Fia Backström is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She represented Sweden in the Venice Biennale 2011 and was included the Whitney Biennial 2008, and Greater New York, PS1 (2016). She was the artist represented for the Artist's Institute season of fall 2015. Her work has been shown in numerous international institutional exhibitions including: MoMA (2010), White Columns (2008), and the Kitchen (2007), New York; Centre George Pompidou, Paris (2019); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019, 2010); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Baltic, Newcastle (2009); Tranzit, Prague (2008); and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2007). Her writings have been published in magazines such as Artforum, Art on Paper and North Drive Press. Her books include COOP A-Script, Primary Information (2016) and Fia Backström, Sternberg press (2011). In 2018 she received the Bernard Heidsieck Literary Prize - Centre Pompidou. She is represented by Callicoon Fine Arts in New York.

Backström studied at the University of Stockholm and Columbia University for her undergraduate studies, and received an M.F.A. from Konstfack University of College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm.

Neveen Shlayan joined the Electrical Engineering department at the Cooper Union in September 2016. Dr. Shlayan was an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York, Maritime until August 2016 where she taught power electronics and electric drives. During her tenure at SUNY, she succeeded in securing funding for multiple research projects in Intelligent Transportation Systems and Structural Health Monitoring for Offshore Structures from UTRC and American Bureau of Shipping, respectively. Previously, she worked at Philips Research North-America where she focused on developing mathematical models and applying parameter estimation techniques for large-scale lighting control of transportation systems and smart buildings. Prior to that, she was a research fellow at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology working on mesoscopic traffic simulations. In 2011, she obtained her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas conducting research in Cyber Physical Systems. She also holds a Master’s degree in Mathematics with a thesis in reconstruction of neutron density distributions.

Professor of Classics and Art History, Mary Stieber received her Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from Princeton University and an M.A. at Princeton University; B.F.A. at Carnegie Mellon; and an M.A. from the University of Pittsburgh. She has published widely on the interrelationships between Greek art and literature. Her books reflect the range of her scholarly interests: The Poetics of Appearance in the Attic Korai (2004) and Euripides and the Language of Craft (2011). A long-standing passion is Plato (and, of course, Socrates), in particular, his acquaintance with, and use of, the visual arts in the dialogues; she is currently engaged in writing an article on the artist and the Forms in the Republic. Other continuing areas of interest include Homer, Greek tragedy, and, on the Roman side, the Augustan era. The projected title of her latest book-in-progress is Paragone:  The Rivalry Among the Arts in Classical Antiquity.

Core courses:  HSS1 and HSS2

Sample Elective Courses

Greek Mythology
Eros in Antiquity
The Life and Death of Socrates
Plato’s Republic
Greek Tragedy
Homer and Greek Tragedy
The Age of Augustus
Ut Pictura Poesis
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
 

Books

The Poetics of Appearance in the Attic Korai

Euripides and the Language of Craft

Nina Ebner, Assistant Professor of Social Geography, is a feminist, urban, and economic geographer. Her research explores the uneven socio-spatial relations that shape unjust urban political economies and ecologies, with a focus on lived experiences of economic and environmental inequality and their contestation.

For nearly eight years, Nina has been based in the urban U.S.-Mexico borderlands, using transnational, qualitative, and collaborative methodologies to examine the relationship between industrialization, border militarization, the politics of economic precarity, and climate change. She has published widely on these topics in journals such as Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Economic Geography, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Global Social Policy, Third World Quarterly, NACLA, and IJURR. Nina is also working on Lives on the Line, a book project that traces the evolution of the U.S.-Mexico border region as a site of economic ‘competitiveness’ built on low-wage factory labor and border enforcement. In addition to exploring how workers use cross-border livelihood strategies to navigate economic uncertainty, she argues that the geopolitical border shapes the racialized and relational hierarchies of value that underwrite the devaluation of labor key to the borderlands’ political economy and to capitalism’s uneven development on a global scale. Alongside this book project, Nina is continuing her research on transnational geographies of social reproduction, examining how restructured social protection policies are reshaping landscapes of precarious labor in border cities. Alongside colleagues at Clark University and the University of Toronto, she is also engaged in a collaborative project that explores how urban political ecologies in the borderlands are shaping, and being shaped by, the climate crisis. This project investigates these relationships through the prism of extreme heat, with a focus on how border militarization shape municipal and community responses to new climate stressors. As a part of these projects, she has been very lucky to have learned with and from brilliant graduate and undergraduate students, and looks forward to continuing this work. Please reach out to Nina if you are a student interested in talking about working together.

Nina received her PhD from the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. She also holds an MSc in Community Development from the University of California, Davis, and a BA in Labor History from Yale University. She was previously a postdoctoral research fellow, funded by the Urban Studies Foundation, at the Colegio de México in Mexico City, in the Centro de Estudios Demográficos, Urbanos y Ambientales (CEDUA) and a postdoctoral Fellow at the UT Austin’s Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.