Branka Arsić, the Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of English and Comparative Literature, has been named a Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University in Spring 2025.
Professor Arsić specializes in literatures of the 19th century Americas and their scientific, philosophical, and religious contexts. She is the author of several essays and books, including Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard University Press, 2016), which was awarded the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize for the outstanding book of 2016. Arsić is currently completing a book entitled Ambient Life, Melville, Materialism and the Ethereal Enlightenment, a project for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. The book focuses on images of the elemental, vegetal, and animal that traverse Melville’s work as a means of investigating how he imagined the capacity of matter to move and transform.
Professor Arsić will be a Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Effron Center for the Study of America in Spring 2025. She will co-teach an undergraduate course with Sarah Rivett (English and American Studies) on Indigenous cosmologies.
Read more about the Visiting Professorship at Princeton here.
Congratulations, Professor Arsić!
