Faculty

Profile

Julia Foulkes investigates interdisciplinary questions about the arts, urban studies, and history in her research and teaching. As a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she focused on her forthcoming book, Culture City: The Rise of the Arts in New York, available in March 2027. A recent essay on Urban Omnibus about the establishment of City Center for Music and Drama sets out the stakes. Various collaborations on the topic include historical notes for the jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles on his commission San Juan Hill Story for the re-opening of Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center and appearing in the documentary San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood. Professor Foulkes also curated The Joffrey + Ballet in the U.S., which explored the widening reach of an elite art form. It was on view at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center from September 2024 to March 2025 and at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago from October to December 2025. 

Professor Foulkes's book A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York (2016) examined what this legendary musical and film reveal about mid 20th-century New York. It provided a foundation for an exhibition she curated that marked the 100th birthday of Jerome Robbins that focused on his relation to New York; the acclaimed Voice of My City: Jerome Robbins and New York was on view at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center from September 2018 to March 2019.

Professor Foulkes's first book, Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (2002), explores how gender, sexuality, race, and politics shaped the development of modern dance in the 1930s and '40s; her second book, To the City: Urban Photographs of the New Deal (2011), charts the spread of urbanization captured in photographs of the 1930s. She is also the editor of a journal volume on The Arts in Place (Journal of Social History, 2010) and co-editor with Aaron Shkuda of a section of essays on arts and urban development in the Journal of Urban History (2015).

With Mark Larrimore, Professor Foulkes also researches and teaches about the history of The New School, which celebrated its centenary in 2019. They oversee a website devoted to exploring the unusual history and far reach of this institution. A 2014 exhibition, Offense + Dissent: Image, Conflict, Belonging, investigated three epidsodes when art roused protest at The New School. The exhibition brought forward the issues in fifty responses from faculty, students, and staff to an artwork or aspect of design that they encounter at the university every day that provokes them. In fall 2018, they initiated a series of essays on the history of The New School at Public Seminar, the university's virtual intellectual commons. A podcast series, New Histories, launched in fall 2019, and a digital book of their essays, Realizing The New School: Lessons From the Past, was published in 2020. She delivered the Aims of Education address at the New School convocation in September 2009 and was a member of the university's search committee for a new president in 2019, received a distinguished teaching award in 2025, and has served as a faculty representative on the Board of Trustees.

Professor Foulkes has received numerous distinctions for her research in addition to the Cullman Center fellowship. She has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Archive Center, a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Potsdam University in Germany, Lecturer in the China Residency Program of the Organization of American Historians, a Fellow and Senior Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, and a fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography and Social Thought at The New School. She has also served as an adviser for arts organizations, such as First Person Arts; for the documentaries Free to Dance, Miss Hill, Ailey, and San Juan Hill; and worked with the Humanities Action Lab, an international hub where the humanities and design generate innovative curricula and public engagement on urgent social issues. 

Research Interests

History. Arts. Cities. Dance. New York City. The New School.

Portfolio

Julia Foulkes

Culture City: The Rise of the Performing Arts in 20th Century New York

A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York

Realizing The New School: Lessons From the Past

Histories of The New School