NYU's LGBTQ+ Center announced that Media, Culture, and Communication Assistant Professor Whit Pow would receive this year's Arnold Grossman Faculty Award.
The award honors faculty for their commitment to education, outreach, and advocacy that centers queer and trans understandings of the world. Recipients have gone above and beyond to mentor, support, and empower queer and trans students to reach their full potential.
Pow joined the department in 2020 as a media historian with a research focus on transgender histories of video games, software, and computational media. They are working on a book about the way that digital media created by queer and trans people question and refuse knowability and legibility, resist representation, and create new modes of historiography, alternative archives, and tactics for refusal and survival.
Organized by Professors Whit Pow and Nicole Fleetwood, the Trans Lineages Symposium was hosted in March 2023 and included keynotes by Cameron Awkward-Rich, Jules Gill-Peterson, C. Riley Snorton, and Erique Zhang.
Together with Professor Nicole Fleetwood, this year they organized a daylong symposium entitled Trans Lineages to "center the trans thinkers who came before us and the trans lineages we extend through our own work, activism, and research."