NYU Constitution Day 2022

Jack H. Knott serves as the Dean of the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University and holds the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean’s Chair. 

Before joining NYU, he served as the Dean of the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he held the C. Erwin and Ione L. Piper Chair in Public Policy and Management. Prior to USC, Dean Knott served as Professor and Director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois and of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University.  He founded the MSU Survey Research Center and helped establish the Michigan Political Leadership Program. Dean Knott was also a visiting faculty member at Warrick University in the United Kingdom and a Fellow at the International Institute of Management in Berlin, Germany.

Dean Knott has published three books, numerous peer-reviewed, journal articles, and several policy reports. His areas of expertise include political institutions and public policy, political economy, and public management. He has served as the principal investigator on numerous research grants and has consulted with foundations and nonprofit organizations on program evaluation and public policy, including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the California Endowment.  He currently serves on the editorial boards of two journals in comparative public management and policy.

Among his awards, he is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and is a past President of the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA).  In addition, he has served as a member of the Educational Advisory Panel, U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Washington D.C., a member of the Endowment Board of the American Society for Public Administration, and a member of the Board of Price Philanthropies foundation.

Dean Knott received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, his M.A. from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, and his undergraduate degree from Calvin University. 

Joe Salvatore is a Clinical Professor of Educational Theatre at NYU Steinhardt where he teaches courses in verbatim performance, ethnodrama, applied / community-engaged theatre, and new play development, and directs the Verbatim Performance Lab. In 2017, Joe collaborated with economist Maria Guadalupe (INSEAD-France), to create Her Opponent, a verbatim re-staging of excerpts of the 2016 presidential debates with gender-reversed casting. This production was nominated for an Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best Unique Theatrical Experience and received media coverage from NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, Fox News, MSNBC, and ABC News, among others. Joe is a cluster member of the University of British Columbia's Research-based Theatre Collaborative, a Creative Consultant for NYU Stern's Leadership Accelerator, an affiliated faculty researcher with the NYU Steinhardt Theatre and Health Lab, an advisory board member for Artists' Literacies Institute, and an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. Member: Dramatists Guild of America, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and American Alliance for Theatre and Education.

Karen Jackson-Weaver is the Senior Associate Vice President of Global Faculty Engagement and Innovation Advancement at NYU. She is an expert on educational policy, a historian specializing in religion, ethics, and political affairs, and a former dean-in-residence at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. Dr. Jackson-Weaver has also served as an academic dean at Princeton University as well as Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She is currently Secretary of the Board of Trustees at the Princeton Theological Seminary. She is the former National Series Editor for the Teaching Religious Studies Series produced by Oxford University Press and the American Academy of Religion. Prior to her leadership roles in higher education, Dr. Jackson-Weaver served under three gubernatorial administrations as the executive director of the New Jersey Amistad Commission. In this role, she facilitated and led institutes throughout the country and edited two volumes of primary source documents which culminated in the publications, Reconstruction Reconsidered: The African-American Presence in American History and the Amistad Curricular Guide to American History. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Princeton University, a master’s degree at Harvard University, and a PhD in American History from Columbia University, where she was a Kluge Scholar Fellow, Merit Dissertation fellowship winner, and nominee for the university-wide teaching award.

Attorney and author Jennifer Weiss-Wolf joined the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network in 2022 as executive director. Prior she was vice president and the inaugural women and democracy fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law. She also leads partnerships and strategy at Ms. – the feminist movement-making magazine. A passionate writer on and advocate for issues of gender and politics, Weiss-Wolf was dubbed the “architect of the U.S. campaign to squash the tampon tax” by Newsweek; her 2017 book Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity was lauded by Gloria Steinem as “the beginning of liberation for us all.” Her forthcoming book, Period. Full Stop. The Politics of Menopause will be published by NYU Press (2025). Weiss-Wolf’s scholarship and writing have been published by the NYU Review of Law and Social Change, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, and William and Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice. Her writing and work have also been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Teen Vogue, NPR, PBS, and NowThis, among others. Weiss-Wolf received her JD from Cardozo Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the Cardozo Women’s Law Journal, and her BA in government from Lafayette College.