Meet Michael Figueroa, New Faculty Program Director
September 17, 2024 | Ruby Wang
When Michael Figueroa first arrived as a new faculty member of the music department at UNC-Chapel Hill, he needed support to transition into a large university with different priorities. “In such a large institution, it’s easy to feel lost when you arrive. I needed to know: how do you make a life here?” said Figueroa about his experience.
Figueroa sought out mentorship from senior colleagues and other newly onboarded faculty through the Institute for the Arts and Humanities’ New Faculty Program. Mentors and peers offered advice and an open dialogue to discuss how faculty can optimize their time and build meaningful relationships. Figueroa’s initial experiences with the New Faculty Program sparked his desire to direct the program over a decade later.
As Program Director, Figueroa seeks to “create opportunities for people to help each other find their way.” But he acknowledges the wide scope of challenges new faculty face. Faculty come from different disciplinary backgrounds and parts of the world and are each in different stages of their career. Some arrive at UNC as tenure-track, while others come on the teaching track. Still, Figueroa seeks to honor the needs of all NFP members. “One of the things I’m prioritizing is soliciting active input from participants of the program to make sure we are meeting people where they are,” said Figueroa.
Figueroa has long supported academics along different career trajectories. He teaches the Ph.D. course “Resources and Methods in Musicology,” which onboards new graduate students in the music department. He also cares deeply about mentoring undergraduate research: in addition to having served for six summers as a Faculty Mentor in the Moore Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (MURAP), he is currently teaching the guided research capstone course for undergraduate music majors.
“I relish in the opportunity to think about the scholarly pipeline from the end of undergraduate studies to graduate and faculty careers,” said Figueroa. “I think about how we can empower folks to do the work that fulfills them, that allows them to manifest their values, their ethics, their intellectual lives.”
His experience in the Institute’s fellowships and initiatives further informs his sense of the multifaceted dimensions of being a faculty member. In the fall of 2020, he was a Pardue Fellow in the Faculty Fellowship Program. Last year, he was a Tyson Academic Leadership Fellow. He received the Schwab Academic Excellence Award in 2018 and again in 2022. He has also served as the coordinator of the Faculty of Color and Indigenous Faculty Group from 2020 to 2022.
He’s learned how a critical component of being a faculty member, specifically in the humanities, is learning from a global lens. He echoes the Institute’s strategic priority to expand faculty’s global impact: “For the humanities to have any kind of value it needs to expand its notion of the human. It’s critical to learn from other ways of knowing, and it’s only possible through good listening.”
Figueroa is applying close listening and an international lens to his current book project, “Racial Awakening in Arab America: Performance, Intimacy, and Self-Critique.” His research examines 21st century performance among Arab communities in the United States, with a focus on intersections between race, gender, and sexuality. As an ethnographer, Figueroa analyzes the “performance of race” in settings from concerts, festivals, and installations to queer nightlife in sites throughout the east and west coasts; the Midwest; and even locally in Durham, North Carolina. With ethnography being a field of immersion in community, Figueroa enjoys building relationships with performers and participants to better understand their identities, motivations, and hopes for Arab diasporic futurity.
View the New Faculty Program webpage to learn more about the program and future events.
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