Our NYU: Special Edition 2019

A Note from President Hamilton

In my role as NYU’s president, I often have the great fortune of chatting—casually or professionally—with faculty, students, and alumni who are using their intellectual gifts, determination, and creativity to make a profound difference in our world.

I always come away from these conversations with such gratitude for the people I encounter in this community, and am reminded how powerfully they contribute to the public discourse. And it got me thinking—perhaps others would draw just as much reward from these talks as I do. So we decided to formalize them in what might be the least formal new medium of all: a podcast.

In each episode of the new Conversations podcast, I will interview members of the NYU family about their relentless pursuit of discovery—an effort that unites us all beyond our disciplinary interests. With each guest, we’ll pull back the curtain to learn the origins of their inspiration, the current focus of their work, and their vision for the future. In the process, we’ll offer audiences far beyond NYU’s campuses a sense of the groundbreaking work and ideas happening here.

For our premiere episode, I’m proud to welcome Rubén Blades, Steinhardt’s inaugural scholar-in-residence. The Grammy Award–winning musician and Emmy–nominated actor is also an activist, lawyer, and politician, with a legacy of advocating for social change. Future episodes will include philosophy and law professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of the “Ethicist” column in the New York Times Magazine, and Steinhardt’s Marion Nestle, who helped create the field of nutrition studies.

It is a privilege to be part of these conversations and to share these stories with you. I hope you’ll tune in to our first episode, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play—or wherever you listen to podcasts.