Create and propose a new cluster within NYU
The Faculty Cluster initiative is an opportunity for schools and departments across NYU to recruit, support, and elevate the most innovative faculty and their research. Interdisciplinary collaboration and inclusion, within and between clusters, will enhance pedagogy and impact generations of global researchers, professionals, citizens, and leaders.
For more background and details about the cluster initiative at NYU, please read the NYU Faculty Cluster Hiring Initiative Roadmap drafted in April 2021.
Goals
The Faculty Cluster Initiative represents a new approach to recruitment and hiring, including:
- A framework for collaboration across schools, departments, and campuses;
- Shared values to enhance the quality of teaching and research, as well as the diversity of faculty within clusters and disciplines;
- A process that expands faculty participation in the recruitment process, while balancing the strategic visions of schools and departments.
The Center for Faculty Advancement supports the Faculty Cluster Hiring Initiative as part of its mission to foster both individual scholars and the academic community at large by enhancing research and teaching excellence within NYU, and by promoting public engagement with the world outside of NYU. We encourage interested schools and departments to review the following criteria for creating a new cluster within NYU
Proposal Components & Submission
Each proposed cluster must be submitted in a standard form for Schools’ Dean’s Offices to complete and submit. The form will include the following information.
- Cluster title
- Proposer names, titles, and brief bios
- University priority best fit: Inequality, Urban, Climate Change, Alliance for Public Interest Technology
- Cluster description
- Departments involved in cluster
- Proposed number of faculty, by rank, in cluster (with rationale)
- Proposed timing/order of hires (AY ’24, ’25, ’26, ’27)
- How will the proposed cluster enhance NYU’s ability to recruit and retain faculty who have experience in the following areas:
- Academic excellence and diverse research
- Interdisciplinary collaboration
- Building inclusive educational environments
- Divergent life experiences
- Public engagement outside the Academy
- Mentoring students, researchers, and other faculty from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (including Black/African American, Latinx, Indigenous/Native American, and Asian), as well as women in STEM fields.
- What persistent scientific, social, and political challenges, problems, or opportunities will this cluster address, and how?
- How will it also enhance our ability to recruit dedicated faculty in these fields?
- How will the cluster promote innovation and pioneering research that distinguishes NYU as a leader in the proposed research area(s)?
- How will the cluster strengthen our ability to secure public and/or private external funding support for research and research impact?
- What types of scholarly and professional development opportunities might the faculty in this cluster work on together (e.g., research seminars, public events, co-teaching, policy interventions, etc.?).
- What will the represented school(s) and departments do to help ensure the success of the cluster as a whole?
- What efforts will target tenure/promotion or other professional milestones for individual faculty? To be clear, we do not expect members of the cluster to do “extra” work. Rather, we want to see a plan from schools for how they will ensure that the cluster “gels,” and produces added value.
- Briefly describe the fields of research involved in your proposed cluster, and what opportunities and challenges exist in these fields to produce a diverse pool of potential candidates.
- How will existing/emerging faculty from historically underrepresented groups will be recruited? For each faculty position (including their respective rank) proposed for this cluster, identify one or two individuals (with links to bios/CVs) whose research profiles exemplify the faculty you seek to recruit, if your cluster proposal is approved.
- Describe the proposed plan for conducting the recruitment process, review, and final decisions about hiring cluster faculty.
Current Clusters
See currently available positions within these clusters. (Not all clusters have open opportunities.)
Primary school: School of Global Public Health
School contact: Melody Goodman
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| GPH Department of Biostatistics | Melody Goodman |
Faculty in the cluster at the School of Global Public Health (GPH) will be part of the new Center for Anti-Racism, Social Justice & Public Health (CASJPH) that launched in the spring 2022. This cluster is across departments (e.g., biostatistics, epidemiology, public health policy & management, social & behavioral sciences) within GPH. We seek to recruit faculty whose research, teaching, practice and service is aligned with the mission of the CASJPH to examine racism as a social determinant of health, develop policy and/or practice interventions to address racism and health equity, and conduct translational stakeholder engaged research. Using both mentored and peer collaborations, this cluster is designed to spur multidisciplinary public health research and practice with a focus on racism, the social determinants of health (e.g., education, housing, transportation, neighborhoods), and social justice issues in public health. CASJPH will provide methodological, pedagogical, and professional development training for affiliated faculty members.
Primary school: Arts & Science
School contact: Susan Anton
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of Art History | Edward Sullivan |
| FAS Department of History | Ed Berenson Andrew Sartori |
| Gallatin School of Individualized Study | Susanne Wofford Myisha Priest |
This cluster brings together several departments and schools across the humanities. Members of the cluster will share interests in the culture and history of Africa, Africans, and the Africa-descended people who have created a vast, culturally rich Black diaspora. This diaspora extends throughout much of the globe and has been especially influential in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions.
Primary school: Arts & Science
School contact: Susan Anton
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of Comparative Literature | Emily Apter |
| FAS Department of English | Elizabeth McHenry |
| FAS Department of French Literature, Thought & Culture | Phillip John Usher |
| FAS Department of Spanish & Portuguese Languages & Literatures | Gabriel Giorgi |
This cluster seeks scholars whose work spans across four language-based literature programs in FAS. Specifically, the cluster will include scholars of African American, Lusophone and Francophone Atlantic, African, and Caribbean literatures. Literature, as an expanded field, in its intersections with other practices such as performance, cinema, music, and the arts, brings breadth and diversity to literary and cultural studies in our departments and across the university. It will enhance current conversations within and between departments about literary genealogies, blind spots in canonical approaches to literature, and the intersections with other aesthetic practices. African American and diasporic literary studies have expanded tremendously in the past decade, and remain active growth areas in the humanities. This cluster will foster this expansion by combining diverse cultural cartographies and languages.
Primary school: Division of Libraries
School contact: April Hathcock
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Business & Government Information Services | Dan Hickey |
| Data Services | Nicholas Wolf |
| Scholarly Communications & Information Policy | Anastasia Chiu |
| Science Services | Hope Lappen Margaret Smith |
The cluster brings together faculty from three diverse and multifaceted departments across the Division of Libraries: Scholarly Communications and Information Policy; Knowledge Access; and the Bern Dibner Library, which is STEM focused and part of the Brooklyn Campus; to participate in the public interest technology initiatives at New York University and beyond. Bringing together expertise in scientific data discovery, data curation and organization, open-access scholarship, digital preservation, and STEM engagement, this cluster will connect a key set of library and information science perspectives and theoretical underpinnings to heighten the impact of work already occurring across the university in the fields of education, data journalism, information and technology policy, data science, and more. The positions in this cluster build on a rich tradition of libraries centering the public good in technology development, selection, policy, and implementation, not only to facilitate access to a range of technologies, but also to bring a critical lens to their inherent limitations and biases. NYU Libraries cluster serves as a means of continuing this work while making new and exciting connections with other areas of the University active in STEM fields, including the Center for Urban Science and Progress, the Center for Data Science, PRIISM, NYU Abu Dhabi, the Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and many others.
Primary school: Silver School of Social Work
School contact: Michael Lindsey
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development | Elise Cappella Erin Godfrey |
A cross-disciplinary approach is critical to creating strategies that support young people and address inequities at the intersections of education, mental health, and child welfare. This research cluster will be comprised of interdisciplinary scholars from diverse backgrounds who build on the collaboration of NYU Blueprints Progressive Change in Juvenile Justice, co-sponsored by NYU’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change (IHDSC) at NYU Steinhardt, Strategies to Reduce Inequality (SRI) initiative, and the Cross-Cutting Initiative on Inequality (CCII) initiative at NYU Silver School of Social Work. The purpose is to develop and test research-based solutions to long-lasting change in the lives of children and their families.
The research hub will bridge different perspectives from disciplinary and methodological grounding, and generate innovative, cross-cutting solutions, building on those of NYU Blueprints. The hub will be anchored by: structured mentorship, with a team made up of senior faculty from NYU Blueprints and across the Schools; and by infrastructure support from the Institute of Human Development and Social Change (Steinhardt) and Silver School of Social Work.
Primary school: Division of Libraries
School contact: April Hathcock
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Division of Libraries | Lauren Kehoe |
| Knowledge Access Department | Gioia Stevens |
| Libraries Department of Data Services | Andrew Battista |
| Libraries Department of Humanities & Social Sciences | Katherine Boss |
| Science Services | Lori Salmon |
This cluster within the Division of Libraries both extends and strengthens the Division of Libraries Commitment to our core values of Inclusion, Diversity, Belonging, Equity, and Accessibility (IDBEA). The positions in the cluster are strategically placed in three core areas of librarianship: collections and subject expertise, description and discovery, and engagement and outreach. The cluster will center underrepresented communities’ voices by bringing in new collections of Africana & African American Studies materials in all formats; highlighting emerging, streaming media collections including the Native American Film and Video Festival, Chiapas Media Project, and the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library; and creating anti-racist description practices. By reimagining our metadata and systems practices through a lens of IDBEA, we can help ensure that diverse collections are discoverable by and accessible to users. Through engagement and outreach, we can address economic and racial inequality around information culture(s) in our own community at NYU. We will provide holistic support for students (including support for academic, emotional, and financial success) and ensure access to affordable course materials.
Primary school: forthcoming
School contact: forthcoming
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| forthcoming | forthcoming |
The traditions that have grown up around the study of antiquity have typically siloed different cultures into completely independent scholarly worlds. Yet it has become increasingly clear that this separation of ancient cultures into discrete units makes no intellectual sense. Indeed, it is a major hindrance to our proper understanding of antiquity. Comparative studies are vital if one is to appreciate and explain the interconnectedness of trade routes, literary cultures, and art and architecture, but also of how cultures evolve similarly over time due to stages of technical and social development.
This cluster will be composed of five scholars whose research, while spanning diverse disciplines and methodologies in Classics, Hebrew and Judaic Studies, East Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, and Art History, shares a commitment to the study of the ancient world and advances the field of comparative antiquities. With an eye to emerging scholarship and undertheorized lines of inquiry, the cluster will challenge and enrich established pedagogies and current conceptions of the ancient world; while also promoting a more diverse view of the ancient past. The cluster aims to attract more diverse faculty, as well as further the curiosity of students, who are introduced to the study of antiquity through the College Core Curriculum.
Primary school: Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development
School contact: Larue Allen
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Institute for Human Development & Social Change | Erin Godfrey |
| Department of Administration, Leadership & Technology | Noel Anderson |
| Department of Applied Psychology | Ed Seidman |
| Department of Applied Statistics, Social Sciences & Humanities | Marc Scott |
| Department of Teaching & Learning | Catherine Milne |
We propose to build a research hub of interdisciplinary scholars from diverse backgrounds to understand the mechanisms by which structural inequities impact educational and service organizations that serve children and youth. Understanding the disproportional and detrimental impacts on the learning, development, behavior, mental health, access to resources, and life opportunities for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and migrant youth is critical. A central focus will be how norms and regularities impact identity and belonging. Hub scholars will seek to understand the mechanisms by which the aforementioned structural inequities impact identity and sense of belonging, and explore and disrupt these negative trajectories by discovering, developing, and testing innovative interventions and policy solutions. To create this hub, we will hire a group of six promising underrepresented research scholars who focus on different parts of this issue and/or different developmental outcomes from diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives. These new scholars will have a “home” and a senior mentor in one of the five participating departments. Their interaction and scholarship will be supported and facilitated by the Institute of Human Development and Social Change, and their interaction will be grounded and enhanced by collaboration with the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools.
Primary school: Silver School of Social Work
School contact: facultyadvance@nyu.edu
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| forthcoming | forthcoming |
Participants in this cluster engage in research that addresses real-world challenges in underserved communities, focusing on topics including community mental health and social service delivery, poverty, homelessness, health equity, AI bias, surveillance and cyber security, and educational access. Scholars in this cluster study environmental discrimination, sustainability, financial literacy, innovation and entrepreneurship, equity and digital money transfer, and the imaginative uses of communications technologies to augment, improve, and bring delight, utility, and meaning to people’s lives.
Primary school: Division of Libraries
School contact: April Hathcock
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Business & Government Information Services | Dan Hickey |
| Data Services | Nicholas Wolf |
| Scholarly Communications & Information Policy | Anastasia Chiu |
| Science Services | Hope Lappen Margaret Smith |
This cluster lies at the Intersection of information science, health and scientific literacy, and social justice. COVID-19’s disproportionate effect on BIPOC communities has amplified attention to inequities caused by structural racism in health care. The last eighteen months have also highlighted the rampant spread of health misinformation and the need for access to sound health and scientific information and expanded health and scientific information literacy. The three positions in this cluster will focus on equity within scientific information culture writ large, and support NYU research and curricular needs in the basic and health sciences, with an emphasis on equity, information literacy, and open scholarship. Two of the positions sit in the Libraries’ Health Sciences department and focus specifically on health equity and health information literacy, while the third position sits in the Libraries Science department, focusing on scientific literacy and open scholarship and bridging basic and health sciences disciplines. All three positions address an increased demand for health and science expertise at NYU that specifically engages with profound disparities around health and scientific literacy, access to information, and the politics of information.These positions will assist researchers with projects ranging from evidence syntheses to community science, and will support learners pursuing careers in research (whether in academia or industry) as well as professional practice.
Primary school: Tandon School of Engineering
School contact: Yao Wang
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Department of Biomedical Engineering | Andreas Hielscher |
The Health Engineering cluster seeks to recruit world-class faculty who can build bridges between NYU’s fast-growing medical engineering community and physicians in NYU’s world-class medical school and hospitals. Many unmet clinical and healthcare needs can potentially be addressed with emerging technologies in various engineering fields. To be effective, close multidisciplinary collaboration between doctors, data scientists, and biomedical, electrical, mechanical, biochemical, and computational engineers is needed. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated and accelerated efforts in this regard. Several technologies developed at NYU have already emerged as crucial tools for containing the spread and impact of the virus. For example, a team of NYU experts in genetics, clinical diagnostics, and robotics has developed a state-of-the-art tool for industrial-scale COVID-19 variant detection, pool testing, and gold-standard PCR testing in only a few months. The cluster will build on and further enhance these activities that transcend traditional academic boundaries. From it, new ideas for interschool initiatives and degrees will emerge that further improve the quality of health care and attract and educate students from diverse backgrounds.
Primary school: Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
School contact: Adam Buchwald, Director of NYU Steinhardt’s Center of Health and Rehabilitation Research
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Tandon School of Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering | Andreas Hielscher |
Rehabilitation science, medicine, and engineering play a critical role in promoting the recovery and the well-being of patients with physical disabilities and impairments. Traditionally at NYU, collaboration between departments and schools have resulted in important therapies and interventions to help patients regain function, improve mobility, and manage chronic pain. This includes NYU Langone’s Rusk Rehabilitation Center, Steinhardt’s Center of Health and Rehabilitation Research (CoHRR), and the robotics and health engineering group at the Tandon School of Engineering.
Building on this foundation, this cluster will be composed of four research scholars from diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives, who will address health disparities, equity, and justice in rehabilitation science and engineering. With the guidance of senior mentors, and through networking and collaboration, scholars will advance their research and work together to develop innovative solutions. The goal of the cluster is to overcome significant barriers and disparities in prevention, diagnosis, and adoption of treatment, and to improve the lives of both individuals and communities.
Primary school: Arts & Science
School contact: Susan Anton
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Center for Data Science | Julia Kempe Brenden Lake Cristina Savin |
| Center for Neural Science | Catherine Hartley Wei Ji Ma Cristina Savin Eero Simoncelli |
| FAS Department of Psychology | Todd Gureckis Catherine Hartley Brenden Lake Bob Rehder |
| Flatiron Institute | Eero Simoncelli |
This cluster was created to focus on understanding and engineering intelligence. Understanding intelligence is one of the greatest scientific quests ever undertaken—a challenge that demands an interdisciplinary approach spanning psychology, neural science, data science, and artificial intelligence (AI). A focus on computation is at the center of this quest—viewing intelligence, in all of its forms, as a kind of sophisticated and adaptive computational process. But the kind of computation necessary for intelligence remains an open question; despite striking, recent, progress in AI, today’s technologies provide nothing like the general-purpose, flexible intelligence that we have as humans. We believe that intensifying the dialog between these fields is needed for transformative research on understanding and engineering intelligence, focused on two key questions: How can advances in machine intelligence best advance our understanding of natural (human and animal) intelligence? And, how can we best use insights from natural intelligence to develop new, more powerful machine intelligence technologies that more fruitfully interact with us?
Primary school: Arts & Science
School contact: Susan Anton
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of English | Elizabeth McHenry |
| FAS Department of History | Ed Berenson |
| FAS Department of Social & Cultural Analysis | Jennifer Morgan |
| Gallatin School of Individualized Study | Kimberly DaCosta Myisha Priest |
| Tisch Department of Cinema Studies | Anna McCarthy Karen Shimakawa |
This cluster is composed of scholars of Native American and/or Indigenous Studies whose teaching and research explores and increases understanding of the history, the cultural and artistic traditions, and the political experiences of indigenous peoples.
Primary school: Courant Institute of Mathematical Science
School contact: Helena Jane Carey
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Center for Data Science | Julia Kempe |
| Courant Department of Computer Science | Denis Zorin |
| Courant Department of Mathematics | Laure Zanna |
| Tandon Department of Civil & Urban Engineering | Magued Iskander |
Climate change disproportionately affects communities who suffer from socioeconomic inequalities, in particular people of color. Assessing the impacts of climate change, adapting to its consequences, and developing strategies for mitigating its effects requires a fundamental understanding and robust predictions of different components of the Earth’s system (atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice) and their interactions across scales. The cluster hire in climate change prediction, linking global change to impacts at the city scale to inform decision-making and planning for climate change adaptation using data science. This interdisciplinary initiative, between Courant, Tandon, and the Center for Data Science, builds on the university’s existing strengths in the sciences, including modeling global and regional climate, methods and applications of data-driven science, and environmental impacts and actions on cities. A cluster hire is necessary to include diverse disciplinary voices, create bridges between different departments at NYU already conducting impactful climate research, establish an inclusive, safe, and productive academic environment, and train the next generation of climate scientists. NYU is uniquely poised to push the boundary of existing climate prediction research, making significant and rapid advances, and taking action at the city and global scale in this critical threat of the 21st century.
Primary school: Arts & Science
School contact: Susan Anton
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of Social and Cultural Analysis |
As a center of urban research in the nation’s largest and most diverse city, New York University seeks faculty in history, social and cultural analysis, and sociology who are researching race and cities in the Americas. Urban areas, including New York, are home to large diasporic communities of people of African and Latin American descent whose opportunities are profoundly shaped by long histories of segregation, discrimination, and racialized injustice in policing, education, employment, and housing. Those inequalities take spatial form in metropolitan geographies, in the differential distribution of public goods and services across neighborhood and municipal lines, and in a multitude of neighborhood effects of concentrated disadvantage. At the same time, cities are places of innovation and opportunity, the result of community formation, especially the creation and reinvention of urban institutions ranging from commercial institutions to churches. To understand cities—past, present, and future—requires analyzing the processes by which people of color shaped cities, how discrimination and segregation hinders opportunities, how diasporic urbanites reinvent communities, and how insights from history and the social sciences can inform contemporary debates.
Primary school: Arts & Science
School contact: Susan Anton
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of Sociology |
The cluster was created to recruit outstanding scholars whose research addresses some of the most vexing political and social problems of our time, in alignment with NYU priority areas: anti-racism and urban environments, politics, and problems. Focusing on these areas will facilitate recruitment of scholars from underrepresented backgrounds who are innovators in our disciplines’ scholarship. Through its focus on developing a multidisciplinary network of scholars, the Race, Identity, and Inequality (RII) cluster promises to provide a more holistic perspective on these problems. The community it seeks to foster and the resources it aims to marshal promise to create a highly attractive environment for scholars working in these areas. The RII cluster will provide a network for scholars to collaborate across NYU and enhance NYU’s ability to mentor students from diverse backgrounds, thus accelerating the recruitment of young scholars into academia. The cultivation of this network will aid in retention efforts by fostering attachment to NYU’s intellectual community. Coordinating recruitment across units can yield rewards by expanding engagement in bringing outside scholars aboard, and by signaling to those scholars that their areas of research are an NYU priority. Research conducted by RII scholars is central to contemporary social sciences, and now is the time to take advantage of cross-unit efforts in faculty development.
Primary school: Tisch School of the Arts
School contacts: Karen Shimakawa
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Department of Cinema Studies | Anna McCarthy |
| Department of Collaborative Arts | Steven Drukman |
| Department of Dance | Rashaun Mitchell |
| Department of Drama | Rubén Polendo |
| Department of Dramatic Writing | Joe Vinciguerra |
| Department of Photography & Imaging | Deborah Willis |
| Department of Undergraduate Television & Film | Ezra Sacks |
Matters of representation lie at the center of research and practice in the arts today. The question of how to stand for, speak for, and depict the lives and beliefs of oneself and others is a pressing concern in the arts education curriculum. Who gets represented? Who creates the representations? Who gets left out and why? Who or what controls this depiction? What does it mean to be unrepresented? (Or overrepresented, for that matter) How does political representation align, or not, with representational diversity in culture? These questions unify disparate areas of creative work, from dance to documentary. They also span multiple fields of scholarly practice. This cluster is an innovative partnership among departments within Tisch School of the Arts, and will create a nexus of practice-led research within the School. It seeks out scholars and practitioners whose work analyzes intersections of race, gender, and identity, and shifts perception through innovative strategies of representation.
Primary school: Tandon School of Engineering
School contact: Yao Wang
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering | Miguel Modestino Eray Aydil |
Addressing the problems caused by anthropogenic pollution and eliminating emissions producing climate change with innovative technological solutions will require coordinated efforts from different engineering disciplines. Engineering and technology hold the key to a greener, healthier future in a world threatened by pollution and climate change. This cluster will comprise faculty with complementary expertise and the potential to collaborate and develop engineering solutions to Avoid, Mitigate, and Remediate emissions responsible for climate change and environmental contamination and, when these are not possible, find strategies to Adapt to these environmental challenges (AMRAd). The objective is to help establish an ecosystem of students, faculty, researchers, educators, and innovators spanning multiple disciplines with a passion and commitment to sustainability.
Primary school: Division of Libraries
School contact: April Hathcock
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Division of Libraries | Lauren Kehoe |
| Knowledge Access Department | Gioia Stevens |
| Libraries Department of Data Services | Andrew Battista |
| Libraries Department of Journalism & Media, Culture & Communication | Katherine Boss |
| Science Services | Lori Salmon |
New York University Libraries are integral to the University’s teaching and research infrastructure, which includes support for inquiry into the problems and opportunities of urban societies. The three positions that comprise The Politics of Space: Data, the City, and Structures of Inequality cluster will enhance a University-wide engagement with urban informatics and data literacy, which are essential to understanding how cities operate, change, and thrive. Two positions are intended to bolster inquiry within specific NYU contexts: Steinhardt’s Education and Human Development programs and Stern’s Business and Economics curricula. The third position, Data Services Librarian, is situated within a Libraries’ department that fosters deeply engaged interdisciplinarity and works with many departments to enhance the research data lifecycle at NYU. This cluster anticipates a burgeoning need for information and research technology expertise for those in urban studies-adjacent disciplines at NYU, including educational sociology, educational leadership, and entrepreneurship and innovation. Cities are a register of deep-seated social inequality, often understood through quantitative data analysis and data visualization. NYU Libraries’ Politics of Space cluster looks outward and imagines expanded capacity for urban economics and education disciplines, moored by holistic support for data analysis and visualization across the disciplines at NYU.
Primary school: Division of Libraries
School contact: April Hathcock
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| Libraries Department of Humanites & Social Sciences | Guy Burak Alla Roylance |
| Scholarly Communications & Information Policy | Zachary Coble |
| Special Collections & Archives | Nicholas Martin |
The cluster was created to bring together faculty in the Libraries: Barbara Goldsmith Center for Preservation and Conservation; Research and Research Services Subdivision; Knowledge Access Department; and the Digital Scholarship Services Department. The cluster will enhance NYU Libraries’ capabilities to support academic and non-academic knowledge production in the humanities and related disciplines at NYU and beyond. The positions in this cluster build upon the advancement of the humanities. The scholarship conducted by the faculty in these cluster positions will center a transformative approach to building and sharing knowledge through critical, ethical inquiries that focus on the (in)visibility of epistemologies from historically and continuously underrepresented communities. The practicality of this cluster’s work will reside in fostering knowledge creation, identifying and acknowledging current and pre-existing knowledge, and focusing on the relationships between the academy and those communities most implicated by any particular area or approach to knowledge creation. The goal of this cluster is to build a transformative humanities that exists beyond the bounds of what has been known as traditional epistemological processes in the interest of more equitable shared knowledge.
Primary school: Arts & Science
School contact: Susan Anton
| Participating departments/units | Department/unit contact |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of Biology | |
| FAS Department of Environmental Studies |
Together with climate change, increasing urbanization presents a key global challenge for the twenty-first century. 83% of the US population currently lives in cities, and 68% of the world’s population is projected to live in cities by 2050. Increasing urbanization impacts issues from social inequity to the underlying biology of the environment within cities and beyond, and presents an intensifying challenge to an ecologically vital and socially just urban future. With a major presence in New York and 14 other major cities across the globe, we believe that NYU is ideally positioned to galvanize cutting edge research to better understand urban environmental changes, and the social processes that produce and maintain urban social inequality.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Recruit and retain faculty from underrepresented groups that contribute to the academic diversity of the University
- Encourage and enhance cross-disciplinary research collaboration and the ability to seek external research funding
- Broaden NYU’s research visibility on key societal problems. Engage in evidence-based research that positively impacts the world by addressing these issues.
- Promote faculty engagement with stakeholders within and beyond the university.
All cluster proposals MUST be submitted through your school’s dean’s office. The deans of each school will/have set up the process by which cluster proposals should be discussed and developed with relevant faculty, chairs, and deans, and, if approved, submitted. Questions about the process in your school should be directed to the specific contacts listed in the School/Unit Contacts section above.
Yes. All cluster proposals, which may include between 3–6 faculty, MUST include faculty from more than one department within a single school, and may include one or more schools. If your cluster proposal includes more than one school, you should be in touch with representatives from each participating school to determine which will submit the proposal.
As with all faculty hires, each school’s dean and the provost approve faculty cluster proposals. Deans approve new clusters by submitting new cluster proposals to the Provost, who then gives final authorization to initiate hiring into the cluster.
The FCAC does not approve cluster proposals. Because this is a university-wide initiative, the role of the FCAC is to: help articulate a set of broad, shared, goals for the Initiative; represent faculty across the university to develop shared best practices for successfully recruiting, hiring, supporting, mentoring, retaining and advancing the professional development of cluster faculty; provide feedback on ways cluster proposals might be strengthened in terms of potential connections to human and financial resources that exist across the university; and provide a university-wide process for accountability by helping to determine a common framework for measuring and evaluating progress towards achieving the initiative’s goals. The FCAC is led by Vice Provost Charlton McIlwain.
No. This working group consists of representatives from each school and other university offices, who work together to enhance faculty recruitment practices across the university. Their objective is to identify best practices, resources and processes that facilitate effective faculty recruitment and to shape, as necessary, university policies and practices governing faculty recruitment. While the working group outcomes inform the work of the FCAC and the cluster initiative, its purview extends beyond the cluster initiative. The working group is led by Kristen Day, Vice Provost, and Karen Jackson-Weaver, Associate Vice President of Global Inclusive Faculty Engagement and Innovation Advancement.
No. Utilizing these overarching themes to facilitate the organization and focus of clusters is a means to an end. The themes help achieve the goals of the cluster initiative in terms of both hiring outcomes as well as to help distinguish NYU as a leading institution for research and impact in specific areas. However, schools may propose clusters that fall outside of the five areas above so long as they make the case, through the proposal components, that the cluster can achieve the goals and objectives of the initiative.
See the NYU Guide to Diverse Faculty Searches for more recruitment strategies and resources.