Affiliate Faculty
Alan Aja— Puerto Rican and Latino Studies
Alan A. Aja is associate professor in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies. He has published in a range of scholarly and public outlets with focus on inter-group disparities, economic stratification, public policy, collective action, and sustainability. His publications include the book Miami's Forgotten Cubans: Race, Racialization and the Local Afro-Cuban Experience (Palgrave-McMillan, 2016) and independent and collaborative pieces in the Boston Review, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, Education Week, the Nation, Dissent, the American Prospect, Latino Rebels and other publications. Aja recently served as co-author on "What We Get Wrong About Closing the Wealth Gap," with Darity et al. (2018), and is a scholar-activist for federal- to municipal-level job guarantees. He advised on the award-winning documentary The Sentence by Rudy Valdez. Before academia, Aja was a labor organizer in Texas. He is currently on the board of directors for the National Jobs for All Coalition.
Kelly Britt—Anthropology and Archaeology
Kelly M. Britt is a community-based historical archaeologist specializing in urban spaces of the Northeast. She is currently interested in exploring the intersection of gentrification, activism, and material culture in her own backyard community of Brooklyn. Previous research has focused on how identity and sense of place are seen materially through heritage discourse during processes of change and flux in urban settings. Historic preservation work has allowed her to work in a variety of settings, including the federal government, museums, academia, and private cultural resource management firms, in addition to freelance projects and consulting. In her former position as archaeologist at FEMA Region II's offices in New York, she served as manager and overseer of archaeological projects under review for Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for projects in New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. She also served as the Tribal Nation liaison for the Environmental and Historic Preservation Cadre of the Region. In addition, Britt held the position as FEMA Region II's liaison for CultureAID and adviser for Alliance for Response NYC, two volunteer network organizations in the New York City area that assist the arts, cultural, and heritage sectors of the city in preparing for, assisting in, and mitigating after disasters. She has written several successful Network to Freedom designations for Underground Railroad sites in Pennsylvania and several pieces on heritage tourism and community archaeology including a chapter in the 2007 edited work, Archaeology as a Tool of Civic Engagement, by AltaMira Press. She has served on several boards of directors for various archaeological organizations in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York, and is currently acting president of Professional Archaeologists of New York City (PANYC), a not-for-profit organization devoted to the protection and preservation of New York City's archaeological sites. She has always felt service is an important part of any position within a chosen career path. The various employment positions she has held permitted her to civically engage with the communities where she has worked and lived, for she feels it is important to bridge the gap between scholarship and action.
Dale Byam—Africana Studies
Dale Byam is assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies. Her work has developed primarily in the field of theater for development in Africa and the diaspora. In recent times she has been focusing her attention on the African transnation and the demise of Afro indigenous art forms in the Caribbean. She is attempting to document the transformations in Afro indigenous performance in the Americas and to draw some conclusions on the directions these forms have taken since the post emancipation era.
Zhongqi (Joshua) Cheng—Earth and Environmental Sciences
Professor Zhongqi (Joshua) Cheng is a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Brooklyn College, director of the Environmental Sciences Analytical Center (ESAC, including the Urban Soils Lab), and a faculty member for the EES Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Macaulay Honors College. He is an associate editor for the Journal of Environmental Quality. Cheng is co-founder of the NYC Urban Soils Institute, member of the Healthy Soils Heathy Communities Project and the Legacy Lead Coalition. He explores a number of urban environmental sustainability issues and aims to find green and sustainable solutions for challenging environmental issues in cities. His research integrates field monitoring, lab analysis, and experiments as well as statistical analysis and computer modeling to study complex environmental problems, sometime coupled with studies on social dimensions. Most of his recent work revolves around urban soils and its roles in natural and human modified systems in New York City. He works closely with agencies and community organizations to carry out research projects. Currently his research focus is on (1) lead (Pb) contamination in urban gardens in New York City, (2) urban green infrastructure systems in New York City, and (3) beneficial use of urban solid waste materials. Professor Cheng's research has been supported by USDA, NYC DEP, US EPA, and NSF.
Miriam Deutch—Library
Miriam Deutch is associate professor in the Brooklyn College Library and director of the Brooklyn College Open Educational Resources Initiative. Her research entails studying the effectiveness of open pedagogy practices that support student engagement with the world outside the classroom and students as producers of public knowledge. She develops, supports, and assists with publishing faculty and student open scholarship and/or open educational resources for Brooklyn-related research projects, including scholarly communications guidance, and serves as the Brooklyn College Library liaison for access to Brooklyn-related content.
Beth Ferholt—Early Childhood Education/Art Education
Beth Ferholt is associate professor in the Department of Early Childhood Education/Art Education and affiliated with the CUNY Graduate Center's Program in Urban Education and Jönköping University's School of Education and Communication. Her areas of research broadly stated are development, learning, and imagination. Her work builds upon the tradition of cultural-historical activity theories. Consistent foci of her publications include playworlds, a relatively new form of adult-child joint play in which adults actively enter into the fantasy play of young children as a means of promoting the development and quality of life of both adults and children; perezhivanie, an important psychological concept in efforts to overcome the separation of cognition and emotion in the social scientific study of learning and development; early childhood education in which children are understood as culture and knowledge creators; and methods for the study of play, perezhivanie, and early childhood education. She leads the Brooklyn College-Jönköping University Student Exchange, mentoring Brooklyn College and Swedish teachers in training as they study abroad, teaches at the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center as well as the Early Childhood Education program at Brooklyn College, and creates playworlds with teachers and young children in Brooklyn Public Schools.
Madeline Fox—Children and Youth Studies/Sociology
Madeline Fox is an assistant professor of children and youth studies and sociology at Brooklyn College. Fox collaborates on critical participatory action research projects with young people and communities to investigate lived experiences of intersecting public policies, structural violence, and community power. She is a recipient of the Whiting Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities at Brooklyn College. Her writing can be found in journals such as International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Children & Society, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, and Qualitative Psychology and in volumes such as A Critical Youth Studies for the 21st Century and Critical Qualitative Research Reader. Fox co-edited the volume Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Narrative to Build Community and Make Social Justice Claims with Rickie Solinger and Kayhan Irani.
Donna Lee Granville—Sociology
Donna Granville is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. Her research and teaching interests broadly focus on symbolic and material boundaries that operate as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at all levels of social life. In her research, she studies boundaries of belonging and the notions of difference that perpetuate inequality as well as creative solutions to bridging symbolic and material divides. Current research projects incorporate her interests in race and ethnicity, citizenship and immigrant integration, and Afro-Caribbean immigrant populations. As an instructor, Granville teaches courses that are geared toward helping students of all ages and backgrounds discover how the sociological imagination empowers them to better activate and direct their agency.
Noel Hefele—Art Education
Noel Hefele is an adjunct professor for an interdisciplinary course based in Prospect Park called Human Tracks in the Urban Landscape, developed along with Associate Professor Linda Louis. He is an artist with a focus on Prospect Park and landscape painting in the era of climate change. He views painting as a type research into landscape, its human and non-human inhabitants, and its history. Shown locally, the paintings are invitations to view the lived-in landscape in a new way.
Linda Louis—Early Childhood Education/Art Education
Michael Menser—Philosophy
Michael Menser, associate professor, teaches philosophy, urban sustainability studies, and Caribbean studies at Brooklyn College and earth and environmental sciences and environmental psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Menser is community engagement advisor for the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay. He is the author of We Decide! Theories and Cases in Participatory Democracy (Temple 2018) and is a contributor to Prospects for Resilience: Insights from New York City's Jamaica Bay (Island 2016). He is founding board president of the Participatory Budgeting Project and helped launch one of the first PB processes in New York, working with the residents of Flatbush in Brooklyn.
Emily Tumpson Molina—Sociology
Emily Tumpson Molina is associate professor of sociology. Her research focuses on urban problems and policy, particularly housing, and quantitative and geographic methods. She is the author of Housing America: Issues and Debates and numerous articles on the impacts of home foreclosures on neighborhoods in the Journal of Urban Affairs, City & Community, and Housing Policy Debate. She is currently at work on "A People's Guide to New York City" (with Penny Lewis and Carolina Bank Muñoz), an alternative tour guide that documents sites of oppression, resistance, struggle, and transformation across the five boroughs.
Martha Nadell—English
Martha Jane Nadell is associate professor of English. Her first book explores the relations between image and text in African American authored texts during the first half of the 20th century. She is currently at work on a literary and visual history of Brooklyn. Nadell teaches courses in 19th- and 20th-century American literature, African American literature, the graphic novel, Brooklyn in literature, and magical realism. She is also involved with one of Brooklyn College's early college high schools, STAR HS. Her activities include fostering curricular alignment between the high school and college and leading professional development seminars about the literature and history of Brooklyn for high school teachers.
Malka Simon—Art
Malka Simon is an architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urban development in the United States and Europe. She teaches courses at Brooklyn College on the history of architecture and urban design, and on New York City's architectural development. Her research examines Brooklyn's industrial landscapes of the early 20th century. Her publications include "'The Walled City': Industrial Flux in Red Hook, Brooklyn, 1840–1920," in Buildings and Landscapes (2010), and "The Architecture of Industry: Bush Terminal and the Evolution of Industrial Form," in Rutgers Art Review (2008). She earned her doctorate from NYU's Institute of Fine Arts in 2009 with the dissertation The Space of Production: Brooklyn and the Creation of an Urban Industrial Landscape. She is currently working on a project that frames Brooklyn's industrial architecture within the broader context of New York City's outerborough landscapes.
Jocelyn Wills—History
Jocelyn Wills is a professor of history, and an affiliated faculty member of the American Studies and Women's and Gender Studies programs at Brooklyn College. Trained as an economic and social historian, Wills specializes in the history of capitalism, surveillance studies, technological innovation and historical amnesia, American dreams and realities, micro-histories of everyday strivers, and Brooklyn in the world. Deeply committed to education rooted in place and civic engagement, Wills often takes her classes to the streets, to tour neighborhoods, visit sites of history making and memory, and undertake collaborative research projects that connect the local to the global. Wills zig-zagged her way to New York from Vancouver, British Columbia, via Texas, Minnesota, and the many dotted roads that connect the contiguous United States with Canada and Mexico. Along the way, she encountered both dazzling diversity and disturbing disparities. This collision of the American promise with everyday reality informs all of her research and teaching interests. Her most recent book, Tug of War: Surveillance Capitalism, Military Contracting, and the Rise of the Security State (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), lifts the veil on a corporate world girded by powerful forces at the nexus of state, capital, and geopolitical power games, revealing the ways in which the neoliberal project turned satellites into a multi-billion-dollar commodity and outer space into a competitive, militarized zone. Her current research focuses on American boom-and-bust, and the everyday experiences of workers, consumers, and small business operators in post–Civil War Brooklyn. Wills is currently completing two book-length manuscripts: one on the 1876 Brooklyn Theatre Fire and its aftermath; and the other, a micro-history of an ordinary, Gilded Age striver.
