Mercer Times

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.

Campt is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities, and professor of art and archaeology and visual arts at the Lewis Center for the Arts. Her fellowship supports her book project, "Art in a Time of Sorrow," which Campt said grew from her experience with grief during the pandemic.

She had lost several loved ones and came to realize how art — "writing about it, seeing it, thinking about it" — helped her cope. "'Art in a Time of Sorrow' is really about what is the role of art and artists in helping us to grieve both personal losses and cultural, social, political grievances and losses," she said.

Last month, Campt led an intensive graduate seminar in the Netherlands and gave a public talk on art and grief, both focused on the work of American artist Carrie Mae Weems, co-hosted by Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and the University of Amsterdam.

"So many people came up to me afterwards and said how important it was for them to hear me talk about my personal experience with grief and how art helps me to express that because they too are doing that," she said. "We all have to find a way to articulate the grief that we've experienced over the last five years."

Campt said she is looking forward to her time in Berlin as a kind of homecoming: She researched and wrote her dissertation there, and her first teaching job was at the Technical University of Berlin.

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 describes "My Elsewheres" as a kind of "Photoshop document that has many layers." It traverses her life outside of the U.S., first studying abroad in France during college in the 1960s; 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 also represents a homecoming.

She said the idea for the book grew from new audiences attracted by her books during this century. "In the 20th century I did not feel I had a market as a writer who was not writing 'as a Black person,'" she said. "After 'The History of White People' (2020), ‘Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over' (2018) and 'I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays' (2024), I have readers who are interested in how I see the world."

"I see the world as myself obviously,” Painter said. “And proudly I am a Black American, which helps me see things that often other people can't see over time and place. It's a freedom I feel now in 2024 to write through my Black person's eyes but not as only being defined by it."

She looks forward to engaging with other historians at the American Academy along with novelists and artists among others. "It brings together people from many different fields," she said.

Since transferring to emeritus status in 2005 Painter has enjoyed a career as an artist. She plans to bring her perspective as an artist and historian into her new book.