Maria E. Montoya has been NYU Shanghai’s new Dean of Arts and Sciences since June. As a tenured member of NYU's history faculty for almost a decade, Montoya also knows NYU Shanghai well, after teaching at the campus as an affiliated professor during the 2014-15 academic year. Author of forthcoming U.S. history textbook, Global Americans: A History of the United States, Montoya is also an…
Spotlight
As world leaders gather in Hangzhou on Sunday for a first-ever G20 Summit in China, scholars from NYU Shanghai have responded with stimulating insights on a broad range of pressing global concerns most likely to be raised during the convention.
As host for this year’s summit, China has highlighted innovation as the main theme. During the two-day conference, leaders…
NYU Shanghai Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology Li Li and her students have discovered a silver lining in an activity that many parents approach with caution -- it turns out playing action games such as “Mario Kart” or “Unreal Tournament” can significantly sharpen a person’s visual motor…
To what degree can technology help save cultural heritage, endangered by encroaching development activities? The answer might be ambivalent. However, as bulldozers and cranes draw near, NYU Shanghai’s Richard Lewei Huang ‘17 created a virtual replica -- “Cardboard Shikumen” -- of his disappearing Shikumen hometown…
NYU Shanghai's Professor Chen, an expert on the history of the Cold War and Sino-US relations, gives a TV lecture on the evolution of relations between the two countries, from total confrontation to a “tacit alliance” during 1950-80s.
At a recent Faculty Lunch Seminar Series, Ye Lu, who teaches Chinese at NYU Shanghai, talked about the history of Chinese characters. The following exchange grew out of that presentation.
Is it difficult to teach Chinese?
What can technology tell us about human nature? At a recent Faculty Lunch Speaker Series talk, Assistant Arts Professor Roopa Vasudevan presented “Technology as Anthropology” and talked about how the digital footprint of various demographics, communities, and cultures reveal ingrained behaviors, belief systems, and views of others. Her tech-blended art projects (whether algorithmically picking…
For centuries, Antarctica, the land of ice and penguins, mysteries and extremes, has been drawing a growing stream of adventurers, now in the thousands. While many only imagine the extreme cold from their TV screens, Zhang Jun, professor of physics and mathematics at NYU Shanghai, flew across the globe, hopped on an icebreaker and embarked on an epic expedition to the remote…
In an example of innovative scholarship, recently published in Neuron, Chuck Kopec, Jeffrey Erlich (now at NYU Shanghai), and Bingni Brunton (now at University of Washington), working in Carlos Brody’s lab at Princeton University, took advantage of optogentics, a new tool developed by co-author Karl Deisseroth (Stanford…
Armin Selbitschka, Assistant Professor of Ancient History, talked about his research on early Chinese notions of the afterlife, at last week’s NYU Shanghai Faculty Lunch Seminar Series. The Gazette caught up with him to talk about his work and learned about his own path to teaching.
Where did the interest in China’s ancient cemeteries come from?
Global Perspectives on Society Teaching Fellow Non Arkaraprasertkul was recently published in Macau’s Revista de Cultura (Journal of Culture) with his article “The Death and Life of Shanghai's Alleyway Houses: Re-thinking Community and Historic Preservation. ” The following exchange reflects related insights and personal experience having lived in a lilong, or alleyway house.
At a recent Faculty Lunch Seminar Series, Professor Joel Bernstein talked about his experience as an expert witness over the past two decades. The following exchange grew out of that presentation.
A study by Interim Dean of Arts and Science David Fitch and the Fitch lab was recently published in the journal Development, on the discovery of a new gene that helps to regulate the timing of the "juvenile-to-adult transition" or the "J/A" transition.
In mammals, the J/A transition is often called puberty, but the J/A occurs in most other animals…
Most of us have been told by a teacher or parent, “If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas” or (近朱者赤、近墨者黑) -- basically, ‘one takes the color of one’s company.’ It turns out this is also true of antisocial behavior and depression among adolescents, who gradually spend more and more parentally unsupervised time being influenced for greater or for worse, by their friends.
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At a recent Faculty Lunch Speaker Series, Lena Scheen, whose research explores the social and cultural impact of China’s fast urbanization, focusing on Shanghai, talked about stumbling on a Pudong construction site that used to be where a 500-year-old temple stood. Fascinated by a group of elderly visitors who frequently pray and burn incense in front of the construction site, Scheen shared…