Princeton University

10/23/2026

Each year, Princeton University welcomes more than 550,000 visitors to campus.

The University offers a wealth of free public resources such as the Princeton University Chapel, Firestone Library and Princeton University Art Museum, that enrich the cultural and intellectual life of the community and state.

10/22/2026

On this day 280 years ago, Princeton University was officially chartered.

Celebrate the "Best Old Place of All":
🐅 Put on your best orange and black
📸 Take a photo
🧡 🖤 Share why Princeton matters to you

🎶 In praise of Old Nassau, we sing,
Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
Our hearts will give, while we shall live, Three cheers for Old Nassau. 🎶

10/19/2026

It's . Since 2023, the Transfer Scholars Initiative (TSI) has helped more than 150 community college students from New Jersey successfully transfer to public and private institutions including Johns Hopkins, Rutgers, Swarthmore, the University of British Columbia, the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia and Williams College.

TSI offers a part-time, for-credit academic curriculum alongside transfer success programming designed to help students identify and apply successfully to their target four-year colleges.

Last summer, 48 students took a Princeton-accredited writing seminar, attended transfer success workshops on topics ranging from essay writing to applying for financial aid, heard from college admission representatives from across the country and learned about Princeton faculty research at weekly colloquia.

Students recently returned to campus for an application "bootcamp" as they prepare to apply for admission to four-year colleges.

10/16/2026

🍂 Fall break 🍂

10/15/2026

: "When I first entered the Dalaba, Guinea, home of the celebrated South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba (1932-2008), I was immediately captivated by the intricacy of woven bamboo in the soaring ceiling. Suddenly, the crinkle of plastic caught my attention: The man who had watched over the home during Makeba’s lifetime, and who has continued to after her death, opened a modest bag he had been holding tightly, filled with pictures of his son and family in the house and gardens where she lived for 17 years, magazine articles about Makeba, a copy of her autobiography and several of her vinyl albums. I was in Guinea for a summer internship working with the Miriam Makeba Museum Project, a joint initiative of the Miriam Makeba Foundation and the Kwame Ture Foundation working to transform Makeba's former home in Dalaba into a museum. My role spanned archival research and gathering oral histories from people in Dalaba who knew Makeba, affectionately nicknamed Mama Africa. While performing in New York in 1960, she attempted to return home for her mother's funeral. The government refused her reentry and later revoked her passport. Guinea was among several African countries that offered her refuge, and she lived in Dalaba from 1968 to 1985. What struck me about the home’s guardian was his possessiveness over his material connections to Makeba. It made me think about the limits of an archive, how fragile the physical traces of a life can be, and how oral histories can substitute the absence of archival material. Creating the museum is an effort not only to restore a physical space, but to give these memories somewhere to live. I grew up in the Bronx, but my mother's family is from Kankan, Guinea, and this was my first visit. I met some relatives for the first time, and visited my mother’s childhood home. It felt like a new kind of ‘home.’ I am so grateful for the Streicker Fellowship that funded this internship. I could not have imagined my first trip to my mother’s home country unfolding this way." — Fanta Kaba '28; photos by Max Diallo Jakobsen '24

10/14/2026

"How can we protect it, if we don’t even realize it’s missing?"

That core question motivated artist Maya Lin to create "What Is Missing?" — an extensive art project in Briger Hall that calls attention to the loss of biodiversity and is designed to inspire action to protect threatened species: https://bit.ly/3TSIFhB

10/12/2026

Congratulations to Michael Woodford, recipient of the 2026 Nobel Prize in economics. Woodford was a member of the Princeton faculty from 1995 to 2004, as a professor of economics and the Harold H. Helm '20 Professor of Economics and Banking.

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford “for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.”

This year’s laureates in economic sciences, Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford, have developed new macroeconomic models that have significantly improved our ability to implement effective stabilisation policy. On the basis of these models, well-timed fiscal and monetary policy measures can reduce the economy’s peaks and troughs.

The economy is characterised by alternating downturns and upturns. Ever since the economist John Maynard Keynes launched his theories almost a century ago, stabilisation policy has been important for tackling these fluctuations. During recessions, the economy is boosted by reducing interest rates and increasing the budget deficit, while the opposite should be done to slow a booming economy.

However, during the oil crises of the 1970s, it seemed that the Keynesian models that govern when and how measures should be implemented no longer worked. They did not reduce unemployment, but led to uncontrolled inflation instead. The West experienced a decade of low growth, high unemployment and high inflation. Many people believed that stabilisation policy had done more harm than good and that it should be retired.

Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford have been awarded this year’s prize in economic sciences for demonstrating how economic models could be reconstructed to revitalise stabilisation policy. Rather than basing the models on statistical links between macroeconomic variables, such as inflation, production and consumption, they chose to build them on a microeconomic foundation. This encompasses an understanding for how the total mass of individual households and businesses affect the economy through their actions.

A central component in these models is that households and businesses are forward looking when making decisions about savings or product prices. When governments and central banks communicate their plans for economic policy, they can influence this view of the future and move the economy in the right direction. Since the new models’ introduction, they have been extremely helpful in dealing with the economic downturns that have affected us.

Learn more
Press release: https://bit.ly/3UTT6S3
Popular information: https://bit.ly/4j2LJSg
Advanced information: https://bit.ly/4gSu6TY

10/08/2026

Princeton University will present its top awards for alumni to Frances Arnold '79, 2018 Nobel laureate and engineering professor at Caltech and Mary Brunkow *91, 2025 Nobel laureate and distinguished investigator at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.

Arnold, who graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering, will receive the Woodrow Wilson Award. Brunkow, who earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology, will receive the James Madison Medal. These awards will be presented on Feb. 20, 2027 at Alumni Day: https://bit.ly/4ds6ZNM

10/08/2026

Congrats to Anne Carson who has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature."

Carson taught at Princeton University in the 1980s and was recently on campus to deliver the 2025 Fagles Lecture. Her presentation, titled "Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind," mixed memoir, classical translation, art criticism, boxing exhibition, and performance art in a personal meditation on life and death in the wake of her diagnosis with Parkinson's disease.

Like previous Fagles Lecturers, Carson taught a special session of the undergraduate Humanities Sequence course "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture," whose students read Carson’s Sappho translations, If Not, Winter (2002) as part of their syllabus. Carson’s lesson plan involved dividing class attendees into small groups of three or four and asking them to leave the classroom for ten minutes spent in search of a "border," physical or otherwise, they could then "redefine."

More on her recent visit: https://bit.ly/3TteJZj

10/07/2026

As the United States faces a critical shortage of primary care and family medicine doctors, Princeton undergraduates are committing to help fill the gap. Princeton is among a select group of universities across the country partnering with the Coleman Family Ventures foundation to give pre-medical students a head start to becoming leaders in the much-needed fields: https://bit.ly/4yK1ZN5