New Faculty Achievements from Across The New School Include Fellowships, Grants, and More
The New School’s innovative and interdisciplinary curriculum is world-renowned, thanks in large part to the celebrated faculty of the university, who year after year play an integral role in training and educating the next generation of leaders.
Recently, professors and faculty members from throughout The New School have been awarded for contributions to their fields with prestigious grants, fellowships, and more.
Armen Donelian, a faculty member in the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, was selected by the U.S. State Department to serve as a Fulbright Specialist for a musical project in Romania, where he’ll engage with students, faculty, and administrators at the National University of Music in Bucharest, as well as interact with others in both academic and social settings. He will also present a concert on May 14th at Transylvania University in the historic city of Brasov, which will include original compositions, free improvisations, Jazz standards, and a few Armenian songs.
“It’s an honor to be selected by the US State Department and entrusted with the responsibility of representing the United States abroad, and so naturally I feel pleased and humbled,” said Donelian. “I’m eager to exchange ideas with people in Romania, formally and informally, to listen to and learn more about Romanian views on European history and current events (including, of course, the war in Ukraine), and to share my world views as they appear to me from this side of the pond.”
In more Fulbright news, Adam Brown, Vice Provost for Research at The New School and Associate Professor of Psychology at Eugene Lang College and NSSR, has begun working as a Fulbright specialist with the University of the Bahamas North. He has been lending his expertise in trauma and global mental health to help the university build its mental health capacities and reduce barriers to care for their students. This is the fourth time Brown has been selected to receive a Fulbright.
“That combination of dealing with the hurricane plus COVID-19 has made it very difficult for a lot of students to be fully engaged with their learning at the university,” shared Brown. “So the faculty there have been trying to come up with a way to assess and evaluate both the educational and the mental health impact of these two events and to develop a strategy to support students. They knew about the work I’ve done in other countries and the work of our Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab at NSSR, which is heavily involved in helping organizations to understand the impacts of traumatic stress on people’s well-being.” Â
Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher, both Faculty of Fine Arts at Parsons, were recently awarded a grant from the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which aims to advance the work of artists through direct financial support and more. To date, the Foundation has awarded more than 5,000 artists with $82 million.
“We are thrilled to have been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for 2022 and honored to be part of this legacy and encourage all our fellow artists to apply for a grant,” share Aziz + Cucher. “Their generous support can make a huge difference in any artist’s work and career.”
With the support of the grant, Aziz + Cucher will continue working on a new series of mixed media paintings and multi-channel video installations while preparing for a major publication on their practice that will celebrate the 30th anniversary of their artistic collaboration.Â
Started almost 100 years ago, the Guggenheim Foundation has been awarding fellowships to a highly selective group of accomplished individuals for decades. This year’s crop of winners have all made impactful contributions to their respective fields, including Alexandra Kleeman, SPE Assistant Professor of Writing who received a fellowship for fiction, and Terike Haapoja, a faculty member in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons, who received a fellowship for film/video.
“It’s amazing to be granted a Guggenheim, especially knowing how competitive the honor is and how much fascinating, vibrant, boundary-pushing work is out there,” Kleeman shared. “This year’s cohort puts me in the company of writers who I’ve long admired, many of whom I consider friends, all of whose work feeds my own and points to a path forward for writing in the 21st century.”
During her year off from teaching, Kleeman plans to draft, redraft, and sift through the research she’s been collecting throughout the past two years for her novel that will explore the rise and fall of money. Her new book will also investigate the “island as a symbol of radical divergence and a cautiously-Utopian notion of becoming.”
Haapoja plans to work on an interdisciplinary project that will explore the intersection of movements for labor rights, animal liberation and environmental justice, with the aim of bringing more attention to the ways in which both human and nonhuman animals are exploited in capitalism. She plans to conduct interviews and build discourse on this crossing, and also work on several large scale video works.
Speaking about the fellowship, she shared “I’m very grateful of course, and surprised because I thought this line of work is quite marginal. So it is reaffirming to get support for this work, and to know that others think this issue is important, too. My work and thinking owes to so many people, so I hope that through this project I will also be able to support others.”