Larissa FastHorse

Short-Term Belknap Fellow in the Humanities Council and Lewis Center for the Arts, Spring 2024

Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota) is a playwright, director, choreographer and activist who has been honored with many awards, including the MacArthur Foundation, the PEN/USA Literary Award for Drama, and the NEA Distinguished New Play Development Grant. Her produced plays include the comedy The Thanksgiving Play, which was one of the ten most produced plays in America in 2022; Cow Pie Bingo, Urban Rez, Native Nation and many others. With The Thanksgiving Play performing at Second Stage Theater in the Spring of 2023, Fasthorse is the first known Native American playwright to have a play on Broadway. FastHorse is also the founder of Indigenous Direction, a consulting firm that helps organizations who want to create accurate creative work by, for and with Indigenous peoples, and she is the Vice Chair of the Theater Communications Group, the largest national organization for the American theater. She has also worked for Universal Pictures and Paramount as a creative executive.

Julietta Singh

Short-Term Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Effron Center for the Study of America, *RESCHEDULED to Fall 2024*

Julietta Singh is a decolonial scholar and nonfiction writer whose work engages the enduring global effects of colonization through attention to ecology, inheritance, race, gender and sexuality. She works and teaches across decolonial studies, the ecological humanities, queer studies, and experimental feminisms. Singh is the author of three books: Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism & Decolonial Entanglements, No Archive Will Restore You, and most recently, The Breaks, in which Singh pens a long letter to her young daughter about race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world. It has recently been hailed as a best nonfiction book of the year by entities such as the New York Public Library, Book Riot, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. She is currently at work on At Home in Another World, an experimental feature film collaboration (with Chase Joynt), currently in development with the National Film Board of Canada. Singh is associate professor of English and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, University of Richmond.

The Indigenous Amazigh Oral Narratives’ Digital Archive

Mounia Mnouer (Near Eastern Studies) will embark on a three year project to center oral histories and narratives as told by people from different Amazigh communities in North African Indigenous lands and the diaspora. Mnouer will travel to five different locations including Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Canary Islands, and France to converse with different Amazigh elders, community leaders, educators, activists, and artists and will create a digital archive that encompasses narratives around their lived experiences in terms of their histories, language, education, environment, art and representation, and cultural engagement and activism. These histories will be incroprated into curriculum, and with the consent of Amazigh communities, made available to Princeton on its digital platforms, while making sure the communities hold the copyright. The Princeton community at large will also be exposed to a diversity of Indigenous voices in North Africa that are often marginalized and underrepresented, and will benefit by knowing how to position themselves when exploring content related to Indigenous peoples. Given that Indigenous research is relational, students and faculty need to be exposed to stories and perspectives told by Indigenous peoples themselves to ensure that scholarship is holistic and inclusive. Learn more at African Communities Unite.