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Rewarding Courage in Public Scholarship

Mention Jan Gross and his 2001 book, Neighbors, and the word ‘controversy’ will soon follow.

The book, which documents the murders of nearly the entire Jewish population of the town of Jedwabne, Poland during World War II, explicitly challenges a long-accepted narrative that denies Polish complicity in the fate of Jewish Poles during the war. Since its publication, the book has provoked virulent responses from all sides: academic, political, media, popular. It has inspired renewed investigations and broad, heated conversations about the very heart of Polish identity. And it has made Gross — a former imprisoned student dissident who fled Poland in 1969 — again an unwelcome figure in his home country as he continues to publish research on anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland during and after World War II.  

That commitment to disseminating knowledge in the face of dangerous opposition has earned him the 2019 Courage in Public Scholarship Award from the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research (NSSR).

At a ceremony on March 7, 2019, Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies Elzbieta Matynia and former NSSR Dean Ira Katznelson will honor Gross and welcome him into a growing family of courageous award recipients.

In a Public Seminar article, Matynia recalls the genesis of the Courage in Public Scholarship Award, when a global group of alumni from TCDS’s annual summer Democracy and Diversity Institutes gathered in 2014 amid a “an ethical and intellectual crisis facing academics in Europe and beyond”:

“Drawing on the ethos of the University in Exile, and their own New School experience, and the conviction that especially in dark times universities carry a special responsibility vis-à-vis society, they considered in two intensive working sessions both the mounting problems and possible ways to address them…

“The outcome of the debate was distilled in their final statement, known as the Wroclaw Declaration, which calls into being the ‘NSSR-Europe’ initiative, an intellectually engaged microcosm of The New School for Social Research within the new post-cold-war Europe.”

In that Declaration, members determined that they would engage in “recognizing and honoring courage in public scholarship through awards and fellowships.” Acting quickly, they presented the first Courage in Public Scholarship Award on June 9, 2015 to Ann Barr Snitow, a “prominent American academic, writer, and activist committed to gender justice and equality, whose work in Central and Eastern Europe over a quarter of a century has helped to recast social discourse, reshape the culture, and empower women in this part of the world.” The ceremony was held at the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland, and was hosted by Minister for Equal Treatment Malgorzata Fuszara, a professor of law and sociology and friend of Matynia and of TCDS. In the years following, the Award was given to NSSR Professor Emerita and famed Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller and Professor Ewa Letowska, former Ombudsperson and judge on Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal.

Courage in Public Scholarship Award recipient Agnes Heller with Democracy and Diversity Institute faculty and students in 2016

The coming 2019 ceremony marks the first time the award will be given at NSSR, and is part of The New School’s Centennial celebrations. It’s a fitting moment for the award to come to New York; though it may be just four years old, the values it represents — a drive to bring scholarship to the general public, intellectual curiosity, and a commitment to challenging the status quo despite fierce opposition — build directly on the 100-year-old history and founding values of The New School itself.

“It’s a question of academic freedom and we stood for it. That’s how we [The New School] were initially in 1919, in 1933, and then in 1989,” Matynia says, referencing the school’s founding as a progressive institution where no faculty would be bound by loyalty oaths; the University in Exile, which rescued nearly 200 scholars fleeing from Nazism and fascism between 1933 and 1945; and the collapse of communism just 30 years ago — a period that a new era of The New School as well as Matynia’s own life and academic career.

Arriving as a postdoctoral fellow at The New School in 1981, Matynia expected to return to Warsaw the following year. But when Poland declared martial law, she ended up staying in the United States, teaching at several colleges before returning to The New School in the mid-1980s. In 1990, she became the director of the East and Central Europe Program, now TCDS, to help revitalize post-Communist scholarly life and create relationships between universities in the region and NSSR.

TCDS’s D&D Institutes began in Poland in 1992 to support scholars in East and Central Europe — Gross taught courses at the first and second institutes and returned in the early 2010s as a guest lecturer — and a sister D&D Institute also met in South Africa from 1999 to 2015 as that country grappled with its own democratic future.

Fittingly, Matynia’s research in political and cultural sociology addresses democratic transformations, especially in emerging countries with a legacy of violence. She, like many, hoped that 1989 would mark a clear transition to democracy for East and Central Europe. That hasn’t been the case; today, Matynia notes, many freedoms — of gender, of movement, of speech, of public gathering — are endangered in the region as well as in the United States.

“The whole concept of freedom is something which is difficult for increasingly right-wing regimes to tolerate,” says Matynia. “At this moment, there are so many threats to knowledge in general that I think it’s even more important than ever to make everyone aware of it. The principles of the way we live, of our democratic life, of society are threatened” as institutions that examine history and society are silenced or closed. As two recent alarming examples, Matynia cites the move of Central European University from Hungary to Austria after government pressure and the forced removal of the director of the Second World War Museum  in Gdansk, Poland for challenging accepeted Polish narratives of the war — much like Jan Gross.

As these outlets for critical thought disappear, suspicion, mistrust, and conspiracies spread even more quickly, making the 2019 Courage in Public Scholarship Award that much more meaningful — and timely.

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Student Research

Connecting with Ancient Greece through the Onassis Fellowship

Over the decades, faculty and students in the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research have earned a reputation for advancing scholarship of contemporary Continental philosophy, especially that of Germany and France. But since 2014, those interested in Ancient Greek philosophy, history, language, and culture have received a tremendous boost thanks to the Onassis Foundation Fellowship. By providing generous funding for several doctoral students as well as a dedicated lecturer, the fellowship is helping emerging scholars access critical sources, develop new interpretations, and draw important connections between ancient and twenty-first century thought.

Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy (above right), helped bring the special philanthropic relationship to life. Having worked closely with the Onassis Foundation for nearly a decade, he felt “able to show them the kind of work that our students and faculty are doing and its close relation to ancient Greek thought, [as well as] the importance that learning Greek has to philosophical studies at The New School for Social Research,” he says. “I have been absolutely delighted with the collaboration.”

One of his first acts as fellowship program director was to hire Mirjam Kotwick (above left). Originally from Germany and trained as a philologist, she is creating an academic career that bridges the classics and philosophy. “In my work I strive to connect my background and interest in classics with all of these philosophical questions that I have. That can be institutionally challenging. But right now at The New School, the Onassis Fellowship is really bringing both things together. That’s the perfect, ideal setting for me,” says Kotwick, whose recent research includes a book on the Derveni Papyrus, an ancient Macedonian text, and several papers on Orphic poetry, philological methodology, the textual transmission of Aristotle, and allegorical interpretation in the ancient world.

As the Onassis Lecturer in Ancient Greek Thought and Language, Kotwick serves as both a teacher and an expert guide to undergraduate and graduate students interested in a wide range of topics. Her ancient Greek language classes attract philosophy students as well as curious students from other disciplines. “Just learning a language is different than studying philosophy,” she says. “I really try to keep the interests that my students bring to the class by confronting them with original philosophical texts from as early on as possible.” She also informally advises students whose projects touch on her fields of expertise, working with them to ensure they’ve translated or understood those original texts correctly and sharing in the excitement of discovering new ideas.

Kotwick also leads more intensive, topic-based graduate seminars with titles such as “Death in Ancient Greek Thought,” “Aristotle’s Search for Wisdom,” and “The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry.” Onassis Fellows and philosophy doctoral students Samuel Yelton and Dora Suarez have found the latter class particularly influential for their academic journeys.

Samuel Yelton, PhD student in Philosophy and Onassis Fellow
PhD candidate Samuel Yelton

An alumnus of St. John’s College and its Great Books program, Yelton chose The New School for Social Research for graduate study because of the school’s specific values, namely “not treating ideas as timeless things, but as objects that have a history and various understandings through time, allowing people to be independent from any dogma in their scholarship.”

For his MA thesis, he examined Book X of The Republic, focusing on Plato’s argument that philosophy is incompatible with poetry and his claim that in the ideal city, poetry ought to be banned. “It’s all about understanding the distinction between form and content, and how an idea’s form can disqualify it from what philosophy is meant to do,” he explains. “Poetry can evade rational criticism, and the seductiveness of its form allows for potentially harmful ideas to get a hold of the soul.”

Now writing his doctoral dissertation, Yelton is diving deeper into this argument by examining a new wave of academic work that ties Greek philosophy more tightly into its broader cultural contours. “Even if Plato posited this quarrel, then there’s still the influences of the surrounding culture, which is largely poetic, as well as the understanding that poetry shouldn’t be understood as an amorphous concept, that there are specific genres [by author]: Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod. Understanding Plato requires that we understand these nuances.”

Suarez came to the U.S. from Uruguay 15 years ago to study modern languages, but unexpectedly fell in love with philosophy. “I feel that we have still not overcome many of the questions that the Greeks were asking,” she says.

Dora Suarez, PhD student in Philosophy and Onassis Fellow
PhD candidate Dora Suarez

In her doctoral dissertation, she is exploring the concept of visibility and its uses within the history of philosophy. “Just as we cannot take Truth and Knowledge for granted we also cannot — and should not —  take for granted what counts as visible or invisible, or to be able to see and/or being seeing,” she says. “My goal is to develop a meticulous philosophical recasting of visibility and its implications, in a way that brings to the fore the ways in which we human beings constantly struggle to resist visibility and to resist through visibility.”

This topic is relevant to both ancient and contemporary concerns, and a recent book on the topic is helping Suarez make those connections. “[In] Andrea Nightingale’s Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy, she describes a transition between wander to wonder, from a vita activa to the vita contemplativa. I became intrigued in thinking about how this change to a kind of seeing that has nothing to do with the eyes and that starts with Plato can be traced to the way we think about visibility today,” Suarez says.

Similarly, other Onassis Fellows are also investigating the historical origins of familiar concepts, such as Justice or Nobility, that are now at the center of contemporary conversations. Teresa Casas, from Spain, is using her dissertation to examine the intersection of theatre and politics both in ancient times and today. Angelica Stathopoulos, from Sweden, is exploring philosophy’s historical relation to passivity within ethics and politics. In each of these cases, Greek philosophy offers insight into how such ideas first entered the stream of philosophy, restoring an important sense of perspective and offering a key to understanding their applications and limits.

More broadly, the Onassis Fellowship and its focused attention on all aspects of ancient thought has not only encouraged the department widen its temporal and geographic scope beyond the contemporary Continental, but helped faculty and students alike renew a commitment to looking past a typical disciplinary distinction between “doing the history of philosophy” and “doing philosophy” to really do it all — and well, too.

Alumni Research

Joining the Dream Team: PhD Alumnus Luis Daniel Torres Gonzalez on His Economics Journey

Eighteen years ago, Luis Daniel Torres Gonzalez embarked on a long road that led him from Mexico City to New York City, where he earned his PhD in Economics at The New School for Social Research.

This month, he reached a new destination: Rome, where he was awarded the prestigious 2018 Pierangelo Garegnani Thesis Prize for writing one of the best doctoral dissertations in political economy in the world. Named for the famous Italian neo-Ricardian economist and awarded by the Centro di Ricerche e Documentazione Piero Sraffa at Roma Tre University, the prize is one of the biggest honors an emerging economics scholar can receive.

But when asked about the award, Torres is modest. He’d much rather talk about that path to his PhD, which he completed in 2018, and how he’s developing that dissertation, entitled “Essays on Prices of Production and the Interindustry Structure of Technology and Demand,” even further.

As an undergraduate at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Torres found himself drawn to the work of several NSSR economists, including Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development Willi Semmler and Professor Emeritus Lance Taylor — part of what he calls NSSR’s ‘dream team’ of heterodox economists. “From that moment, I decided that I must do my graduate studies at The New School,” he says. “But that took a lot of time.”

After earning a Master’s degree at UNAM and working for several years at the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology, he finally arrived at NSSR with a valuable government scholarship and a clear direction. He knew he wanted to study the foundations of the economy and delve further into theory of prices of production, and he began working closely with Leo Model Professor of Economics Duncan Foley and Professor of Economics Anwar Shaikh, who also served as his dissertation advisor.

He recalls that dual mentorship as being absolutely critical to his success; the two professors helped him begin his research in his second semester; supported him through long years of research, writing, and conference presentations; and, most recently, encouraged him to apply for the Garegnani Prize.

Collaboration was also an important part of his NSSR experience. In fact, he wrote the third chapter of his award-winning dissertation together with fellow student Jangho Yang, now a postdoctoral research fellow at Oxford. “The Persistent Statistical Structure of the US Input-Output Coefficient Matrices: 1963-2007” was published as part of the Economics Department Working Paper Series and has been accepted for publication in the top field journal, Economics Systems Research.

Torres is continuing that research as a postdoctoral research fellow back at UNAM. “I’m working on the study of the financial markets based on the same [long-period analysis] method that I used for studying the prices and the structure of production,” he says. “I’m interested in measuring the effects of the financial sector on income distribution based on linear production models.”

He’s also investigating the interindustry structure of technology and demand. “This structure is relevant for the determination of important ratios, such as industries’ capital intensities and commodities’ composition of output….I explore the implications of the identified statistical structure to different linear production models,” he writes. A key scholar in that field? Piero Sraffa, of the eponymous Italian center now honoring Torres.

The road to becoming a top emerging economics scholar may be long, but for Torres, it has been entirely worth it.

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Global Mental Health: Adam Brown on Psychology That Crosses Borders

Emergency room doctors at the University Hospital of Bern were stumped.

Lately, more patients had been reporting headaches, stomach and back pain that, despite extensive testing, did not show any clear physical root. That this uptick occurred mostly among a particular patient population — recent refugees from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Eritrea — made them wonder if stress and other similar factors might be at play. So they invited Associate Professor of Psychology Adam Brown to help them dig a little deeper.

As a Fulbright Specialist, Brown collaborated with the Bern doctors, the Swiss Department of Health, several NGOs, and refugee communities over two summers to research the situation, identify gaps in mental health care, and plan and launch a new intervention. Now, refugees awaiting treatment at University Hospital emergency room complete a brief, carefully-worded, and culturally-sensitive mental health assessment via iPad.

It’s an important first step. Brown has since returned to help the program scale and expand to Zurich, Basel, Geneva, and other Swiss cities. New funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation means he’ll be returning for four more summers.

Investigating and developing treatments for populations routinely exposed to and impacted by stress and trauma has become the focus of Brown’s work as a clinical psychologist. He’s traveled across the globe to work refugees and migrants, human rights advocates, emergency workers, combat veterans, and more; before heading back to Bern this year, he wrapped up a large-scale mental health survey of 17,000 United Nations staff members. His findings have informed the organization’s ambitious new Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being Strategy.

From Local to Global

Surprisingly, Brown’s path to a career in global mental health started on a much smaller scale. Graduating college with a degree in environmental studies and political science, he worked for a Bay Area nonprofit, interviewing neighborhood residents to find out how their environmental concerns and access to green space affected their wellbeing.

“It was through those interviews that I became really interested in the psychology of how they were dealing with stress, of how they were coping with day-to-day experiences,” he says. “And that just opened up a set of curiosities and interests in the mind.”

That realization led Brown from California to New York in 2002 — specifically to the Psychology MA program at The New School for Social Research (NSSR), where he fit in well with the many other students pursuing psychology as a second field or career.

Just one year after 9/11, New York City was still finding a new sense of normal. Brown remembers that time as an emotional turning point for both psychologists and patients in the city. “[After the attacks] there was a more careful and systematic approach to measure and study how people were coping with stress and trauma on a fairly large scale. And there was this whole tough masculine culture that, prior to that, might have placed barriers [for men] to talking about mental health issues. Suddenly, they were considering reaching out and connecting with a therapist.”

Brown teamed up with a New School alumna at Cornell Medical School to study utility workers who had cleaned up debris at Ground Zero. At NSSR, he co-founded and wrote for the New School Psychology Bulletin. As his interests in memory and trauma grew, he planned conferences together with with sociologists and anthropologists in the interdisciplinary Memory Studies Network. And in a cognitive psychology class with Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Psychology William Hirst, he formally began to study Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

New Research at The New School

In the early 2000s, most PTSD researchers believed that traumatic memories would resurface and cause new waves of stress and impairment in the present. Brown has taken those understandings one step further. “As more research came out suggesting that our ability to imagine the future depends so much on our ability to remember the past, I began to wonder if we would see similar alterations and maladaptive processes in how people with PTSD imagine the future. And that is what we’re finding…. We also believe this is partially what makes it hard to recover from those sorts of events.”

But memories aren’t always accurate and memory itself isn’t fixed; in fact, it’s quite malleable, much like the brain itself. That quality drives Brown to ask bigger questions about PTSD treatment as well as prevention. “We’ve found that if we have people recall memories in which they were able to overcome or successfully manage a stressful event, it seems to actually increase people’s sense of self-efficacy. And then when we give them tests they’re much more effective at problem solving, emotional regulation, they view the future more optimistically…. As we begin to better characterize risk factors, we might be able to do things prior to exposure to events that might help to mitigate the negative impacts of stress.”

That could mean moving more post-crisis treatment plans from the hands of psychologists to the people themselves. “We’re thinking about psychological first aid,” Brown plans. “What are some of the things we might want to put in place to help reduce stress or to identify things that might require urgent care? We need to think about how we can train community leaders and other people to be the drivers of mental health care in those communities.” Such program promise to be more efficient, more cost-effective, and more personal, all helping reduce barriers to mental health care.

Brown is looking forward to bringing students from NSSR and across The New School into his work. “Most science happens in teams. The ability to work across disciplines for me is really so important,” he says. In his new Global Mental Health Lab, he’s working closely with Psychology master’s and doctoral students as well as Eugene Lang undergraduates and Parsons graduate students — some of whom will join him in Switzerland this summer. A Global Mental Health minor, currently in development, aims to help more New School students engage in the topic and apply their social science skills in fieldwork with local and international NGOs, in collaboration with the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility.

Teaching at his alma mater is a fitting homecoming for a world traveler, and Brown sees his research as fitting squarely with The New School’s progressive history and mission. “Within science in general there was a feeling that if you brought politics into your work, you couldn’t do good research. We’re finally at a point now where that is being challenged and dismantled.”

Faculty News

Nancy Fraser Is the Newest Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur

Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science, has been named a chevalier de la Légion d’honneur — a knight of the Legion of Honor of France.

This highest reward for outstanding merit, founded by Napoleon in 1802, is given to French nationals and others who have served the country or helped further its values. In Nancy’s case, as noted in her official award letter: “You develop through your many papers a reflection on the major issues facing our contemporary societies that is as philosophic as it is political. Your original feminist thought aims to understand the inequalities of gender from a triple economic, cultural and political perspective. Through your work, you wish to help change society, and to imagine a new one…. France recognizes the breadth of your work, your commitment to promoting French language and thought as well as your cooperation with French and European universities.”

During her tenure at The New School for Social Research, Nancy has developed a longstanding relationship with the French academy. She has served as Blaise Pascal International Research Chair of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales from 2008-2010, and as the International Research Chair in Social Justice at the Collège d’études mondiales of the Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme from 2011-2016.

The Legion of Honor is the latest award Nancy has received this year for her work. She was also awarded the Nessim Habif World Prize, conferred at the University of Geneva on October 12, and the Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship from the Haven Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to be conferred there on April 11, 2019.

Nancy has published dozens of books and articles on social and political theory, feminist theory, and contemporary French and German thought. Her latest work is Capitalism: A Conversation in Political Theory, co-authored with Rahel Jaeggi, in which the two leading thinkers “show how, throughout its history, various regimes of capitalism have relied on a series of institutional separations between economy and polity, production and social reproduction, and human and non-human nature, periodically readjusting the boundaries between these domains in response to crises and upheavals.”

Join Nancy this summer at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry’s 2019 Summer Seminars, where she will be leading the Critique of Capitalism seminar.