New York University

Peder Anker's teaching and research interests lie in the history of science, ecology, environmentalism, and design, as well as environmental philosophy. He has received research fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Dibner Institute and been a visiting scholar at both the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Columbia University. Among his publications is Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order of the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), which investigates how the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. He has more recently published a series of articles related to the history of environmentalism and design, which he has expanded to a forthcoming book. Professor Anker's current book project explores the history of ecological debates in his country of birth, Norway. Links to his articles and up-to-date information about his work are available at www.pederanker.net.

Jian Chen's research focuses on the new cultural interfaces provoked by the transnational circulation of sexed racial and ethnic cinematic images. Areas of interest include: gender and sexuality studies; film theory and visual cultures; postcolonial diasporas; and queer and transgender critique. S/he is currently working on a book manuscript exploring the relationships between post-cinematic film and video and extra-cinematic imagery of deviant Asian/American sexualities and genders. Chen received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine in Spring 2009 and B.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies and English at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to graduate work, s/he worked as a community organizer, event planner, and fundraiser for San Francisco Bay Area non-profit organizations confronting immigrant sweatshop labor and anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer violence. Chen has also participated in multiple subcultural literary, performance, and visual productions.

Kimberly McClain DaCosta's research explores the intersection of cultural ideas about race, family, and consumption. A sociologist, she is especially interested in the contemporary production of racial boundaries. Her book, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford University Press, 2007), explores the cultural and social underpinnings of the movement to create multiracial collective identity in the United States. She is currently working on an ethnographic study of the advertising industry and the structural, economic, and cultural dimensions of ethnic marketing called Black Magic: African American Advertising, Symbolic Boundaries, and the Making of Inequality. Professor DaCosta's work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Advertising Educational Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She teaches courses on race in different societies, families, and consumerism in international perspective. Professor DaCosta also serves as Assistant Dean of Students at the Gallatin School.

Gregory Erickson received his Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2004. His first book, The Absence of God in Modernist Literature, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2007, and his second book, Religion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred, coauthored with Richard W. Santana, appeared in 2008, published by McFarland. He has also published in scholarly collections and in journals such as The Henry James Review. Erickson has taught writing at the Gallatin School from 2004 to 2009, specializing in courses on music and literature, including "Writing Twentieth-Century Music and Culture" and "Writing Beyond Language: The Surreal, the Mystical, and the Monstrous." Since 2002, he has also taught writing and world literature at Mannes College, the New School for Music, and directed their Writing Center. For five years, he was the director of the Classical Music Division at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. Erickson is a classically trained musician who plays the trombone and is actively performing with orchestras around New York. His training as a literary scholar and classical musician enables him to enrich the curriculum of Gallatin in multiple formats. He will be teaching first-year writing courses on 20th-century music and on popular music and identity, and a first-year seminar on music and literature. Erickson is also planning both an interdisciplinary course and an arts workshop.

Hallie Franks is an Assistant Professor of Ancient Studies. Her teaching and research interests are in the art and archaeology of Greece, Rome, and the ancient Near East, and she is particularly interested in the points of cultural overlap and exchange between the Mediterranean and the East. Her research has taken her to Greece, Italy, Egypt, and Bulgaria, and she has cotaught an on-site excursion course for undergraduates in Turkey. After receiving her Ph.D., Professor Franks taught in the Department of the Classics at Harvard University. Currently, she is revising her dissertation, "Hunters, Heroes, Kings," for publication. In this book, a painting preserved on a royal tomb in ancient Macedonia serves as the foundation for an investigation into the ways that the kingdom's court drew from various cultural traditions in the visual expression of its self-identity.

Hannah Gurman comes to Gallatin from Columbia University, where she concentrated in 20th-century American literature and U.S. diplomatic history. Her dissertation, "The Dissent Papers: The Voice of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond," was awarded distinction and won Columbia's prestigious Bancroft Prize. In the dissertation, she examines the efforts of U.S. State Department officers to affect American foreign policy through the written word. Gurman was an instructor last year at Barnard College and a consultant in the Columbia University Writing Center. She also taught the courses "University Writing" and "Critical Reading" at Columbia from 2004 to 2007. In addition to holding the Marjorie Hope Nicolson Fellowship at Columbia from 2003 to 2008, she received the Alice Green Fredman award in 2007 and was a William Golden Fellow from 2006 to 2007. Gurman has published in Logos and The Minnesota Review and has essays forthcoming in Diplomatic History and the Journal of Contemporary History. She brings her training in literature and history, as well as writing and intensive research, to Gallatin's First-Year Program. She will teach a first-year seminar on war and peace, as well as writing courses that cross the disciplines of literature, history and political theory, including "Utopic/Dystopic America," and "The Politics of Change."

Amy Huber received her doctorate in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009. Her dissertation, "The General Theatre of Death," is an interdisciplinary consideration of the pressures placed by 20th-century practices of total war on the narrative and visual forms of modernism. She is currently finishing a project that works with archival materials from the Strategic Bombing Survey of 1945 and considers how the American tactical and political use of terror against civilians in Japan and Germany (where Shock & Awe was first named and tested) raises a number of timely questions about fear and the rhetorical deployment of "security" in times of war. Huber has presented papers at the Amherst College 'Violent States' Series, the Institute for Advanced Studies, The International Association for Cultural Studies, the Modernist Studies Association, CUNY, Brown University and Stanford University, among others. She has an essay forthcoming in a special issue on Human Rights in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society. She comes to NYU from a year as a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College, and she has been awarded numerous other fellowships and grants. Huber brings to Gallatin an expertise in photography and the literature and culture of modernity, and an interest in violence and aesthetics that crosses disciplinary boundaries. She will be teaching a first-year seminar, "The Poverty of Literature," as well as two writing seminars, "Visual Texts" and "What is Terror: Literature and Critiques of Violence."

Myisha Priest's teaching and research focus on African American literature and material culture. She has published articles mining this fruitful intersection in The Crisis, Meridians, and Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination. She is currently completing a book manuscript, "The Children's Miracle": The Impact of Children's Literature on African-American Writing, an interdisciplinary project that considers how figures of children and children's literature impact African American writing. Professor Priest is a recipient of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Fellowship for the 2009-2010 academic year.