Marcia Pally

Site updated July 10, 2010

Professor Dr. Marcia Pally teaches at New York University in Multilingual Multicultural Studies and is a permanent Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She has been awarded the DFG [*German Research Foundation]’s “Mercator” Guest Professorship for Humboldt University, Berlin, is the co-recipient of a DFG [German Research Foundation] research grant for 2009–2011, and has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) in 2007 and again in 2010.

Her most recent books are:

Liebeserklärungen aus Kreuzberg und Manhattan (Berlin University Press, 2009) [Loveletters from Kreuzberg and Manhattan: Notes on politics and plumbing in Europe and America since 1989]
Die Hintergründige Religion: Der Einfluss des Evangelikalismus auf Gewissensfreiheit, Pluralismus, und die US-amerikanische Politik (2008, Berlin University Press) [Religion Behind the Scenes: The contribution of evangelicalism to freedom of conscience, pluralism and US politics]
Warnung vor dem Freunde: Tradition und Zukunft amerikanischer AuBenpolitik (2008, Parthas Verlag) [Religion expressed, Religion submerged: Evangelicalism and the Foreign Policy of the Country with the Biggest Guns].
Lob der Kritik. Warum die Demokratie nicht auf ihren Kern verzichten darf (Berlin Verlag, 2003; 2005 second edition). [Critique Abandoned: The Ceding of Democracy]

Prof. Pally’s research interests include the intersection among culture, religion, and politics, and the influences of culture on language use and learning.

In addition to her academic work, Prof. Pally has been a columnist in the U.S. and Europe for the past 20 years, and is the author of two books on censorship and freedom of expression, Sex & Sensibility: Reflections on Forbidden Mirrors and the Will to Censor (1994) and Sense & Censorship: The Vanity of Bonfires (1991). She has written for The New York Times, the Village Voice, The Nation, Internationale Politik (German Council on Foreign Relations), Film Comment, Cinéaste, Index on Censorship, Z Papers, die Zeit, Südduetsche Zeitung, Merkur, die Tageszeitung, Berliner Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, Frankfurter Rundschau, Cicero magazine and Weltwoche, among other periodicals.

Prof. Pally has lectured widely at universities and professional associations, among, them Oxford University, Harvard, Columbia, The University of Chicago, Humboldt University (Berlin), The University of Zurich, The Cato Institute, and the Aspen Institute-Berlin. She is past vice president of The Freedom to Read Foundation, served on The Media and Communications Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union.

In the field of language acquisition, Professor Pally has edited Sustained Content-Based Teaching in Academic ESL/EFL (2000, Houghton-Mifflin), for which she also wrote several chapters. She is the author of Screening English: Studying Movies for Reading, Writing, and Critical Thinking (1997, Pearson Press). Her work has appeared in numerous academic journals including Language and Education, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Journal of Second Language Writing, and JBW.

*the German Research Foundation is the German equivalent of the US National Institutes for the Humanities

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