The Center for Faculty Advancement (CFA) supports the Faculty Cluster 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.
Our current clusters and recruited faculty are listed below.
Anti-Racism, Social Justice, & Public Health
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.
Adolfo Cuevas, Assistant Professor, Social & Behavior Sciences, School of Global Public Health
Saba Rouhani, Assistant Professor, Epidemiology, School of Global Public Health
Black Diaspora Cultural Studies
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.
Monique Bedasse, Associate Professor, Department of History, College of Arts & Science (Fall 2023)
Emilie Boone, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, College of Arts & Science
Clifton Boyd, Assistant Professor, Department of Music, College of Arts & Science
Audrey Celestine, Associate Professor, Department of History, College of Arts & Science
Madina Thiam, Assistant Professor, Department of History, College of Arts & Science
Delio Vasquez, Assistant Professor, Gallatin School of Individualized Study (Fall 2024)
Black Diaspora Literary Studies
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.
Andrea Adomako, Assistant Professor, Department of English, College of Arts & Science
Isabel Bradley, Assistant Professor, Department of French, College of Arts & Science
Honey Crawford, Assistant Professor, Department of English, College of Arts & Science
Paul Edwards, Assistant Professor, Department of English, College of Arts & Science
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, College of Arts & Science
Fred Moten, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, College of Arts & Science
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, College of Arts & Science
Bridging Systems Toward Equitable Solutions for Youth: Education, Mental Health, and Child Welfare
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.
Sireen Irshied, Assistant Professor, Silver School of Social Work
Building STEM for the Public Good: Cultivating Openness in the Sciences
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.
Hebah Emara, Assistant Curator, Dibner Library, Division of Libraries
Amanda He, Library Associate, Dibner Library, Division of Libraries
Maria Mejia, Assistant Curator, Department of Scholarly Communication and Information Policy, Division of Libraries
Centering Underrrepresented Voices: Anti-Racist Practices in Libraries and Archives
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.
Gabriela Garcia, Assistant Curator, Undergraduate Services, Division of Libraries
Chelsea Gizzi, Assistant Curator, Knowledge Access, Knowledge Access & Resource Management Services, Division of Libraries
Kristen Owens, Assistant Curator, Department of Arts, Performance, and Humanistic Inquiry, Division of Libraries
Roxane Pickens, Assistant Curator, Department of Community Engagement, Division of Libraries
Creating a Just Society: Equity and Belonging
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.
Lauren Mims, Assistant Professor, Department of Applied Psychology, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Mike Hoa Nguyen, Assistant Professor, Department of Administration, Leadership, and Technology, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Shamari Reid, Assistant Professor, Department of Teaching and Learning, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Health and Scientific Literacy, Openness, and Equity
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.
Brynne Campbell-Rice, Assistant Curator, Department of Health, Education, and Human Development, Division of Libraries
Nicole Helregel, Assistant Curator, Department of Science Research Services, Division of Libraries
Stacy Torian, Assistant Curator, Department of Health, Education, and Human Development, Division of Libraries
Health Engineering
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.
Irene de Lazaro del Rey, Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tandon School of Engineering
Rose Faghih, Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tandon School of Engineering
David Truong, Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tandon School of Engineering
Erdem Varol, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Tandon School of Engineering
Minds, Brains, and Machines
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?
SueYeon Chung, Assistant Professor, Center for Neural Science, College of Arts and Science
Grace Lindsay, Assistant Professor, Center for Data Science
Native American & Indigenous Studies
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.
Ashley Agbasoga, Assistant Professor, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
Lou Cornum, Assistant Professor, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, College of Arts & Science
Jacob Floyd, Assistant Professor, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts
Eve Tuck, Professor of Native Indigenous Studies, Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Race, Identity, and Inequality
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.
Rahsaan Maxwell, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, College of Arts and Science (Spring 2023)
Ravaris Moore, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, College of Arts & Science
Domingo Morel, Associate Professor, Department of Politcal Science, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service (Spring 2023)
Bryant Moy, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, College of Arts & Science
Gaetan Nandong, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, College of Arts & Science
Representation in the Arts
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.
Florence Barrau-Adams, Assistant Arts Professor, Department of Undergraduate Film and Television, Tisch School of the Arts
Sean Fader, Assistant Professor, Department of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts
Michael Gillespie, Associate Professor, Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts
MJ Kaufman, Assistant Arts Professor, Department of Dramatic Writing, Tisch School of the Arts
August Luhrs, Assistant Arts Professor, Tisch School of the Arts
Kristen Wright, Assistant Professor, Department of Undergraduate Drama, Tisch School of the Arts
Andre Zachery, Assistant Arts Professor, Department of Dance, Tisch School of the Arts
The Politics of Space: Data, the City, and Structures of Inequality
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.
Dawn Cadogan, Assistant Curator, Department of Health, Education, and Human Development, Division of Libraries
Talya Cooper, Research Curation Librarian
Zehong Liu, Metadata Librarian for Science & Geospatial Data
Jiebei Luo, Assistant Curator, Department of Business, Economics, and Entrepreneurship, Division of Libraries
Transforming Ecologies in Urban Environments
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.
Kristin Winchell, Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, College of Arts and Science
Yi Yin, Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, College of Arts & Science
Transformative Humanities for All: Building and Sharing the Cultural Record
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.
Rye Gentleman, Assistant Curator, Department of Arts, Performance, and Humanistic Inquiry, Division of Libraries
Anabel Gutierrez, Assistant Curator, Division of Libraries