Project Co-Directors

The "Living Humanities" Ph.D. for the 21st Century project will be led and managed by two Co-Directors, Dr. Eva Badowska and Dr. Matthew McGowan. They will share all responsibilities for the planning process and outcomes, but with different emphases.

Dr. Eva Badowska
Dean of GSAS and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

As Dean of GSAS, Dr. Badowska will contribute to discussions of the current landscape for humanities Ph.D.s and the realities and constraints of the possible implementation environment for proposed models; she will also assume the responsibility, through GSAS staff, for the administrative support of the project.

In addition to being Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Eva Badowska also publishes on Victorian fiction (in Victorian Studies, PMLA and Victorian Literature and Culture), feminist theory (in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature), psychoanalytic theory (in The Psychoanalytic Review) and Polish poetry (in Parnassus: Poetry in Review), as well as the “Anne Brontë” entry in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. Dr. Badowska has a volume of essays, co-edited with Francesca Parmeggiani, on Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ten-film series on the Ten Commandments, Of Elephants and Toothaches: Ethics, Politics and Religion in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue (Fordham University Press, January 2016), which includes Dr. Badowska’s essay, “States of Exception: Politics and Poetics in Decalogue Six.” Currently Dr. Badowska is working on Krzysztof Kieślowski—Between History and Theory, a short book which seeks to revise the standard critical tendency to regard the director’s work as ahistorical, instead placing his interpretation of the Ten Commandments in the context of the Polish 1980s, a period of profound social unrest and cultural change.

Dr. Matthew McGowan
Associate Professor and Chair of Classics

Dr. McGowan, as a full time tenured faculty member in the Department of Classics, will have primary responsibility for conversations that may lead to proposed academic/curricular changes, as those are the domain of the faculty in the Fordham institutional landscape.

Dr. Matthew McGowan has mentored Ph.D. students and helped revise the graduate curriculum in Classics. As a member of the University Task Force on the Future of Liberal Education, he is deeply familiar with the challenges facing doctoral education in the humanities in the US and abroad. He has ample program and budgetary management experience, including as Director of the Fordham College Honors Program (2013-15) and President of the NY Classical Club (2009-15). In summer 2015, he was elected Vice-President for Outreach and Executive Board Member of the Society for Classical Studies, where he continues to sit on the Advisory Board for the NEH-sponsored Fellowship to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich, Germany.