Learn about clusters & search for openings
Cluster initiatives represent both an opportunity and a responsibility for NYU to be a leader and a force for positive change in recruitment in higher education. By hiring, supporting, and elevating the most innovative faculty with diverse research, life experience, and a commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration, NYU enhances learning for both faculty and students. The expertise of cluster faculty will benefit generations of global researchers, professionals, citizens, and leaders.
The Center for Faculty Advancement (CFA) supports the Faculty Cluster Initiative as part of its mission to foster both individual scholars and the academic community at large by enhancing research and teaching excellence within NYU, and by promoting public engagement with the world outside of NYU.
We invite interested academics to explore the following NYU Faculty Cluster opportunities:
This cluster brings together several departments and schools across the humanities. Members of the cluster will share interests in the culture and history of Africa, Africans, and the Africa-descended people who have created a vast, culturally rich Black diaspora. This diaspora extends throughout much of the globe and has been especially influential in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions.
Primary school: Arts & Science
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of Social and Cultural Analysis | forthcoming |
This cluster seeks scholars whose work spans across four language-based literature programs in FAS. Specifically, the cluster will include scholars of African American, Lusophone and Francophone Atlantic, African, and Caribbean literatures. Literature, as an expanded field, in its intersections with other practices such as performance, cinema, music, and the arts, brings breadth and diversity to literary and cultural studies in our departments and across the university. It will enhance current conversations within and between departments about literary genealogies, blind spots in canonical approaches to literature, and the intersections with other aesthetic practices. African American and diasporic literary studies have expanded tremendously in the past decade, and remain active growth areas in the humanities. This cluster will foster this expansion by combining diverse cultural cartographies and languages.
Primary school: Arts & Science
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture | forthcoming |
| FAS Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures | Assistant Professor |
A cross-disciplinary approach is critical to creating strategies that support young people and address inequities at the intersections of education, mental health, and child welfare. This research cluster will be comprised of interdisciplinary scholars from diverse backgrounds who build on the collaboration of NYU Blueprints Progressive Change in Juvenile Justice, co-sponsored by NYU’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change (IHDSC) at NYU Steinhardt, Strategies to Reduce Inequality (SRI) initiative, and the Cross-Cutting Initiative on Inequality (CCII) initiative at NYU Silver School of Social Work. The purpose is to develop and test research-based solutions to long-lasting change in the lives of children and their families.
The research hub will bridge different perspectives from disciplinary and methodological grounding, and generate innovative, cross-cutting solutions, building on those of NYU Blueprints. The hub will be anchored by: structured mentorship, with a team made up of senior faculty from NYU Blueprints and across the Schools; and by infrastructure support from the Institute of Human Development and Social Change (Steinhardt) and Silver School of Social Work.
Primary school: Silver School of Social Work
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development | forthcoming |
The cluster brings together faculty from three diverse and multifaceted departments across the Division of Libraries: Scholarly Communications and Information Policy; Knowledge Access; and the Bern Dibner Library, which is STEM focused and part of the Brooklyn Campus; to participate in the public interest technology initiatives at New York University and beyond. Bringing together expertise in scientific data discovery, data curation and organization, open-access scholarship, digital preservation, and STEM engagement, this cluster will connect a key set of library and information science perspectives and theoretical underpinnings to heighten the impact of work already occurring across the university in the fields of education, data journalism, information and technology policy, data science, and more. The positions in this cluster build on a rich tradition of libraries centering the public good in technology development, selection, policy, and implementation, not only to facilitate access to a range of technologies, but also to bring a critical lens to their inherent limitations and biases. NYU Libraries cluster serves as a means of continuing this work while making new and exciting connections with other areas of the University active in STEM fields, including the Center for Urban Science and Progress, the Center for Data Science, PRIISM, NYU Abu Dhabi, the Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and many others.
Primary school: Division of Libraries
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| Data Services | Metadata Librarian for Science & Geospatial Data |
The traditions that have grown up around the study of antiquity have typically siloed different cultures into completely independent scholarly worlds. Yet it has become increasingly clear that this separation of ancient cultures into discrete units makes no intellectual sense. Indeed, it is a major hindrance to our proper understanding of antiquity. Comparative studies are vital if one is to appreciate and explain the interconnectedness of trade routes, literary cultures, and art and architecture, but also of how cultures evolve similarly over time due to stages of technical and social development.
This cluster will be composed of five scholars whose research, while spanning diverse disciplines and methodologies in Classics, Hebrew and Judaic Studies, East Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, and Art History, shares a commitment to the study of the ancient world and advances the field of comparative antiquities. With an eye to emerging scholarship and undertheorized lines of inquiry, the cluster will challenge and enrich established pedagogies and current conceptions of the ancient world; while also promoting a more diverse view of the ancient past. The cluster aims to attract more diverse faculty, as well as further the curiosity of students, who are introduced to the study of antiquity through the College Core Curriculum.
Primary school: forthcoming
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| forthcoming | forthcoming |
This cluster lies at the Intersection of information science, health and scientific literacy, and social justice. COVID-19’s disproportionate effect on BIPOC communities has amplified attention to inequities caused by structural racism in health care. The last eighteen months have also highlighted the rampant spread of health misinformation and the need for access to sound health and scientific information and expanded health and scientific information literacy. The three positions in this cluster will focus on equity within scientific information culture writ large, and support NYU research and curricular needs in the basic and health sciences, with an emphasis on equity, information literacy, and open scholarship. Two of the positions sit in the Libraries’ Health Sciences department and focus specifically on health equity and health information literacy, while the third position sits in the Libraries Science department, focusing on scientific literacy and open scholarship and bridging basic and health sciences disciplines. All three positions address an increased demand for health and science expertise at NYU that specifically engages with profound disparities around health and scientific literacy, access to information, and the politics of information.These positions will assist researchers with projects ranging from evidence syntheses to community science, and will support learners pursuing careers in research (whether in academia or industry) as well as professional practice.
Primary school: Division of Libraries
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| Data Services (Research & Research Services subdivision) | Research Curation LibrarIan |
Rehabilitation science, medicine, and engineering play a critical role in promoting the recovery and the well-being of patients with physical disabilities and impairments. Traditionally at NYU, collaboration between departments and schools have resulted in important therapies and interventions to help patients regain function, improve mobility, and manage chronic pain. This includes NYU Langone’s Rusk Rehabilitation Center, Steinhardt’s Center of Health and Rehabilitation Research (CoHRR), and the robotics and health engineering group at the Tandon School of Engineering.
Building on this foundation, this cluster will be composed of four research scholars from diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives, who will address health disparities, equity, and justice in rehabilitation science and engineering. With the guidance of senior mentors, and through networking and collaboration, scholars will advance their research and work together to develop innovative solutions. The goal of the cluster is to overcome significant barriers and disparities in prevention, diagnosis, and adoption of treatment, and to improve the lives of both individuals and communities.
Primary school: Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| Tandon School of Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering | forthcoming |
This cluster is composed of scholars of Native American and/or Indigenous Studies whose teaching and research explores and increases understanding of the history, the cultural and artistic traditions, and the political experiences of indigenous peoples.
Primary school: Arts & Science
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of English | forthcoming |
| FAS Department of Spanish and Portuguese | Assistant Professor in Indigenous Studies |
| Gallatin School of Individualized Study | forthcoming |
| Tisch Department of Cinema Studies | forthcoming |
Climate change disproportionately affects communities who suffer from socioeconomic inequalities, in particular people of color. Assessing the impacts of climate change, adapting to its consequences, and developing strategies for mitigating its effects requires a fundamental understanding and robust predictions of different components of the Earth’s system (atmosphere, ocean, land, and ice) and their interactions across scales. The cluster hire in climate change prediction, linking global change to impacts at the city scale to inform decision-making and planning for climate change adaptation using data science. This interdisciplinary initiative, between Courant, Tandon, and the Center for Data Science, builds on the university’s existing strengths in the sciences, including modeling global and regional climate, methods and applications of data-driven science, and environmental impacts and actions on cities. A cluster hire is necessary to include diverse disciplinary voices, create bridges between different departments at NYU already conducting impactful climate research, establish an inclusive, safe, and productive academic environment, and train the next generation of climate scientists. NYU is uniquely poised to push the boundary of existing climate prediction research, making significant and rapid advances, and taking action at the city and global scale in this critical threat of the 21st century.
Primary school: Courant Institute of Mathematical Science
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| Courant Center for Data Science | Open-rank joint faculty position |
| Courant Center for Ocean Science | Open-rank faculty position |
| Courant Department of Computer Science | forthcoming |
| Courant Department of Mathematics | Open-rank joint faculty position |
| Tandon Department of Civil and Urban Engineering | forthcoming |
As a center of urban research in the nation’s largest and most diverse city, New York University seeks faculty in history, social and cultural analysis, and sociology who are researching race and cities in the Americas. Urban areas, including New York, are home to large diasporic communities of people of African and Latin American descent whose opportunities are profoundly shaped by long histories of segregation, discrimination, and racialized injustice in policing, education, employment, and housing. Those inequalities take spatial form in metropolitan geographies, in the differential distribution of public goods and services across neighborhood and municipal lines, and in a multitude of neighborhood effects of concentrated disadvantage. At the same time, cities are places of innovation and opportunity, the result of community formation, especially the creation and reinvention of urban institutions ranging from commercial institutions to churches. To understand cities—past, present, and future—requires analyzing the processes by which people of color shaped cities, how discrimination and segregation hinders opportunities, how diasporic urbanites reinvent communities, and how insights from history and the social sciences can inform contemporary debates.
Primary school: Arts & Science
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of Social and Cultural Analysis | Assistant Professor |
The cluster was created to recruit outstanding scholars whose research addresses some of the most vexing political and social problems of our time, in alignment with NYU priority areas: anti-racism and urban environments, politics, and problems. Focusing on these areas will facilitate recruitment of scholars from underrepresented backgrounds who are innovators in our disciplines’ scholarship. Through its focus on developing a multidisciplinary network of scholars, the Race, Identity, and Inequality (RII) cluster promises to provide a more holistic perspective on these problems. The community it seeks to foster and the resources it aims to marshal promise to create a highly attractive environment for scholars working in these areas. The RII cluster will provide a network for scholars to collaborate across NYU and enhance NYU’s ability to mentor students from diverse backgrounds, thus accelerating the recruitment of young scholars into academia. The cultivation of this network will aid in retention efforts by fostering attachment to NYU’s intellectual community. Coordinating recruitment across units can yield rewards by expanding engagement in bringing outside scholars aboard, and by signaling to those scholars that their areas of research are an NYU priority. Research conducted by RII scholars is central to contemporary social sciences, and now is the time to take advantage of cross-unit efforts in faculty development.
Primary school: Arts & Science
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of Sociology | Assistant Professor (Sociology) |
Matters of representation lie at the center of research and practice in the arts today. The question of how to stand for, speak for, and depict the lives and beliefs of oneself and others is a pressing concern in the arts education curriculum. Who gets represented? Who creates the representations? Who gets left out and why? Who or what controls this depiction? What does it mean to be unrepresented? (Or overrepresented, for that matter) How does political representation align, or not, with representational diversity in culture? These questions unify disparate areas of creative work, from dance to documentary. They also span multiple fields of scholarly practice. This cluster is an innovative partnership among departments within Tisch School of the Arts, and will create a nexus of practice-led research within the School. It seeks out scholars and practitioners whose work analyzes intersections of race, gender, and identity, and shifts perception through innovative strategies of representation.
Primary school: Tisch School of the Arts
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| Tisch Department of Collaborative Arts | forthcoming |
Addressing the problems caused by anthropogenic pollution and eliminating emissions producing climate change with innovative technological solutions will require coordinated efforts from different engineering disciplines. Engineering and technology hold the key to a greener, healthier future in a world threatened by pollution and climate change. This cluster will comprise faculty with complementary expertise and the potential to collaborate and develop engineering solutions to Avoid, Mitigate, and Remediate emissions responsible for climate change and environmental contamination and, when these are not possible, find strategies to Adapt to these environmental challenges (AMRAd). The objective is to help establish an ecosystem of students, faculty, researchers, educators, and innovators spanning multiple disciplines with a passion and commitment to sustainability.
Primary school: Tandon School of Engineering
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering | forthcoming |
New York University Libraries are integral to the University’s teaching and research infrastructure, which includes support for inquiry into the problems and opportunities of urban societies. The three positions that comprise The Politics of Space: Data, the City, and Structures of Inequality cluster will enhance a University-wide engagement with urban informatics and data literacy, which are essential to understanding how cities operate, change, and thrive. Two positions are intended to bolster inquiry within specific NYU contexts: Steinhardt’s Education and Human Development programs and Stern’s Business and Economics curricula. The third position, Data Services Librarian, is situated within a Libraries’ department that fosters deeply engaged interdisciplinarity and works with many departments to enhance the research data lifecycle at NYU. This cluster anticipates a burgeoning need for information and research technology expertise for those in urban studies-adjacent disciplines at NYU, including educational sociology, educational leadership, and entrepreneurship and innovation. Cities are a register of deep-seated social inequality, often understood through quantitative data analysis and data visualization. NYU Libraries’ Politics of Space cluster looks outward and imagines expanded capacity for urban economics and education disciplines, moored by holistic support for data analysis and visualization across the disciplines at NYU.
Primary school: Division of Libraries
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| Business, Economics and Entrepreneurship | forthcoming |
| Data Services (Research & Research Services subdivision) | Research Curation LibrarIan |
The cluster was created to bring together faculty in the Libraries: Barbara Goldsmith Center for Preservation and Conservation; Research and Research Services Subdivision; Knowledge Access Department; and the Digital Scholarship Services Department. The cluster will enhance NYU Libraries’ capabilities to support academic and non-academic knowledge production in the humanities and related disciplines at NYU and beyond. The positions in this cluster build upon the advancement of the humanities. The scholarship conducted by the faculty in these cluster positions will center a transformative approach to building and sharing knowledge through critical, ethical inquiries that focus on the (in)visibility of epistemologies from historically and continuously underrepresented communities. The practicality of this cluster’s work will reside in fostering knowledge creation, identifying and acknowledging current and pre-existing knowledge, and focusing on the relationships between the academy and those communities most implicated by any particular area or approach to knowledge creation. The goal of this cluster is to build a transformative humanities that exists beyond the bounds of what has been known as traditional epistemological processes in the interest of more equitable shared knowledge.
Primary school: Division of Libraries
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| Archival Collections Management | forthcoming |
| Preservation | forthcoming |
| Research and Research Services | Librarian for Music |
Together with climate change, increasing urbanization presents a key global challenge for the twenty-first century. 83% of the US population currently lives in cities, and 68% of the world’s population is projected to live in cities by 2050. Increasing urbanization impacts issues from social inequity to the underlying biology of the environment within cities and beyond, and presents an intensifying challenge to an ecologically vital and socially just urban future. With a major presence in New York and 14 other major cities across the globe, we believe that NYU is ideally positioned to galvanize cutting edge research to better understand urban environmental changes, and the social processes that produce and maintain urban social inequality.
Primary school: Arts & Science
| Participating departments/units | Apply via Interfolio |
|---|---|
| FAS Department of Biology | forthcoming |
| FAS Department of English | Assistant Professor of Environmental Literary Studies and Environmental Humanities |
| FAS Department of Environmental Studies | forthcoming |
In addition to the above Cluster Hire opportunities, we invite you to search for other job openings at NYU.
Recruitment Goals & Objectives
The Faculty Cluster Initiative follows these goals and objectives to recruit new faculty to NYU.
Advance NYU’s priorities to significantly increase the proportion of underrepresented groups among NYU’s full-time faculty.
- Emphasize diverse research, life experience, commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration, dedication to building inclusive educational environments, and commitment to public engagement.
- Highlight the importance of modeling support and mentorship for students, researchers, and other faculty from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, and build NYU’s capacity to positively impact the world.
Intentionally support faculty retention & interdisciplinary collaboration.
- Build and sustain a vibrant community of scholars.
- Incentivize intellectual engagement, professional development and advancement, social and emotional support, and the ability to engage in and produce cooperative research and scholarship.
Distinguish NYU as an innovative leader in research and scholarship that addresses some of the most urgent, complex, and persistent scientific, social and political challenges of our time.
- Build a critical mass of faculty with diverse expertise, research backgrounds, methodological training, underrepresented perspectives, interdisciplinary focuses, and connections to communities of concern.
Promote NYU as a leader in teaching and learning through diversity, inclusion, belonging and equity.
- Create an educational environment where diversity, inclusion, belonging, and equity are integral to teaching and learning beyond the learning environment itself.
- Pedagogical practices that value curriculum accessible to, and understood by, diverse learners, cultures, and critical thinkers of all backgrounds enhances teaching and learning across disciplines.
Expand NYU’s global impact.
- Enable cluster faculty to secure greater external research funding, develop public and private partnerships, and increase public visibility for research outcomes.
Facilitate opportunities for faculty along with undergraduate and graduate students to engage with community organizations that focus on:
- inequality;
- the urban environment;
- climate science, sustainability and environmental justice;
- artificial intelligence and public interest technology; and
- other issues that align with established and new university priorities.
Change the culture of faculty search and recruitment.
- Create a new norm by which NYU departments, schools, colleges, campuses and the University as a whole recruit, develop and advance faculty.
Why join the NYU faculty?
