Edition 5 - April 2016

FACULTY NEWSLETTER

Michael Newman, War, Peace and World Order, has released a new book, Six Authors in Search of Justice: Engaging with Political Transitions. This book seeks to makes an original and readable contribution to defining the nature of justice in the aftermath of a repressive regime. While considering transitional justice as conven-tionally defined, this work explores broader conceptions of justice and is distinct in approaching the subject through a discussion of the lives and works of six writers: Victor Serge in Stalinist Russia, Albert Camus in Vichy France, Jorge Semprún in Spain under Franco, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in colonial and post-colonial Kenya, Ariel Dorfman in Chile under Pinochet, and Nadine Gordimer in apartheid South Africa. Each lived under a brutal regime,

was prepared to take substantial risks in order to contribute to its overthrow, and survived a transition to a new regime. Each thought deeply about the evolving situation with viewpoints derived from a combination of lived experience and intellectual and artistic creation. Each illuminated key questions with reference to a particular country, while developing wider insights. The book demonstrates that their writings provide a valuable addition to academic analysis and external policy advice that too often fails to take sufficient account of reflective understanding, social and cultural contexts and the specificity of each situation. It also highlights the evolving and multi-dimensional nature of justice and injustice in political transitions.

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: MICHAEL NEWMAN

In March 2015, I was honoured to represent NYU London, along with Eliya Ribak, Cultural Foundations, at the Global Faculty Symposium on "The Material Archive: The Politics of Provenance, Preservation, and Place”, kindly hosted by NYU Florence. The densely-packed two days included a full programme of papers around the subjects of muse-ums, display, archives, preservation and presentation.

Brilliantly organized and chaired by archaeologist and Gallatin Assistant Professor Hallie Franks and Patrick McCreery, it was a stimulating and productive gathering of interesting ideas and people. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting and working with the diverse group of faculty and made some good friendships with an excellent group

of colleagues from a number of global sites, including New York. Each faculty member submitted an essay on the wider subject and these were grouped into three discussions sessions: Collect, Archive and Display. I led the Display session and introduced questions about the role of purpose-built museum architecture or house museums in representing or shaping the philosophy of museum content; the importance of context in how we understand or engage with a collection; and the risks to the preserva-tion of collections when a museum undergoes a change of fortunes or an unresolved battle of ideologies. The assembled faculty with a wide range of expertise and experiences made each session both fun and thought-provoking. The setting of our discussion was extraordinary and it was a real treat for us to study and enjoy the architecture, landscape and collection at Villa La Pietra. It was also strange to discover that my great grandparents' family name from Florence – Capponi – were the family that owned the house for 300 years! The tiny room of recently restored, ornithologically-correct frescoes of birds dating from the 1740s was a particular delight. We chatted with NYU London conservation students who were engaged in hands-on work to protect the dresses of the glamorous Hortense Mitchell Acton, who owned the villa in the early twentieth century.

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GLOBAL FACULTY SYMPOSIUM AT NYU FLORENCE Emily Gee, Seeing London’s Architecture

FACULTY NEWSLETTER April 2016 02

It was a great symposium that wove together a number of ideas and subjects in an imaginative way. I also found it valuable for gaining a better understanding of NYU and its global sites that will certainly enrich my relationship with NYU London students. At the end, we managed some quick visits to take in the remarkable architectural history of Florence, the cathedral of course, and also Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti (1419-27). The connection of this to the eighteenth century Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury, a minute’s walk from NYU London, was a poignant reminder of the international resonance of social history and museums, which empha-sised the importance of just this sort of symposium.

GLOBAL FACULTY SYMPOSIUM AT NYU FLORENCE (CONT.) (continued from page 1)

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: BENEDICT O’LOONEY

Benedict O’Looney, Seeing London’s Architecture, is a few weeks away from completing a new project in South London – a women’s and children’s wing for the Croydon Mosque. It opens during this year’s Ramadan festival in June.

The Croydon Mosque is one of the biggest mosques in Britain and they have developed their site in in Croydon in three phases since the 1980s. In 2011 Benedict was commissioned to design a new wing and worked up a project that attempts to harmonize traditional Islamic architecture with London’s familiar brick Victorian and Edwardian public buildings. A particular reference point is London’s Victorian Board Schools with their daylight-filled interiors and decorative brickwork.

This new building will be filled with activity: at the ground level, is the new men’s wudhu (bathing area), loos and a last rites, (janazah) room. Above this are the ladies’ wudhu and meeting spaces. Occupying the top two floors of this building is a bright, day-lit double height prayer room reserved for women and children.

The building attempts to be as open and welcoming as possible. Its brickwork comprises banded stripes of yel-low & red bricks from Leicestershire, and the main win-dows have traditional clay tiled arches as in Roman archi-tecture.

The theme of familiar, natural and vernacular materials is carried on inside by exposing the south wall structure and the underside of the laminated timber roof. Between the main load-bearing timbers, painted timber slats fol-low the arcing line of the curved and inclined roof.

The next stages of work in Croydon will be to make a long mosaic frieze to the front elevation with Arabic and Eng-lish script, and to build a free-standing minaret to the front of the Croydon Mosque ensemble of buildings.

The international spirit of NYU London is echoed in the eclectic influences of this new project for Croydon!

FACULTY NEWSLETTER April 2016 03

Sabbatical is still an amazing privilege of our profession,

writes Vince Mitchell, Introduction to Marketing.

Whilst away from NYU London in Spring 2015 on sabbati-

cal from Cass, I’ve was working hard on earning the privi-

lege of being allowed to take sabbatical. Although six

months isn’t a long time, it is enough time to move big

projects forward and to gain a wider perspective on the

daily research and education issues that we all face. My

main tool gaining psychological perspective was to have a

different physical perspective by exploring the burgeoning

Asian education market with extensive trips to Taipei,

Bangkok, Beijing, Hong Kong and Hanoi to visit establish-

ments such as; the University of Shenzhen, Chinese Uni-

versity of Hong Kong and the British University of Vietnam.

Three things struck me. First, the entrepreneurial spirit

and practice of these Asian countries which far outstrips

anything we have in the UK. Second, was the refreshing

nature of the communal aspects of more caring collectivist

cultures, coming from the individualistic and masculine-

dominated UK. Third, the quality, variety and value of

Asian cuisine was a daily mouth-watering indulgence of

the senses which fuelled me to focus on publishing a cou-

ple of papers on ongoing research projects including;

‘Consumer captivity within service contexts; how consum-

ers prepare and react to them’, ‘Why should I attend? The

value of business networking events’ and ‘The effect of

peers vs parents on ethical attitudes towards the internet

of Generation Y consumers’.

In addition, I engaged in some more practitioner-based

work and chaired two industry conferences on ‘From big

data to smart data’ and a cross-industry conference on

‘Data analysis to Data Insight’ together with undertaking a

research project for the Marketing Society (the UK’s lead-

ing practitioner community) looking at over 100 winning

case studies over the last 30 years of their awards to ana-

lyse trends and changes within marketing practice. I was

busy too developing new educational materials including;

a new course on cross-cultural consumption which I deliv-

ered at the Wirtshaftuniversitat, Vienna, a paper on ‘Why

study Marketing?’ for students thinking about subject

choices and attending a Harvard Business School seminar

on teaching the case method. Finally, I had my acting

debut in a promotional video for our newly launched MSc

Marketing, Strategy and Innovation at Cass. To make your-

self smile, check out the video at https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fvu7WZpers.

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: VINCE MITCHELL

Peter Cave, Central Problems of Philosophy, released a

new book in October 2015 (published in November 2015

in the States), The Big Think Book: Discover Philosophy

Through 99 Perplexing Problems. He has also written a

chapter on 'Death as Annihilation' in The Wiley Blackwell

Handbook of Humanism, edited by Copson and Grayling

and released in May 2015.

Clive Bloom, Gothic Literature and Cultural Foundations,

recently published Thatcher's Secret War: Subversion,

Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974-90, which has

been nominated for the Bread and Roses Prize for out-

standing radical book of 2015. He has also been invited to

become a patron of Searchlight Research Associates, the

Anti-Fascist magazine, as well as a member of the Interna-

tional Conference of Beliefs and Behaviour In Education

and Culture. Later in the year he will be giving Keynote

addresses at both the University of Timisoara in Romania

and Trinity Dublin.

Vijay Chudasama, Organic Chemistry I, was highlighted by

Chemical Communications as one of their Emerging

Investigators for 2015, in a recent special issue. He was a

keynote speaker at the ADC Summit, presented at PEGS

Europe in Lisbon last year, and recently gave invited pres-

entations at GSK and Imperial College London. He is now

part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training

Network (ITN) in Chemical Biology.

In 2015 Phillip Drummond, British Cinema, was the

external Panel Member on the Quinquennial Review of

the vibrant School of Film and Media at the University of

Lincoln. He edited The London Film & Media Reader 3: The

Pleasures of the Spectacle, a collection of 60 essays from

The Annual London Film & Media Conference, published

as an e-book by The London Symposium. In the current

academic year he is speaking at conferences in Britain,

France and Italy organised by New York University in

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FACULTY NEWS

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FACULTY NEWSLETTER April 2016 04

London, the British Association for Film, TV, and Screen

Studies, the Société de recherches sur le cinéma

anglophone, Academic Conferences London, and the

Mediterranean Studies Association. In July 2016 he will

direct FILM & MEDIA 2016: The Fifth Annual London Film

& Media Conference - Questions of Cultural Value and in

the course of the year will publish a further edited

collection, The London Film & Media Reader 4: Visions of

Identity – Global Film & Media. In Fall 2016 he will launch

a new collaborative course on World War 1 with

colleagues in Washington Square.

Clive Gabay, World Politics, has published a new book with Lexington, Exploring an African Civil Society: Development and Democracy in Malawi 1994-2014. He has also received a two year research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (£175,000) for a project entitled 'Historicising Contemporary Africa Rising Narratives'. Scott Kelly’s, British Politics, latest pamphlet, ‘Raising productivity by improving higher technical education: Tackling the Level 4 and Level 5 conundrum’, was published by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) in July 2015. He also wrote an article on the same subject for the Guardian’s Higher Education Network, also published last July. Trino Manuel-Ñinguez, International Economics, has recently published three articles: Ñíguez, T. M., and

Perote, J. 2016. Multivariate Moments Expansion: Application of the Dynamic Equicorrelation Model. Journal of Banking and Finance, forthcoming. DOI: 1.1016/j.bankfin.2015.12.012 Ñíguez, T. M. 2016. Evaluating Monthly Volatility Forecasts using Proxies at Different Frequencies. Finance Research Letters, forthcoming. DOI: 10.1016/j.frl.2016.01.008 Ñíguez, T. M., Paya, I., Peel, D., and Perote, J. 2015. Higher-Order Risk Preferences, Constant Relative Risk Aversion and the Optimal Portfolio Allocation. Working Paper 1520. Bank of Spain. ISSN: 1779-8666 (online) Sophie Von Stumm, Personality, is launching moo-Q, a

new scientific iPhone application with her lab that allows

people to track their mood and brainpower over time.

moo-Q is available for free in the iPhone app store, for

more information visit http://www.hungrymindlab.com/

moo-q/. She has also won a Rising Star Award by the

Association for Psychological Science (APS) in December

2015. The award recognizes early career researchers who

have already made a contribution to psychological sci-

ence and also show great promise.

Emma Sweeney, Creative Writing, has a new novel, Owl Song at Dawn, which has been acquired by Legend Press. The press release can be found here: https://emmaclairesweeney.com/2015/10/15/owl-song-at-dawn

FACULTY NEWS (CONT.)

TEACHING CASES THE HARVARD WAY Vince Mitchell

Here I share some of my learning and observations from attending a recent seminar on case teaching by Harvard Business School while on my sabbatical. Let’s assume you’ve chosen a good case which is of interest to students, relevant to the course learning outcomes, and at the right level of complexity. First, a key ingredient to successful case teaching is not only knowing the way you want the case discussion to go and pre-writing out board plans- which will appear on the walls of your classroom as the case unfolds- but also getting students to preflect and reflect. Preflection comes in two forms, individual preparation and group analysis, both of which can be incentivised by having to hand in a preliminary case analysis, marked or unmarked, prior to class. The bulk of the thinking comes during the class discussion, hence it is important for everyone to follow the discussion. Here, there needs to be an explicit shifting of the learning contract from independence to interde-

pendence, i.e., from self to between students, such that they see it as part of their job to help other students un-derstand using their knowledge and experience. Impor-tantly for experiential learning, though, is to give time for reflection on case issues which again can be done indi-vidually or in groups and can be incentivised through the allocation of marks for written reflections. Making sure students work diligently in all the elements is essential to a good case learning experience. Second, is to give particular thought to the set questions you will ask because cases have multiple ways of being interpreted and the questions you ask can also be a set of instructions to guide student thinking. For example, ‘What’s the problem here?’ gives no instruction to the student, but ‘What’s the marketing problem for John?’ frames and focuses their thinking and the subsequent discussion. ‘What’s the marketing problem for John, but

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FACULTY NEWSLETTER April 2016 05

UPCOMING EVENTS

We welcome updates from faculty regarding upcoming academic events,

please email details to academics@nyu.ac.uk

let’s not consider the budgeting decisions’ can also help them in what not to look at. To engage students more, asking a specific student to pretend to be John and then asking the question, intensifies the debate. Questions tend to be open ended towards the beginning of a case and closed towards the end, but you can reverse it by asking a closed ended question to get students to take a position initially, like ‘who would launch now as opposed to delay’ and then use the two polarised groups to unpick their stances and discuss the underlying reasons for their choice. Third, is the case teacher skill in responding which sometimes requires unlearning the habit that every com-ment requires the lecturer to give a wordy response. Sometimes, a gesture or acknowledgement, asking the class to comment, restating the comment for clarification, pushing the idea to an extreme, or simply saying nothing, can all to be used instead of giving your opinion. Fourth is to understand that students can become frustrated and even confused with the analysis. However, this confusion is the glue on which, when the theory or framework solution is poured later, the theory will stick. The less the frustration and working the problem, the less impact the framework, theory or solution will have. At this stage, it’s not a bad technique to go sometimes into ‘meta comment’ mode and explore what’s happening in the learning process in the class room to help students understand and stay with the case journey. Fifth, at least from a student perspective, is the frustration that there isn’t one answer, there are many right ones. This puts more emphasis on the way of arriving at solutions and what the characteristics of good solutions are, such as that they use evidence and reason well and consider all the important factors. What can also be helpful here is to at least identify some wrong solu-tions during the discussion and explain why. Sixth, some consider that cases are theoretical. In good case executions theory is taught inductively, i.e., stu-

dents, together with your guidance in the closure of the case, derive generalisable principles from the specific de-tails. However, case method can sometimes fall down because not all cases produce generalisable principles, which is why the instructor might have to add frame-works or theory to the case to beef up the learnings dur-ing the case sum up. Alternatively, a short theory/framework lecture could be given after the case discussion covering the relevant ideas which could be used to help come up with and justify suggested solutions for the case. Of course, even without this, the students have had experience of working through problems with the aid of group discussion and an experienced facilitator. Seventh, is out of date cases as perceived by students. Here you can rightly insist the learnings are still relevant, rather than defensively defending the use of a 1980s case, the suggestion is to find a really old case from 50, 100 or even 200 years ago and show how it can be useful in teaching us lessons. Then the criticism of irrelevance diminishes and relatively speaking, your 1980’s case is really quite new. This, together with some very recent cases, should address most students’ concerns. Finally, as the case method is highly didactic, it exposes the relationship between lecturer and the class like few other teaching techniques. To keep this on track, Harvard advocate some quick feedback during the course. One quick, simple and effective mid-course feedback technique is to ask students to anonymously write down in three minutes one thing you should quit doing, start doing and keep doing. Another easy one which is more about the course- rather than about you- is one thing you like, one thing to improve and one thing you’d like to know. Since students, like many of us, often think that their opinion is generally shared and therefore more important, one way of dealing with conflicting student feedback is to show the dilemma, e.g., 20% class said cases were too hard, and 25% said they were too easy, so what should I do? This not only shows students that their opinion isn’t generally shared, but also shows why you can’t do much about it without upsetting part of the class.

TEACHING CASES THE HARVARD WAY (CONT.) (continued from page 4)