Recent debates about truth, lies, and authenticity have reminded us that truth has a history, and that the meaning of truthfulness and justice keep changing over time. The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University seeks applications from scholars exploring the historical evolution of regimes and practices of establishing, telling, and writing truth. We understand the notion of truth broadly: as a philosophical and epistemological category, an ideal of social equity and political justice, and a principle governing historical writing, legal, and scientific investigation. We invite historians who study the role of ideology, religion, informational technology, and media in the historical evolution of truth. We are also interested in projects on the history of lying, deception, and misinformation. Intellectual historians, historians of art, gender, race, sexuality, information, governance, science, and technology from antiquity to the modern period whose work engages with these subjects are encouraged to apply. Topics may include (but are not limited to) the use and misuse of facts in political propaganda, problems of evidence and objectivity, authenticity and source criticism, fakes, forgery and conspiracy theories, and diplomatic, inter- and intra- national reconciliation.
Davis Center Fellows
2025–26
Jessamyn Abel, Pennsylvania State University
“Information, Truth, and Democratization in Postwar Japan, 1945–1955”
Spring 2026
Mikhal Dekel, CCNY and the CUNY Graduate Center
“Beyond Restitution: Global Reverberations of Holocaust Memory”
Fall 2025
Tamara Fernando, SUNY Stony Brook
“Shallow Blue Empire: Labor, Science and Environment across the Indian Ocean Littoral, 1850–1925”
Fall 2025
Cindy Hahamovitch, University of Georgia
“That Same Old Snake”: Slaves, Coolies, Guestworkers, and the Global History of Human Trafficking”
Year 2025–26
Jacqueline Hylkema, Leiden University College
“Faking Truth and Truthfulness in the Dutch Republic, 1608 – 1688”
Spring 2026
Taushif Kara, King's College London
“The Problem of Taqiyya: Invisible Subjects in Colonial India”
Fall 2025
José Ragas, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
“Becoming Data: Bodies, Personal Information and Technology in Modern Peru”
Spring 2026
Pavlina Rychterova, Austrian Academy of Sciences
“The Return to a Simple Truth and Its Consequences: Discourses of Failure and Loss in Late Medieval Bohemia”
Spring 2026
David Sartorius, University of Maryland
“Cuban Paper Trails: A Colonial History of Passports, Race, and Mobility”
Fall 2025
Mischa Suter, Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
"The Transferential Truth About Subjects: Psychoanalysis Between West Africa and Western Europe in the Sixties"
Fall 2025
2024–25
Paul Bertrand, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
“Forging the European Middle Ages: An Essay on the Regimes of Fake”
Spring 2025
Katlyn Carter, Notre Dame University
“The Politics of Truth in Early America”
Spring 2025
Greg Eghigian, Penn State University
“Carried Away? Truth, Trust, and Trauma in the Alien Abduction Phenomenon”
Fall 2024
Tim Livsey, Northumbria University
“Beyond Secrecy: Rethinking Histories of Knowledge and the British Colonial Migrated Archive”
Fall 2024
Jennifer Luff, Johns Hopkins University
“The Mendacious State: Political Policing in Interwar Britain”
Fall 2024
Caroline Mezger, Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History
“Rumor and Displacement: A History of Forced Migration under the Third Reich, 1938-1948”
Spring 2025
Genevieve Renard Painter, Concordia University
“Trials as Factories of Truth: Judgment in a Settler Colony”
Fall 2024
Sasha Turner, Johns Hopkins University
“The Incalculability of Britain's Debt: Accounting for Emotions in Slavery”
Spring 2025
Aro Velmet, University of Southern California
“The Information Revolution: From Socialist Utopia to Digital Democracy in Eastern Europe”
Spring 2025
Greg Yudin, Princeton, UCHV
"'True Picture of Public Opinion': Opinion Polling as a Scientific and Political Technology"
Academic Year 2024–25
Postdoctoral Fellows
Davis Center Postdoctoral Fellows:
Victor Couto Tiribás
“Reading a Book from the Outside: The Transatlantic Diaspora of a Marginal Sephardic Circle”
Morgan Carlton
“Mothering the Race: Racial Uplift and Motherhood in Interwar Detroit”
Davis Center / Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Postdoctoral Fellows:
Nataly Shahaf
“Multiple Exposures: Ghosts, Buddhism, and Visual Heritage in Early Twentieth-Century China”
Alex Reiss-Sorokin
“Trust in Search: Credibility and Doubt in Legal Research Technologies”
