Rama Chorpash, Associate Professor, Product Design, Parsons School of Design

Rama Chorpash is also Director of the MFA program in Industrial Design at Parsons. He focuses on exchanges between people and everyday things. As an generalist industrial designer, developing benchmark products challenges him to express not only what role he plays in creating the useful and sublime, but in_articulating complex frameworks of practice. He is interested in expanding the notion of product to include intentional and unexpected by-products. His work has been widely published, from: 1,000 Product Designs, Co.Design | Fast Company, The New York Times Style Magazine to Metropolis. Work has exhibited coast to coast, from the Museum of Modern Art to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and internationally, from Portugal’s Bienal da Prata to Switzerland’s Design Miami/Basel Art Fair. While engaged in his creative-practice, he is an Associate Professor and the Director of Product Design at Parsons. As an academic leader, his design discourse extends to activities such as organizing symposia, judging design reviews, and acting as moderator or panelists. He is currently judging the Art Directors Club 91st Annual Design Awards. 

Mark Frazier, Co-Director, India China Institute, Professor of Politics, The New School for Social Research. 

Mark W. Frazier’s research interests focus on labor and social policy in China, and more recently on the political conflict over urbanization, migration, and citizenship in China and India. His newest book, The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth-Century Shanghai and Bombay (Cambridge University Press, 2019) examines long-term changes in political geographies and patterns of popular protest in the two cities. He is also the author of Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (Cornell University Press, 2010), The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Co-Editor of the SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China (SAGE Publications, 2018). He has authored op-ed pieces and essays for The New York Times, Daedalus, and The Diplomat. Dr. Frazier serves on the editorial board of China Quarterly and is a Faculty Associate at the Columbia University’s China Center for Social Policy. He received a Fulbright Research Award in 2004-05 and has been a Public Intellectuals Program fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations since Before assuming his current position at The New School in 2012, he held a chaired professorship in Chinese Politics at the University of Oklahoma and was the Luce Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of East Asia at Lawrence University, a liberal arts college in Wisconsin.

Victoria Hattam, Professor, Politics, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts

Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research. Her research focuses on American political thought and culture, American political economy, and American political development. She has a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Laura Y. Liu, Associate Professor of Global Studies and Geography, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts

Laura Liu is interested in encouraging thoughtful engagement with ideas and practices of social transformation at various scales, in particular, its spatiality, contextual contingency, contradictions, and enduring possibility. She has a PhD in Geography from Rutgers University; and MA in Geography, Rutgers University; and a BA in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley.

Brian McGrath, Professor, Urban Design, Parsons School of Design

Brian McGrath is the founder and principal of Urban-Interface, LLC, an urban design consultancy fusing expertise in architecture, ecology, and media. Mr. McGrath is a Principle Investigator in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, where he leads the Urban Design Working Group. His books and publications include: Urban Design Ecologies Reader (2012), Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design (2012), Growing Cities in a Shrinking World: The Challenges in India and China (2010), co-edited with Ashok Gurung and Jiyanying Zha, and Sensing the 21st Century City (2007). McGrath served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Thailand in 1998-99 and an India China Institute Fellow in 2006-2008; he was Research Director in the joint US-EU exchange program Urbanisms of Inclusion. Mr. McGrath received his BA from Syracuse University and an MA in Architecture from Princeton University. 

Christian Moon, Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies, Parsons School of Design

Christina Moon is Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design. Her research looks at the social ties and cultural encounters between design worlds and manufacturing landscapes across Asia and the Americas, exploring the memory, migration, and labor of cultural workers. Her recent project is on the fast-fashion industry within the U.S. In general, she writes on fashion, design and labor, material culture, social memory, the ephemeral and everyday, and ways of knowing and representing in ethnographic practice. She is also a SSRC Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellow, GIDEST fellow and member of the India China Institute at The New School, and member of the Fashion Praxis working group at Parsons. She has a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University.