faculty

Lang’s cultural relevance, commitment to academic freedom, New York City campus, and position as part of The New School all attract faculty who turn classroom theory into world engagement. These forward-thinking educators are also practitioners out in the field, global leaders deeply connected to organizations and industries addressing some of today’s most pressing issues. Many of our faculty are integral members of the university community, some jointly appointed at Lang and The New School for Social Research. Lang students also benefit from close relationships with faculty; this interaction enriches students’ scholarship and understanding of the world.

INTERVIEW: DEAN BROWNER Featured Faculty In Conversation: DEVA WOODLY AND AUSTIN OCHOA FEATURED FACULTY IN CONVERSATION: SHANELLE MATTHEWS AND JASVEEN SARNA

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Faculty

Dean Stephanie Browner’s third-floor office provides a rare vantage point on Lang and The New School: the bustling courtyard below; the Skybridge, where students both create and curate art each semester; and The New School’s original 12th Street building. Dean Browner spoke with us about her research, Lang’s engaged approach to theoretical discourse, and the university mission that brought her here.

What drew you to Lang?

Well, I originally found out about The New School because my mom—both my parents were immigrants—read anything she could get her hands on that had a progressive take on art or politics. She didn’t go to college until after she had children, but books by Hannah Arendt and others associated with The New School were everywhere in our house. So I knew about the university’s values, and its commitments to being in and of New York City, and being intellectually progressive—not just superficially, but deeply intellectual and serious. I have a history of working in small liberal arts colleges, and that, combined with The New School’s mission, drew me to Lang.

“Intellectually progressive”—can you expand on that?

Yes. People think higher education is liberal or progressive, because the students tend to skew that way. But actually, higher education can be quite stodgy and traditional. An ivory tower can be a very conservative place, and not actually open to the ideas of people who haven’t traditionally been admitted.

What kind of student thrives at Lang?

I think Lang students in general have a voice far earlier and far stronger than most college students. Visiting professor and author Mary Gaitskill told me this my first year here. They tend to have a sense of purpose, or at the very least a habit of independent thought. They don’t ask, “What’s going to be on the exam?” Many hone this voice through writing, through creative work, through activism. I like that those who are activists do so both outside the university and within. They speak up at university events. Often, even in the middle of the Lang Academic Awards, students use their moment at the microphone to speak truth to power. We honor that kind of fierce individuality and independence.

How is the curriculum at Lang unique?

I feel that our students aren’t just here for the cultural capital of being able to say, “Oh, I read Marx” or “I read Lolita” or “I read Aristotle.” You’ll read all those things here, but it’s because these writers and these ideas are powerful and relevant. Class discussions are not competitive or oneupmanship environments. The classroom is where we open up questions and really interrogate ourselves and the world, our thoughts, and what other people are thinking.

When I first came to Lang, we designed and started offering 20 Civic Liberal Arts courses each year that our faculty co-teach with partners from outside of the academy, such as a curator from the Whitney Museum of American Art and an editor from the New York Times. These “outsiders” are there in the classroom, designing courses with professors. They’re thrilled to be teaching at The New School, and students are doing work that is very important to people outside the academy.

Is there any specific programming that supports Lang’s commitment to civic liberal arts?

Lots! The most popular program in recent years has been the bell hooks residency at Lang. Bell and I have been colleagues for years, first getting to know each other in Kentucky. We’ve brought her to The New School four times, I believe. The first time, people waited more than an hour in a line that went down Fifth Avenue in order to hear her talk with Melissa Harris-Perry. Each residency, she has had conversations with a wide range of people—Laverne Cox, Eve Ensler, Samuel Delany, Janet Mock, Cornel West, etc. These are on YouTube and are still very popular and important. She never stops thinking critically and always finds pleasure and humor in her dialogues with others.

What new areas are students at Lang exploring these days?

We began the Journalism + Design program a few years ago. It prepares students to be journalists of all kinds and to help shape a sector that is of critical importance to democracy and in radical disruption right now.

And while reading and writing have long been core to a liberal arts education, technology is a third strand we’ve begun to weave into our offerings. In spring 2020, we launched a new minor, Code as a Liberal Art, that integrates critical thinking and coding to deepen understanding of technology’s impact on almost everything in our lives, from private conversations to national elections. As far as we can tell, there are very few schools exploring this topic from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Outside of being Lang’s dean, you’re also a faculty member. What are you teaching this term?

I love to talk about what I’m teaching, because it’s important to me. I can’t be a good dean if I’m not in the classroom. My background is in American and African American literature, so I’ve taught those courses, but I’ve also taught a freshman seminar. In my 19th- and 20th-century American literature class, we begin with Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, then on to Harriet Jacobs, who wrote a slave narrative and hid in her grandmother’s attic for seven years to avoid a predatory white slave owner. We’ll eventually end up with Langston Hughes and Marianne Moore.

What was behind your decision to play so many roles on campus?

I get to know the college through student eyes that way. It’s really easy to think you know the college when you’re the dean, but I don’t know it any better than my students do, and if I don’t stay in touch, I’ll be oblivious to their needs. Being an advisor also requires that I know the curriculum from the student perspective and spend time in conversation with one student at a time.

But this is why we’re here—to change lives one at a time. It’s about human learning and the relationships that nurture learning, for them and for me. It keeps me happy.

Featured Faculty: Natalia MehlmanPetrzela

Associate Professor of History

Lang courses often bring together different perspectives in provocative ways. Is that true of your courses?

That certainly is true of a new course I’m teaching called Publishing Life. It’s actually part of a grant that Lang got from the Mellon Foundation. In the course, students and I collaborate with Verso Books, a preeminent left-leaning American press. Verso publishes a lot of New School authors—it’s respected and world renowned.

In class, we investigate the work of theorists embedded in a Marxist framework and self-help authors—writings in two totally different genres. The premise is that the two groups of authors are actually taking on very similar questions, like, How do we lead a “meaningful life”? and What is the philosophically coherent way to be a smart consumer and/or producer of these kinds of genres?

What are the benefits of Lang’s approach to small seminar courses?

I’ve had some of the same students in five or six classes. So one benefit of Lang’s small seminars is the fact that students are able to come back to the same professor in their department, be familiar with him or her, and expand on ideas developed previously. There are 18 people in the room, max—so everyone involved is going to come into the class already having some type of relationship.

But Lang seminars also bring the classroom out into the world. I always say to my students, “My most profound hope is that our academic work will actually shape your understanding of your own experiences. These texts should really bump up against your identity and who you think you are in the world.”

So it’s not just that the students and I get to be buddybuddy. Lang seminars involve community-based projects that are great opportunities to enhance the academic dimension through a more 360-degree kind of engagement.

Featured Faculty: David Bering-Porter

Assistant Professor of Culture and Media

How does your research influence the courses you teach?

My research is on the mediated body—in other words, how the body works as a medium or a canvas that reflects and informs your relationship to the world. So my courses reflect that interest. In Race and Digital Media, we were trying to think about how race functions as a technology within our society, understanding not only how people of color and certain ethnic minorities interact with technology, but also that race itself is a construct that has a societal function—it works like a cultural mechanism of identity, oppression, privilege, etc. We’re really trying to push through some complicated theoretical ideas in class.

Why is Lang the right college to investigate these ideas?

Knowledge doesn’t pertain to one discipline at a time. I think that Lang has been a particularly fruitful institution for looking at the body, race, identity, culture, and media because of how it allows students from a wide variety of disciplines, a wide variety of backgrounds, to come into this space and have conversations about interconnected networks of knowledge.

We come at our work in class from a wide variety of angles. I naturally have a lot of Culture and Media students. But I’ve also had students from across the university take my courses, including several from Parsons’ Fashion Design program, which has been really fun in terms of process. They bring an interesting aesthetic sense to the creative and design-oriented projects in my classes, and I’m looking forward to having that kind of aesthetic sense in the class on data visualization that I’m teaching next semester.

In Conversation: Deva Woodly and Austin Ochoa

Deva Woodly is an associate professor of politics at Lang. Her work in and outside of the classroom focuses on political communication, social movements, and public opinion and behavior. She was the Senior Capstone faculty advisor to Austin Ochoa, BA Politics ’18. We spoke with them about Austin’s project and Deva’s pivotal guidance during his research.

Interviewer: Deva, can you tell us a little about what you’re teaching this semester? Deva: Right now, I’m teaching a class called Becoming Generation Citizen, which is a really cool Civic Liberal Arts class, supported by a Mellon grant. It allows us to work with an outside organization, a nonprofit called Generation Citizen. The organization trains our students to guide high school students through a civic action, from research through the implementation of some change, whether that’s gathering information that wasn’t previously known, contacting a public official, or seeking new legislation. Interviewer: So you’re sort of creating an ecosystem of civic engagement. Deva: Yes, one that consists of political and civic awareness and participation. And it’s going great. I also teach the Senior Capstone, which Austin is in. Each student does an independent research project, and then we collect those research projects into a journal called UnderPol. Not only do the students create the scholarly content, but they do the artistic direction and layout design. Interviewer: Austin, what type of project are you doing for your capstone? Austin: I have a particular interest in constitutional law and criminal law, so, for my senior thesis I wanted to bring together everything I’ve learned in the past three or four years at Lang—the Bill of Rights; the rights of the accused; the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments; and the history behind those rights and those who have them.

Interviewer: Students at Lang often take theory they’ve learned in the classroom out into the world. Have you had any similar experiences outside of Lang?

Austin: Yes. Last year I got a job with a criminal court judge here in Manhattan, so every day I was seeing the constitutional amendments I’d been learning about in the classroom, their histories, their political implications, all at work in the courtroom. I saw human rights come into play, making the process more fair and equal for all involved, like Mapp v. Ohio. All these concepts are being played out in the courtroom every single day, and it’s kind of cool to have that broad perspective on it. It helped me learn that one of the greatest things about the U.S. Constitution is its ability to fix itself—to right its own wrongs. Interviewer: And how has Deva influenced your research for your senior capstone? Austin: Oh, she’s been monumental in br oadening my perspective on my paper. Specifically, I’m very attracted to case law and legal jargon and I often get kind of lost in it. Deva’s helped me ask, “What are the cultural implications of Mapp v. Ohio in 1961, and how did that transform courtrooms all across the country?” Deva’s really done a great job at opening my eyes and pointing me in the direction of how to uncover those implications. Deva: Now , it should be said that Austin started out a very good writer and a very analytical mind. But his fascination and talent are for the details of the law. So, I think that my main goal this semester has been to broaden his view, to say, “This is what the law is, but how does that affect practice?” And over the course of the drafts we do to develop the theses, you see students and their perspectives blossom on the page.

But with every student I start by saying, “You have a topic that you really care about. How do we make this a research paper—a truly intellectual endeavor?” Austin: Big-time. A lot of my classmates have had the same kind of experience with Deva’s direction. Friends of mine in the Becoming Generation Citizen course love the work they’re doing. They’re a pretty sharp group. Interviewer: Specifically, what do they say? Austin: That it’s an experience. Deva: That’s the wor d on the street? Austin: Y ep. Deva: Haha. Austin: But that “e xperience” is the reason I came to this school—being able to have my finger on the pulse of our culture, of our generation. It’s really embodied at The New School, and specifically at Lang, in terms of what our generation stands for. Deva: And what do you think your generation stands for?

Austin: So many things: progress, equality. But for anyone interested in the work our generation is doing, I’d say come to a seminar at Lang—you’ll find out.

Featured Faculty: Allison Lichter Joseph

Assistant Professor of Journalism + Design and former Deputy Emerging Media Editor at the Wall Street Journal

Lang students are known for integrating thoughtful inquiry with real-world collaborative action. How does your teaching help students do that?

Lang has a tradition of rigorous scholarly study and a deep appreciation of professional careers, and that enriches our students’ experiences. I’m a good fit here because of that. After working at WNYC radio for nine years, I joined the Wall Street Journal as an online features editor and eventually joined what was then called the Social Media desk. This was when many people at the Journal questioned what social media could do. I translated between two worlds, traditional journalists and digital readers, and our team experimented to see what worked and what didn’t.

As an instructor, I see an opportunity to impart what I’ve learned to future journalists. Most important, I want my students to be great collaborators. Collaboration and trust are essential for newsrooms to keep pace with changing technology and audience needs. Our students need to know how to build relationships and solve problems in effective ways.

How is NYC a resource for students?

We help students connect with important people in the news business. For example, this past semester, both the standards editor and the deputy general counsel for the New York Times visited a class taught by a longtime NYT reporter, Mireya Navarro. They discussed real news, fake news, and what the truth means today. Students heard firsthand the lengths a major news agency goes to to build the trust of its readership. They engaged in conversation that inspired them to become better researchers and analysts able to report with integrity.

The fact that we’re bringing in so many outside professionals from institutions like ProPublica, the New Yorker, and Vox means that our students are constantly interacting with frontline news makers who are also potential future employers.

Featured Faculty: Katayoun Chamany

Mohn Family Professor of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

At Lang, critical thinking is considered an important skill for engaged citizens. How do you help Lang students develop this capacity through your work in science?

Our program investigates the dynamic interplay between human health and the environment (natural, built, and social) in an effort to simultaneously promote scientific innovation and socially just practices. Our courses showcase how science can be an active participant in change, not just a neutral discourse of facts and equations. For example, in a recent senior seminar, students focused on energy resources and planetary health by facing the very real challenge of whether nuclear energy should be subsidized by taxes and be included in New York State’s energy portfolio. Students took on the roles of real stakeholders, such as CEOs, mayors, scientists, nuclear regulators, public health researchers, and representatives of Native American populations and realized how multilayered and complex energy policy can be. After the project, many students said that they had a much more informed and nuanced stance on the issue.

Our students are invested in problem solving and social change, so they need to learn how to negotiate, compromise, and shape health and environmental policy and practice when their values differ from others’. These are important skills that we teach in addition to the concrete scientific content, principles, and data analysis skills.

What are the benefits of Lang’s small seminar courses?

My freshman seminar course Biology, Art, and Social Justice integrates art with labs. One module that has gained much attention is focused on painting with bacteria. Here, students apply what they have learned in the course to curate their own artistic design in a Petri dish and present their work alongside a design statement. From this experience they begin to see the similarities and differences between the scientific method and the art/design process, the role that genes and environment play in ecosystem dynamics, and the parallels that can be drawn between bacterial colonization and settler colonialism.

In Conversation: Shanelle matthews and Jasveen sarna

Shanelle Matthews is the former director of Communications for the Black Lives Matter Global Network and was the inaugural activist-inresidence at The New School, where she taught Black Resistance: 1960–Present. Her former student Jasveen Sarna majored in Literary Studies, with a minor in Race and Ethnicity, at Lang. We spoke to the two about the importance of community in activism and how organizing today is always a collaboration with the past.

Interviewer: Shanelle, can you tell us a little bit about your role as The New School’s activist-in-residence?

Shanelle: During my time as The New School’ s activist-in-residence, I worked alongside students, faculty, and staff to ideate on how to marry scholarship and activism to create a more equitable and just world. In doing so, I guest-lectured across disciplines, engaged in community-centered lecture series like Race in the U.S., and shared my experience as an activist and communications strategist. I also taught Black Resistance: 1960–Present, where we studied the resistance strategies of civil and human rights organizations centered on Black liberation. Our goal was to understand how organizations and the organizers therein use particular resistance strategies to change how people engage with power.

It’s critical to couple local community engagement with the ideas and theories that the faculty and students have about the future of social movements in New York and in this country.

Interviewer: Why are students at Lang a good fit for this coursework?

Shanelle: The students who come to Lang, and The New School at large, expect they will have access to social justice opportunities because of the history and publicity of the university.

Interviewer: Jasveen, what prompted you to take Shanelle’s class?

Jasveen: I got an email! I’m an Ethnicity and Race minor, and I got an email from Lang’s Civic Engagement and Social Justice office about the class with Shanelle—I immediately jumped on it. It

Interviewer: And was it? Jasv een: Definitely. I got exactly what I expected. A lot of times things in academia can seem so theoretical, and so a little hopeless, but having an activist like Shanelle teach your class, someone who is working from a much more real-world, realexperience framework, is so valuable.

And It was so helpful that the group in our class bonded a lot. We went to Harlem to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with Shanelle, and we all got breakfast together. It was a really beautiful bonding experience that informed our work. I think it’s very important to have time and space for community building. Interviewer: So the classroom was like a community for you? Jasveen: Definitely. I nterviewer: How many students wer e in your Black Resistance: 1960–Present course?

Shanelle: I had eight students, which I appreciated. I went to a state school, and there the ratio of students to faculty was like 50 to one. Having a small class gave us space to talk intimately and at length about barriers to achieving social justice, how we are impacted by the same kind of oppression we read about, and what our dreams are for the future. We spent a lot of time talking about what it means to be a student of color here at The New School, where students of color are the minority, and what it means to be a person of color in the world, too. It was a meaningful conversation to have, given the current political conditions and because it’s never a wrong time to talk about being a person of color in America.

Jasveen: The real world came into our discussions almost every class. Shanelle: It did. And that dynamic wasn’t transactional for me. I hope that these eight students are in my life for a long time. I want to continue building relationships with them and support them wherever they go. In college at LSU, I organized on campus against hanging the Confederate flag, for ADA accessibility, and for access to the African American Cultural Center and women’s center, so it resonated with me when I saw them organizing. They learned about resistance strategies both in class and in practice, and I learned so much from them about what it meant to organize on campus in 2018. All of this led to really productive conversations in the classroom and building communication and shared strategies across generations. Interviewer: And what kind of student projects were sparked from these conversations? Shanelle: I’ll admit, I was bursting at the seams to talk about communications and its role in social movements, because it’s what I believe in most intensely and the area to which I’ve committed my life, but alas, I’ll save that for a future course (wink, wink). The curriculum I developed for this course delved into resistance strategies starting in the 1960s, which was the start of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, through today’s Movement for Black Lives. We discussed what it meant for Ella Baker, as a black woman organizer, to lead and her role living in the shadow of Dr. Martin Luther King, and how that compares to today’s Black Lives Matter Global Network, which is led by queer Black women. We talked a lot about organizing both then and now—and how important it is to paint a prophetic vision for the future.

Built into every lesson were dynamic individuals and organizers that fought tirelessly to win improvements in the lives of Black people and to put power in the hands of the people, where it belongs. It was a fantastic refresh for me, too. When you’re working in the field, time to read and study is rare. I can’t overstate how much this experience was mutually beneficial.