Faculty

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.

As a transdisciplinary Africanist scholar with nearly two decades of research in South Africa, Dr. Lim's work spans art, architectural design, literature, and cultural heritage across Africa and the African diaspora. As part of the M.A. program in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies (HDCS), Dr. Lim teaches The African Archive Beyond Colonization, a curatorial praxis seminar that connects students with institutions like the Brooklyn Museum and NYU’s Africa House to research and curate under-documented African collections for digital exhibition.

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. 

Ph.D in Sociology, Yale University

M.A. in African Studies, Yale University

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

Lim, Denise. (Forthcoming, Winter 2027). "African Archives: Pedagogies of Drift, Imagination, and Mattering." Visual Arts Research 53(2).

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).