Each academic year the School of Arts and Sciences Newark welcomes new faculty to our family from across the liberal arts disciplines. This year’s group is diverse, spanning the social sciences, humanities, arts and physical sciences. Below, in Part 4 of our series, we profile some of the professors making their SASN debut during the fall semester.
Carla Murphy | Journalism
Carla Murphy is an Assistant Professor of Journalism in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media. She received her undergraduate degree from NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies after transferring from Duke University, working full-time and completing her degree at night. She also has an M.S. in Gender and International Development from the London School of Economics, and an M.A. from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, now known as the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Murphy's current research and writing connects journalism's labor, class and race issues to the production and ever-narrowing distribution of quality journalism and the implications for the profession's mandate within the democracy. Over the next five years, she is part of a small team that is evaluating the MacArthur Foundation's Journalism and Media multimillion-dollar portfolio, focusing on civic media practices and legacy journalism. Murphy is also researching the Kerner and other press commissions to examine the failed legacy of “representation” and “diversity” in the journalism industry.
Murphy has been an ILA Fellow at Boston College, where she designed and taught a course called Class in Journalism, which looked at the role of class in news coverage and newsroom staffing, and the industry's dependence on freelance workers. She has taught in the adult degree program at Lehman College in the Bronx, and has been a writing instructor for the New York Writers Coalition, which provides writing workshops for marginalized and/or vulnerable populations through the New York City public library system, the Rikers Island jail complex, alternative high schools and other venues. At RU-N Murphy is teaching Journalism, Ethics and the Law this fall, and is looking forward to developing new courses for the program.
“I'm looking forward to serving RU-N's student population. I consider it an honor to teach at a public institution,” said Murphy. "New Jersey may be the first state in this modern media era to experiment with taxpayer-funded community journalism (California recently waded in in a big way), and I'm keen to be a conduit between RU-N and responsible community leaders in any field who share an eagerness to see new news outlets communicate with and center residents not as consumers or passive subjects but as active citizens.”
Simeon Marsalis | English
Simeon Marsalis is an Assistant Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing Program who Simeon specializes in Jazz Literature. He earned a B.A. with honors from the University of Vermont for his thesis on Jazz and American Nationalism, and an MFA in 2019 from Rutgers University-Newark, where he was the Henry Rutgers Fellow.
Marsalis’ first novel, As Lie Is to Grin, was published by Catapult in 2017 and was on the shortlist for the Center for Fiction's first novel prize. His essay “Why Jazz: A Music Festival Review,” was published on Catapult.Co in the same year. His short story "The Exterminator" appeared in the Fall 2021 Founder's Issue of Lampblack, the magazine of Lampblack Literary Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to supporting Black literature, which he co-founded. Marsalis is currently working on his second novel, End Times.
Marsalis served as a Part-time Lecturer in RU-N's Department of English from 2017 to 2022, where he taught English Composition and Jazz Poetry. In 2020–2021, he wrote curriculum for a high school Jazz Poetry workshop at NJPAC, and for a Jazz Poetry class through City Verses, a joint initiative of RU-N and NJPAC. Marsalis has also led many workshops, including an intersectional justice workshop for incoming freshman at The Cooper Union, in New York City, that focused on the lives of enslaved people in New York City during the 17th century (2020–2021); an 8-week Metafiction course at the Center for Fiction, in Brooklyn (2020); and Writing Flash Fiction and Writing Through Photography workshops at the Newark Public Library (2019).
Photo of Simeon Marsalis by Lawrence Sumulong