
Photo credit: Dwight Carter
Princeton professors Tina Campt and Nell Irvin Painter are among the 24 recipients of this year’s Berlin Prize Fellowship.
The prestigious fellowship is awarded by the American Academy in Berlin to U.S. scholars, writers, composers and artists. Awardees “represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields, from the humanities and social sciences to journalism, public policy, fiction, the visual arts and music composition,” the academy said in its announcement.
Fellows spend a semester at the Academy’s Hans Arnhold Center in Berlin’s Wannsee district, where they participate in public programs in addition to pursuing their scholarship. Campt and Painter both received fall 2024 fellowships.
Nell Irvin Painter
Painter is the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita. Her fellowship also supports a book project.
Her work-in-progress, “My Elsewheres,” is a reflection on moments from her life in France, Ghana and Germany and how they helped shape her academic career focused on narrative storytelling about race and history.
Painter, who grew up in California, describes “My Elsewheres” as a kind of “Photoshop document that has many layers.” It traverses her life outside of the U.S. — first in the 1960s studying abroad in France during college, then spending two years in Ghana with her parents after college, then engaging in research on history and memory for “The History of White People” in Germany in 2001. So it, too, represents a homecoming.