Teaching Awards
2019-2020 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award
Stephen Duncombe
Stephen Duncombe was awarded a 2019-2020 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award, an honor that recognizes faculty who have contributed significantly to the intellectual life of the University through their teaching. Duncombe’s interests lie in media and cultural studies. He teaches and writes on the history of mass and alternative media and the intersection of culture and politics. He is also the creator of Open Utopia, an open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, and co-founder and co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism, a research and training institute.
2020-2021 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching
Julian Cornell
Julian Cornell’s primary research and teaching areas are American, Scandinavian, and Japanese cinema and genre cinema, including disaster movies, science fiction, children’s films, animation, and documentary. His work on children’s films, apocalyptic disaster movies, and bad taste has been widely published. He has written for Vice.com and for the film analysis Website ScreenPrism.com. His current research project is an exploration of media narratives and social media responses to mass shootings and the mythology of gun violence in American society. Cornell teaches Media at the Gallatin School For Individualized Study, Film in the Tisch School of the Arts, and Media Studies at Queens College, CUNY. He has also taught Film Studies and Screenwriting at Wesleyan University. Prior to teaching, he spent a decade in Scheduling and Network Programming at HBO and Cinemax, and in independent film production.
Vasuki Nesiah
A legal scholar with a focus on public international law, Vasuki Nesiah areas of research include the law and politics of international human rights and humanitarianism, with a particular focus on transitional justice. Her most recent book A Global History of Bandung and Critical Traditions in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which she co-edited with Luis Eslava and Michael Fakhri, reflects her continued interest in critical approaches to international law that find their intellectual and political home in the global South and in the grappling with decolonization. She is one of the founding members of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and has continued as an active participant in this global network of scholars for over two decades.
Carol Zoref
A part-time member of the Gallatin faculty since 2001, Carol Zoref teaches fiction writing in the Advanced Writing Program. She has been a full-time member of the Sarah Lawrence College faculty since 1998. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hall Farm Center for Arts, and In Our Own Write. Her novel Barren Island (New Issues, 2017) won the Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction, the AWP Prize for the Novel, National Jewish Book Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize for Fiction, and it was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction.
2019-2020 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching
Judith Greenberg
Trained in comparative literature at Yale, Judith Greenberg specializes in issues having to do with memory and trauma. She also writes and teaches about 20th century French and English literature, often focusing on questions of narrative and gender. She has published academic articles on the role of trauma in literature, from the novels of Virginia Woolf to writers responding to the Holocaust authors such as Charlotte Delbo and Patrick Modiano. She edited Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (Nebraska Press, 2003), a collection of essays by writers, psychologists, photographers and academics both in New York and around the world as they responded to the attacks within months of 9/11. Her current manuscript, Cypora’s Echo, tells how she turned to study her own family after discovering a diary from 1942 written by a 25-year-old cousin who was a young mother trapped in a ghetto in Siedlce, Poland.
Steven Rinehart
Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Steven Rinehart is a screenwriter, ghostwriter, speechwriter, carpenter, and fiction writer. He was a speechwriter for former president Bill Clinton and is the author of the short story collection Kick in the Head (Doubleday, 2000) and the novel Built in A Day (Anchor, 2004). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, More, GQ, Story, Ploughshares,The Georgia Review, and elsewhere, and his work has been anthologized in several books, including The KGB Bar Reader, Sleepaway, Bastard on the Couch, Money Changes Everything, and Over the Hill and Between the Sheets.
Eugene Vydrin
Eugene Vydrin’s research interests are in 20th-century literature, visual art and criticism, in the intersections between verbal and visual mediums, and in the relation between aesthetic form and political critique. He is interested in the ways that artworks, both verbal and visual, represent and embody specific places, especially those in which the superseded past lingers or returns. Vydrin's dissertation examined the modernist aesthetic doctrine of medium specificity in relation to place, arguing that artworks model themselves on the specific sites where they are made. He is currently writing about British detective fiction, its relation to national identity, and its representation of the local past. Prior to joining NYU as a full-time faculty member, Vydrin taught in the First-Year English program at Barnard College. He was recognized with an Adviser of Distinction Award in 2013.
2020-2021 Gallatin Adviser of Distinction
Cynthia Allen
Cynthia Allen is on the Executive Committee (nominator) of the renowned New York theater critics’ organization, Outer Critics Circle (OCC), as well as being its website director, editor, and a voting member of OCC. In addition, she is a member of the nationally celebrated American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA). Allen reviews cultural events concerning theater, the arts, film, dance, photography, and music. Some of the filmmakers she has worked with include Joel and Ethan Coen, Sergio Leone, and Martin Scorsese. She is the founding co-festival director of HEAR Now: The Audio Fiction & Arts Festival, and worked with HEAR Now between 2013 and 2019. For almost eight years, Allen was the program coordinator for NYU’s Center for Advanced Technology in New Media. For more than 25 years, she has been involved with all aspects of film production—from producer to director—and continues to produce and direct programming for the Web TV series.
2019-2020 Gallatin Adviser of Distinction
Antonio Rutigliano
Since 1982, Antonio Rutigliano has directed and taught seminars abroad for SCPS on Greek and Roman civilization. He has received Gallatin’s Student Choice Award and Gallatin’s Advisor of Distinction Award as well as the SPS Award for Outstanding Service. He is an honorary member of Casa Dante in Florence, and he has received Italy’s Gold Medal for Civic Merit from the Comune di Bitetto. His publications include Lorenzetti’s Golden Mean (Peter Lang Publishing, 1992); “Art and Liminality’’ in Greg Wyatt, Transatlantic Bridges Through Sculpture (Newington-Cropsey Foundation, 2006); “Icarus” in Empedocles (Museo Regionale di Agrigento, 2008); Un’Anima alla Ricerca della Santità: Chiara del Sacramento (Vistosi Maggi, 2014); Il Tenet di Metatron (Vistosi Maggi, 2015). He is currently working on a collection of medieval women’s trials, The Song of the Cicadas.