Community Life and Diversity

Professor Brock is a writer, educator, researcher, strategist, and purveyor of culture, drawing critical segues among race, identity, art, and our evolving humanity through storytelling. He is griot-descended from Laurel, Mississippi—a keeper of things—a Native Son—and a dreamer from Compton, California. Currently, he holds adjunct faculty appointments at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Marymount Manhattan College teaching cultural studies, African American literature, LGBTQ+ literature, media studies, the “DJ” as a healer, “love” as a gift–and a thief, and the significance of subculture. 

He received a B.A. in American Literature and Culture from UCLA with a minor in Political Science. Three years later, while working as a personal executive assistant to a music producer, he received a Master of Communication Management with a focus on Media and Entertainment Management from the University of Southern California (USC), Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. At present, he is a Dr. W. Burghardt Turner Fellow and PhD Candidate (ABD) in Cultural Studies & Africana Studies in the Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University. His book project, Sensational Oppression: Revolutionary Aspirations for Black Bodies, Queer Kinship, and Resistance in Visual Culture, is forthcoming.

Senior Scholar-in-Residence Dr. Extra received her doctorate in American Studies at Rutgers University. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Film & Media Studies with a minor in French from the University of Rochester; a Master’s in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from CUNY Hunter College; and a Master’s in Afro American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Extra has been granted many fellowships and awards including, most recently, the Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship in History Education, a year-long fellowship at the Museum of the City of New York for doctoral candidates who have an interest in teaching and public scholarship.  

Cynthia (Cindy) Yuan Gao is a PhD candidate in American Studies at New York University. Professor Gao previously received her B.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Columbia University ​​and her M.Phil in Social and Cultural Analysis from NYU.  Her dissertation, “Revolutionary Asia and the US Radical Imagination, 1967-1991,” uses a combination of archival research and oral history interviews to examine how different social movements in the United States – women’s liberation, multi-racial organizing, and indigenous land struggles – were influenced by political movements in Asia during the second half of the 20th century. In 2018, as an instructor at Saturday Academy, a program for NYC high school students at the Museum of the City of New York, Professor Gao developed and implemented two sections of “Asian American Immigrant History,” which was Saturday Academy’s first ever A/P/A-centered offering. Most recently, at NYU, she was the instructor of record for her department’s Approaches to Gender and Sexuality course as well as one of her own designs, Revolutionary Voices, which focused on social justice movements in the United States from the 1960s to the present. Professor Gao has experience teaching in Asian American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Ethnic Studies and is fluent in Mandarin Chinese.

Professor Walds is a writer, educator, and image-maker, originally from Detroit, Michigan whose work engages global movement, connection, and resistance in lyrical, theoretical, and political modes. As an educator, he has taught throughout the United States, from Sunflower County in Mississippi to New York City and abroad, in Durban, South Africa, Hargeisa, Somaliland, and Ramallah in the Occupied West Bank. Professor Walds has designed and taught classes on critical contemporary issues such as environmentalism, mass incarceration, the Global South, and the art of protest. He comes from an interdisciplinary academic background and is a PhD student in Geography at Rutgers-New Brunswick. He holds a MFA in Cross-Genre Writing (focus on poetics) from UCSD, MAs in Pan-African Studies and General and Special Education, and a BA in Political Science and Ethnic Studies. His current writing project continues in his investigation of fugitivity as an artistic practice and practice of resistance, of Black experimental  and electronic music, and of the painter Beauford Delaney’s engagement with figuration and abstraction.