The New School for Social Research is a graduate institution in New York City. We generate progressive scholarship in the social sciences and philosophy. Our 75+ full-time faculty members in nine departments offer masters and doctoral degrees to 800 graduate students.
Anthropology (MA)
Anthropology (PhD)
Research and Work
Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism
Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism (MA)
Economics (MA)
Economics (MS)
Global Political Economy and Finance (MA)
Economics (PhD)
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Certificate Curriculum
Liberal Studies (MA)
Philosophy (MA)
Concentration in Psychoanalytic Studies (MA)
PhD in Philosophy
MA in Politics
PhD in Politics
MA in General Psychology
MA Concentration in Mental Health and Substance Abuse Counseling
PhD in Cognitive, Social, and Developmental Psychology
New School Psychotherapy Program
PhD in Sociology
Our distinctive intellectual tradition encourages public debate and rigorous academic pursuit, while small programs encourage close collaboration between students and professors.
Theodor Heuss and Hans Speier Visiting Professorships
Our faculty of more than 75 full-time scholars creates active and long-lasting partnerships with students. These public intellectual are leaders in their fields of study, shaping public debate, academic research, and pushing the boundaries of social sciences and philosophy around the world.
Interdisciplinary Centers & Institutes
Center for Attachment Research
Center for Public Scholarship
Center for Research with Infants and Toddlers
Critical Perspectives on Democratic Anti-Colonialism
Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought
Hannah Arendt Center
Husserl Archives
Institute for Critical Social Inquiry
Janey Program in Latin American Studies
Memory Studies
Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies
The Safran Center for Psychological Services
Sándor Ferenczi Center
Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis
Transregional Center for Democratic Studies
Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility
Grounded in theoretical criticism, interdisciplinary exploration, and dissection of the world today, graduate students and faculty at NSSR produce scholarship that challenges the status quo, shapes the present, and leads the future of public debate. Explore their research and work.
Intellectual Life in NYC
Inter-University Doctoral Consortium
Three-Minute Thesis Challenge
Academic Petitions and Policies
Graduation and PhD Guidelines
Become part of a rich, vibrant, and diverse community of dedicated academics and intellectuals. Connect with students and faculty who share your passions and drive to investigate the challenges that face society today. Live in one of the world's most intellectually dynamic cities, New York City.
Notable New Schoolers
Graduate students at The New School for Social Research develop the skills to boldly question conventional thinking and break down the boundaries of social thought. See stories of our intrepid alumni, shaping the intellectual future of their fields.
Admission & Funding
Financial Aid and Funding Opportunities
Fellowships and Funding
Explore our fellowships and funding opportunities. More than 90% of new full-time master's students receive merit scholarships, averaging 49% of the cost of tuition.
James E Miller
Professor of Liberal Studies and Politics, and Faculty Director of Creative Publishing & Critical Journalism
millerje@newschool.edu
D - 6 East 16th Street
James Miller is Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies, and Faculty Director of the MA in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism at The New School for Social Research. His latest book, Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea from Ancient Athens to Our World, has just been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
He is the author of six other books, including Flowers in the Dustbin: the Rise of Rock & Roll, 1947-1977, winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award and a Ralph Gleason BMI award for best music book of 1999; The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993), an interpretive essay on the life of the French philosopher and a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for General Nonfiction, which has been translated into nine languages; "Democracy is in the Streets": From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987), an account of the American student movement of the 1960s, also a National Book Critics Circle Finalist for General Nonfiction and recently recommended by Michael Kazin as one of the 5 essential books to understand the roots of the Occupy Wall Street movement (to read the article, please click here); Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (1984), a study of the origins of modern democracy; and History and Human Existence - From Marx to Merleau-Ponty, an analysis of Marx and the French existentialists.
The original editor of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (1976), he has written about music since the 1960s, when one of his early record reviews appeared in the third issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Subsequent pieces on music have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times and Newsweek, where he was a book reviewer and pop music critic between 1981 and 1990. Pieces on philosophy and history have appeared in The London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review. In 2000, the magazine Lingua Franca published his best-known essay, "Is Bad Writing Necessary? George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Language."
Besides publishing in such peer-reviewed academic journals as History and Theory and Political Theory, he has contributed to a variety of reference works, from Encyclopedia Britannica and A New Literary History of America, published by Harvard in 2009, to the Dictionnaire de philosophie morale edited by Monique Canto-Sperber in 1996.
From 2000 to 2008, he edited Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an NEH Fellow twice, and in 2006-2007 he was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. A native of Chicago, he was educated at Pomona College in California, and at Brandeis University, where he received a Ph.D. in the History of Ideas in 1976.
Degrees Held
PhD 1975, Brandeis University
Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Today (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, editor (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)
Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977 (Touchstone, 1999)
The Passion of Michel Foucault (Harvard University Press, 1993)
Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Harvard University Press, 1987)
Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (Hackett, 1984)
History and Human Existence: From Marx to Merleau-Ponty (University of California Press, 1982)
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, editor, (Random House, 1980)
Select essays:
"Will Extremists Highjack Occupy Wall Street?"
"The Abyss of Philosophy: Rousseau's Concept of Freedom"
"El Paso"
"In Praise of Recklessness"
"Return of the Weathermen"
"From Socrates to Foucault: The Problem of the Philosophical Life"
"Is Bad Writing Necessary?: George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Language"
Philosophy as a way of life; democracy in theory and practice; social movements; popular culture; intellectual history, eighteenth century to the present; radical social theory; history of political philosophy.
Directed Dissertation Study
GPOL 7991, Spring 2023
GPUB 6990, Spring 2023
GLIB 6990, Spring 2023
Public Seminar Internship
GPOL 7991, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
GPUB 6990, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
GLIB 6990, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
GPUB 6991, Fall 2022