No Such Thing: Education in the Digital Age

Christina Katopodis, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and the Associate Director of Transformative Learning in the Humanities, a three-year initiative at the City University of New York (CUNY) supported by the Mellon Foundation. She is the winner of the 2019 Diana Colbert Innovative Teaching Prize and the 2018 Dewey Digital Teaching Award. She has authored or co-authored articles published in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, MLA’s Profession, Hybrid Pedagogy, Inside Higher Ed, Synapsis, and Times Higher Ed.

The learning process is something you can incite, really incite, like a riot. - Audre Lorde

Cathy N. Davidson is the Senior Advisor on Transformation to the Chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY), a role which includes work with all twenty-five campuses serving over 500,000 students. She is also the Founding Director of the Futures Initiative and Distinguished Professor of English, as well as the M.A. in Digital Humanities and the M.S. in Data Analysis and Visualization programs at the Graduate Center (CUNY). The author or editor of over twenty books, she has taught at a range of institutions, from community college to the Ivy League. She held two distinguished professor chairs at Duke University, where she taught for twenty-five years and also became the university’s (and the nation’s) first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. She is cofounder and codirector of “the world’s first and oldest academic social network,” the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC.org, known as “Haystack”). Founded in 2002, HASTAC has over 18,000 network members.

Davidson’s many prizewinning books include the classics Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America and Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (with photographer Bill Bamberger). Most recently, she has concentrated on the science of learning in the “How We Know” Trilogy: Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn; The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux; and, co-authored with Christina Katopodis, The New College Classroom (due August 2022).

Davidson has won many awards, prizes, and grants throughout her career including from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, NEH, NSF, the MacArthur Foundation, and others. She is the 2016 recipient of the Ernest L. Boyer Award for “significant contributions to higher education.” She received the Educator of the Year Award (2012) from the World Technology Network and, in 2021, the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences presented Davidson with its annual Arts and Sciences Advocacy Award. She has served on the board of directors of Mozilla, was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Council on the Humanities, and has twice keynoted the Nobel Prize Committee’s Forum on the Future of Learning. She lives in New York City.