New faculty and fellows advancing social justice

This fall, eight new faculty and two inaugural Strauch fellows who focus on social justice and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration join Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP). 

Jen Delos Reyes
AAP Associate Dean for Diversity and Equity; Associate Professor, Art
Delos Reyes is an artist, educator, writer, and radical community arts organizer. As inaugural Associate Dean for Diversity and Equity, she joins the college’s senior leadership team for advancing AAP’s vision and priorities around academic excellence and inclusion. Delos Reyes is based in Ithaca and Chicago, where she founded the SIDE by SIDE residency and Garbage Hill Farm. 

Social Justice Cohort

Peter Robinson
Assistant Professor, Architecture
Robinson is an architect, educator, and founder of WorkUrban and Blackspace Urbanist Collective. His research focuses on cultural subjectivity and the city, broaching parallels and interferences among architecture, urban design, planning, and cultural practices/theories to engage/inform social action. Robinson is Vice Chair to the Board of Trustees at AIA New York Center for Architecture. 

Ife Vanable
Assistant Professor, Architecture
Vanable is an architect, historian, theorist, and director of the architectural workshop and think tank i/van/able. Her scholarly work addresses complex relationships between architecture, law, and public policy, the performance of domesticity and respectability, and the politics, aesthetics, and materiality of the making of home. Vanable is the inaugural KPF Visiting Scholar and a Presidential Visiting Fellow at the Yale School of Architecture, and a Ph.D. candidate in architectural history and theory at Columbia University.

Oscar Rene Cornejo
Assistant Professor, Art
Cornejo is an artist, educator, and activist based New York and Western Massachusetts. His socially engaged practice draws together histories of abstraction in the US and Latin America with his personal experiences of the construction site, family memory, and historical forgetting. He is a founding member of Junte Adjuntas, an artist project based in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, and a fresco instructor at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Oasa DuVerney
Assistant Professor, Art
DuVerney is an artist, educator, and mother who has exhibited widely at venues across the United States, particularly in the New York City area. DuVerney’s work is included in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s permanent collection and has been featured in publications such as The Guardian, The Independent, Hyperallergic, Palestine News Network, and The New York Times, among others.

Jocelyn Poe
Provost New Faculty Fellow, City and Regional Planning
Poe’s research focuses on communal trauma, reparative praxis, and anti-racist futures. Poe uses interdisciplinary and creative methods for theorizing planning practice and engaging communities to shape her research, practice, and teaching. Her work resonates with critical issues of justice and equity in planning that affect our cities and futures.

CIVIC (Critical Inquiry into Values, Imagination, and Culture)

Keith Obadike
Professor, Art
Obadike is an artist, educator, and composer who works collaboratively with writer Mendi Obadike. They have exhibited and performed at the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA.

Wenfei Xu
Assistant Professor, City and Regional Planning
Xu’s research questions how housing policies, practices, institutions, and technologies shape urban inequality, with an orientation toward methods in urban analytics. She works on topics in social-spatial stratification, segregation, race and ethnicity, data science, mapping, and neighborhood change in the US. 

Strauch Fellows

Sydney Maubert
Strauch Fellow, Architecture
Maubert is an architect, artist, muralist, scholar, and teacher. She directs Studio Maubert, a scholarly art and design practice exploring Black, Latin, Indigenous, and Fem modes of cultural and spatial production at the intersection of architecture, geography, and culture. She is the founder of Sydney R. Maubert LLC., her art and mural practice.

Zakhary Mallett
Strauch Fellow, City and Regional Planning
Mallett’s research investigates relationships between transportation finance, travel behavior, and urban form, and examines the extent to which individual travel behaviors and location choice are influenced by inefficient transportation pricing and how this influences aggregate travel patterns, urban spatial structure, and distributional impacts.