Summer Reads 2025: Princeton professors share what’s on their lists

Six Princeton professors talk about favorite books and share what’s on their summer reading lists — novels, biographies and memoirs, fantasy, history and more. 

Tell us about a particular book on your shelf.

Professor Sally Poor’s summer read is “Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard” by Doug Tallamy.

The nature preserves and open spaces in the U.S. are not enough to support our bird/insect ecosystem — with the number of species rapidly declining in the last 50 years. Tallamy started a movement, Homegrown National Park, to encourage people to plant even a few native plants in their backyard, creating “stop-overs” for migrating birds and monarch butterflies and homes for insects.

Professor Poor is an associate professor of German. Her current book project “The Literary Agency of Medieval Women: Kunigund Niklasin and the Library of St. Catherine’s in Nuremberg,” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (summer 2026).