From Climate Cinema to Ancient Law: Meet the 2026 Arts & Humanities Award Recipients

540th Convocation Honors Winners Who Put Scholarship into Practice

The Division of the Arts & Humanities is proud to announce its 2026 student award recipients. Honored during Convocation on June 5, both graduating and current students were recognized for excellence in scholarship, teaching, course design, leadership, and research. Their projects span medieval literature and climate cinema, North African multilingualism and prehistoric archaeology, digital exhibitions and early Islamic law. A culmination of intensive study, their work demonstrates the many ways humanities research shapes classrooms, public life, and our understanding of the past.

Master of Arts Awards

The Division's master's awards recognize exemplary academic achievement, collaborative leadership, and significant contributions to a field of study.

Dean's Award for Excellence in Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History Recipient: Sifan Raymond Chen (MA’26)

Dean's Award for Excellence in Middle Eastern Studies Recipient: Erin Anderson (MA’26)

Dean's Award for Outstanding Graduate Leader in Visual Arts Recipient: El Lee (MA’26)

Dean's Award for Excellence in the Master of Arts Program Recipients: Cas Crevecoeur (MA’26), Evan DaYu Ling (MA’26), and Will Robertson (MA’26)

Together, these students exemplify the breadth of graduate work across the Arts & Humanities, pairing rigorous scholarship with intellectual generosity and expansive engagement.

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Dean's Awards for Graduate Student Teaching Excellence

Recognizing outstanding graduate instruction and mentorship, this award honors teachers whose classrooms inspire students to take intellectual risks and develop their own lines of inquiry.

Kashaf Qureshi
PhD Candidate, Department of English Language & Literature

Qureshi's highly in-demand course, Medieval Desire, invited students to grapple with the surprising intersections of spirituality, eros, and selfhood in late medieval England. She encouraged students to work together through challenging Middle English poetry, adapting discussions and activities so that every student could contribute regardless of prior experience. One nominator praised her ability to create “the range of ideas and strategies I would expect from a much more seasoned teacher,” adding that her classroom demonstrated “it's good to present students with difficulty and give them space to grapple with that difficulty.”

 

Nat Modlin
Dual PhD Candidate, Departments of Cinema & Media Studies and Germanic Studies

Whether teaching advanced German through film or designing a new course on environmental media, Modlin creates spaces where students can tackle complex ideas with confidence. Their course, Climate Change Cinema, asks how moving images shape our understanding of environmental crisis across genres, including science fiction, documentaries, and “eco-thrillers,” and national traditions in China, India, Japan, and the US. A recommender described Modlin as “one of the best graduate instructors that CMS has had in recent years” noting their rare ability to bridge language instruction and film analysis to foster sophisticated classroom discussion.

 

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Stuart Tave Course Design Awards

Named in honor of former Dean Stuart Tave who passed away in January, these awards commemorate Tave’s commitment to the highest standards of research and dissemination of intellectual inquiry through teaching. The distinction celebrates innovative course design and the enduring connection between research and teaching.

Jessie Alperin
Dual PhD Candidate, Art History and the Committee on Social Thought

Alperin's course, Global Art Nouveau, reimagines a well-known artistic movement through a network of European, Asian, African, and Islamic art traditions. The final project—a digital exhibition—asked students to create interactive object maps using Miro software, blending the analysis of primary documents with public-facing digital scholarship. According to one nominator, Alperin “showed us how it's done”: the course inducted students into disciplinary knowledge and emphasized transferable technical skills despite the pressures of AI.

 

 

Joseph Harris
PhD Candidate, Middle Eastern Studies

In The Neolithic Revolution in the Middle East, Harris brings students into deep antiquity to examine the emergence of villages, agriculture, and new social worlds across the Fertile Crescent. The course combines archaeological evidence with debates about environment, culture, and historical change in the prehistoric Middle East. One assignment invited students to design their own excavation proposal for one of the sites under study. A recommender described Harris as “utterly immersed in his love of deep antiquity,” praising the course for filling a longstanding gap in the department's curriculum.

 

Ye Ram Esther Kim
PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature and Romance Languages & Literatures

Kim's course, Diaspora, Language, Identity: North African Literature and Cinema, explores the multilingual worlds of the Maghreb, where French, Arabic, Amazigh, and Darija intersect with questions of colonialism, memory, and belonging. Through literature and film, students examine exile, resistance, and cultural renewal across North Africa and its diasporas. A nomination letter praised the course's “brilliantly articulated” learning goals, which highlight the capacity of language to withstand colonial violence and reclaim cultural heritage, and Kim’s ability to make complex linguistic and historical questions accessible without sacrificing nuance.

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Dean's Distinguished Dissertation Award

This award recognizes an exceptional dissertation that advances deeply original scholarship in the Arts & Humanities.

Tobias Scheunchen (PhD’25, MLS’19)
Department of Middle Eastern Studies

Dissertation: Recording Justice in Byzantine and Early Islamic Egypt (550–800): Material Culture, Ordinary People and the Making of the Islamic State

Now a Princeton Society Fellow, Scheunchen examines the emergence of Islamic law not through elite legal theorists but through surviving documents of everyday life. Working across Greek, Coptic, and Arabic papyri, he reconstructs how ordinary Muslims, Christians, and Jews navigated systems of justice in early Islamic Egypt. One recommender observed that the project “upends the perspective of nearly two centuries of scholarship on Islamic law by taking a bottom-up, rather than a top-down view,” opening a window onto “grassroots” practices that shaped legal life in early Islamic history. A consummate scholar and educator, Scheunchen obtained a master’s in law from the University of Chicago Law School and has taught at Yale Law School—graduating last year with one book already under his belt and two in progress.