Advisory Board

Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies and Senior Academic Convenor for the Global Network at New York University. He is the author of Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929 2001 (AATSEEL book prize), Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (2008 AWSS book prize), Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (2020 Wayne S. Vucinich brook prize and 2020 AATSEEL book prize), and Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power (Bloomsbury, 2020).  He has three books forthcoming: Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head (Cornell, 2022), Meanwhile, in Russia…: Russian Internet Memes and Viral Video (Bloomsbury, 2022), and Soviet-Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism (Cornell, 2023). He is now writing HBO’s The Leftovers: Mourning and Melancholy on Premium Cable and Unstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny.

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.

Manthia Diawara received his education in France and later traveled to the United States for his university studies. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (Basic Civitas Books, 2003), Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (ed. Routledge, 1993), African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Indiana University Press, 1992), and In Search of Africa (Harvard University Press, 1998). He has published widely on the topic of film and literature of the Black Diaspora. Professor Diawara also collaborated with Ngûgî wa Thiong’o in making the documentary Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema, and directed the German-produced documentary Rouch in Reverse.

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 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.

Jordana Mendelson is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and affiliate faculty in Art History and CLACS. Her research focuses on early 20th-century Spanish visual culture and the history of photography and print culture. She author of Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation 1929-1939, co-editor of Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity; curator of Encounters with the 1930s, and Revistas y Guerra 1936-1939, and co-curator of Margaret Michaelis: Fotografía, Vanguardia y República en la Barcelona de la República and Miró-ADLAN. She serves on the advisory committee of the Archivo Español de Arte and Culture & History, the Editorial Board of Modernism/Modernity, and is Editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Her current book project is tentatively titled Administrating Modernity: The Cultural Politics of Paper in 1930s Spain. She is currently Director of NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC).

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.

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.