Author, Senior Advisor on Transformation (CUNY), Founding Director of the Futures Initiative and Distinguished Professor of English
City University of New York
Cathy N. Davidson is the Senior Advisor on Transformation to the Chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is also Founding Director of the Futures Initiative and Distinguished Professor of English, as well as the M.A. in Digital Humanities and the M.S. in Data Analysis and Visualization programs at the Graduate Center (CUNY). The author or editor of over twenty books, she has taught at a range of institutions, from community college to the Ivy League. She held two distinguished professorships at Duke University, where she taught for twenty-five years, and also became the university’s (and the nation’s) first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. She is cofounder and codirector of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC.org, known as “Haystack”), the “world’s first and oldest academic social network,” founded in 2002. Davidson’s many prizewinning books include the classics Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America and Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (with photographer Bill Bamberger). Most recently, she has concentrated on the science of learning in the “How We Know” Trilogy: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn; The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux; and, co-authored with Christina Katopodis, The New College Classroom (due August 2022). Davidson has won many awards and grants including from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, NEH, NSF, and the MacArthur Foundation. Most recently, the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences presented Davidson with its annual Advocacy Award. She has served on the board of directors of Mozilla, was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Council on the Humanities, and has twice keynoted the Nobel Prize Committee’s Forum on the Future of Learning.
Author, Postdoctoral Research Associate and the Associate Director of Transformative Learning in the Humanities
City University of New York (CUNY)
Christina Katopodis, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and the Associate Director of Transformative Learning in the Humanities, a three-year initiative at the City University of New York (CUNY) supported by the Mellon Foundation. She is the winner of the 2019 Diana Colbert Innovative Teaching Prize and the 2018 Dewey Digital Teaching Award. She has authored or co-authored articles published in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, MLA’s Profession, Hybrid Pedagogy, Inside Higher Ed, and Times Higher Ed. With Cathy N. Davidson, Katopodis is author of The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press, forthcoming August 30, 2022), a book that, in effect, draws from bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Paolo Freire to offer practical examples and extensive research on how to actually do active, equitable, inclusive teaching in any classroom, any discipline, at any kind of university, in both introductory and specialized classes. While Katopodis was a doctoral student, she co-founded and co-directed Better to Speak, an advocacy group for women and gender-nonconforming adjuncts, and she co-founded Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities, an organization the offers activist resources and reading lists that can be incorporated into any syllabus. She also managed the “Progressive Pedagogy Group” on HASTAC.org, which features a live crowd-sourced bibliography of readings about critical pedagogy. She currently serves on the boards of three professional literary associations and two of their racial justice committees. Her book project, “Sound Ecologies: Listening to America’s Literary Vibrations from Margaret Fuller to Standing Rock,” centers environmental studies on sound, calling attention to how sounds occupy and claim territory, influencing the health and vitality of local and global soundscapes. Reading across genres, bodies, and public and private spaces, Katopodis reimagines common reading practices in literary studies to attend to the evolution of sound’s function in the American literary and physical landscape. Her website, “The Walden Soundscape,” which received the 2018 Digital Dissertation Award from the New Media Lab at CUNY, examines changing literary insights and representations of human and nonhuman sounds before and after the advent of sound recording technology. Her work has been supported by the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society and the National Science Foundation, and numerous grants from her home institution.
