus far focused on the novel.
Daily Princetonian and a violin coach for the Trenton Youth Orchestra. I previously served as the essay editor for The Nassau Literary Review, and before the pandemic, played violin for the Princeton University Orchestra. In my leisure time, I enjoy watching films, listening to music, cooking and baking, and run a pop-up tearoom for friends and Princeton community members. This past summer, with support from the A. Scott Berg Fellowship and the Lewis Center for the Arts, I worked on an experimental publication called “CAPSULE” with my friend Megan Pai, a senior in the School of Architecture. “CAPSULE” is many things: an artist’s book, a transcript, an imprint, a timestamp, an experiment in the art of gathering — but ultimately, it began and exists as a living conversation. The text is a fictional roundtable discussion, fabricated from nine two-on-one interviews with digital and web-based artists conducted over the summer of 2021. The result is a collaborative exploration into (cyber)space/ time, and a physical re-enactment of the way we connect, browse and communicate online. We printed the booklets at a risograph studio based out of Brooklyn, New York, and bounded by hand all 100 editions using a simple pamphlet stitch.
Cammie Lee (A.B. ’22) I am a senior in the English department pursuing certificates in Asian American studies and East Asian studies, with additional interests in art history, media theory and gender studies. On campus, I am a co-head editor for the arts and culture section of The
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