Morrison, Graziosi named Behrman Professors in the Humanities, will begin term next fall

The Humanities Council named Professor Barbara Graziosi and Professor Simon Morrison as the newest Behrman Professors in the Humanities, a three-year appointment during which the two will, among other duties, co-teach the year-long Western Humanities Sequence.

The Western Humanities Sequence (HUM Sequence) — HUM 216–219 — is a year-long series of two classes collectively worth four credits entitled “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture,” designed to cover 2,500 years of history and literature across two semesters. Only first-years and sophomores are eligible to take the HUM Sequence, which is co-taught by a group of around six professors in various humanities departments.

Each professor will spend one year as part of the teaching cohort for the course, and one year overseeing the course as a whole, which includes determining the subject matter covered in the course and organizing the class structure and precepts. For the third year of their appointment, the two will co-teach a capstone seminar for the minor in Humanistic Studies.

In an interview with The Daily Princetonian, Morrison discussed his plans for teaching the course. His two primary focuses are on increasing literary and artistic diversity in the course while maintaining enrollment rates between both the consecutive semesters of the sequence, as well as overall yearly sequence enrollment numbers.

Graziosi, who is currently on leave and did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, is currently the Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature and professor in the Department of Classics. She will return in the 2026-2027 academic year to coordinate the HUM Sequence, which she previously helped teach in Fall 2024.

Morrison is a professor in both the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Music, where he studies the archival history of 20th-century Russian and Soviet music. Though he will begin his term as a Behrman Professor in the 2026–2027 academic year, he will not coordinate the HUM Sequence until the 2027–28 academic year.

“[The appointment] is great for my continuing education,” he told the ‘Prince’ in an interview. “Even in my dotage — to be with a cluster of colleagues and then with amazing undergraduate students, there’s just an incredible amount of richness and growth in that.”

Prior to receiving the appointment, Morrison said that he had only “been involved with [the HUM Sequence] periodically… maybe every other year for about the last six years.” He specialized in lectures which focused on the “music component” of the Sequence, but said that he had also gained experience in “[teaching] things that are outside of my natural realms. I’ve taught Descartes, I’ve taught Nietzsche, I’ve taught some of the great novels as well.”

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Morrison said that he has continued to teach the HUM Sequence because “the students in the course are amazing.” He said that “the incredible commitment and really the intellectual prowess that the undergraduates, as well as my colleagues, [bring] make the course [worthwhile].”

During his involvement in the course, Morrison said that he appreciated how the curriculum “diversified” over the years, going from being “very white on white” to covering a wider range of texts and perspectives.

Although Graziosi will oversee the course for the upcoming academic year, Morrison will serve as part of the teaching cohort.

He said that he anticipates continuing the Sequence’s recent efforts to have students read a more diverse range of literature, while incorporating his work as a music historian into the curriculum when he curates the course for the 2027–28 academic year.

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“Literature is not simply words on the page,” he told the ‘Prince.’ “There’s a kind of performance aspect to it. … There’s Bardic narratives, there’s songs and so forth. I think that there’s an opportunity, maybe — [even] though it’s a collaborative, collective decision — to think about the structure of the precepts and perhaps bring in a little bit more context about how these texts were not meant to be read, but performed in their own time.”

“That’s a way to diversify even the traditional canon — when you actually think about the means in which these things were produced and communicated,” he added.

In response to potential concerns that the high workload for the sequence might dissuade some students or prevent them from finishing, Morrison said that in his opinion, “one of the hardest parts of the course” was “the exam component of it, where [students] are actually given a series of blocks of text, and asked to identify them. I think that that’s something to look at, because I personally [see] that exercise as being very challenging — maybe too challenging.”

Morrison also plans to focus on maintaining student enrollment in the course, rather than students dropping halfway through.

“I’d also want to think about the way in which the second half of the course can be more broadly integrated with the first half. Maybe that’s a way to actually encourage students to take the whole thing,” he said.

He shared that enrollment for the 2025–26 academic year had been encouraging to him. “I just hope that it continues to grow. Those great texts, we read them and we can talk to them, but they talk back to us,” Morrison said. “I really am fundamentally concerned with not only the livelihood of that course, but its relevance and robustness.”

Morrison also emphasized the continued relevance of the texts studied in the sequence in contemporary academia.

“These texts are increasingly, increasingly relevant when you actually think about even the policy right now in political discourse. So they still have a lot of lessons for us.”

Leela Hensler is a staff News writer and a staff Sports writer for the ‘Prince.’ She is from Berkeley, Calif. and can be reached at leela[at]princeton.edu.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.