Current Concentrators

Iliyah Coles

Samuel Himmelfarb

Cammie Lee

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.

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.

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 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.

Our Commitment to Anti-Racist Teaching and Research

The Princeton Department of English supports and actively seeks to promote anti-racism within and beyond our teaching and research. We join with all people of conscience in the United States and across the world in condemning the police violence that has taken so many Black lives, and we mourn the loss of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Tanisha Anderson, Trayvon Martin, and many, many more.

“We strive for active anti-racism in our classrooms and our scholarship as a means of raising awareness and changing consciousness.”

We also celebrate the potential and the power of the teaching, writing and scholarship of faculty, graduate students and undergraduates to dismantle racism and challenge white supremacy past and present. As critical readers of literary texts, we confront firsthand how these values are created and defended. We also have access to a vast store of rich, moving, heartbreaking and joyful stories in which we can witness the destruction of racist practices and ideologies.

We strive for active anti-racism in our classrooms and our scholarship as a means of raising awareness and changing consciousness. We seek to investigate racist beliefs and practices with rigor and compassion. We emphasize our determination to join together in this anti-racist work — work that has too often been carried mostly by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islanders and other people of color. We believe such work can be done most successfully together, in community, with freedom and shared values.

In this work, we confront literary study’s long history as a prop to the worst forces of imperialism and nationalism, and its role in underwriting crimes of slavery and discrimination. Such a history compels us to continually reflect on how we read and teach literature and to actively dissociate literary studies from their colonial and racist uses. With renewed urgency, we can read the long history of dissidence and free imagination that is the best legacy of books across time and tradition. In this work, we will depend upon the vast energies of writers now writing, in whose words the causes of abolition and racial justice burn with wisdom and exigency.

Simon Gikandi, Chair, Sophie Gee, Associate Chair, and the members of the Executive Committee, 2020-21.