Princeton faculty members Basile Baudez, Margot Canaday and Tamsen Wolff have been awarded the Sophie and L. Edward Cotsen Faculty Fellowship for 2025–28 in recognition of their distinguished careers in teaching and scholarship at Princeton. Established in 1990 by a gift from Lloyd Cotsen ’50, the fellowships support the development and teaching of new undergraduate courses, or other distinctive contributions to the undergraduate teaching program at Princeton. Awardees receive a grant of $5,000 per year for each of the three years of the fellowship.

Margot Canaday

Canaday is the Dodge Professor of History and an award-winning legal and political historian who studies gender and sexuality in modern America. Canaday, a faculty member since 2008, was one of four Princeton faculty members awarded a Graduate Mentoring Award by the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning in 2021. The mentoring award recognizes Princeton faculty members who nurture the intellectual, professional and personal growth of their graduate students. Canaday has also won fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Princeton University Society of Fellows, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2016.

Canaday has written two books: “The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America” (2009) and “Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America” (2023).

As a Cotsen fellow, Canaday said she hopes to develop three new courses. “Queer Archives” would expose students to the distinctive and fascinating problematics of the queer archive. Canaday plans to strategize with students about a variety of ways to find archival evidence and to collectively produce a guide to different kinds of sources for writing LGBTQ history that could be carried out from Princeton and nearby facilities. “The Intellectual History of Feminism” would track primary source texts in the history of feminist thought, and “The History of the Workplace” would be structured around different kinds of workplaces and cover the pre-industrial era to the present.