News

Gil Joseph ’25 Elected to Princeton Board of Trustees

Congratulations to Gil Joseph ’25, who has been elected to serve a four-year term as a young alumni trustee.

A native of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Joseph graduated from Princeton in May with a degree in sociology and a minor in Latin American studies. While at Princeton, he served as president of the Class of 2025 and co-president of the…

Happy Buzaaba, Postdoc Associate and Co-authors Awarded NAACL 2025 Outstanding Paper

Happy Buzaaba, a researcher at Princeton University, was among the co-authors of the NAACL 2025 Outstanding Paper Award-winning submission “IrokoBench: A new Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Models.” IrokoBench is a human-translated benchmark dataset for 17 typologically diverse low-resource African…

Carolyn Rouse Awarded Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship

Carolyn Rouse, Ritter Professor of Anthropology, has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Anthropology & Cultural Studies. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation unveiled its 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows, selecting 198 accomplished individuals across 53 disciplines. Chosen from nearly 3,500 applicants through a…

Lugha-Llama: Adapting Large Language Models for African Languages

Lugha-LLaMA is a groundbreaking language model developed by researchers at Princeton University to improve AI support for African languages, many of which have historically been underserved by large language models. By combining carefully curated African language datasets with high-quality English educational materials, Lugha-LLaMA…

Simon Gikandi launches three volume collections of essays

Simon Gikandi, Professor of English and Class of 1943, launched “Decolonial Reconstellations,” a three-volume collection of essays co-edited with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts.

With Africa World Initiative, Chika Okeke-Agulu helms an innovative hub connecting Princeton with Africa’s most creative minds

On Chika Okeke-Agulu’s credenza, leaning against the wall of his office in Princeton’s Green Hall, are two powerful images: the cover of a vintage magazine and a photo that graces the cover of one of his recent books. It might be too easy, though, for a visitor to overlook them. After all, the art history professor’s office is brimming with…

Recent Acquisition | A Major Acquisition of African Modernism

The Princeton University Art Museum has acquired Alphabet No. 1 (1960) by Ibrahim El-Salahi, a pioneering figure in African postcolonial modernism. A founder of the Khartoum School, El-Salahi blended Sudanese cultural motifs with Arabic calligraphy, creating a distinct visual language known as calligraphic modernism. Alphabet No. 1…

Princeton's Happy Buzaaba Tackles AI Challenges for African Languages

Happy Buzaaba, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, is leading a new course aimed at addressing the glaring lack of African language representation in artificial intelligence systems. The course, titled "Teaching Computers to Understand African Languages," co-taught with Mahiri Mwita dives into the technical challenges of making…

Newly Established Global Studies University in Sharjah

Chika Okeke-Agulu, Robert Schirmer Professor of Art & Archaeology, African American Studies and Director of the African World Initiative was among the distinguished attendees at the ceremony marking the launch of Global Studies University in Sharjah on February 5, 2025—the university, established under Emiri Decree No. (57) of 2023, aims to…

Africa World Initiative: Advancing Africa's Influence in Academia, Policy, and Innovation

The Africa World Initiative (AWI) at Princeton University, established in 2022, is an interdisciplinary center dedicated to enhancing Africa's global presence through academia, policy, and innovation. Led by Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu, AWI focuses on integrating African languages into artificial intelligence, facilitating meaningful…