Visiting Speakers

Claudia L. Johnson joined the faculty at Princeton in 1994 and was Chair of the English Department from 2004-2012.  She specializes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, with a particular emphasis on the novel.  In addition to eighteenth-century courses, she teaches courses on gothic fiction, sentimentality and melodrama, the history of prose style, film adaptations of novels into film, detective fiction, Samuel Johnson, and, of course, Jane Austen.  In addition, she has strong research interests in eighteenth-century music and culture, in the idea of voice, in letterpress printing, in Yiddish story, and in the American Songbook of the 1930’s and 1940s.

My major research and teaching interest is in the general area of popular literature, particularly in the fields of horror fiction and film, and of Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction.  Most specifically, I am interested in writers such as M. R. James, H. G. Wells, Arthur Machen, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, and their contemporaries in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century popular literature.  My edition of the Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James was published by Oxford University Press in 2011, and my Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson was published by OUP in 2014.  I am currently working on editions of Arthur Coman Doyle's Gothic Tales, and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and The Island of Doctor Moreau, all for OUP.

Architect, head of collections at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC), member of the Collegio Docenti della Scuola Dottorati del Istituto Universitario di Architettura (IUAV) of Venice and also holder of the King Juan Carlos I Chair of Spanish Culture and Civilization at New York University (NYU).

David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Department Head of MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and also Professor of Physics in MIT's Department of Physics. He completed an A.B. in physics at Dartmouth College and Ph.D.s in physics and the history of science at Harvard University. Kaiser's historical research focuses on the development of physics in the United States during the Cold War, looking at how the discipline has evolved at the intersection of politics, culture, and the changing shape of higher education. His physics research focuses on early-universe cosmology, working at the interface of particle physics and gravitation.

Bill Keller was executive editor of The New York Times from 2003 to 2011 and was an Op-Ed columnist from 2001 to 2003 and again from 2011 to 2014. From July 2003 until September 2011, he was the executive editor of The Times, presiding over the newsroom during a time of journalistic distinction, economic challenge, and transformation. During his eight years in that role, The Times sustained and built its formidable newsgathering staff, winning 18 Pulitzer Prizes, and expanded its audience by mastering the journalistic potential of the Internet. The newsroom also participated in the creation of a digital subscription plan to help secure the company’s economic future.  

Tamta Khalvashi holds her doctorate from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Since 2015 she has been an Assistant Professor in the School of Governance and Social Sciences at the Free University of Tbilisi. She has held scholarships from the Soros Foundation and the British Council at the University of Oxford, where she was also a Chevening Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the International Gender Studies Center.  

Born and bred in the Boston suburbs, Rob Kahn graduated Columbia University with a B.A. in History. The summer after his junior year Kahn studied in Madrid, Spain. Kahn then attended NYU Law School, where was a member of the Order of the Coif, as an editorial board member of The Commentator, NYU’s law student newspaper, and a Note and Comment Editor for the N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change. After law school, Kahn clerked for Magistrate-Judge Leonard I. Bernikow of the Southern District of New York and litigated social security disability cases with Harlem Legal Services.