Founded in 1780 in the midst of the Revolutionary War, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences began as a Boston-based initiative of John Adams "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." Following in the footsteps of inaugural Fellows Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, the Academy continues to celebrate leaders who show commitment to the nation's founding ideals through the pursuit of excellence in their respective fields. This year the Academy elected 269 new members, two of whom are NYU Arts & Science professors Marisa Carrasco and Pamela Newkirk.
Julius Silver Professor of Psychology & Neural Science and Collegiate Professor Marisa Carrasco was elected to the Academy as part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences: Neurosciences category. Earning her PhD from Princeton and beginning her career as an assistant professor at Wesleyan University, Carrasco has taught at NYU since 1995 and served as Chair of the Psychology department from 2001 through 2007.
Carrasco's research centers on visual perception and attention; specifically, the psychological and physiological mechanisms involved in these processes. Combining studies in perception, cognitive psychology, and neurophysiology, Carrasco's current work is dedicated to researching the effect of sensory factors and attentional mechanisms on visual search–that is, the process of visually scanning an environment to locate a particular object. This work is furthered by the Carrasco Lab at NYU, where she leads a team of postdoctoral fellows and doctoral students in the quest to better understand visual perception.
Professor of Journalism Pamela Newkirk was elected to the Academy as part of the Leadership, Policy, and Communications: Journalism, Media, and Communications section. An undergraduate alumna of NYU, Newkirk earned her master's degree and PhD from Columbia University and is an award-winning journalist and scholar. Her body of work is largely dedicated to uncovering exclusionary representation of African descendants throughout scholarship and pop culture. Her most recent book, Spectacle: the Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, is about the racial attitudes of the early 20th-century centered around the 1906 exhibition of a young Congolese man in the Bronx Zoo monkey house. Spectacle won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Literature as well as the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award.
Another well-known work of Newkirk is Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, which considers the influence of race on news coverage and won the National Press Club Award for Media Criticism. In addition, Newkirk has written for New York Times, Washington Post, and Guardian, among other esteemed publications, and was a member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at New York Newsday.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded to recognize individuals who pursue interdisciplinary work with the goal of improving society. Arts & Science is proud of Professors Marisa Carrasco and Pamela Newkirk's unrivaled contributions to their fields and excited that their work is being recognized with this prestigious fellowship.