Announcing the 2024-2025 Provost’s Faculty Fellows
Dear New School Community,
It is with great pleasure that I announce the appointment of Professors Panteá (Pani) Farvid and Gabrielle Williams as the inaugural Faculty Fellows for the 2024-2025 academic year. As the first appointed Faculty Fellows, they will work in collaboration with leadership throughout the Provost’s Office to enhance faculty support, strengthen faculty and student engagement in campus life, and advance our values in all aspects of faculty development and related activities.
The launch of this fellowship reflects my commitment to fostering deeper partnerships with our faculty, staff, and students, and to creating leadership development opportunities for members of our community with praxis and expertise in advancing equity, inclusion, and social justice at The New School and beyond. As scholars, researchers, and dedicated faculty members, Professors Farvid and Williams each bring extensive experience, interdisciplinary research interests, and a student-centered perspective to this role.
I look forward to finding more opportunities to engage with our faculty across the university and believe this is an important step in bolstering our capacity to create new and improved ways of working together to ensure faculty expertise is embedded in our planning across academic affairs. A key component of the Fellows’ service during this pilot year will include developing and designing an inclusive nomination and selection process for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Continue reading to learn more about the Fellows and the scope of their work for this academic year. Please join me in welcoming Professor Farvid and Professor Williams in their new roles.
Faculty Fellow Panteá Farvid
Panteá Farvid (PhD) is an Associate Professor of Applied Psychology within the Schools of Public Engagement and the chair of psychology in the Bachelor’s Program for Adults and Transfer Students (BPATS). She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in social and applied psychology, psychology for social change, psychology of gender and sexuality, psychology and technology, and research methods.
Her expertise, research, teaching, and advocacy work center on the critical examination of gender, sexuality, and intimate relationships. Dr. Farvid is the founder and director of The SexTech Lab at The New School, which examines evolving social issues at the intersection of sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, culture, technology, and intimacy. Her work addresses various intersections of contemporary interpersonal, social, and structural inequities, with a view to mobilizing empirically driven social and political change. As of Fall 2023, she is also the co-director of the Gender and Sexuality Institute at The New School. A recipient of the 2024 Distinguished Teaching Award, Dr. Farvid’s teaching and pedagogy is grounded in social justice, pluralistic knowledges, and collaborative models of learning.
In her role as Faculty Fellow, Dr. Farvid will work as a key partner with the University Faculty Senate and the Faculty Center in the Provost’s Office to design and deliver professional development opportunities for faculty in coordination with other Faculty Fellows. She will collaborate with the Executive Deans on advancing a proposal for a pluralism center at The New School, and as co-chair of the Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice (EISJ) Committee, she will also align this committee’s work with the university’s strategic plan.
Faculty Fellow Gabrielle Williams
Gabrielle Williams (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, a Leadership Council Member for the Andrew W. Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence, and a DEI and EISJ conflict resolution advisor to faculty, students, and administrative staff at The New School. She teaches undergraduate courses in African American, African Diaspora, and “classic” literatures with a focus on aesthetics, critical race theories, disability studies, discourses of blackness, poetics, performance studies, queer studies, and rhetoric.
Dr. Williams is a New School alum and holds a PhD in African American & African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley. Prior to her work in academia, Dr. Williams had a long career as a Contemporary Modern dancer and brings a community-facing, inclusive, interdisciplinary, and social-justice seeking approach to her research, teaching, and service. She has also directed, mentored, and taught for several HEOP initiatives geared toward assuring holistic success for disabled, first-generation, justice-impacted, LGBTQIA+, undocumented, and other marginalized campus populations. Dr. Williams has received extensive training in conflict and crisis resolution management for small- and large-scale occurrences relevant to DEI and EISJ issues.
In her role as Faculty Fellow, Dr. Williams will develop programming grounded in liberatory education, critical pedagogy, theologically-interested education, and new and transformative ways of teaching and learning as a collective. As a New School faculty member and alum, she is uniquely positioned to work across the university’s cross-sections of students, staff, faculty, and alumni to deepen our connection with, understanding of, and ways of embodying our university’s mission and vision. Dr. Williams will also work as a key partner with The Faculty Center and Student Success and Engagement on equipping our students to be activists and advocates for bringing positive change to our world. An essential component of this work will include assessing our university-wide community agreements so we can better demonstrate the importance of community agreements in practice, understand and analyze their impact, and work on new and improved approaches to being in community with one another.