8 NYU professors

It’s that time again: new classes, new teachers, a fat bill from the bookstore and you’re already fighting the urge to skip your 8 a.m. recitation. But this year, after reading up on your profs on RateMyProfessors.com, take a look at some of the best and brightest new professors NYU has to offer. From an NYU grad who has returned to his former haunts half a century later to the acclaimed author of “Everything is Illuminated,” these eight distinguished professors will be researching, teaching class and making their intellectual homes right here on Washington Square.

Samuel Howard-Spink
Age: 36
NYU Department: Steinhardt Department of Media, Culture and Communication
Education: Bristol University (B.A.), Hunter College (M.A.)
Hometown: London
Most Recently Was: Working for his Ph.D. at NYU

Samuel Howard-Spink is a gaming geek turned music business professor by day, hip-hop spinning DJ by night.

Howard-Spink, a new music business professor, said that NYU students aren’t likely to find him playing his mash-ups at local bars — but it’s not impossible.

Drawn to New York by his hip-hop obsession, Howard-Spink left London to teach in the Big Apple. Also a confessed video game junkie, he is finding new ways to incorporate his interest in multimedia interactivity in the classroom. This semester, his students will be gaining hands-on experience in the music and gaming industries. 

“We are going to play and discuss the resurrection of bands by integrating their work with games,” said Howard-Spink. “Guitar Hero saved rock ’n’ roll.”

After years of working as a journalist, Howard-Spink gave up his full-time music writing gig to get a master’s degree. Going back to school, he said, kept him busy until the American music industry stopped suing their customers and found new ways to capitalize on music distribution. 

Currently, he is working on his Ph.D. dissertation at NYU on copyright and the globalization of the music industry. Research for the project recently brought him to Brazil, which he said is the coolest country he’s researched. Picture a 6-foot-plus Brit jamming to nouveau Bossa Nova beats in Rio and you’ll get a taste of Samuel Howard-Spink’s life.

— Amanda Sakuma


Samuel Rascoff
Position: Assistant Professor
NYU Department: NYU School of Law
Age: 35
Hometown: New Rochelle, N.Y.
Education: Harvard, Oxford, Yale
Research interests: Counterterrorism policy

On Sept. 11, 2001, Samuel Rascoff was heading towards NYU’s School of Law. It was his second day of work as a postdoctoral research fellow.

“When I got close to Washington Square Park, I noticed a large group of people pointing in amazement as they looked downtown on LaGuardia Place,” he said. “It wasn’t until one of them mentioned the words ‘second plane’ that I myself looked up and immediately realized what was going on.”  

Seven years later, Rascoff has combined his two passions — law and counterterrorism — at his current position as an assistant professor. This semester, he is teaching a course called “Counterterrorism and the National Security Constitution,” which will let him draw on his counterterrorism expertise.

Rascoff has held a number of notable jobs in both of his areas of interest, including a clerkship for a Supreme Court Justice and the director of the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division.

Rascoff has spent his career shaping counterterrorism efforts, both locally and nationally. With the NYPD, he worked to create an intelligence unit from scratch. In an advisory capacity, Rascoff has worked with various governmental organizations to expand their institutional knowledge of other languages and cultures. And as far as his first few classes in his latest gig? “So far, so great,” Rascoff said with a grin.

— Jane C. Timm


Matthew Rockman
Position: Assistant Professor
NYU Department: Biology
Age: 33
Hometown: San Francisco, Calif.
Education: Yale (B.S.), Duke (Ph.D.)
Research interests: Evolution, variation, genetics

Matthew Rockman seemed surprised to be chosen for this list, but he shouldn’t be. After a postdoctoral research fellowship with the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund at Princeton University, he brings experience and credibility to the biology department’s Center for Genomics, and he does it with humility and humor. Working from a brightly lit Brown Building lab, he starts full-time this week, but has been in and around campus since May getting settled into his new office and starting his research.

Why did Rockman choose NYU? “This department and the Center for Genomics have been really unusually successful in creating and fostering a collaborative research setting. And everyone says that about their department, but it’s actually true here,” he said. “That’s actually quite unusual.”

For the 2008-09 academic year Rockman will focus on his genomic research, but in fall 2009 he will begin teaching — a first for the 33-year-old scientist.

Working with genomes, Rockman and his collaborators have explored the relationship between development and evolution and have pinpointed genes that have changed based on natural selection in humans. Now Rockman is leaving the human species and moving on to a tiny worm called Caenorhabditis elegans, a life-form which he published a paper on in late August, expounding on natural selection in its mating habits.

When asked what fact Rockman wouldn’t want out, Rockman’s lab technician, Max Cramer, revealed a tidbit that few Manhattanites offer up willingly: “He has an inexhaustible knowledge of things to do in New Jersey,” he said, glancing at his boss.

Rockman nodded. It’s the Jersey bias, he said, that “keeps the prices low.”

— Jane C. Timm


Jonathan Safran Foer
Age: 31
Position: Collegiate Professor
Dept. at NYU: Creative Writing
Education: Princeton University (B.A.)
Hometown: Washington D.C.

Jonathan Safran Foer was just like a lot of you; he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. “I didn’t want to go home every day and have to question whether I did anything important,” he said.

This New York Times bestselling author of “Everything is Illuminated” didn’t even start writing until he came to college, and he largely attributes his passion to a creative writing professor he had while attending Princeton University. “She didn’t have to teach,” he said. “She didn’t need the money or anything else, but teaching filled out her writing life.”

Foer is now looking to do the same at NYU, where he will be joining the Creative Writing Program this fall.

He knows what it is like to be a struggling writer. His big break did not come until after some struggles with a lack of willing agents and publishers. “I wasn’t expecting to finish my first book, much less get recognized for it,” he said.

Foer is now a leading contemporary author with a sense of humility; he strives to share his enthusiasm for writing. “I am in awe of other writers and the incredible amount of energy they have,” he said.

It is that kind of energy that Foer is looking to bring into his classroom. “I want the class to be something to look forward to,” he said. “I know what it’s like to waste hours in a classroom, but I also remember the feeling of counting time backwards looking forward to the next class.”

— Amanda Sakuma


Jason Samuels
Position: full-time faculty
NYU Department: Journalism
Hometown: Upper West Side
Research Interests: developing a newsmagazine for ESPN called E:60

When WSN interviewed Samuels last week, he hadn’t finished moving into NYU. There were no nameplates labeling his office, no pictures on his desk, no books on the shelf. It was the first day of orientation, and Samuels blended in well with the crowd of anxious people soaking in all of the new information.

“I think the orientation was just as much of a help for me as it was for the students,” he said afterward.

The prospect of sitting down with an Emmy award-winning journalist who is the former senior producer of “ABC World News with Charles Gibson” is terrifying for a young journalist, but Samuels is easy to talk to. He is precise and articulate but still relaxed and down-to-earth, even pulling out his iPhone to show off pictures of his 6-month-old son.

Passionate for his craft and eager to start teaching, Samuels has many goals for his students that go beyond the major networks he used to work for.

“I want to instill the importance of journalism,” he said.

Samuels left the formal media industry because he found its growth to be stunted by a lack of ambition and creativity. He’s excited to see change within his profession; he said he wants to bring in former colleagues to speak, to engage the city as a classroom and to share his passion with students.

“I love what I do,” he said. “I love being a journalist.”

— Amanda Sakuma


Charles Simic
Position: distinguished poet-in-residence
NYU Department: Graduate Creative Writing
Age: 70
Hometown: Belgrade, Yugoslavia
Education: New York University (B.A.)
Most recently: published his 19th poetry book in May, titled “That Little Something” (Harcourt)

This past year’s Poet Laureate, Charles Simic, went to NYU, but he never imagined he would return to the university to teach as a distinguished poet-in-residence.

“It’s a nice surprise,” he said, adding that it is “like going back home.”

Simic is a Pulitzer-prize winning poet who has published over 60 books and is constantly praised for his surreal but relatable poetry. Although recognized as an American poet, Simic grew up in Yugoslavia during the violent times of World War II. He moved to Paris for a year and then relocated to the United States in 1954 to live in the Chicago area with his family.

After a brief stint in the army, Simic earned a bachelor’s degree in Russian at NYU. He once lived in the former NYU dorm Hotel Albert on University Place and 10th Street, and he also worked at NYU Press and the payroll department to help pay tuition. Simic said that many of his poems are about the Village and that he remembers a lot from his college days. “There are certain things that are still pretty much the same,” he said. “MacDougal Street, West Broadway, University Place — all of that is full of memories.”

“What the Grass Says,” Simic’s first full-length book of poetry, was published shortly after he graduated. He won the Pulitzer Prize for “The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems” in 1990. Simic has also earned countless other awards and prestigious titles, such as the Academy Fellowship in 1998. He was also elected chancellor of the Academy of American poets in 2000.

— Sara Dover


Joseph Thometz
Position: Master Teacher
NYU Department: Liberal Studies Program
Education: Berkeley (B.A., Ph.D.), San Francisco State University (M.A.)
Age: 46
Home State: California

Joe Thometz has a big grin and smile lines around his eyes; personable and genuine, he epitomizes a charismatic professor. In conversation, he reacts to movements and eye contact, never missing a beat.

Thometz has been a visiting professor for two years but spent one of those semesters on a Fulbright fellowship in the United Kingdom. This year, Thometz begins as a Master Teacher in the Liberal Studies Program, but he shies away from the official title. It raises the question, he said, what is a master? Still, his philosophy of education closely mirrors that of LSP.

“If it’s really good, liberal studies education changes you,” he said.

In addition to teaching at schools like Swarthmore College and the University of California at Berkeley, Thometz volunteered to teach an ethics course pro-bono at San Quentin State Penitentiary, the only on-site, degree-granting prison program in California. He describes it as “one of the richest teaching experiences of my life.”

Prisoners read some of the same “great works” as LSP students, Thometz said. “They didn’t like Plato so much, but they loved Thomas Hobbes. They can understand man’s natural condition of being at war with one another.”

Outside of academia, Thometz beams when he speaks of his family. His wife is a Gallatin professor Eve Meltzer, and his 3-year-old son, Sam, is a Neil Diamond fan — no surprise to Thometz. “He has a good ear for lyrics,” he said.

— Jane C. Timm


Christian Tryon
Position: Assistant Professor
Dept. at NYU: Department of Anthropology
Age: 34
Hometown: Charlotte, N.C.; Mansfield, Conn.
Education: University of Connecticut (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.)

Assistant professor Christian Tryon is now into his second week of living in New York with a fat cat and his wife, and he can’t wait to do all of the touristy things in the city.

“I moved from Washington, D.C., and didn’t think it would be that big of a jolt,” he said. “But it’s a lot more concentrated here, and there’s a hell of a lot more going on.”

Tryon, who joins NYU after leaving the Smithsonian Institution, will teach a small African archaeology class of around 20 students. He is not shy about why he is here: “NYU is a great place for what I hope to be the start of a tenure-track position.”

Archaeology is Tyron’s calling in life, and he views the low-key nature of the study at NYU as a good opportunity.

“I don’t see this as a limitation,” he said. “It means there’s a lot of room for expansion, and I am very excited.”

Tryon described his research interests as the archeology of modern human origins.

“I sort of bridge archaeology and anthropology, and this is the opportunity to bridge human evolution from a biological perspective,” he said.

As for this semester, Tryon hopes students take advantage of the hands-on experience archaeology provides and use it as a gateway to get involved. Oh, and don’t fall asleep — it’s the worst thing a student can do in his class.

So what is it about archaeology that gets professor Tryon pumped? “I get to play in the dirt and have fun, but get paid to do it anyway,” he said.

— Hyein Lee