External Grants Fund New Work at The King’s College

The King’s College announces that it has received grant funding to support the following initiatives:

Galsworthy Criminal Justice Reform Program: In May 2017, King’s received a generous $200,000 grant to launch the Galsworthy Criminal Justice Reform Program, headed by Dr. Anthony Bradley, director of the Center for the Study of Human Flourishing.

The program’s purpose is to bolster the number of academics who are researching, writing, teaching, and speaking publicly on these issues.

This program will invite to King’s faculty from other academic institutions, experts in the social sciences, humanities, and law, who will be instructed in the latest research on overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and criminal justice reform. It will award Galsworthy Fellowships to visiting faculty members, who will attend two weekend intensives facilitated by leading criminal justice and legal experts. The program will through a course development grant, furthermore, assist the Galsworthy Fellows in developing courses on criminal justice for their home institutions.

In Fall 2017, additionally, King’s will host its second annual “Overcriminalization and Mass Incarceration” panel, which in the first year featured such distinguished experts as: Stephanos Bibas, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School; James Forman, Jr., Professor of Law at Yale Law School; and Dr. John Pfaff, Professor of Law at Fordham University Law School at the Princeton Club in New York City.

The program is named in honor of John Galsworthy (1867-1933), an English lawyer and playwright who was at the forefront of the criminal-justice reform movement in England.

Six by Eight Portrait Project: During the summer of 2017, Professor Paul Glader, associate professor of journalism, director of the McCandlish Phillips Journalism Institute, and director of NYC Semester in Journalism, along with King’s alumni Peter Freeby (’15) and Madison Peace (’12) and portrait photographer Denny Renshaw, will launch the Six by Eight Portrait Project. Six by Eight Portrait is a journalistic project, housed under the McCandlish Phillips Journalism Institute, that seeks to explore the impact of incarceration on families in the New York City metropolitan area through photography and storytelling. The project draws its name from the average size of a prison cell. It will consist of a website and Instagram feed and will culminate in a photography exhibit and panel hosted at the college in the fall.

Book on the 2008 Financial Crisis and Development of Economics Curriculum: During the 2017-2018 academic year, Dr. Paul Mueller, assistant professor of economics, will pursue research into the mechanics and causes of the 2008 financial crisis, which will challenge the conventional wisdom on the topic. He will also develop economic courses for the College, including creating a new course on the financial crisis (based on his research) and revising the current Political Economy course, which will be co-taught with other members of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) faculty. This Political Economy course will draw on the scholarly expertise of the PPE program to shed light from multiple angles on the effect that different kinds of government interventions have on material welfare, making it a highlight for PPE students who are eager to use and synthesize what they have learned. Mueller will also host economics-focused events on campus, including lunches, book clubs, visits from guest faculty in the greater New York City metropolitan area, and bi-annual salon dinners featuring a senior economist, which will be open to prominent economists and professors from around the city. One such salon dinner, scheduled for March 14, 2018, will feature David Schmidtz, a leading analytical and public-reason philosopher who is the Kendrick Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona.