Six exceptional scholars selected as Princeton’s 2025-26 Fung Global Fellows

Six exceptional scholars from around the world will come to Princeton University this fall to begin a year of research, writing and collaboration as the 13th cohort of Fung Global Fellows.

The Fung Global Fellows for the 2025-2026 academic year are:

• Noureddine Amara, postdoctoral fellow, SNF-Projekt-Mitarbeiter at University of Zürich
• Masako Hattori, assistant professor, National University of Singapore
• Gerard Llorens-DeCesaris, postdoctoral fellow, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
• Falak Mujtaba, lecturer, University of Toronto
• Kristóf Nagy, assistant professor, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and permanent research fellow, Central European Research Institute for Art History, Budapest
• Dongkyung Shin, research professor, Ewha Womans University, Seoul

The program is funded by a portion of a $10 million gift from Princeton 1970 alumnus William Fung of Hong Kong that is designed to substantially increase the University’s engagement with scholars around the world and inspire ideas that transcend borders. The program is administered by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS).

The new cohort of scholars will focus on “postimperial spaces of amnesia.” While the current Fung Global Fellows are in conversation investigating the residues of colonialism in diverse parts of Asia, Africa, the Near East and Latin America, this group will expand the conversation to examine the willed amnesia, or yet nostalgia, concerning the imperial past — in former metropoles and colonies alike.

Michael Laffan, the Paula Chow Professor of International and Regional Studies, professor of history and director of the Fung Program said: “I’m particularly excited to see our new cohort arrive and take the question of colonial residues back to former metropoles, and even to places that sometimes make use of or celebrate a colonial past without necessarily seeing it in such terms. It’s also my hope that our public talks will continue to generate interest in the wider Princeton community, and that the newest group will take up where our current fellows have left off, joining all sorts of conversations on both sides of Washington Road.”

More about the fellows:

Noureddine Amara is an Algerian historian whose research and teaching focuses on imperial citizenship, critical legal theory, migration and narrative, in the 19th century Mediterranean. Amara holds a Ph.D. in history from the Sorbonne in Paris and is currently rewriting his dissertation for a publication as a monograph, under the title “Cannibalizing the French Nationality. Ethics of Belonging to a Settler-Colonial State.” At Princeton, he will be working on a project entitled “The Unforgettable Amnesia: Defeating Narrative, Contesting the Law about the French Colonial Crimes in Algeria.”

Masako Hattori teaches U.S. political and diplomatic history. Her research interests include war and society, imperialism and nationalism, and social policy, as well as the U.S. in the Asia-Pacific. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the author of “The Age of Youth: American Society and the Two World Wars.” During her fellowship year, she will work on her second book project, which explores the relationship between imperialism, tourism and public memory in twentieth-century Japan.

Gerard Llorens-DeCesaris is a historian of nationalism, empire and the Atlantic world from the long 19th century to the present. He completed his Ph.D. and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and was a Europaeum scholar engaged in interdisciplinary dialogue linking historical research and policy debates. As a Fung Global Fellow, he will study the concept of colonial ignorance and trace its role in shaping institutional narratives and the political discourse of sub-state nationalist movements in Catalonia and Scotland.

Falak Mujtaba completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching explore the enduring legacies of colonialism and neocolonial relations on immigration detention, migration and citizenship, with a focus on Global North-South power relations. Her forthcoming book, “The Detention Continuum in Canada,” examines how immigration detention in Canada creates an ambiguous and oscillating cycle of perpetual violence, precarity and displacement in the lives of former detainees. As a Fung Global Fellow, her research will focus on the neocolonial dynamics shaping Spain’s border externalization and migration policies at the Spain-Morocco border.

Kristóf Nagy is a historical anthropologist and sociologist specializing in the cultural politics of contemporary far-right governments. With a background in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a Ph.D. in social sciences from Central European University, his research explores the intersections of imperialism, cultural infrastructures and far-right culture wars through ethnographic and historical methods. For seven years, he has edited “Fordulat,” a journal of left social theory. At Princeton, he will develop his first monograph on far-right cultural policies and their global historical connections, centering the case of Hungary as a laboratory for contemporary culture wars.

Dongkyung Shin is a historian specializing in British imperialism, decolonization and transnational history, with a particular focus on West Africa and the Caribbean. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from King’s College London. During her fellowship year, she will complete her first book project, “Universities as ‘Postimperial Spaces of Amnesia’ in Africa, Britain, and the Caribbean,” while also advancing her research on Anglo-American initiatives to strengthen university ties between the Global South and the Global North.