Two professors in the Department of Public and Applied Humanities have been promoted, demonstrating excellent performance in teaching, service and research.
Dr. Jonathan Jae-an Crisman is promoted from Assistant Professor to tenured Associate Professor, and Dr. Nicholas Ferdinandt is promoted from Associate Professor of Practice to Professor of Practice.
Crisman is an artist and urban scholar whose work considers the intersections between culture, politics, and place. His book Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City (MIT Press, 2020), co-authored with Dana Cuff, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Todd Presner, and Maite Zubiaurre, stakes out new disciplinary terrain for the humanities. His current research focuses on the role that art and culture can play as forms of political engagement in gentrifying cities, and (with collaborator Maite Zubiaurre) on the forensic, cultural, and political practices around migrant death in the Borderlands. Work from his collaborative art practice has been shown at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, the West Bund Biennial of Arts and Architecture, and the Reykjavík Arts Festival. He was formerly the founding Project Director and Core Faculty for the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative, and was a research affiliate with USC’s Spatial Analysis Lab (SLAB) where he worked with Annette Kim on humanizing cartographic representation. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning and Development from the University of Southern California, Master of Architecture and Master in City Planning degrees from MIT, and a BA in Architectural Studies, Geography, and Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA.
Ferdinandt completed his EdD in Educational Leadership at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, where he also completed his undergraduate degree in Russian. Dr. Ferdinandt’s MA in Slavic Languages and Literatures is from The Ohio State University. Dr. Ferdinandt has been a teacher and tutor trainer as well as an ESL instructor in the US, Brazil, and Mexico. He created the University Track Pathway in the Center for English as a Second Language (CESL) at the University of Arizona and came to Public & Applied Humanities by way of the directorship at CESL (2017-2020). Dr. Ferdinandt has many years of experience as a leader in language education as a course and program developer, as well as a language program evaluator. Dr. Ferdinandt has a variety of interests that include language program evaluation, intercultural training, leadership for intercultural understanding, and myth and story as social construction.