Presenters

Khulood Alawadi is a UAE-based design scholar and practitioner. She is a full-time faculty in Engineering Design at NYU Abu Dhabi, where she develops and teaches courses at the intersection of Engineering, Design, Art, and Technology. Her pedagogical interests include decolonizing design education and critiquing the socio-political systems that govern design practice today.

I am a socio-environmental researcher and communicator and a lecturer in Environmental Studies. My work covers interdisciplinary spaces and knowledge transfer in multi-disciplinary teams. In my lectureship I aim to combine the evidence-based knowledge we have about the environment with social aspects, policies, politics, and circular economy. I also advocate and work towards climate justice and expanding the western-based perspective to include indigenous knowledge.

Kevin M. Bonney is Assistant Dean of Faculty Development and Program Advancement and Clinical Associate Professor in Liberal Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from Northwestern University, where his research focused on the immunopathology of Chagas disease. Since then his primary scholarly focus has shifted to biology education research and the scholarship of teaching and learning, and has led to publication of a book and numerous peer-reviewed journal articles.

Dr Nicky Busch’s research focus is on migration and low-paid and informal labour in the UK and across Europe. She has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on these subjects. Her book As an Equal was published by Zed Books in 2018.

NYU London

Ida Chavoshan is a clinical assistant professor in Liberal Studies at New York University (NYU), where she is a member of the writing faculty and the head of the academic support program for international students. As a classroom language teacher for over 16 years and a scholar in the field of second language teaching and learning, she has worked on a wide-variety of topics. Her teaching and research interests include academic writing, grammar, classroom pedagogy, cognitive linguistics, global Englishes, and multimodalities.

Dr Katherine Connelly is a lecturer in Modern Imperialism at NYU London. She gained her PhD from Queen Mary, University of London, in 2018 for her thesis on Karl Marx’s use of Parisian popular culture in his writings on the French Second Republic. She is a biographer of the socialist and anti-imperialist suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. 

Gabrielle is a biological oceanographer with a PhD from North Carolina State University and is part of the biology faculty at Barnard College of Columbia University and an adjunct at New York University. Her research focuses on marine plankton ecology with overlapping interests in citizen science and aquaculture. To support her efforts in marine science, Gabrielle is a National Geographic Explorer and a member of the UN Ocean Decade Network. 

Dr Omega Douglas has practiced as a journalist and editor for several decades. She is the convenor of the BA in Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London, and teaches Global Media at NYU London. Omega’s research interests are in race, representation, international reporting, particularly coverage of Africa, media diversity and inclusion, journalism, and the role of diasporic and transnational communities, as well as international institutions, such as NGOs, in global communications. Omega has recently co-authored a book, Journalism, Culture and Society (Routledge). 

Dr. Dragomir researches issues of global justice and human rights, focusing on migration/mobility patterns. Her book Power on the Move: Adivasi and Roma Accessing Social Justice was published by Bloomsbury Academic (2022) and it is based on fieldwork conducted over 7 years in  Romania and India. Her second book – also grounded in Migration Studies - was just (April 2023) published  by University of Illinois Press, and it is titled: Making the Immigrant Soldier: How Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender Intersect in the US Military. 

NYU Liberal Studies

Ifeona Fulani's research interests include Caribbean, African, and Black British literatures and cultures. Her recent scholarly publications include an edited volume of essays, Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women and Music (University of West Indies Press, 2012) as well as articles published in Atlantic Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Small Axe and Anthurium, and a chapter in the three-volume series, Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800 – 2020 (Cambridge UP, 2020).

Dr Eve Grubin is the author of three collections of poems: Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press), The House of Our First Loving (Rack Press), and Grief Dialogue (Rack Press). Her poems and essays appear widely in UK and US publications. She is a lecturer at NYU in London and a tutor at the Poetry School.

NYU London

Susanna Horng (she/her, pronounced soo-SAN-na HONG) is a Clinical Professor at New York University in Liberal Studies, where she teaches writing, documentary film, and cultural studies to undergraduates. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Bennington Review, Global City Review, La Libreta, and Minerva Rising. She has received support from Catwalk Art Residency, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature from the Jerome Foundation.

Linnéa J. Hussein is a Clinical Assistant Professor in Liberal Studies at New York University. Trained in cinema studies, her work focuses on the intersection of global documentary theory, disability studies, and ethics. Her current research project, The Cinematic Straitjacket, examines discourses on mental illness, race, and disability in fiction, documentary, and news media, to reframe censorship as acts of restriction that privilege comfort and protection over the right to self-represent. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Film Quarterly, Studies in Documentary Film, The New Inquiry, Social Text, and Film & History.

NYU London

Hasan Johnson has 20+ years of professional experience in education, IDBEA, mental health, K-12 education, college teaching, clinical supervision, and teacher and counselor education, supervision, training and professional development. He has worked as an instructor at Rutgers University and Montclair State University in the USA. He has been in the UAE for five years and has worked at Zayed University where he served as a faculty member (Professor of Practice), Assistant Dean of Students Affairs for the College of Education, and as Chair for the Department of Education in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He currently works as the Head of Training and Education for the Office of Inclusion and Equity at the NYU Abu Dhabi campus.

NYU Liberal Studies

Dr Karen Karbiener is a scholar, writer, curator, and cultural activist and has been teaching at NYU since 2003. Recognized for her creative approaches to experiential learning, she received an honorable mention for NYU’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the Arts and Sciences Teaching Innovation Award (twice), and was the first professor featured in NYU’s “Cool Course Dispatch” series. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she is an internationally recognized scholar of Walt Whitman.  Her work on the poet is intersectional, combining elements of material culture studies and cultural biography, such as Poet of the Body: New York’s Walt Whitman (Chicago, 2022; Grolier Club exhibition, 2019).  A native New Yorker and local public scholar, she serves as president of the Walt Whitman Initiative, a NYC-based nonprofit that inaugurated an open-access poetry library in 2022. 

David Larsen is a scholar and translator of premodern Arabic literature, and a Clinical Associate Professor of Liberal Studies. Currently he is a Senior Research Fellow of the Library of Arabic Literature at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Dr Alex Lee is a medieval historian whose work focuses on the intersection between epidemic disease and religion in late medieval Europe. She currently teaches Liberal Studies at NYU London, and History at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her book on the Bianchi of 1399 was published with Brill in 2021, and she has published articles on processions, wearing white, miracles and confraternities, as well as teaching with Twitter. Her current projects include an edited collection on disability in Higher Education and an exploration of the impact of 14th century plagues on sites of pilgrimage. 

Farzad Mahootian (Ph.D. Philosophy, M.S. Chemistry) is a Clinical Associate Professor of Global Liberal Studies at New York University where he has been teaching science, and humanities courses since 2010. He has also worked for over ten years as a contractor with NASA’s education division during its transition from paper to internet. His research centers on the relevance of myth and metaphor to philosophy, science, technology and society. Recent projects include digital humanities approaches to the history of alchemy, and critical perspectives on the psychedelic renaissance.  

I received my Ph.D. in English literature from NYU, specializing in 18th century British literature, with a focus on satire, non-fiction prose, and literature and law. My interest in satire and in the ways that literature interacts with society also drew me to science fiction/speculative fiction. The anthology I edited, Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts, includes critical and theoretical works from a variety of disciplines alongside a selection of short stories from the 19th-21st centuries. The theorists who have most influenced me are Bakhtin, Habermas, Baudrillard, and Haraway. 

James McBride holds a Ph.D. in religion & social ethics from GTU/UC-Berkeley and a J.D. from the Cardozo School of Law. Prior to being NYU’s Chair of Law, Ethics, History, and Religion, he practiced securities law in NYC. His latest articles include “Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence: The State, Police Violence, and Black Lives Matter,” “Ecocide: Holding Corporations and Their Officers Criminally Liable,” “Anamnestic and Anagnoretic Approaches to Historical Memory: Confederate Monuments, Violence, & the American Cultural Divide” and “The Qur’an, Islamic Veiling, and Laïcité: French Law and Islamophobia."

Afrodesia McCannon received her PhD from the University of California – Berkeley in Comparative Literature (French, English, German) and has been a Fulbright and NEH fellow.   She has a particular interest in the medieval autobiographical impulse, the global Middle Ages, and the uses of the medieval past. She is on the steering committee of the fellowship of Medievalists of Color and has chaired the Medieval Academy of America’s Mentoring Program Committee and the Inclusivity and Diversity Committee, and is its current delegate to the ACLS.   

Erin Morrison is a clinical assistant professor in Liberal Studies at New York University, where she teaches Life Science. She has a BA in biology from Amherst College and received her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona. Erin is an evolutionary biologist interested in how trait architecture determines patterns of phenotypic diversification, and her research focuses on the diversification of color in birds.

Talia is a scientist, a professor, and an adventurer. She earned a B.S. in genetics from UC Davis, an MPH in infectious disease epidemiology from the University of Melbourne, and a PhD in molecular virology from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Weill Cornell Medicine, where she researches a cure for HIV. She is also a professor at NYU and Fordham University, where she teaches science and the societal impact of diseases like HIV and AIDS. She additionally sits on the Board of Directors for ELEVATE New York, an organization that works with underserved urban youth in the South Bronx.

Dr. Eugenia (Genia) Naro-Maciel, Clinical Associate Professor and Chair of the Sustainability, Health, and the Environment Concentration in Global Liberal Studies at New York University, is a graduate of Yale University (B.S., Cum Laude, Distinction in Biology). She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology from Columbia University, with a Certificate in Environmental Policy. Her research program focuses on genetic and genomic approaches for aquatic biodiversity and conservation. Genia is also a committed practitioner of evidence-based teaching and learning strategies, and has co-authored numerous educational materials on protected areas and biodiversity conservation.

Jeremy Pilcher is a lecturer of law at NYU London. His academic work on the intersection of art and law builds on his early career in the law and academic qualifications in cultural studies, art law and art history. After first being employed in New Zealand as a Crown prosecutor Jeremy worked in commercial litigation. He subsequently moved to England, where he qualified as a solicitor and worked in both the public and private sectors as a fraud investigator. 

Hana Qugana (PhD, University College London) is Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Global History at the University of Sussex and Lecturer in Liberal Studies at NYU London. Weaving together histories of empire, ethnogenesis and global civil society in the Asia/Pacific, her research deals broadly with publishing and print cultures across diasporas, converging through networks of Third World solidarities and anti-colonial resistance, with particular interests in race, ecology and heritage. She is currently completing a monograph about Philippine educational publishing during the archipelago’s transition from US colonial rule to nationhood.

Mitra Rastegar is a Clinical Associate Professor in Liberal Studies at New York University and earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her book Tolerance and Risk: How US Liberalism Racializes Muslims, published in 2021 by University of Minnesota Press, examines the circulation of media discourses about Muslims and Muslim Americans as objects of tolerance and sympathy. Her scholarship has also been published in GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, and International Feminist Journal of Politics. Rastegar’s research and teaching interests include cultural studies, liberalism and secularism, race and racialization, and transnational feminism. 

Nancy Reale holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU. Her scholarship concentrates on European literature of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance; she has integrated this focus with her interests in music and the visual arts throughout her career.  Dr. Reale has taught in Liberal Studies since 1985 (when it was the General Studies Program) and has developed a wide range of classes dealing with the arts, among them freshman Arts and Cultures courses, sophomore seminars, and GLS senior seminars, thesis, and colloquium courses.

Serene Richards is a lecturer in law at NYU London.

Juliana Roth teaches writing for Liberal Studies and formerly for NYU Tandon, Rutgers University, the Writers House, the School of the New York Times, and the Edward Hopper Museum and Study Center. Her web series on the aftermath of sexual violence on college campuses, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing and screened at survivor justice nonprofits across the country, including the Obama-Biden nonprofit It’s On Us, before being acquired by Films Media Group for educational distribution. Currently, she serves as an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction where she is at work on a new novel.

Michael Shenefelt teaches Global Works and Society at Liberal Studies in New York. He is the author of two books, The Questions of Moral Philosophy (Prometheus), and If A, Then B: How the World Discovered Logic, with co-author Heidi White (Columbia University Press).

Jared Simard is a Clinical Assistant Professor of World Cultures, Arts, and Literatures at New York University-Liberal Studies, where he teaches ancient and pre-modern literature and art from a global perspective. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. His publications have traced the reception of ancient mythology in the art and architecture of New York City combining classics, history, art history, archival studies, and biographical approaches. Subsequently, his research touches upon theories of reception, American studies, and empire, as well as space and material culture.

Milena Tekeste is a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. Prior to joining NYUAD, Milena taught at University College London, the London School of Economics, and Royal Holloway University of London. She completed her MSc in Human Resource Management and Organisational Analysis at King's College London, and her PhD in Management at Royal Holloway, University of London. Milena's research interest focuses on understanding the future of work. In particular, Milena seeks to understand the idiosyncrasy of workplace flexibility within professional service firms. In addition, her work challenges current theoretical and methodological applications within management research.

Minu Tharoor teaches Arts & Cultures in NYU Liberal Studies Core Program, and Art, Text, Media (ATM) Approaches & Global Women's Rights in Global Liberal Studies. She is completing her book manuscript, The Empire Within: Empire & Women in 19th/20th Century British Domestic Novel.

Jason Williamson currently teaches writing in the LS Core and also works as a screenwriter and theatre-maker. As the Resident Playwright of Dramatic Adventure Theatre, he contributes to devised projects across the globe, collaboratively creating community-centered performances within Quechua and Shuar villages in Ecuador, Roma settlements in Eastern Slovakia, and within several distinct communities across Tanzania. Most recently, Oscilloscope Laboratories distributed his feature film Silo to theaters across the US; the movie was subsequently acquired by Hulu where it’s now available for streaming. 

Mahnaz Yousefzadeh is Professor of Global Liberal Studies NYU and Affiliate Professor of Art History at NYUAD. Her current projects – one academic and the other a creative non-fiction – trace the encounters between traditions through the movement of people, artifacts, and images. Her scholarly book project is on Florence’s relation to the Persianate world  in the early modern period.