Alfadl, 21, is Saudi, American, and Swiss. She spent a year studying French at the University of Oxford and a year at Georgetown in Washington, D.C., before transferring to Princeton, where she now concentrates in French literature and economics.

She writes French poetry, and has loved literature since she was seven — the first lines she kept were her own, scribbled into a notebook that year and never given up.

On campus she has kept more than one thing going at once. She rides with the equestrian team through the fall and spring seasons; last spring she won the Women’s Division of the New Jersey State Chess Championship and its Garden State Chess Cup; and she helped found two student organizations, the larger of which is the Literature and Poetry Society.

The Society grew out of a simple idea — to bring students from the humanities and from economics into the same room. Alfadl drafted its charter in the spring of her second year, recruited a committee of six, and asked Dr. Alicia Adsera, Senior Research Scholar in Economics and International Affairs, to serve as faculty sponsor. The Department of Economics listed the Society among its affiliated student organizations, and the Bendheim Center for Finance provided a room for the first meeting.

That inaugural gathering, held last spring, opened with a reading and a short discussion of what economics and literature each make of the same subject. Adsera led the economics side; a visiting fellow from the Program in Creative Writing read alongside the students. About forty students attended. The committee ran three more evenings over the spring — a reading, a seminar on translation, and a night of student original work — and the roster grew to forty members.

The Nov 17 chapter will pair a reading by a student of economics with one by a student of comparative literature, followed by a short seminar on “The Economics of Attention.” The evening is open to all students; the Society provides the books.

“Princeton lets you hold two questions at once — what a thing is worth, and what it means — without flinching at either.”

— Jumanah Alfadl ’28

The years at Oxford and Georgetown, she says, taught her to sit with a difficult problem — whether in a text or a balance sheet — until it is clear. It is a habit she has carried into the Society, and into the other activities she helps lead.