Meet the 2024-2025 Princeton-Mellon Fellows

Caitlin Blanchfield, Da Hyung Jeong, Babak Manouchehrifar, Blessings Masuku, Victor Próspero, and Jennifer Strtak

The Princeton-Mellon Initiative is excited to welcome six fellows to campus over the 2024-25 academic year. These fellowships are made possible by the generous support of the Mellon Foundation and the Princeton Humanities Council, Institute of International and Regional Studies, Program in African Studies, School of Public and International Affairs, Effron Center for American Studies, Department of Art & Archaeology, Program in Latin American Studies, Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the School of Architecture.

Caitlin Blanchfield, 2024-2025 Princeton-Mellon / Humanities Council Fellow

Caitlin Blanchfield is a historian of architecture and landscape whose work examines the infrastructures of settler colonialism and material practices of resistance. Her research addresses the role of modernist land management and design practices in projects of dispossession and colonization in North America and across the reaches of U.S. empire, as well as the anticolonial architectures that unsettle them. Blanchfield received her PhD in architectural history and theory at Columbia University with her dissertation, "Unsettling Colonial Science: Modern Architecture and Indigenous Claims to Land in North America and the Pacific." This project examines the contested landscapes of Cold War-era research infrastructure in the continental United States, Hawai‘i and Canada, and charts how Indigenous movements for land protection work through the built environment and material practice. Other work includes collaborative investigations into the impacts of border infrastructures on Indigenous lands and multimedia projects on the geopolitical management of architectural value.

Blanchfield is a founding editor of the Avery Review, a digital journal of critical essays on architecture, her coauthored book Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. Her work has been supported by the New York State Council for the Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, The Graham Foundation, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. She holds an M.S. in Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University and a B.A. in history from Oberlin College.

In Fall 2024, Blanchfield is offering the graduate seminar, Against the Settler Colonial City [ARC 523].

Her fellowship is made possible by the Mellon Foundation, Princeton University Humanities Council, the School of Architecture, and The Effron Center for the Study of America.

Da Hyung Jeong, 2024-2025 Princeton-Mellon / Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies Fellow

Da Hyung Jeong is a historian of 20th-century architecture whose multidisciplinary work explores transnational, transregional and trans-ideological connections while engaging with discourses on the environment, coloniality, race and affect. He earned his PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where his dissertation investigated the rise of architectural postmodernism in the multiple ‘peripheries’ of the Soviet empire, particularly in Soviet Central Asia. His research has received support from the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, where he was a 2021-2022 Predoctoral Fellow, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. At MoMA, he held the Mellon-Marron Museum Research Consortium Fellowship, which allowed him to conduct curatorial research in connection with and contribute to the catalogue of the recent exhibition The Project of Independence: Architecture and Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985.

Jeong received his doctorate in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 2024 with a dissertation titled “Soviet Architectural Postmodernism, 1977-1991.” He previously earned a bachelor's in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. 

In Spring 2025 he will teach a course titled, Modern Architectures in Context: Cities in Asia.

Jeong's fellowship is supported by the Mellon Foundation, Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Institute for International and Regional Studies.

Babak Manouchehrifar, 2022-2025 Stewart Fellow in the Council of the Humanities and Princeton School of Public and International Affairs Fellow

Babak Manouchehrifar is an urban planner and a scholar of urban humanities, studying the interplay between religion, secularism, and urban space. He received his Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his dissertation, “Urban Planning and Religious Practice: Three Challenges,” explored how the tensions between religious traditions of urban communities and secular principles of urban governance affect spatial planning processes and the administration of justice in Western and non-Western cities.

He holds degrees in Civil Engineering, City Planning, and Regional Studies. He has several years of experience as a professional planner and has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at both MIT and the National University of Iran (SBU).

At Princeton, Manouchehrifar’s research focuses on the intersection of race, place, and religion. His pedagogy and research center on exploring inclusive strategies to create egalitarian and equitable urban settings and seeks to advance faith-centered calls for racial justice and spatial equity in contemporary cities. In Spring 2023, he taught "Religion and the City" [HUM 339, REL 398, URB 339] in the Humanities Council’s Program in Humanistic Studies, and in Fall 2023 he taught a seminar on "Religion and Public Policy: At Home & Abroad" [SPI  403-7] at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, which examines how religious beliefs and values shape public policy debates and outcomes in various domains. He will again offer this class in Spring 2025.

Babak Manouchehrifar’s fellowship is made possible for a third year through the support of the Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Council, and the School of Public and International Affairs.

Blessings Masuku, 2024-2025 Princeton-Mellon / Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies Fellow 

Blessings Masuku is an urban sociologist, human and urban geographer with background that cuts across the disciplines of Sociology, Development Studies, and Geography. His research interests include Southern urban studies, urban food and nutrition security, governance, food systems, food policy, urban informality, informal food markets, Southern infrastructural geographies, social safety nets, the post-colonial state, and the restructuring of the post-colonial city; urban space and urban spatial justice, everyday urbanism, and township economies.

Masuku's research focuses on urban food and nutritional insecurity. Over 2.6 million South African households have inadequate access to food, and 1.1 million households face a severe food shortage. This problem is particularly acute in major metro areas. This prevalence of food inadequacy varies significantly by gender, citizenship, region, and city. Informal food markets provide both access to food and are the primary source of income for over 70% of South Africa’s poor and marginalized urban populations. Yet informal food markets remain neglected by public policy and institutional funding. His dissertation research, building off a multimodal study in and around the city of Johannesburg, argues that achieving spatial justice, food justice and sustainable food security in the context of urban inequality and increasing climate variability are some of the most pressing challenges for the contemporary South African city.

Masuku received his PhD  in Built Environment & Urban Studies from the University of KwaZulu Natal in 2024. He previously earned a Master of Social Sciences in Development Studies from University of Fort Hare in 2019 and a Bachelor of Commerce Honors in Development Studies and Bachelor of Social Sciences in Human Resource Management from the University of Fort Hare in 2019 and 2014, respectively. Before coming to Princeton he was a Visiting Fox Fellow at Yale University's McMillan Center for International and Area Studies.

In Spring 2025, he will offer a new course on Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Post-Urbanism in the Global South. 

Masuku's fellowship is supported by the Program in African Studies and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

Victor Próspero, 2024-2025 Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities

Victor Próspero is an architect and architectural historian with main research interests in the relationship between architecture and politics in twentieth century Latin America, reflecting on epistemologies of modernity and development ideology disputes. His current work focuses on the ambivalences of São Paulo architectural field during the Brazilian military dictatorship, from 1964 to 1985.

Próspero was a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University, Department of History of Art and Architecture (2021-2022) and holds a PhD from University of São Paulo undertaken with a Fapesp Fellowship. In São Paulo, he has been fostering constant dialogue between University and social movements, and he was Vice-President of the Brazilian Institute of Architects’ São Paulo branch (2023-2024). He recently co-edited a book of interviews with architectural historians and was co-curator of several exhibitions reflecting on memory disputes and the built environment in Brazil.

At Princeton, Próspero will work on the book “Paulista Architecture and Military Dictatorship”, drawing from his PhD dissertation. In Fall 2024, he will co-teach the Interdisciplinary Design Studio [ARC 205/URB 205/LAS 225/ENV 205] with Prof. Mario I. Gandelsonas, which focuses on social forces that shape design thinking. 

Próspero's fellowship is supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Princeton University School of Architecture, and the Program in Latin American Studies. 

Jennifer Strtak, 2024-2025 Princeton-Mellon / Humanities Council Fellow

Jennifer Strtak is a historian specializing in the built environment and technology of the early modern world. Her current research redefines the carriage’s historical significance, challenging the conventional view of it as merely a symbol of elite luxury and conspicuous consumption. In her forthcoming monograph, Routes of Power: Mobility, Social Inequality, and Urban Transformation in Early Modern Paris, Strtak explores how vehicles catalyzed change in early modern urban environments and the mechanisms through which this transformation unfolded.

Strtak's work reexamines the carriage as a pivotal element in urban history, illustrating how it reinforced and entrenched uneven power dynamics and social inequalities within Paris's urban fabric between 1650 and 1789. Her research draws on municipal ordinances, legal records, financial accounts, guidebooks, and visual representations to demonstrate how, for instance, the transformation of walking spaces to accommodate wheeled traffic occurred alongside the covert use of carriages by police to transport the poor to prisons for colonial deportation. Drawing on examples like these, as well as cases illustrating the changing treatment of animals and gender dynamics, her work underscores the contentious role of early modern vehicles and invites us to reconsider several key aspects of urban life, including bureaucratic control, imperial expansion, socio-economic stratification, urban infrastructure development, and the freedoms and constraints on everyday human movement.

Prior to arriving at Princeton University, Strtak earned her PhD in History at Yale University (2024). She obtained her MPhil in History from Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge (2016) and her BA from Trinity College, University of Toronto (2015). During the 2021-2022 academic year, Strtak was an invited Research Fellow at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris. Her research has been generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada as well as the Fox International Fellowship Program.

In Spring 2025 she will teach a new seminar titled, City and Nature: Urban Nature and Society, 1450-1800.

Strtak's fellowship is supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Princeton University Humanities Council, and the Department of Art & Archeology.