Faculty
Mirza Jaffer Abid | History of Islam
Mirza Jaffer Abid (Jaffer) is a historian who works on the history of Islam in modern South Asia and focuses on the intersections of intellectual and political history. He is broadly interested in the colonial and postcolonial history of Muslims in South Asia, Islamic reform and anticolonial modernisms in the global Muslim world. His scholarship engages with questions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, modernity and secularism, and the relationship between colonial knowledge formation and anti-imperialism. Jaffer’s current research draws on modern Urdu history writing, examining the ways in which history writing became a means for colonized Muslim intellectuals in India to assert their cosmopolitan notions of community and self-determination. He received his PhD from SOAS in 2023.
Nick Andrews | Global Public Health
Prof Nick Andrews is deputy head of the Statistics Unit at Public Health England in the UK and the Statistician responsible for work in the Immunisation Department. In this role he has worked extensively on post licensure vaccine safety, impact and effectiveness assessment, clinical trials and correlates of protection. He is currently a partner in European projects on vaccine safety and effectiveness and was a member of the World Health Organization Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety from 2012-2018. Recently he assisted WHO in determining the best way to implement any licensed Ebola vaccines and is currently on the advisory group for pilot implementation of RTS,S malaria vaccine in Africa. He is also a project lead on a research collaboration on using electronic health records for vaccine assessment with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He lectures at the LSHTM, New York University in London and on vaccine courses internationally. He has over 350 publications with more than half of these in the vaccine field.
Nicole Baerg | Political Economy
Dr. Nicole Baerg is a Senior Researcher in Data Science at the Bank of England as well as a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of Essex. She has a number of publications on political economy including a book published by Oxford University Press titled Crafting Consensus: Why Central Bankers Change Their Speech and How Speech Changes the Economy as well as journal publications in Comparative Political Studies, Economics and Politics, Political Research and Methods and others.
Alice Jones Bartoli | Psychology & Human Development
Alice Jones Bartoli is a Professor of Psychology and Education at Goldsmiths, University of London where she is Director of the Unit for School and Family Studies. Alice gained a first degree in Applied Psychology from University of Cardiff, before being awarded a PhD by Kings College London. Alice's work focuses on children who are at risk of social and academic exclusion. She works with schools, education organisations, charities and political commissions, as well as sitting on the council for the National Forum for Neuroscience and Special Education and Learnus. Between 2016-2022, Alice was the Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Educational Psychology.
Clare Bayley | Dramatic Literature and English
Clare Bayley’s translation of George Sand’s Gabriel was part of Oxford Playhouse Plays Out summer season, 2022. Other plays include After The Peace (longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize 2019), Family Trees (readings at Bolton Octagon 2019 and Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough), Pixel Dust (Omnibus Theatre and Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2017), Blue Sky (Hampstead Theatre Downstairs 2012), The Enchantment (National Theatre, London 2007) and The Container (Fringe First and Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award 2007).
Clare also writes for radio (In The Van, The Secret Place, Portobello Beach) and is currently under commission to BBC Radio 4.
Clare runs the Oxford Playhouse writers’ scheme, Playhouse Playmakers. She is co-author with Fraser Grace of Playwriting: A Writer’s and Artist’s Companion (Bloomsbury 2015) and teaches Playwriting at Central School of Speech and Drama and University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education.
As a theatre critic she has written for The Independent, The Guardian, Time Out and is former Theatre Editor of The Independent.
Stefi Benjamin | Biochemistry
Stefi Benjamin completed her PhD at Imperial College London under the supervision of Prof. Steve Matthews with a particular focus on the use of NMR to solve the structure of Immune Mapped Protein 1 (IMP1) from Plasmodium falciparum. Her first postdoctoral position was at King's College London under the guidance of Prof. Jim McDonnell where she studied allosteric communication within Immunoglobulin E (IgE) upon ligand binding using NMR and SPR. This project was a collaborative one with UCB Pharma.
Stefi is currently on her second postdoctoral project under the guidance of Prof. Kurt Drickamer and Dr. Maureen Taylor and the focus of the project is to study host-pathogen interactions through human lectins by using a lectin array.
Owen Bennett-Jones | Journalism
Owen is a freelance journalist, writer and teacher. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. Yale University Press published his book The Bhutto Dynasty: The Struggle for Power in Pakistan in 2020. His history of Pakistan: Pakistan: Eye of the Storm is now in its third edition.
He has made two award-winning podcast series, The Assassination for the BBC and The Hijack for Audible. The Assassination investigated the murder of Benazir Bhutto. The Hijack told the story of PK 326, a plane hijacked in 1981 with fatal consequences.
Owen graduated from the London School of Economics in 1983 and obtained an M Phil in politics from St Antony’s College Oxford in 1985. In 2018 he was awarded a PhD by publication by the University of Hull.
Barbara Bessac-Khelifi | Expressive Culture: Images
Barbara Bessac is an art historian, curator, and artist based in London. She teaches contemporary art history, visual theory, history of design and decorative arts at NYU London, Ithaca College London Center, and the University of the Arts London. Her research focuses on the history of material culture and design in relation to the performing arts and entertainment, from the nineteenth century to the present day. She has published essays on the relationship between gender expression and set design, the staging of domesticity, and Byzantium's material representations on the Victorian stage. She earned her PhD both in History of Art from Université Paris Nanterre and in Theatre Studies from the University of Warwick in 2022. Additionally, she teaches art practices such as painting and life drawing.
Monica Bohm-Duchen | Art History
Monica Bohm-Duchen (MA Courtauld Institute) is an independent lecturer, writer & exhibition curator, who has lectured on a part-time basis at NYU London since 2007. She also teaches for Birkbeck College, University of London. The other institutions for which she has worked include Tate, the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, Sotheby's Institute of Art and the Courtauld Institute; the journals to which she has contributed include RA Magazine, Art Monthly and Modern Painters. She curated After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art (1995) and co-curated Art in Exile in Great Britain 1933-1945 (1986), and Life? or Theatre? The Work of Charlotte Salomon (1998). Her many publications include Understanding Modern Art (1991),Chagall (1998), The Private Life of a Masterpiece (2001) and The Art and Life of Josef Herman (2009). Her latest book, Art and the Second World War, was published in November 2013 by Lund Humphries in association with Princeton University Press.
Dorota Bourne | Management
Dr. Dorota Bourne works as the Professor of Leadership and Change Management at Henley Business School, University of Reading. She holds a PhD in Management and a fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. She is also a certified Neuro-Linguistic Programming Master Coach and a member of the British Psychological Society’s Occupational Psychology and Coaching Psychology divisions. Her expertise lies in coaching and change management programmes based on Personal Construct Psychology. Her clients range from multinational corporations, such as General Motors, to public sector institutions such as the Chinese aerospace industry. Her academic work involves creating executive education programmes and researching coaching and change management. She has won numerous research grants to support her projects, which have been published in various international journals and books. She has served on a board of the European Personal Construct Association and organized many conferences in this field. She acts as a reviewer for a number of academic journals and is currently an associate editor for the European Management Review and the Journal of Constructivist Psychology.
Mark Boutros | Screenwriting
Mark is an International Emmy nominated screenwriter who has written for Sky One, Sky Arts, and CBBC. He's written on shows including, The Reluctant Landlord, Urban Myths, The Dumping Ground, and Lagging. He writes comedy, drama, and used to be a TV producer.
George Briley | Experiential Learning Seminar
George Briley is a PhD candidate at the Open University. His research explores leadership and management practices in contemporary service work, particularly with a focus on hospitality labour processes. His most recent publication is Exposing and re-placing leadership through workers inquiry in the journal Leadership. His research interests include the sociology of work, management, industrial relations, automation, workers inquiry, leadership, and ethnographic methods. He has previously worked at University College London, Kings College London and Goldsmiths University of London.
Nicky Busch | History, Sociology
Dr Nicky Busch is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research and teaching cover migration and migration policy, low-paid work in urban environments, transnational labour flows and the study of gendered and racialised work. She is currently working on a book about migrant domestic workers.
Marina Chang | Food Studies
Dr Marina Chang is Director of Research and Academic Engagement at the Oxford Artisan Distillery. She is responsible for developing and implementing high-quality and high-impact research to advance the Company's vision to become a world's leader in the areas of heritage grains and sustainable grain production for 'green' distilling.
Prior to this role, she was Head of Programmes for the Grand Challenges of Sustainable Cities and Transformative Technology at University College London (UCL). She remains as an Honorary Associate Professor at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at UCL.
She is also an Adjunct Professor for the undergraduate course, "Food, Culture and Globalisation: London" at NYU-London. This course is underpinned by an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach to research, teaching and community engagement.
Her career has enabled her to cross boundaries between academia, industry, businesses, public sector and community / volunteer sector. Her research has focused on food and the city; food, health and wellbeing; food commons; decolonising food geographies; agroecology and data science; and the heritage grain movement in the UK.
She holds a PhD in Development Planning from the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, and MSc in Urban Studies, both at UCL.
Martyna Chrzescijanska | Psychology
Dr Martyna Chrzescijanska is a PhD in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies (University of Essex). She is currently in Doctorate Training at the Tavistock Clinic. She works at Islington CAMHS as a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist in Doctoral Training, and is the author of Psychogeotherapy: Revisioning Therapeutic Space (Routledge, 2020).
Katherine Connelly | History
Dr Katherine Connelly is a historian and writer who works on the history of Britain, France and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is broadly interested in the history of empire and anti-imperialism, radical social movements, the city, political ideas and popular culture.
Her first book, Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire, was published by Pluto Press in 2013. She recently edited and introduced Sylvia Pankhurst’s hitherto unpublished writing on race, gender and class in America, published as A Suffragette in America: Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change by Pluto Press in 2019. Kate’s interest in transatlantic radical networks informs her current work which is writing the first biography of Zelie Emerson.
Kate was awarded her PhD in History from Queen Mary, University of London, in 2018 for her thesis, ‘Conjuring away the Revolution: Parisian popular culture in Marx’s writings on the French Second Republic’. She has recently written on Karl Marx’s theory of the lumpenproletariat in Paris’ June Days for the edited collection The Idea of the Lumpenproletariat (Routledge, forthcoming).
Jan de Fockert | Psychology
I am a cognitive psychologist, and my main research interest is human visual selective attention. I use a range of selective attention paradigms to investigate to what extent the attention system of the human brain is capable of selective processing of to-be-attended information. I am specifically interested in the control of selective attention by frontal areas of the human brain, which I investigate using behavioural measures, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Electro-encephalography (EEG). After studying at the University of Amsterdam and King’s College London, I received my PhD from the University of Essex, and was then a postdoctoral research fellow at University College London. Since 2002, I am a faculty member of the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Janet Dickinson | Texts & Ideas; Liberal Studies - Arts and Cultures
Janet Dickinson is Senior Faculty Advisor and Lecturer at New York University in London and Senior Associate Tutor in Early Modern History at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education. She has several times been recognised as ‘Most Acclaimed Lecturer’ and ‘Outstanding Tutor’ at Oxford University Student Union’s Annual Teaching Awards.
Her main research interests focus on the Tudor nobility and the court of Elizabeth I as well as the global history of the court in the early modern period, on which she has published widely, including a monograph, Court Politics and the Earl of Essex (2011). She regularly reviews books and exhibitions for journals and newspapers and is always keen to hear about new developments in her field.
Janet’s research interests recently led to a year working on an Anglo-Dutch project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, entitled ‘Maritime Archaeology meets Cultural History’. This focused on the extraordinary objects retrieved from a 17th century shipwreck off the Dutch island of Texel, and in particular a collection of leather bookcovers. The article arising from this research, ‘Drowned books and ghost books’, has now been published with open access.
Janet is currently Chair of the Faculty Liaison Panel at NYU London. She is Conference Secretary and a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for Court Studies. She recently served on the steering committee of the Lord Burghley 500 Foundation, celebrating the 500th anniversary of William Cecil, Lord Burghley’s birth in 2020: www.lordburghley500.org. She tweets as @Tudornobility.
Mari Dominguez | Child/Adolescent Mental Health Studies
Maria de Gracia Dominguez Barrera, MD. PhD, graduated in Medicine (University of Navarra, Spain), completed her specialist clinical training in psychiatry and began her academic career in Neuroscience (University of the Basque Country) in Spain. In 2006, Dr. Dominguez obtained a Marie Curie Fellowship and moved to Maastricht University (Netherlands), where she developed her research interest in psychiatric epidemiology studying environmental and social determinants of psychosis in adolescence. After obtaining her PhD 'A Dynamic Model of the Onset of Clinical Psychosis from an Epidemiological Perspective', she continued to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University. In 2010, Dr. Dominguez obtained an Alicia Koplowitz Fellowship (combined clinical and research fellowship in Child & Adolescent Psychiatry) at Imperial College London (UK), where she worked as Clinical Lecturer and continued her research work in adolescent clinical psychosis. In 2012, Dr. Dominguez completed PGCert in University Learning and Teaching at Imperial College (2012 Rees Rawling Prize). In 2014, Dr. Dominguez completed the PGDip at Applied Systemic Theory/Systemic Therapy at the Tavistock Centre (University of East London). In 2016, she completed her CCT in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Dr. Dominguez currently works as Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Clinical Lead of the Neurodevelopmental Service at Ealing Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, West London Mental Health NHS Trust, and honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London. Dr. Dominguez was awarded the European Psychiatry Association research prize in child and adolescent psychiatry in 2014. Since 2014, she has been the president of the Association of Scientists in Child and Adolescent Mental Health - Alicia Koplowitz Foundation.
Omega Douglas | Media, Culture, Communication
Dr Omega Douglas has practiced as a journalist and editor for national British magazines and newspapers, as well as digital and broadcast media, for two decades. She has worked for Conde Nast, The Guardian, TI Media, The Independent, Hearst and the BBC, amongst others. She has also worked as a media consultant for various organisations, including the UN. Omega completed an ESRC funded PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2019, where she works as a lecturer in the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Department. She has also taught journalism at the University for the Creative Arts.
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 INGOs, in global communications. Her doctoral research addressed the racialisation of news reporting on sub-Saharan Africa, the involvement of journalists of colour and INGOs in this process and the agenda produced. Through in-depth interviews with journalists and INGO press officers who work for some of Britain’s largest news and aid organisations, the innovative concept of postcolonial journalistic field theory was developed. This interdisciplinary framework importantly adds to theories of representation, black (British) identity, journalism, race and cultural productions studies.
Omega has recently co-authored a book, 'Journalism, Culture and Society' (Routledge). She has also been engaged in a transnational journalism research project for UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists, investigating online harassment of women journalists.
Ben East | English for Academic Purposes
Ben East studied English at the University of Bristol, Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, and EFL/EAP teaching at International House, London. He has taught English in Spain (Valladolid and Castellò de la Plana), Australia (Adelaide and Perth) and various UK further and higher institutions. Most recently he has taught EAP courses at Coventry University and the University of Hertfordshire. Ben is also Academic Director of an annual summer school residential programme, run in conjunction with the Liceo Scientifico Carlo Livi, Prato, Italy.
Miranda El-Rayess | English
Dr Miranda El-Rayess is a lecturer in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her main area of research is late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and culture, particularly the work of Henry James. She is the author of Henry James and the Culture of Consumption (Cambridge UP, 2014), and several articles. She is currently co-editing a volume of short stories for The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, and working on two articles inspired by her research for this scholarly edition.
Emily Gee | Art History - Architecture
Emily Gee has worked at Historic England (formerly English Heritage) since 2001, and is Regional Director, London and South East. Emily studied in the US (Smith College, BA; University of Virginia, MA Architectural History) and has a Diploma in Building Conservation from the Architectural Association in London. She has published on the history of purpose-built housing for working women in Victorian and Edwardian London. Emily has taught at NYU in London since 2011. Her 'Seeing London's Architecture' lectures integrate study of a wide range of listed buildings and conservation issues.
Marina Gerner | Business & Journalism
Dr Marina Gerner is an award-winning journalist writing about business, tech and culture. She's working on a non-fiction book, which focuses on femtech, sextech and women's health and pleasure, to be published by Sourcebook (US) and Icon Books (UK). Her articles have appeared in The Times/ Sunday Times Raconteur, the Times Literary Supplement, Guardian, the i paper, Courier, Jewish Chronicle, Wired, Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and she has been a guest speaker on the BBC World Service. In 2020, she was an Emerging Writer at the London Library, where Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Isaiah Berlin and Agatha Christie were members. She was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in Germany and the UK, so it may not come as a surprise that she has a PhD on what it means to be a cosmopolitan.
George Giannakopoulos | Politics
I grew up in Greece and I studied political science and history in Athens (BA, MA Panteion University, Athens). I then moved to London and completed my doctoral studies at Queen Mary, University of London. My research focuses on the history and politics of Britain and Europe since the late nineteenth century. At NYU London I lecture on Western European politics: on the peculiarities of Europe’s political and electoral systems and on the (political, financial, climate, public health) crises that engulf Europe and the world. I have held teaching and research positions at Queen Mary University of London, UCL, NYU, Durham University, the University of the Peloponnese, the Hellenic Open University, the Academy of Athens, and City University of London. For more details about my research and teaching profile you may visit my website.
Tim Glencross | Stern First Year London (FYLO)
Tim Glencross is a lecturer at NYU London, where he coordinates the Stern First Year London (FYLO) program. He received a B.A. degree from the University of Cambridge, an M.F.A. from New York University, and a PhD from Kingston University. A qualified (non-practicing) lawyer, Tim has previously worked as senior researcher and speechwriter for legislators in the U.K. Parliament. He is also the author of two novels, Barbarians (2014) and Hoffer (2017). Alongside teaching at NYUL, Tim is a Panel Tutor at the University of Cambridge Centre for Creative Writing and is a juror for the 2023 Writers Guild of Great Britain First Novel Award.
Matthias Gobel | Psychology
Matt Gobel received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University College London. He is the recipient of multiple prestigious research fellowships including from the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Matt Gobel’s research focuses on the study of social hierarchies across different levels of analysis from broad cultural differences to low-level cognitive mechanisms using diverse methodologies including eye tracking technology and electroencephalography. Before joining NYU London, Matt Gobel has studied and worked in France, Canada, the U.S., and Japan.
Eve Grubin | Liberal Studies - Writing
Dr Eve Grubin is the author, most recently, of Grief Dialogue (Rack Press 2022). Her next book of poems Darling, I Used to Dance at These Parties will be published by Four Way Books in 2025. She is also the author of Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press 2006) and The House of Our First Loving (Rack Press 2018). She is the winner of the 2022 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize and was long listed for the Ivan Juritz Award. Her essays have appeared in various magazines and anthologies including, The Veil: Women Writers on Its History Lore and Politics (University of California Press, 2009) and Jean Valentine: This-World Company (U of Mich Press, 2012). She received her BA in English Literature from Smith College, her MA from Middlebury College, an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and PhD from Kingston University. Eve was the Programs Director at the Poetry Society of America for five years and has taught at The New School University and in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at The City College of New York. In addition to teaching at NYU in London, whe is a tutor at The Poetry School.
You can visit her website at: www.evegrubin.com
Stephen Hannah | Economics
Stephen Hannah studied economics at Sussex and University College, London. Following a lectureship at the University of Keele - publishing research on macroeconomic theory and labour markets - Stephen joined HM Treasury during the turbulent 1980s to advise the UK Chancellor on monetary and exchange rate policy. He then moved to the City of London, in the wake of the UK financial sector's "Big Bang," enjoying a long career as Chief Economist and independent consultant, advising on financial market strategy to a wide variety of clients.
Stephen returned to the academic sector a few years ago, teaching postgraduate programmes in economics, quantitative methods and research techniques. At NYU London, he lectures on Intermediate Macroeconomics and Money & Banking. His research interests focus on macroeconomic models, financial markets and fiscal policy.
Josephine Harmon | Politics
Josephine Harmon is a researcher in Political Science, Lecturer in Politics here at NYU London and a completing doctoral researcher at University College London. She has previously taught at UCL, King’s College London, the University of Bath and the University of Exeter. She has lectured on the British Library’s US Politics Today programme since 2019, and in November 2022 delivered two lectures at the US Embassy in London. In 2018 she was a Visiting Assistant in Research at Yale University. Her research focuses on strategic behaviour and political beliefs. She is currently working on her academic and mainstream book proposals. Before her PhD, Josephine worked in public policy with a Member of Parliament and the Labour Party, and in UK-EU policy at several political campaigns and think tanks including the Remain Campaign and the UK in a Changing Europe. She is on the executive committees of the Political Studies Association’s American Politics Group and Conservative Studies Group. Alongside her academic work, she is currently producing a report on living standards among millennials. She has published in Critical Studies-Critical Methodologies and The Washington Post. She has won research prizes including the 2020 APG Richard E. Neustadt Paper Prize. She tweets @Josephine_HAR.
Ronan Hatfull | Studies in Shakespeare
Dr Ronan Hatfull currently teaches at the University of Warwick and NYU London. He is an award-winning educator, with teaching specialisms that include Shakespearean adaptation, biographical fiction and contemporary theatre. He has been published widely on Shakespeare’s cultural legacy within stage, screen and audio, including superhero films, rap music and radio broadcasts. Ronan is also an actor, director, dramaturg, playwright and musician. He co-founded theatre company Partners Rapt in 2015 and most recently staged an original Shakespeare-Marvel mash-up play ‘Henry the Thorth’ at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dell Festival in Summer 2022. Ronan is currently co-writing Shakespeare and Hip-Hop: Adaptation, Citation, Education (Cambridge University Press, 2022) with the pedagogic rapper Devon Glover, co-editing Shakespeare and Biofiction on the Contemporary Stage and Screen with Dr Edel Semple, and developing a proposal to turn his doctorate on the Reduced Shakespeare Company into a monograph for Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare.
Nigar Hashimzade | Economics
Nigar Hashimzade is Professor of Economics and Finance at Brunel University London and Director of the Research Centre for Law, Economics and Finance. Her previous academic posts were at Durham University, the University of Reading, and University of Exeter. She earned her PhD in Economics from Cornell University in 2003. Her research articles in economic theory and econometric theory have been published in leading international journals. She regularly presents at the major international conferences, including the annual meetings of the American Economics Association, the annual conferences of the Royal Economic Society, and the annual meetings of the Econometric Society.
Susanna Horng | Liberal Studies - Writing
Susanna Horng (she/her, pronounced HONG) is a Clinical Professor in Liberal Studies at New York University where she teaches writing and cultural studies to undergraduates. Her stories and poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Minerva Rising, Global City Review and The Rumpus. She received her MA in Cinema Studies from New York University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature 2021-2022 from the Jerome Foundation, and has received support from Catwalk Art Residency, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts.
Courtney Hopf | English; Liberal Studies - Writing
Courtney (she/her) received her PhD in English from the University of California, Davis. She first came to England as a study abroad student at the University of Kent in Canterbury, and later returned to do her MA at the University of East Anglia, before ultimately settling in London. She is a full time staff member at NYUL, teaching Writing and English courses while also working administratively as Senior Lecturer and Programme Manager for Liberal Studies and Creative Arts. Courtney is a narratologist specialising in 20th and 21st Century British literature, and she is the co-editor of David Mitchell: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury).
Simon Hubbert | Mathematics
Dr Hubbert is a senior lecturer in mathematics and mathematical finance at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of Essential Mathematics for Market Risk Management (Wiley Finance) and also a former practitioner in financial risk management at the Debt Management Office (a branch of HM-treasury). His major research interests lie in approximation theory and applications where he has published on a variety of themes.
Keith Jarrett | Creative Writing
Dr. Keith Jarrett’s writing and research spans poetry, fiction and the essay form to interrogate British and Caribbean history, religion and sexuality.
Keith is an international poetry slam champion and was selected for the International Literature Showcase as one of 10 outstanding LGBT writers in the UK. His writing is widely anthologised. Selah, his debut poetry collection, was published in 2017. His play, Safest Spot in Town, was performed at London’s Old Vic and filmed for BBC Four, and his poem ‘From the Log Book’, was projected onto the façade of St Paul’s Cathedral as a commemorative art installation. He has also been commissioned for written and performed work at the Royal Festival Hall, Madrid’s Matadero and Centro Azkuna in Bilbao, both in English and Spanish.
Keith has judged the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Polari Prize and the Foyle Young Poets Award. He is the poet-in-residence at Imperial Healthcare Trust.
Scott Kelly | Politics
Dr Kelly lectures on British Politics and works as a policy adviser in Westminster. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics in 2000 and subsequently published his thesis under the title ‘The Myth of Mr. Butskell’. He has been published in academic journals and lectured at both British and American Universities. He has also advised political parties in Eastern European and Africa about policy development.
Daliany Kersh | History
Dr Daliany Jerónimo Kersh (BA Hons, MA, PhD), previously worked as a Lecturer in International Relations at Regent’s University (2017-8), an Assistant Professor of International History and International Relations at Richmond, the American International University in London (2018-2020), Lecturer in International Relations and Politics at the University of West London (2021-22), Associate Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at St. Mary’s University (2020-present), and Teaching Fellow in Development at SOAS (2021-preseent). In addition to teaching two history modules at NYU London, she currently teaches US Foreign Policy at Syracuse in London and Political Economy at Fordham London. She is also an External Examiner at Canterbury Christchurch University in History and American Studies, and a Senior Fellow of the HEA. Her academic research focuses on women’s labour and social mobility in the Global South and her first book ‘Women’s Work in Special Period Cuba; Making Ends Meet’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) discusses Cuban women’s work and everyday earning strategies during the Post-Soviet Special Period economic crisis. She has also published on the topics of women and the Right in Brazil, pro-poor tourism in Cambodia, and the Venezuelan refugee crisis through the framework of neo-liberalism.
Nathalie Khan | Fashion
Nathalie Khan is a cultural historian with an academic background in performance and film theory. She teaches fashion history and theory at Central Saint Martins and London College of Fashion. She is a unit leader on the Executive MBA at London College of Fashion and a guest lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York, the University of Bologna and The Conde Nast School of Fashion and Design. Khan is a leading theorist and writer on contemporary fashion media and the impact of new technology on the traditional catwalk show and fashion photography. She is a regular contributor to the fashion media platform SHOWstudio. Recent curatorial practice includes a project titled I know simply that the sky will last longer than I, with the Belgian visual artist Pierre Debusschere during the 28th International Festival of Fashion and Photography (Hyeres, 2013). Before pursuing a career in academia she worked as a brand consultant for Kurt Geiger and as a sales and distribution manager for global brands such as Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Pollini and Prada.
Usman Khan | Communicative Sciences & Disorders and Global Public Health
Usman teaches Health and Society in a Global Context at NYU London.
Usman is Managing Director of Modus Europe a European Public Policy Consultancy and is Interim Director at the European Health Management Association.
Modus Europe provides strategic public policy advice and undertakes related economic and policy studies with a particular focus on health and social care.
Usman was previously Managing Director of Matrix (TMKG Ltd) and has over twenty years public policy and management experience. He has held Board Director positions in public, private and not for profit organisations and has experience of leading significant change management projects in a number of countries.
Core roles include strategy development, analysis, stakeholder engagement, business development and leadership.
Yasmin Khan | Marketing
Biography coming soon...
Aga Kosinska | Chemistry
In 2000, Dr. Aga Kosinska graduated from Gdansk University of Technology in Poland with MSc engineer degree in Chemical Technology. In 2001, she started her international adventure across countries and educational systems around the world. In 2003, she began her research in the area of analytical chemistry at the University of San Francisco (USF) where she received: The American Institute of Chemists Foundation Award Certificate as an Outstanding Student Majoring in Chemistry and The Department of Chemistry Graduate Award for Achievement in Teaching. Then, Dr Kosinska moved to the University of St Andrews where she did her PhD studies in the area of organic and medicinal chemistry. In 2010, she started working as a Chemistry Teaching Fellow at UCL’s Centre for Preparatory Studies in Astana, Kazakhstan. She came back to the UK in 2013, and started working as a Lecturer in Extended Science at Plymouth University. In 2014, she completed Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and become a Fellow of Higher Education Academy. Currently, she is working at the UCL CLIE as the UPCSE Senior Chemistry Teaching Fellow and Chemistry Coordinator where she has been sharing her innovative learning and teaching approaches to international students.
Yulia Kovas | Psychology
Yulia Kovas is Professor of Genetics and Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
She is a visiting Professor at several international universities. Professor Kovas is the director of InLab (International Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Investigations into Individual Differences in Learning) at Goldsmiths; and leads the genetically-informative mathematics research in the Twins Early Development Study – TEDS at King’s College, London. The aim of her research is to provide insights into the complex co-action between genetic and environmental factors in their effects on learning, motivation, achievement and other human traits. Her research uses psychology, neuroscience, twin methodology, cross-cultural comparisons and molecular genetics. For more information, see her Google Scholar profile.
Leya Landau | English
Leya Landau’s main research interests lie in the field of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing and culture, and in the relationship between literature and the city. She has published articles on Romanticism and London, eighteenth-century opera and women poets of the period. She is currently writing a book on the female urban imagination in eighteenth-century literature. She has taught at both American and British universities, and most recently at University College London.
Alex Lee | Liberal Studies - Global Works and Society
Dr Alex Lee (she/her) is a medieval historian. She received her PhD from UCL in 2017 in Italian Studies. In addition to teaching Liberal Studies at NYU London, she teaches medieval history at King's College London and History of Medicine at Goldsmith's. Her research focuses on the intersection between popular religion and epidemic disease in late medieval Europe. She has published a book on the Bianchi of 1399, a medieval popular religious revival, as well as articles on religious confraternities, processions, miracles, the colour white, and teaching with Twitter. Alex co-founded Medievalists with Disabilities in 2017 and organises an annual panel on accessibility at Leeds International Medieval Conference. She was nominated to UCL's Student Choice Roll of Honour for Inspiring Teaching Delivery in 2021, is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Leren Li | History of British Fashion
Leren Li is a design historian and researcher. She received her PhD degree from the V&A/RCA History of Design Programme. Her research and practice has been exploring fragility, damage and mending in textiles and everyday objects. Focusing on the Japanese patchwork boro, Leren’s PhD project investigates the traditional repair craftsmanship as a revived cultural phenomenon and excavates the layers of value and meaning embedded in the mending practice through transcultural reproduction in art, design and fashion contexts.
Prior to living and working in London, Leren joined Fashion Studies program at Parsons School of Design, deepening her understanding of sustainable issues in the fashion system as well as individual fashion practices. Her research concentrates on the role that craft and design can play in fashion sustainability. Working with craft makers and designers, she explores the creative possibilities and challenges of reducing, reusing and recycling.
Leren actively collaborates on an international scale, She is the researcher and international programme lead at China Design Museum. In London, She teaches History of British Fashion at NYU London. Beyond her academic endeavours, Leren holds the position of founder and chair at the educational charity, London Culture Salon, passionately dedicated to fostering cultural enrichment within the city.
Corrado Macchiarelli | Business and Political Economy Program
Corrado Macchiarelli is a Lecturer in Economics and Finance at Brunel University London and a visiting Research Fellow in European Political Economy at the London School of Economics, where he was previously a Postdoc. Beyond his academic endeavors, he is a member of an LSE-based team of Monetary Policy Experts for the European Parliament. In the past, he worked for the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund; he consulted for the European Central Bank and the Swedish Riksbank. His interests mainly lie in the fields of macroeconomics, financial economics, business cycles, and European economic governance. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Torino (Collegio Carlo Alberto). At NYU London, he lectures on Introductory Macroeconomics.
Royce Mahawatte | Liberal Studies - Writing and Fashion
Royce Mahawatte (DPhil. University of Oxford) is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins. Selected academic publications are the monograph George Eliot and the Gothic Novel (University of Wales Press, 2013), chapters in the collections Queering the Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2009), Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion (Oxford: Berg 2008) and More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power (2003). He has chapters forthcoming in Horror: A Literary History (British Library, 2016) and Fashion and Fiction (Intellect Books, 2016). His research interests are Victorian fiction and cultures of fashion and the
body.
Jack McKenna | Mathematics
Dr Jack McKenna is a Visiting Lecturer on the Mathematics Foundation Programme at City University of London. He has also taught at King's College London.
Jack received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from the University of Kent in 2023. His research focuses on the field of topological solitons. In the context of particle physics, a topological soliton is a subatomic structure which "acts like a particle", but is not directly composed of common subatomic objects like protons and neutrons; instead, the soliton is like a little knot of particle-stuff, held together because the fundamental fields that make up the usual particles are twisted together in an interesting way. In particular, Jack looks at simple models of introducing fermions (particles like electrons) to these solitons, to examine the resulting behaviour and compare it to electron interactions with "regular" (proton-neutron) atomic nuclei.
Emily Midorikawa | Liberal Studies - Writing
Emily Midorikawa studied history at University College London and creative writing (MA, prose fiction) at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice (2021) and A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontё, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, co-authored with Emma Claire Sweeney (2017). Emily is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. Her journalism has appeared in, among others: TIME, The Times (of London), the Paris Review and the Washington Post. You can find out more about Emily’s writing by visiting her website.
Marie Milofsky | Liberal Studies - Global Works and Society
Marie started her career as a risk analyst for a future and commodities broker after studying economics and finance. However, her real passion was for philosophy, so she decided to change career. She obtained her PhD in Philosophy from the London School of Economics and has been teaching there ever since. She joined NYU-London in 2012. Her areas of expertise are ethics and philosophy of economics.
Trino-Manuel Ñíguez Grau | Economics
Trino-Manuel Ñíguez is a Reader in Economics at the University of Westminster, Westminster Business School, London. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics (1998) and a master in quantitative economics (1999) at the University of Alicante. He completed his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Alicante in 2004. He was a research fellow at the Bank of Spain in 2015 and has held visiting positions at the University of Alicante and New York University in London. Prior to joining the University of Westminster, Dr Ñíguez was a teaching assistant at the University of Alicante from 1999-2003 and a research scholar and graduate teaching assistant at the London School of Economics in 2003-2004. He also worked for the Spanish government as a professional clarinetist (1987 to 1991), obtaining a degree as a teacher of clarinet from the Superior Conservatory of Music "Oscar Espla" of Alicante in 1994.
His research interests are in the areas of econometric theory, financial econometrics, time series econometrics, optimal portfolio choice, and forecasting. He has published his work in Economics Letters, Finance Research Letters, International Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Banking & Finance, Journal of Forecasting, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Quantitative Finance, and Spanish Economic Review, among other journals. He currently studies: (1) the importance of higher-order statistical moments and risk attitudes in optimal portfolio choice, with applications to economic modelling and forecasting under high levels of uncertainty, and (2) multivariate semi-nonparametric densities as a feasibly parameterized way to represent conditional volatility and asymmetric correlation, skewness and heavy tails observed in asset return distributions.
Dirk Nitzsche | Finance
Dr Dirk Nitzsche is a Senior Lecturer at Cass Business School (City University, London). He is also a visiting lecturer at New York University (in London) - Stern School since 2001 and has links with Olin Business School at Washington University in St Louis. After completing his PhD in 1996 he worked in the economics department at the University of Newcastle before joining City University Business School in 1997 and the Management School at Imperial College in 1998. In 2004 Dirk rejoined Cass Business School (City University) where he is the course director for MSc Financial Mathematics and MSc Quantitative Finance. Dirk has written a number of articles in refereed journals and recently co-authored three textbooks in finance: Investments: Spot and Derivative Markets (2001, 2008), Financial Engineering: Derivatives and Risk Management (2001) and Quantitative Financial Economics (2nd edition) (2004). He has presented his work at international conferences in Europe, the US and Australia. His research interests includes the wider areas of asset pricing as well as fund management and portfolio theory.
Dirk's current research focuses on the perfomance of the mutual fund industry where he uses sophisticated statistical techniques in alalysing the industry. Key questions which are addressed here are persistence of fund performance, ability of market timing and whether the fund performance can be explained by luck or skill.
Deirdre Osborne | Social and Cultural Analysis
Dr Deirdre Osborne is a Reader in English Literature and Drama at Goldsmiths University of London. She co-convenes the MA Black British Writing and teaches modules on Shakespeare, Feminism, Modernism and Postmodernism. Her research interests span late-Victorian literature and maternity, Landmark Poetics, mixedness, and adoption aesthetics. Publications include: editor of the first Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945-2010) (2016), guest-editor Special Issue, ‘Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing’ for Women: a Cultural Review (2009) and co-editor, Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama (Palgrave 2014). She is Associate Editor of the literary journal Women’s Writing: Early Modern to 1918 (Taylor and Francis).
Mehrnoosh Ostovar | Chemistry
Dr. Mehrnoosh Ostovar obtained her PhD in organic chemisty from UCL, where she worked on “Novel Approaches to the Synthesis of Ether-Containing Natural Products, Acutiphycin and Zaragozic acid (A)” under supervision of Prof. Karl Hale and Prof. Charles Marson (2005-09).
In September 2009, she joined Prof. Varinder Aggarwal as a post.doc in the School of Chemistry at University of Bristol. In this period, she worked on two research projects: “Asymmetric Aziridinations Using Readily Available Chiral Sulfide Isothiocineole” and also “Palladium-Mediated Annulation of Vinyl Aziridines with Michael Acceptors, Stereocontrolled Synthesis of Substituted Pyrrolidines and Application to a Formal Synthesis of (–)-α-Kainic Acid”.
Since October 2012, Mehrnoosh has been working as a posdoctoral research officer for Prof. Stephen Husbands in the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology at University of Bath. The title of her project is “Discovery and development of new opioid ligands as relapse prevention agents for the treatment of opioid abuse and as analgesics with low abuse potential”
Varsha Panjwani | Dramatic Literature, English, and Theatre
Dr Varsha Panjwani is the host of the award-winning ‘Women & Shakespeare’ podcast the author of Podcasts and Feminist Shakespeare Pedagogy (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Her teaching and research focus on the way in which Shakespeare is deployed in the service of diversity and how that, in turn, invigorates Shakespeare. She has published on these topics in journals including Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Studies, and Multicultural Shakespeare, and in edited collections such as Shakespeare, Race and Performance, Shakespeare and Indian Cinema, Eating Shakespeare: Cultural Anthropophagy as Global Methodology, and The Arden Research Handbook to Shakespeare and Adaptation. She is the co-editor of Re-contextualizing Indian Shakespeare Cinema in the West: Familiar Strangers (Bloomsbury, 2023) and a special issue of Multicultural Shakespeare. She was one of the principal organizers of the multi-grant-winning conference and film festival, ‘Indian Shakespeares on Screen’ in collaboration with the BFI Southbank and Asia House (UK), and the National Film Archives of India and INOX Movies (India).
She has won grants from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Society of Theatre Research, and the Society of Renaissance Studies, and prizes for digital innovation in Shakespeare teaching. She has been invited for public and research lectures by numerous institutions such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, The Shakespeare Institute, the Jaipur Literary Festival at the British Library, the London School of Economics, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford.
She is currently working on an Introduction for the Oxford World Classics edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which she has been commissioned to write.
Katherine Parker | Architecture
Dr Katherine Parker is a historian interested in the histories of empire, exploration, the map, and the book. Her focus is on European expeditions to the Pacific in the long-eighteenth century and the map and bookselling communities of London. At NYU, she is a part-time lecturer in architecture, teaching on the Seeing London's Architecture module. She is also the Cartographic Collections Manager at the Royal Geographical Society and serves as the Administrative Editor of the Hakluyt Society.
M. Amir Parsa | History of Islam
A historian of the Turco-Persianate world, M.A.H. Parsa (“Amir”) is currently engaged in researching the coalescence of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic traditions in the Islamic world from the beginning of the medieval period to the rise of nation-states in the twentieth century. In particular, he is interested in how pre-industrial societies in Iran and the wider Turco-Persianate world discussed collective identity before the advent of nationalism. Having attained his BSc in Mathematics at Royal Holloway, University of London, Amir transitioned to studying Islamic history at SOAS. In 2022 he completed his doctorate on eighteenth-century imperial Iran while teaching world history at the SOAS History Department. In Fall 2022 he joined New York University (London campus) as a lecturer, and is offering two courses on Islamic history. Amir has two upcoming books: The Turk-o-Tajik World: Coalescence of Arabic, Turkic, and Persian Spheres (I.B. Tauris), and Imperial Iran: Iranian Identity and Imperial State Formation c. 1720-1750, (Cambridge University Press).
Jeremy Pilcher | Legal Studies
Jeremy Pilcher is a lecturer of law and the Law Programme Co-ordinator at NYU London. Prior to becoming an academic, Jeremy worked in New Zealand as a Crown prosecutor before moving into commercial litigation. After arriving in England, he qualified as a solicitor and worked as a fraud investigator in both the public and private sectors. Jeremy's research at the intersections of art and law builds on academic qualifications in cultural studies, art law and art history as well as his earlier career in the law.
Alan Powers | CORE - Expressive Cultures
Dr. Alan Powers studied History of Art at Cambridge and took his PhD there on Architectural Education in Britain 1880-1914. He has combined teaching (mainly at the University of Greenwich) with writing, exhibition curating, and voluntary conservation work with the Twentieth Century Society. This work has been on subjects relating to British art, architecture and design. Books include Britain in the series Modern Architectures in History, and Eric Ravilious, artist and designer, published in 2013. He began teaching for NYU in 2013.
Hana Qugana | Liberal Studies
Hana Qugana is a lecturer in Global History at the University of Sussex, specialising in the Asia/Pacific and the Philippines, from 1500 to the present. For details about her research and teaching, please visit her Sussex faculty page.
Eliya Ribak | Liberal Studies - Arts and Cultures
Dr Ribak has a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Reading. She published a book on inter-communal relations in Byzantine Palestina and papers on the architecture and art of religious Communities in Byzantine Palestina and Medieval Britain. Her latest paper: “Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval London, An Archaeological Evaluation” has recently been published in in Reading Medieval Studies. She is currently interested in the historical relationship between human societies and their natural environment. Dr Ribak lectures at IES London and New York University London.
Daria Ricchi | Architecture
Daria Ricchi is a writer and architecture historian. She was trained as an architect in Florence, Italy, and has a PhD in History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University. She has been teaching History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, Parsons the New School, Yale University, University of Oxford, and Oxford Brookes University where she is Senior Lecturer in Architecture.
Her last book Writing Architecture in Modern Italy was published by Routledge in October 2020. She is currently editing a book on the Maggie’s Centers, and she is working on a book about the Laban movement analysis, and the importance of movement to experience space.
Serene Richards | Legal Studies
Serene Richards is a lecturer in law at NYU London. She completed her PhD at Birkbeck College, School of Law and has taught at NYU Abu Dhabi, Goldsmiths College, University of Kent, the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, among others. She writes on contemporary and medieval philosophy, social theory and legal theory. Her recent publications include a chapter entitled ‘Miracles’ published in the Elgar Research Handbook in Law and Literature. Serene is currently developing a project on the government of the passions. Her book Biopolitics as a System of Thought is forthcoming.
Mark Roberts | Mathematics
Dr Mark Roberts is departmental Tutor and lecturer in the Mathematics Department at UCL. He currently teaches first year algebra and Galois Theory to undergraduates at UCL. Research interests are in abstract algebra, in particular non-commutative ring theory.
Diego Salzman | Finance
Diego Salzman, PhD MSc, CPA specialises in the areas of behavioural finance, corporate finance, derivatives and alternative investments. He has been the recipient of numerous awards for outstanding teaching including the student experience outstanding teaching award. Prof Salzman has been a global lecturer in Europe, Asia, North and South America and presented his work to academic and practitioners in more than a hundred speaking engagements. He is recognised internationally as a top global thought leader in matters relating alternative investments, behavioural and digital finance.
Jyoti Saraswati | Economics and Business and Political Economy Program
In addition to teaching on the Business and Political Economy (BPE) Program at the Stern School of Business, New York University, Dr. Jyoti Saraswati is Director of the Beyond the Developmental State Working Group for the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE). His research is primarily focused on the political economy of emerging markets in Asia, particularly as it pertains to capital formation in, and the emergence of transnational corporations from, India and China. He is author of Dot.compradors: Power and Policy in the Development of the Indian Software Industry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor of Beyond the Developmental State: Industrial Policy into the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2013) and publishes regularly in prominent academic journals and news outlets including China Report, Economic and Political Weekly, Third World Quarterly, Development Viewpoint, Queries and Open Democracy. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Saraswati worked across public and private sectors in both the UK and Japan, and continues to provide consultancy to a number of major international organisations and private corporations, including the European Commission and the World Bank. He is currently working with the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) on a project evaluating the prospects of industrial catch-up in several sectors across four major emerging economies. Dr. Saraswati has also taught at the Department of International Development, Oxford University, and the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary, University of London. He is currently writing an international economics textbook centred on presenting a practical, rather than theoretical, guide to the structures of, and systems within, the global economy.
Laurence Scott | Liberal Studies - Writing
Laurence received a PhD in Comparative Literature from King’s College London in 2010. He is the author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (2015), which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award, and was named a “Top-Ten Book of the Decade” by WIRED magazine. His second book, Picnic Comma Lightning (2018), explores experiences of reality in the twenty-first century and was read in instalments on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Boston Globe, and the London Review of Books, among many others. He is also a presenter on BBC Radio 3’s Arts and Ideas programme, Free Thinking. Laurence teaches several writing courses at NYUL. You can also view his professional website.
Hagai Segal | History and Politics
Hagai M. Segal is an academic, consultant and analyst, specialising in Middle Eastern affairs, geo-strategic issues, and modern terrorism/militancy. A United Nations Alliance of Civilizations recognised ‘Global Expert’, Hagai serves on the London First Security & Policing Advisory Board and the Executive Advisory Committee of the Global Risk Network. An analyst, consultant and advisor for numerous companies, private bodies, business groups, security agencies and politicians - advising them on these same issues - Hagai has taught and guest lectured at Universities across the globe. A regular guest on national + international television and radio stations/channels Hagai also writes for a number of newspapers and publications around the world. He is a recipient of the NYU in London Annual Teaching Award. You can find further information on his work on his website at www.hagaisegal.com
Hagai has additionally been commended for outstanding teaching evaluations on the Liberal Studies Program, by the Dean of Liberal Studies, Dean Schwarzbach.
James Smith | Health Policy in a Global World
Dr James Smith, a practising UK physician, has taught and conducted research on global health and humanitarian issues for almost a decade. James has worked in a variety of roles with Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders, including as a physician, researcher, advocacy manager, humanitarian affairs advisor and regional migration referent. James’ research interests span humanitarian public health, global health politics and global health ethics.
Click here to read through his research.
Eiko Thielemann | Politics
Dr Eiko R. Thielemann is an Associate Professor in Political Science and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He studied Economics at the University of Heidelberg, International Relations at the LSE, and completed his PhD in Political Science at the University of Cambridge. Eiko has been teaching and researching full time at LSE since 2000. He has also held visiting positions at the Australian National University (ANU), the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Victoria (Canada). Eiko has worked as a consultant for the European Commission and the European Parliament and has done advisory work for several other national and international organisations. His research focuses on EU- and comparative policy making, in particular on issues such as: international co-operation, redistributive politics and multi-level governance, with a focus on immigration and refugee policies. He has been a guest-editor for the Journal of Common Market Studies and the Journal of Refugee Studies. More information about his work can be found on LSE’s website and Google Scholar.
Helen Walter | Art, Design, and Fashion
Helen is an art and design historian with a special interest in dress history and portraiture. Her research has been focussed on the intersection of performance, identity and the body in portraits of late nineteenth-century actor-managers, and the problematic role of theatre costume in narratives about authenticity in the same period. She has published articles on these topics in Visual Culture in Britain, Studies in Costume and Performance, Costume, and contributed a chapter to Pantouvaki and McNeil's Performance Costume: New Perspectives and Methods (2020). She has taught for the University of the Creative Arts, the Courtauld Institute and Plymouth University, and is currently a visiting tutor on the Historical Costume MA at Arts University Bournemouth and Lawrence University's London Centre.
Lisa Weber | Environmental Studies
Dr Lisa Weber has a PhD in Marine Sciences, in addition to a first class degree and an MSc equivalent in Physical Geography. Most recently she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. Her entire education at University and subsequent jobs have revolved around environmental and marine issues. Her research is focused on the biogeochemical cycles of nutrients in marine ecosystem models, which is an important aspect of the global carbon cycle and climate change research.
Julia Weiner | Art History
Julia Weiner (MA Oxon) is an art and design historian with extensive experience of teaching in museums and galleries. From 1990-2001 she was Head of Education at the Courtauld Gallery where she ran the education programme for the seminal exhibition Art on the Line. Since 2008, she has also worked at Regent’s University London where she is now Associate Professor in Art and Design History and Director of Content for Liberal Arts. She has also taught at Florida State University, London and Anglo-Educational Services London where she has taught students from a number of universities in North America. This is her fourth year teaching at NYU London.
Julia also worked as a Lecturer and Educator at the Victoria & Albert Museum until the pandemic stopped group visits. She was the art critic of the Jewish Chronicle for nearly 30 years. Additionally, she is a freelance curator and has co-curated two exhibitions for the Jewish Museum London. She also curates exhibitions for the Knapp Gallery at Regent’s University London.
Valerie Wells | Biology
Valerie Wells is a research scientist. Her research is focused on defining differences in the signalling pathways which operate in normal and cancer cells, in order to exploit differences in their genetic makeup which can be targeted to selectively activate programmed cell death in cancer cells while leaving normal cells unharmed. A novel cytokine, beta-GBP (beta-galactoside binding protein), has been identified and cloned and has been found to selectively induce apoptosis in cancer cells. Valerie Wells is currently investigating the molecular signalling pathways activated by βGBP leading to programmed cell death and to immunogenic cell death.
Recent publications
Mallucci, L. and Wells, V. (2022) Intrinsic S phase checkpoint enforced by an antiproliferative oncosuppressor cytokine. Cancer Gene Therapy 29, 897-900.
Cirone, M., Lotti, L., Granato, M., Di Renzo, L., Biunno, I., Cattaneo M., Verginelli, F., Vespa, S., Davies, D., Wells, V., Mariani-Costantini, R., Mallucci, L. (2019) Sourcing the immune system to induce immunogenic cell death in Kras-colorectal cancer cells. British Journal of Cancer 121, 768–775.
Mallucci, L .and Wells, V. (2014) The end of Kras cancers? A new way forward. Drug Discovery Today, 19, 383-387.
Mallucci, L., Shi, D., Davies D., Jordan, P., Nicol, A., Lotti, l., Mariani-Costantini , R., Verginelli, F., Wells, V. and Zicha, D. (2012) Killing of Kras mutant colon cancer cells via Rac-independent actin remodeling by the beta-GBP cytokine a physiological PI3K inhibitor therapeutically effective in vivo. Mol. Canc. Ther. 11, 1884-1193.
Katharine Whitehead | Physics
Katharine Whitehead was born in Manchester and educated at the University of Sheffield where she completed an undergraduate degree in Physics and a doctorate in Experimental Solid State Physics. She then went on to work in Professor Donal Bradley’s Molecular Electronic Materials group at Imperial College, London specialising in Liquid Crystalline and Inorganic Semiconducting Polymers.
Jonathan Wilson | Organizational Communications
Prof. Jonathan A.J. Wilson PhD DLitt is an award-winning practitioner and academic with two doctorates – specialising in what he calls the ABCDs of business and culture: Advertising, Branding, Communication, and Digital. After receiving an MBA and Chemistry degree in the ‘90s, he began his career in advertising, before later deciding to experiment with the idea of being a brain for hire.
Prof Wilson has over 200 pieces of published work, given over 100 conference talks, travelled to 40 countries, and worked with governments, agencies, firms, and high-profile professionals on branding everything - from countries to people. He received a LinkedIn Top Voices award for 4 consecutive years, appeared in their US primetime television advertisements, took part in a LinkedIn Twitter takeover, and is a LinkedIn Learning Instructor with a trending course on ‘Unlocking Authentic Communication in a Culturally-Diverse Workplace’ attracting 10k learners in its first month. He also has online masterclass courses on Personal Branding and Branding Professionals with FurtureLearn and GoodHabitz.
Away from the classroom, Prof’s music and voice feature on the early Grand Theft Auto video games, he’s performed internationally on television and stages like Glastonbury music festival, and he holds seven Dan grades in Japanese martial arts.
Matt Wolf | Journalism
Matt Wolf in Sept 2023 marked 40 years as an American arts and theatre journalist abroad where over the years he has held longterm posts with The Associated Press, Variety, and The International New York Times (formerly the International Herald Tribune). He is theatre editor and a founding member of The Arts Desk website and a regular critic for londontheatre.co.uk. and is one of the begetters of a new industry publication, Musicals, that was launched in 2022. A graduate of Yale, Matt has spent his entire professional career in London and has written for most major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Times and Sunday Times (UK) and The Evening Standard, The Observer and The Daily Telegraph, as well as the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune. Matt’s books include Sam Mendes at the Donmar: Stepping Into Freedom, and he is at work on one about performing Stephen Sondheim. He taught for many years for Syracuse University in London and continues to lead a summer theatre course for the University of California at Berkeley’s alumni association and teaches an autumn theatre course for the V&A Museum.
Alexandra Wood | Playwriting and Contemporary Drama
Alexandra Wood is a playwright and lecturer from London. Her plays include: Descent (Audible Originals), Silence, co-writer of an adaptation of Kavita Puri’s ‘Partition Voices’ (Donmar/Tara Theatre), The Tyler Sisters and The Empty Quarter (Hampstead Theatre), Never Vera Blue (Futures Theatre), The Human Ear and The Initiate (Paines Plough), Ages (Old Vic New Voices), a translation of Manfred Karge’s Man to Man (Wales Millennium Centre), Merit (Plymouth Drum), an adaptation of Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (Young Vic/ART), Unbroken (Gate Theatre), The Eleventh Capital (Royal Court Theatre) and Twelve Years (BBC Radio 4). Her plays are published by Nick Hern Books.
She studied at the Universities of York, Birmingham and Roehampton, where she completed her PhD, focusing on the playwright’s creation of dramatic character.
Jamie Woodcock | Internship
Dr Jamie Woodcock is a fellow at the LSE and author of Working the Phones. His current research focuses on digital labour, the sociology of work, the gig economy, resistance, and videogames. He has previously worked as a postdoc on a research project about videogames, as well as another on the crowdsourcing of citizen science. Jamie completed his PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and has held positions at Goldsmiths, University of Leeds, University of Manchester, Queen Mary, and Cass Business School.
Stan Zochowski | Physics
Dr Stan Zochowski is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCL and has previously taught at Birkbeck.
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: Leya Landau
What do you teach at NYUL?
I teach Writing London: a course that examines and encourages students to investigate literary representations of the city in a variety of novels, poetry, films, essays and shorts stories at particular times in the history of London; and starting in the spring, Literatures in English II: Literatures of the British Isles and British Empire 1660-1900.
What do you enjoy most about working with NYUL students?
The sheer diversity and range of the student body: we have students from all over the world and this brings a wonderful kaleidoscopic perspective and energy to the classroom and to a little corner of Bloomsbury. I'm also constantly impressed by how articulate our students are and appreciate their punctuality and ability to hand papers in on time!
Are you currently working on any research projects?
I've recently published an article on the representation of Brighton in the writings of late 18th- and early 19th-century novelist and diarist, Fanny Burney; it's also a study of the changing literary and visual responses to the sea and seaside in late 18th-century and Romantic literature. It appears in Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). The bigger project I'm working on is a book about the female urban imagination in the eighteen century and Romantic period.
How do you make the most of being in London in your classes?
NYU London's location in Bedford Square makes it a gift for teaching a course like Writing London. We can pop round the corner to the British Museum to see where Keats was inspired to write his poem "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles"; a walk around local Bloomsbury streets and squares brings the London writings of Virigina Woolf and her circle to life; and the two-hour Dickens walk from Temple and the Inns of Court to Covent Garden maps out the life and works of perhaps London's greatest chronicler. The open classroom windows also provide a fitting -- and sometimes noisy -- soundscape of traffic, chatter and screaming sirens that complement -- and sometimes compete with! -- our classroom discussions.
What is your favourite area of London, and why?
I'm constantly drawn back to the South Bank: the collision of music, film, theatre, art, bookstalls and cafes, and spectacular views down the river are an antidote to any creative blocks. A special mention, too, to Sunny Hill Park in North West London: a wonderful hilly park where I like to run -- it has fantastic views to the north of the city and to the west, over Wembley Football Stadium, especially when it is lit up at night. The log cabin cafe there serves some of the best coffee in London.