Advisory Board

Bruce J. Altshuler is the Director of Museum Studies at NYU, and a Clinical Professor within the program as well. Altshuler's scholarship focuses on the history of exhibitions; history of museums; as well as modern and contemporary art. Altshuler has been recipient of the Dedalus Foundation Senior Fellowship (2010),  the Sir Banister Fletcher Award (2009), and the ACLS Study Fellowship (1980-81). His most recent publications include Biennials and Beyond; Exhibitions that Made Art History, 1962-2002 (Phaidon Press, 2013), and Salon to Biennial -- Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 1863-1959 (Phaidon Press Inc., 2008). Among other publications, Altshuler's work has been featured in The Art Newspaper, Art in America, and Mousse Magazine. 

Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies, Collegiate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Acting Chair of East Asian Studies, and Senior Academic Convenor for the Global Network at New York University. His first book, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1919, won the AATSEEL award for best work in literary scholarship in 2000. In 2007, he published Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture, which received the AWSS award for best book in Slavic Gender Studies in 2008. A 2009 Guggenheim recipient, Borenstein is working a monograph entitled Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism which he is writing and posting to his blog, plotsagainstrussia.org, in real time. He is also the editor and developer of All the Russias, the blog site and web portal for the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

J. Martin Daughtry is an associate professor of ethnomusicology at New York University. He teaches and writes on acoustic violence; voice; listening; jazz in New York; music in the anthropocene, Russian-language sung poetry, and the auditory imagination. His monograph Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford, 2015) received a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers and the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society of Ethnomusicology. Daughtry is co-editor, with Jonathan Ritter, of Music in the Post-9/11 World (Routledge 2007), and has published essays in Social Text, Ethnomusicology, Music and Politics, Russian Literature, Poetics Today, and a number of edited collections. He is currently writing a small book on interspecies vocality, atmosphere, particulate matter, radio waves, and art.

Bruce Grant is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. A specialist on cultural politics in the former Soviet Union, he has done fieldwork in both Siberia and the Caucasus. He is author of In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas (Princeton 1995), a study of the Sovietization of an indigenous people on the Russian Pacific coast, and winner of the Prize for Best First Book from the American Ethnological Society; as well as The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Cornell 2009), on the making of the Caucasus in the Russian popular imagination. He was co-editor of Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area (LIT, 2007) and The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke, 2010).

His current research explores rural Muslim shrines as sites of the retelling of Soviet history in Azerbaijan; the spectacular rebuilding of the Azerbaijani capital of Baku; and a historical project on the early twentieth-century, pan-Caucasus journal Molla Nasreddin (1905-1931) as an idiom for rethinking contemporary Eurasian space and authoritarian rule within it.

Toby Lee will be on sabbatical for Fall 2020-Spring 2021. Toby Lee is an artist, anthropologist, and Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She works across video, installation, performance and drawing, and her work has been exhibited at the Locarno Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Her research interests include visual and media anthropology, the anthropology of cultural institutions, cultural citizenship, expanded documentary, and cultures of surveillance and documentation. She has a PhD in Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies from Harvard University, where she was a member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Film Study Center at Harvard University, and the Flaherty Film Seminar. From 2012 to 2014, she was the Director of the Collaborative Studio at UnionDocs: Center for Documentary Art.

Robin Nagle is clinical professor of environmental studies and anthropology in Liberal Studies. She is also founder and director of Arts & Science in Action, a new engaged-learning program in the College of Arts & Science.
 

After earning her PhD in anthropology at Columbia, Nagle came to NYU as Assistant Dean for Student Affairs in the Graduate School of Arts and Science. She then served as director of the Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in GSAS before moving to Liberal Studies and CAS last year.

Nagle’s early research considered the role of politics in religion, with particular focus on conflicts within Brazilian Roman Catholicism. Claiming the Virgin: The Broken Promise of Liberation Theology in Brazil (Routledge 1997) is her account of the violent clashes and political strife that tore apart a community on the outskirts of Recife, a city of three million on the northeast coast of Brazil. The stakes in the conflict were higher than they might otherwise have been because the community also happened to be a famous regional pilgrimage site dedicated to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.

More recently, Nagle’s work investigates labors, infrastructures, bureaucracies, and histories of waste in urban contexts. Her book Picking Up (FSG 2014) is an ethnography of the New York City Department of Sanitation. As part of her research, Nagle was hired as a municipal sanitation worker; she learned first-hand what it takes to load out garbage trucks, plow snow, operate a mechanical street sweeper – and wear a uniform that invites scorn far more than praise. She is co-founder of the Discard Studies website, has launched an oral history project with the DSNY, and since 2006 has been Sanitation’s anthropologist-in-residence.

Michael Ralph is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He is also Director of the Metropolitan Studies program. Michael has published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Souls, Social Text, Public Culture, South Atlantic Quarterly, the Journal of the History of Sport, and Transforming Anthropology. Michael serves on the editorial boards of Sport in Society and Disability Studies Quarterly. He is a member of the Social Text Editorial Collective and the Souls Editorial Working Group. Michael is Editor-in-Chief of Transforming Anthropology, the flagship journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists.

Alexandra T. Vazquez is Associate Professor of Performance Studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on music, U.S. Latina/o and Latin American Studies, Caribbean aesthetics and criticism, race and ethnicity, and feminist theory.

Her book, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke University Press 2013), won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Prize in 2014. Her work has been featured in the journals small axe, American Quarterly, Social Text, women and performance, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies; and in the edited volumes Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, Reggaeton, and Pop When the World Falls Apart. In 2010-2011, she received a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship.  Prior to coming to NYU, Vazquez was an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Center for African American Studies at Princeton University (2008-2015) and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University (2006-2008). 

Vazquez is currently working on Writing Sound: The Florida Project, a new manuscript that investigates Florida as an under-theorized yet vibrant creative laboratory of the circum-Atlantic world. 

Jay Wegman is the Director of New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. He previously served as Director of the Abrons Art Center at Henry Street Settlement from 2006-2016. During his tenure, Abrons was awarded OBIE Awards for Innovative Excellence and Bessie Awards for Best Productions. He also served as Canon for Liturgy and the Arts at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine from 1993-2002 and was a Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. from 2004-2005. He frequently serves on juries and review panels for public funding and private foundations, and was award the 2015 Franky Award in for "making a long-term, extraordinary impact on contemporary theatre and performance in New York City." He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and Yale University.