A dozen spaces inside the recently renovated Prospect House will be named in honor of a range of individuals who “persevered and excelled” in the face of adversity.

Those honored include faculty, alumni and others with connections to Princeton’s history, reaching across time from a formerly enslaved man who became an influential pastor and author to the trailblazing lawyer who as a student filed a suit that opened Princeton’s last all-male eating clubs to women.

The new names for the Prospect House meeting rooms, dining areas, library and terrace were approved by the Board of Trustees based on recommendations from the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) Committee on Naming. The committee — which includes faculty, staff, alumni, undergraduate and graduate student representatives — collected naming suggestions from the University community as part of its work.

“Through honoring these individuals, we aim to tell a more complex history of the University,” Professor of History Beth Lew-Williams, then-chair of the CPUC Committee on Naming, wrote in the recommendation to the trustees. “When faced with adversity, these Princetonians persevered and excelled in ways that can serve as a model for future generations. We wish to honor these remarkable individuals, whose tenacity helped to shape the University and the world.”

Prospect House, which serves as a dining and events venue for faculty, staff and other members of the University community, reopened last fall after a year of renovations. The updates to the historic 19th century building included significant accessibility and sustainability improvements. The refreshed interior spaces feature a new collection of photography, paintings and sculpture by students, faculty, staff and alumni curated by the Princeton University Art Museum.

The University will host a dedication event for the named spaces in the fall. Below is a list of the 12 honorees and the current Prospect House spaces that will be named for them.  

• Daniel Wallace Culp (Wisteria Room/Parlor). Born in 1852 as an enslaved person in South Carolina, Culp attended the Princeton Theological Seminary after the Civil War and earned his degree in 1879. As a seminary student, he attended Princeton University classes with the support of then-President James McCosh, despite objections from students. Culp became a minister, physician, lecturer and essayist who fought to raise awareness of Black intellectuals and their work.
• John Doar ’44 (Rose Room/Presidential Dining Room). A prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Doar served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and completed his law degree at the University of California-Berkeley. From 1960 to 1967, as a lawyer in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, he played a key role in the drafting and enforcement of federal civil rights legislation, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. In his role representing the federal government, Doar accompanied James Meredith as he became the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi in 1962 and bravely calmed an angry crowd after the funeral of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963. Doar was recognized for his contributions to civil rights with an honorary degree from Princeton in 1968 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Doar served as a University trustee from 1969 to 1979.
• Sally Frank ’80 (Terrace Café/Tap Room). Frank is a trailblazing figure in the history of women at Princeton. In 1979, she filed a lawsuit challenging the exclusion of women from the three undergraduate eating clubs that remained all male after the University’s 1969 implementation of coeducation. Following a lengthy legal battle that continued after Frank’s graduation, all three clubs began admitting women by 1991 and Frank officially won her lawsuit in 1992. In addition to her Princeton bachelor’s degree, Frank earned a master’s in clinical education from Antioch University and her law degree from New York University School of Law. She is currently a professor of law at Drake University.
• Katharine Fullerton Gerould (Magnolia Common Room). Born in 1879, Fullerton Gerould was a prolific writer and novelist whose work was published in magazines such as Scribner’s, Harper’s and The Atlantic. She taught English and writing at Bryn Mawr College until she moved to Princeton following her 1910 marriage to Professor of English Gordon H. Gerould. As the wife of a faculty member in the early 20th century, Fullerton Gerould often found herself excluded from the University’s intellectual community. She continued to write and received national recognition for her work. She also supported student literary and news organizations such as The Daily Princetonian and Nassau Literary Review. 
• Charles Hey-Maestre ’77 (Beech Room). Hey-Maestre spent his legal career fighting for the rights of underserved and marginalized people in Puerto Rico. He was executive director of Puerto Rico Legal Services and was a staff attorney and administrator at the Puerto Rican Civil Rights Institute. While in private practice, he argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico. As an undergraduate, Hey-Maestre helped establish the student organization Acción Puertorriqueña. He earned his undergraduate degree in politics from Princeton and his law degree from New York University School of Law.
• John Nash *50 (Redwood Library). Nash received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 for his breakthrough work in game theory. His other awards include the 2015 Abel Prize in mathematics from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Nash earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton in 1950 and joined the faculty of MIT in 1951. He returned to Princeton as a senior research mathematician in 1995 and was a legendary figure within the department. His genius at math and his schizophrenia were the subject of the award-winning book and movie “A Beautiful Mind.”
• Franklin S. Odo ’61 *75 (Cedar Room). Odo was an internationally recognized scholar and historian in the field of Asian American studies. He was the founding director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center from 1997 to 2010. A third-generation Japanese American born in Honolulu, Odo was also the founding director of the University of Hawaii’s Ethnic Studies program. He was a visiting professor at Princeton and taught one of the University’s first courses on Asian American studies in 1995. He also served on the faculty of Amherst College as the John J. McCloy ’16 Visiting Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy and as the John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer in American Studies. Odo earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in history from Princeton and received the 2021 distinguished alumni award from Princeton’s Asian American Alumni Association.
• Alan Turing *38 (Garden Room). Considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing played a key role in the British government’s decoding of the Nazi’s Enigma codes during World War II. In 1952, Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” and barred from continuing his cryptography work with the British government after admitting to having a sexual relationship with a man — a criminal offense in the United Kingdom at the time. He was posthumously granted a royal pardon in 2013. Turing earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton in 1938. The University also honored Turing with a commissioned portrait in 2019.
• Oswald Veblen (South Terrace). Veblen was an internationally recognized mathematician who taught at Princeton for 27 years starting in 1905. He played a central role in building Princeton mathematics into a world-renowned department and was instrumental in establishing the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), where he also served on the faculty. Veblen made important contributions to differential geometry and the early development of topology, which found applications in atomic physics and the theory of relativity. He was also known for his humanitarian work during the rise of Nazism in Germany, helping bring Albert Einstein and other top scholars fleeing Hitler’s regime to U.S. academic institutions, including IAS and Princeton.
• Alexander Dumas Watkins (Dogwood Room). Watkins was a self-educated biologist who conducted scientific research alongside Princeton faculty in the 1880s. He is remembered as the University’s first Black instructor — lecturing on behalf of the faculty with whom he worked — although he was never given a formal academic title.  At Princeton, Watkins worked in what was called the histological laboratory. He studied mosquitos’ “venomo-salvatary” glands and made contributions to early malaria research. His work was discussed in academic journals, including Scientific American and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
• Bruce Wright (Holly Room). Wright was a judge in New York for 25 years and served as a justice on the New York State Supreme Court. During his time on the bench, he spoke out against racial injustices in the legal system. He also wrote poetry and co-edited a 1954 anthology of poems with Langston Hughes. Raised in Princeton and New York, he was admitted to the University with a full scholarship in 1939. However, upon learning that Wright was Black, admission officials prevented him from registering for classes and strongly advised that he not attend Princeton. Wright ultimately earned his bachelor’s degree from Lincoln University and his law degree from New York University School of Law. He also is a veteran of World War II. Princeton’s Class of 2001 named Wright an honorary class member upon its graduation.
• Chien-Shiung Wu (Hydrangea Room). Known as a foremost experimental physicist, Wu played a crucial role in the advancement of atomic science. In the early 1940s, she became the first woman hired as a faculty member in Princeton’s Department of Physics. In 1944, she left to take a position at Columbia University to work on the Manhattan Project. Wu was the first woman to be awarded an honorary doctorate by Princeton, the first woman named president of the American Physical Society, and the seventh woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She received many other national honors for her research, including the Comstock Prize in Physics and the Wolf Prize in Physics. Wu earned her undergraduate degree from what is now Nanjing University in China and her doctoral degree in physics from the University of California-Berkeley.

The CPUC Committee on Naming was established in the fall of 2016 to provide advice to the Board of Trustees “for naming buildings or other spaces not already named for historical figures or donors to recognize individuals who would bring a more diverse presence to the campus.” Since 2016, the University has named a number of spaces with input from the CPUC naming committee, including Betsey Stockton Garden, Laura Wooten Hall, Ikeda Arch and Sonia Sotomayor Hall.