Information for Prospective PhD students

I'm delighted that we're starting a PhD program, and we look forward to welcoming our first students in 2025. All of the details about the program and application are available here (see the FAQ, in particular).

You do NOT need to contact me in advance of applying, although you are welcome to. If I do not reply, or reply slowly or with minimal detail, please do not take that as a lack of interest. I am on leave through January 2025 and am trying to focus on writing.

How our program works

Our program does not admit students to work with particular faculty. We admit as a department. You will have time during the first year to get to know everyone in the department, including me, and decide who you would like to ask to be your advisor. I encourage you to read papers from various faculty and be sure that you can imagine putting together a cohesive committee of faculty (within and beyond the department) whose interests and expertise could help you develop your own unique project. In your application, I encourage you also to explicitly mention the ways in which your proposed work and interests connect to faculty in our department as well as in NYU more broadly.

Why do you want to work with me, and why our program?

If you're not sure whether our program might be a fit for you, but you are particularly interested in working with me, I would be happy to answer any questions you have. But please, when writing, let me know why you’d like to work with me. What about my methodological approach or topical interests that overlaps with your own proposed PhD project? You don’t have to have read all my work in detail, but skimming over it will help make our exchange more fruitful. Please also describe, in your email, what you’d specifically like to work on for your PhD, in broad terms. It does not yet have to be a fully developed proposal (that’s what your committee is there to help you with in the early years!), but it has to be clear you have an idea – and that your idea fits with our departmental expertise.

Please don’t just send me a list of your accomplishments - I want to know about what you want to do in our program, and how it fits with my own expertise and that of the broader department.

My advising interests

I am not looking for students working on a particular subject or project; indeed, I do not have a research group, and if admitted to our program, you would be developing your own, fully independent research project.

Broadly, however, I would be most excited to advise students who are seriously interested in humanistic and critical inquiry into environmental issues, even if it only forms part of a broader, interdisciplinary project. This does not necessarily mean that you must be interested in conducting primarily ethnographic or archival research as I do – I would love to work with students that straddle the boundaries between the humanities, natural/social science, and engineering. But it does mean I would be most enthusiastic about students interested in inductive forms of inquiry that do not presuppose the coherence of the objects and concepts they seek to study (e.g. “pollution” or “efficiency”), but rather interrogate the very construction of those objects and concepts. I'm particularly interested in work that seeks to understand and address the root causes of environmental inequality and injustice, in any form, time, or place, as well as work that seeks to imagine alternative modes of existing on our damaged planet.

My current work is focused on the politics and political economy of disasters and their relationship to engineering and infrastructure in urban spaces. But at the broadest level, I'm interested in the interrelationships between society, technology, and the environment.

I am also especially interested in working with students who are underrepresented in the U.S. professoriate and students from the global South. I am serious about professionalization and would do my best to set my students up for success in any career path they choose, regardless of their background coming into the PhD.