Cat Lambert, the Joyce A. Yelencsics Rosevear ’65 and Frederick M. Rosevear ’64 Assistant Professor of Classics, was awarded a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in the School of Historical Studies for the spring semester of the 2026-27 academic year. This prestigious membership allows for focused research and the free and open exchange of ideas among an international community of scholars at one of the foremost centers for intellectual inquiry.
During her stay, Professor Lambert will work on her second book project, tentatively entitled Touching Feeling Antiquity: C. P. Cavafy and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick:
“What do we do as readers when we encounter texts that transmit harmful histories, that are cause for shame, that seem inhospitable to queer desires and lives? What if, instead of keeping these texts safely at arm’s length, we feel strange, partial attachments to them? My project explores these questions through a little-known ‘artist’s book’ made by the queer theorist and literary critic, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Sedgwick’s creation asks, what if Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s (1834) Last Days of Pompeii—a novel that puts classical antiquity to racist, gay-genocidal ends—fell into the hands of the homosexual poet of the Greek diaspora, C. P. Cavafy? Sedgwick, I argue, mobilizes Cavafy’s queer poetics of reading antiquity’s material remains in order to do things with and to this book “as” Cavafy. By “scissoring Cavafy” and collaging numerous excerpts from his poetry across the novel, Sedgwick/Cavafy makes surprising and fleeting queer possibilities emerge from the margins of this homophobic account of Pompeii’s final days.
“Scissoring Cavafy” might feel like an iconoclastic, even perverse way to read the now-canonized national poet of Greece, but I argue that this practice has both interpretive and ethical value. “Scissoring Cavafy” not only queers a book that perniciously uses classical antiquity to legitimate homophobia and white supremacy. By “scissoring Cavafy,” Sedgwick illuminates Cavafy’s own piecemeal method of poetic production and perverse, erotic modes of reading, meddling with, and refashioning the past.
Princeton is the perfect place to undertake this project. I am excited to learn from the many scholars there working in classical reception studies, history of reading and the book, and Cavafy studies. Most of all, I can’t wait to explore the invaluable Cavafy archive housed in Firestone Library.”
Each year, IAS welcomes more than 250 of the most promising post-doctoral researchers and distinguished scholars from around the world to advance fundamental discovery as part of an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. Visiting scholars are selected through a highly competitive process for their bold ideas, innovative methods, and deep research questions by the permanent Faculty—each of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Past IAS Faculty include, Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, John von Neumann, Hetty Goldman, George Kennan, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Located in Princeton, NJ, the Institute for Advanced Study was established in 1930. Today, research at IAS is conducted across four Schools—Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Science—to push the boundaries of human knowledge.
Among past and present scholars, there have been 37 Nobel Laureates, 49 of the 68 Fields Medalists, and 25 of the 29 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows, winners of the Turing Award and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge, and Pulitzer Prizes.
