Faculty

Profile

Dr. Denise L. Lim is an Assistant Professor of Black Material and Visual Culture in the Art and Design History and Theory (ADHT) program at The New School's Parsons School of Design. She was formerly a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar (2022-24) with the New School's Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence.

Dr. Lim is a transdisciplinary Africanist scholar working at the intersections of art, design, and social scientific inquiry. She has spent 18 years primarily researching South African art, architectural design, cultural heritage, and literature, but has also researched, taught, and curated cultural collections from Nubian Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and South Sudan. Her work draws from material and visual culture to explore the politics of identity, place, and time throughout diverse African and African diasporic contexts. With the support of the NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, Dr. Lim is completing her first digital monograph, Palimpsests in Ponte City, which explores the complex heritage of an iconic residential tower called Ponte in Johannesburg, South Africa. Treating multi-sensory data as cultural palimpsests, this interactive website takes users on a virtual tour to uncover legacies of colonialism and apartheid built into Ponte’s architectural design, visual media, and material artifacts. 

Degrees Held

Ph.D in Sociology, Yale University

M.A. in African Studies, Yale University

B.A. in English and Sociology, Bryn Mawr College

Recent Publications

Alhassen, Maytha, Nsenga Knight, Denise Lim, Mona Oraby, and Najha Zigbi-Johnson. 2025. "Women of Color and Malcolm X's Enduring Legacy." The Black Scholar 55 (3-4): 37 - 62.

Lim, Denise and Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra. 2024. “Architecting Friendship: A Spatial Commemoration of Yuri Kochiyama and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz/Malcolm X” in Mapping Malcolm edited by Najha Zigbi-Johnson. New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.

—“Architecting Friendship: A Spatial Commemoration of Yuri Kochiyama and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz/Malcolm X.” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 8, no. 1-2 (2023): 196 - 206.

Lim, Denise L. "Book Review of Wake Up! This Is Joburg by Tanya Zack and Mark Lewis." Urban Studies 60, no. 12 (2023): 2524 - 2526.

Lim, Denise L and Sonya Solanki. 2023. Reclaiming African Heritage for the Post-COVID Era. New Haven: Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage.

Lim, Denise L. 2022. “Remnants of Apartheid in Ponte City, Johannesburg.” Pp. 189-210 in The Politics of Design: Privilege and Prejudice in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia & South Africa, edited by Federico Freschi, Farieda Nazier, and Jane Venis. Dunedin: Otago Press. 

—2021. “Prototyping New Possibilities: Digital Architectures for the Preservation of African Cultural Heritage.” Pp. 28-31 in Spectral Hauntings: Spaces of the Hyperreal in Post-Colonial Egypt, edited by Huda Tayob, Sarah de Villiers, and Naadira Patel. Johannesburg: University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture.

Lim, Denise, and Sumayya Vally. 2021. “Diasporic Entanglements.” Pp. 107-30 in Conversations Across Place: Reckoning with an Entangled World, edited by Nicola Brandt and Frances Whorrall-Campbell, 107-30. Berlin: The Green Box. 

—2018. “What the Landscape Recalls: Articulating Scales of Violence in Landscape Trauma in Namibia.” ART AFRICA, February 8. (http://artafricamagazine.org/20754-2/).

—2018. “Quiet Images of the Zionist Christian Church.” City Press, July 8. (https://www.w24.co.za/Entertainment/Arts/quiet-images-of-the-zionist-christian-church-20180708).

Awards And Honors

The New School's Innovations in Education Fund for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, August 2025 - May 2026

NEH Institute on Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities: Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing: Resources and Roadmaps, July 2024

NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, January - August 2024

Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence Postdoctoral Fellowship, July 2022 to July 2024

BIPOC Curatorial Postdoctoral Fellowship, Stanford University Archaeology Collections, May 2021 - August 2022

Yale GSAS Alumni Fellowship, Yale University, August 2020 - April 2021

Macmillan International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Yale University, August 2018 - August 2019

Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, October 2017 - August 2018

Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, August 2013 - May 2014