Two faculty members from Princeton’s Department of French and Italian have been awarded prestigious Humanities Council grants for 2025-26, supporting innovative projects that foster collaboration and deepen humanistic inquiry across campus and beyond.
Christy Wampole: Special Grant for ESSAY WEEK
Professor Christy Wampole has received a Special Grant for ESSAY WEEK, a dynamic, week-long celebration of the essay form set to take place from November 17-22, 2025. The event will gather students, faculty, and community members around a diverse program of public lectures, roundtables, experimental formats, screenings of essay films, and both undergraduate and graduate essay contests. Wampole noted, “No one is impervious to the power of a good essay. I am grateful for the Humanities Council’s acknowledgement that this special form of expression deserves a campus-wide celebration. Vive l’essai!”
Conceived as an inclusive and cross-disciplinary gathering, ESSAY WEEK will spotlight the essay’s enduring relevance across languages, disciplines, and media. Inspired by a similar event at Stanford University, the Princeton edition will feature contributions from renowned scholars and essayists, including David Remnick (The New Yorker), Emily Greenhouse (The New York Review of Books), and contributors to The Cambridge History of the American Essay and The Cambridge History of the British Essay. The event also highlights the essay’s power as a medium that bridges academic, public, and artistic discourse, and is poised to become a signature celebration of the humanities at Princeton.
Gaetana Marrone-Puglia: Team-Teaching Grant for Women in European Cinema
Professor Gaetana Marrone-Puglia, in collaboration with Maria DiBattista (Department of English), has been awarded a Magic Grant for Innovation to develop Women in European Cinema: Gender and the Politics of Culture. Offered for the second time, this interdisciplinary course (HUM 316/COM 313/ECS 374/ITA 316) explores how cultural identity shapes cinematic representations of women across genres, time periods, and national traditions.
Expanding on earlier iterations of the course, Marrone-Puglia and DiBattista aim to rethink the relationship between cinema and gender to “fit what it means today,” as Marrone-Puglia puts it. Drawing on the expertise of both instructors, the course provides students with essential historical and theoretical frameworks to analyze women’s roles in European cinema.
In addition to grounding students in film poetics, the course emphasizes a visual and interpretive approach: “it is a course that works primarily not with the word but with the image,” Marrone-Puglia notes. This method encourages students to critically examine how gender and culture have been portrayed on screen. “All the directors featured in the course have distinguished themselves for artistically controlling the field of cinema in their time,” she explains.
“The Humanities Council,” she adds, “has always been highly supportive of such expansive projects,” reaffirming its role in fostering innovative and inclusive teaching.
