Selected Faculty Achievements, 2015

The Faculty of the New School for Social Research are actively publishing books and scholarly articles. Below are some highlights of faculty-published research and research-related awards they have received this year.

Politics

Nancy Fraser, Henry Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics, has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège, Belgium for her work and commitment to society.

Fraser received her Ph.D. in philosophy from City University of New York in 1980. She specializes in the areas of social and political theory, feminist theory, 19th and 20th century European thought, and philosophy of social science. Fraser has received five honorary doctorates since 2006. Fraser has published fourteen books, and over 80 scholarly articles, book chapters, and essays. In 2013, Fraser published the book Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (Verso Books). Her scholarship is the subject of several edited volumes, from the 2007 book, (Mis)recognition, Social Inequality and Social Justice: Nancy Fraser and Pierre Bourdieu (Routledge) to the forthcoming Justice, Criticism, and Politics in the 21st Century (UNSAM, Argentina).

Read Fraser’s 2014 article, Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode, in the New Left Review.

Banu Bargu, Associate Professor of Politics, received the 2015 First Book Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association this September. The book, Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons, was published by Columbia University Press in 2014. From the publisher:

Starve and Immolate tells the story of leftist political prisoners in Turkey who waged a deadly struggle against the introduction of high security prisons by forging their lives into weapons. Weaving together contemporary and critical political theory with political ethnography, Banu Bargu analyzes the death fast struggle as an exemplary though not exceptional instance of self-destructive practices that are a consequence of, retort to, and refusal of the increasingly biopolitical forms of sovereign power deployed around the globe.

Banu Bargu received her PhD from Cornell University in 2008. Her main area of specialization is political theory, especially modern and contemporary political thought, with a thematic focus on theories of sovereignty, resistance, and biopolitics. Her research is situated at the intersection of philosophy, politics, history, and political anthropology, with a regional focus on the Middle East, especially Turkish politics. Bargu’s work draws upon the traditions of continental and critical theory as well as the history of Western political thought, with a keen interest in interrogating these traditions from the perspective of salient political issues and current resistance practices. Since publishing the book Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons, Bargu is currently working on a book-length manuscript on rethinking the materialist tradition, especially in light of the posthumous publication of Louis Althusser’s work on the aleatory.

Read her most recent articles on self-destructive protest (Angelaki: Journal of the Humanities, 2014) and enforced disappearances (Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 2014).

Psychology

William Hirst, recently named the Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Psychology, has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, for his contribution as one of the world leaders in the field of collective memory and social remembering, and being the first cognitive psychologist to study the social aspects of memory.

Hirst received his Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell University. Hirst has published over 140 scholarly articles and edited four books and four special journal issues. Between 2010 and 2014 alone, he was author or co-author on 46 articles; this included articles in Psychological Science, the most influential journal in psychology, The Journal of Trauma and Stress, Social Cognition, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Most recently, his work on memory of 9/11 was featured in Time Magazine. He also continues to sit on editorial boards of journals and is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and Memory Studies.

Read Hirst’s chapter, Putting the Social Back into Human Memory, in the SAGE Handbook of Applied Memory (SAGE, 2013).

Anthropology

Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor of Anthropology and co-director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, delivered the annual Elizabeth Colson lecture in June 2015 at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, England. In the talk titled “Innocence: Understanding a Political Concept,” Ticktin explored the idea of innocence in the context of humanitarianism, and the roles of “the child, the trafficked victim, the migrant, asylum seeker, the enemy combatant and the animal.” Ticktin has also been awarded a one-year fellowship at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study for this academic year.

Ticktin received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.  Professor Ticktin works at the intersections of the anthropology of medicine and science, law, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory. She is co-editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. Her most recent book, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (University of California Press, 2011), was awarded one of two 2012 William A. Douglass Prizes in Europeanist Anthropology by Society for the Anthropology of Europe. Recent publications include “Transnational Humanitarianism“ (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2014), “Cross-species craziness: Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mental Illness” (Books Forum, Biosocieties, 2014) and “Humanitarianism as Planetary Politics” in At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror (University of Toronto Press, 2014).

Listen to Ticktin’s full lecture on the Refugee Studies Centre website.

 Economics

Duncan Foley, Leo Model Professor of Economics, and Lance Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Economics, were awarded the 2015 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. The prize, given by the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University (GDAE), recognizes economists whose work combines theoretical and empirical research to promote a more comprehensive understanding of social and environmental processes. Their joint research project, funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, examines the economics of climate change.

Lance Taylor was recently interviewed by the Institute for New Economic Thinking to discuss his paper, Wage Increases, Transfers, and the Socially Determined Income Distribution in the USA (Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2014).

Duncan Foley is the Leo Model Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research. He graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Mathematics in 1964, and received a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1966. Dr. Foley has made key contributions to a wide range of fields, such as microeconomic theory, econometrics, political economy and the economics of climate change. In 2003, he authored Unholy Trinity: Labor, Capital and Land in the New Economy (Routledge) and in 2006, he published Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology (Harvard University Press), which discusses the history of political economy and economics. His recent research has analyzed critical contemporary issues such as financial instability, sustainable economic growth, and global warming from a political economy perspective.

Lance Taylor is the Emeritus Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research and the former Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development. Formerly, he was a Professor of Economics at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Visiting Professor at the Universidade da Brasilia, Delhi University, and the Stockholm School of Economics. He has served as a visiting scholar or policy advisor in over 25 countries, including Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia, Egypt, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Pakistan, India, and Thailand. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1968.

 Historical Studies

Julia Ott, Associate Professor of Historical Studies, and Co-Director of the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, recently delivered a public lecture as part of the University of Oklahoma “Presidential Dream Course” initiative. Ott was invited to provide her perspective on American political and economic history in a course called “America: Renaissance or Decline?”

Julia Ott received her Ph.D. from Yale University. Ott was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in 2009-2010. Ott specializes in economic history and political history. She is the author of When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Watch a discussion between Julia Ott, Thomas Piketty, and others at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge in April 2014.