Teacher Feature: A Conversation with Maia Pujara

Tina Nouri-Mahdavi ‘26

Maia Pujara Speaking at the Sarah Lawrence 2023 Graduation, Courtesy of Cristle Collins Judd

Maia Pujara, professor of psychology, has only been teaching at Sarah Lawrence for a few years, yet she has already gained notoriety for her innovative teaching methods and, most notably, for her ever-coveted lecture: Finding Happiness and Keeping It. 

Her office’s size enables its coziness, with her desk in one corner and a small table with two folding chairs. I imagine this is where she holds her conferences and meetings like ours, eschewing the desk’s tangible separation between teacher and student. The bookshelf is an assortment of tea, cookies, and books, while her desk is home to a short stack of records. Small posters of cartoon women scientists smile at us as we each take a folding chair. She offers me peppermint tea to soothe my scratchy throat. The office exudes the warmth that is palpable in her presence.

Maia, originally Argentinian, was born in Rosario before moving to Miami, Florida at the age of six. She then moved to and settled in South Carolina where most of her family resides now. She attended Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina for undergraduate, double majoring in English and Neuroscience. She then proceeded to University of Wisconsin-Madison for her PhD in neuroscience where she wrote her dissertation on the role that the prefrontal cortex and striatum play in responses to rewarding outcomes (namely, money) during the decision-making process. She completed her fellowship and additional training at the National Institute of Mental Health and came directly to Sarah Lawrence College in 2020. 

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So, how did you become interested in psychology and neuropsychology specifically? 

My parents subscribed to a lot of magazines growing up, and I just read everything cover to cover. I really started to gravitate towards the magazine articles about the brain. Whenever they had journalists doing all of these incredible pieces and long-reads on things like autism and Alzheimer's, I just got so mystified by the whole thing, like, how can it be that the brain can turn on us? We have this beautiful piece of machinery that we don’t often think about, until it goes wrong. Until we’re forced into thinking about how these faculties that we have, these aspects of cognition, are no longer functional. And so I got really interested in that and wanted to understand everything I could about the brain. I had to take my driver’s test three or four times and the fourth time I finally got it. The fourth time, I got the driver's license and my parents took me to Barnes and Noble and said, “Okay, you can pick out one book.” And—I think I might have it here—it’s called Brains That Work a Little Bit Differently. It had everything ranging from stories about ADHD, Alzheimer's, autism, deja vu, all sorts of neurological phenomena. And that got me really, really excited. I was like, oh, you can actually do this for a living? After that I knew I needed to, or wanted to, go get a major in neuroscience. And that was that.

What classes are you teaching this semester? 

I’m teaching “Finding Happiness and Keeping it: Insights from Psychology and Neuroscience.” It's open level, open to students who have never taken classes in psychology and neuroscience before who are just really interested in learning about those topics. I’m also teaching an intermediate level research seminar, called “Mind-Body Interactions: Psychoneuroimmunology", on the mind-body interactions through the lens of the immune system. I got really interested in thinking about how our bodies talk to our brains and vice versa and the things that our immune system can tell us about the state of our mental health and our well-being. So, if you tend to get sick for longer or more often, what's going on? If you get an autoimmune disease, what are the social factors that contribute to that?

It seems like a lot of what you do is the link between psychology and the day-to-day. Finding Happiness and the Neuropsychology of Sickness seem very applicable for students, not even just for their studies, but just for their own bodies. 

Exactly, yeah! And that’s very much the mode of Dewey's progressive learning model, of applying what you’re learning. It’s not just about memorizing and having the facts. It's about thinking about, how is this gonna better other people’s lives, your own life? What are the practical aspects of the things that you are learning that you can take out into the real world? I definitely subscribe to that pedagogical model, thinking about how these things that students are learning in the classroom can be useful to themselves, their families, their communities, to their hobbies. This is really important to me as a teacher, that this stuff can go beyond the classroom.

Did you always know that you wanted to get into teaching? Did you go into majoring in neuroscience with that in mind? 

It’s funny you ask that because I didn’t actually realize that these jobs were accessible to me. I got really excited about research so I went down the research path quite extensively. The whole time I should have known I was interested in teaching because I was doing outreach, guest lecturing, figuring out ways to teach other people about my work, communicating my work. Somehow I came to realize that I really love mentorship. I've always enjoyed teaching, and I hadn’t had any formal teaching in it until my last year of my post-doc, my fellowship. And then I realized it was a career and I went for it and here we are. 

To that, what’s your favorite part of being a professor, and specifically a professor here at Sarah Lawrence, where the teaching methods are so unique to the college? 

I love it. I really love that I’m not constrained by a specific curriculum or structure. I love the academic freedom. So, for example, for my Finding Happiness class’ final project, I give students the option of either doing a regular report, an 8-10 page paper, or they can do a shorter report but add a creative component. And a lot of the students have taken me up on that; a little less than half of the class will do the creative component. And I was a little nervous at first because I was like, Oh what if students just do this so that they can write less? But it was incredible. Students would spend half of the semester working on a film, for example. Actually putting in really beautiful, meaningful intentionality behind some of their output that they could use for some of their film reels or other classes as well. And bringing in whatever skills they had gotten from their classes in art and visual medium, bringing it into our classroom. I can’t imagine being able to do that anywhere else. Sarah Lawrence seems like the best place to bring people from other disciplines into your disciplines. It almost feels like an invitation, and more of a warm welcome, rather than, here’s an exam, if you don't get this, you're not worthy of this discipline. Everyone’s invited. I really love that part of teaching. I love it here.

Can you talk more about whether you subscribe to a specific method of teaching? Are you more free-form, adapting to the class? Are there any sort of theories, beliefs, or methods that you try to apply to your teaching? 

Again, that progressive mode of education. I really like having a lot of structure and consistency. So, I give my students—or I hope I give them— a lot of information about what to expect. I set up my syllabi really intentionally, I provide what I hope are clear deadlines. The structure is there and the organization is there. I also like to make visual syllabi. I really subscribe to this model of welcoming, I want the space to be welcoming, I want the students to feel they have representation. I do a lot of playing around in the classroom itself, I like to have interactive components, I like to do a lot of call-on responses. Students do have very important things to say and sometimes those lectures can be a way for students to learn about the material in a different way.

I’m not sure how it works with creating courses; do you have the freedom to craft a course based on something in your field or is it more based on what the college has to offer? If it was your own doing, what brought you to what you teach now? 

I was shocked when coming here that we didn't have to teach Intro to Psychology, for example, that we could teach these classes of our own invention. And I think Sarah Lawrence does pride itself on teaching the latest research and the latest work that's out there. So, when I started teaching here something that was really popular was this course on happiness at Yale. It’s wild. It’s the biggest course that has been taught in Yale history. It's actually been modified to a Coursera course online that now has millions of subscribers. The professor, Laurie Santos, started a revolution of sorts in psychology to normalize pedagogy and offerings around positive psychology, where before people kind of saw it as this very, very niche thing. So when I started here in 2020, I was like, well, this is a course that’s proven really popular at Yale. What I found really interesting is that I teach it more now to a Sarah Lawrence crowd. I have taken part of the past few years to answer these questions of what our definition of happiness looks like against other global communities and the way that they conceptualize happiness. What we know from the literature, how is it representative of other communities, if at all? If we're talking about a privileged class of individuals that's being studied by these researchers, they often don't generalize to other populations. I guess what I'm trying to say is that when I started at Sarah Lawrence they were basically just like, "What do you wanna teach?" And that was the start of it. And so I was like, "Really anything? I can teach anything?" And they said, "Yeah, within reason, and here’s what we're offering in our curriculum, so based on what we're offering, where do you see your line of work complementing that?" Because I think they hire tenure track faculty in particular to fill gaps in the curriculum for specific types of classes that students will really want to take. So I proposed a class on neuropsychology, which was in my background. Happiness was kind of new to me but adjacent to the kind of work I do. The mind-body class is again adjacent to the work I do. I've got classes on the back of my mind that I'm thinking about. It just kind of evolves from old and new thought. Actually, can I tell you about something I'm very excited about?

Yes, of course! 

This is brand new, but I'm hoping to co-teach a class with a film historian on campus, Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen, as well as visual artist John O’Connor; we were talking about teaching a class on laughter together, and the psychology of laughter and how it pertains to digital media and media representations of laughter. And only at Sarah Lawrence could we do something like this, where we could kind of combine all these different ideas and bring them together. I can't think of a better place to be enmeshed in the humanities and other disciplines than at Sarah Lawrence. I actually was a double major in English as an undergrad. I couldn't decide. 

I can’t either. But that's why I love being here, is because I can explore all these different things. At least right now I don't have to know what I want to do.

And the cool thing is that you can take that one class outside of these disciplines and find that that's what answers your questions. Like, what I love about Sarah Lawrence is that triangulation of thought and that outside of the box thinking eventually coming around to help you with your original problem, which I don’t think a lot of institutions place an emphasis on. You never know. It's important to just stay open to all possibilities and see what you get from that. 

Totally, and I think that having these specific classes really helps with that. It’s bringing things that are interesting to people who aren’t necessarily interested in those broader fields like psychology. To that point, do you have a method of why you choose a specific class to teach? Why do you feel that these are the topics to bring to light in your teaching? 

I guess my own personal reasoning comes from thinking Sarah Lawrence students should have an education that reflects the value of what they're paying for. In the sense that you are going to a top tier institution, that has a name value, that should give you the latest, more cutting edge ideas in a field, so that you can go out there as a grad student and have had classes that teach you the latest theories in a particular field. That's for people who are specializing. For people that are coming to it from a brand new perspective, what I’m hoping for is to give people a handle on something that they wouldn't otherwise touch at all. For the Finding Happiness class, for example, I think, or I hope, I've drawn in students from different disciplines like film and other curricula that wouldn’t otherwise take a psychology course. For me, that's really important so that we can figure out where their disciplinary interests lie in the curriculum, bringing people in in that way. But why these courses in particular and how they evolve? For me, it sort of comes from this impetus of thinking that students should know this because it’s timely, it’s relevant. I want to give people different entry points for caring and thinking about these things that are really important and timely.

With the Finding Happiness class, when I was looking at it I saw that the final paper or project was your own habit and breaking that habit. Can you speak to how you came up with that idea? 

That's another mode of pedagogical thinking and theory suggesting that if you bring the individual into the work, they'll find it more meaningful and learn more from it. Unlearning yourself is embedding the course's major goals into the personal work that you do through the class. I've had a lot of students telling me, “I took this in my freshman year and it set up my success for the next four years.” I've had students come back to me after they've graduated already and said, “You know that habit that I tried to unlearn? I kept with that.” It's little moments like that that make me realize that this class has an impact in a much more significant way than being a class to take just to take it. I actually said this in class yesterday, whether you learn this just to have it for the final paper, or if you learn it for the rest of your life, I hope you'll take something away from it. The nature of that course requires some sort of personal self work. And that unlearning yourself project actually came from Laurie Santos' work on rewirement. She has these exercises where she asks people to rewire their thinking or brain around a particular concept, and so I'm having the students do that throughout the week with weekly assignments but also at the end of the year with the unlearning yourself project.

People are definitely more creative here; we have the outlet to be creative and most people here are here to study more creative fields and I feel like that seeps into even the stem fields. I can imagine your answer will pertain to this lasting impact on students through your classes, but what would you say would be the most gratifying part about teaching here at Sarah Lawrence for you? 

Just the student connections, feeling like I get to know the students. The way you all express yourselves is really authentic. Having the donning system, for example, where you have your students from FYS up until graduation. My first set of FYS students are going to be seniors next year, and I'm getting choked up just thinking about what that's gonna be like, to see their progression. From the time that they were first years coming out of a really tough time with the pandemic—they were just coming out of only Zoom classes—to now, what they're gonna look like in their senior year. And they're just such wonderful, delightful people. Every one of them has such unique strengths, they've all gone off to do things in film and theater, and what a gift. What a gift to be able to see somebody's development like that and watch them go through some of the most significant, poignant times of their lives. I think that's an incredible thing about this year in particular.

I will say that I think that the connection that you love so much really shows in your teaching, everyone who has taken your classes loves them. I heard that 75 or so people registered for your 45 person lecture, so even in interviews, in those twenty short minutes, people already found themselves gravitating towards you and what you teach. How have you felt the impact that you’ve made on students? 

It’s kind of overwhelming, to be honest. But I have set it up intentionally in that way because I think that it's important that you welcome people, it's a core value of mine, that people feel seen, valued, because you don't get that in many places. I just feel as if it's a thing I owe people as a teacher. It's a thing that students deserve, especially if you're coming into a scary place, or a place that you're unsure about. Let's say you're taking this psychology class for the first time, I think you're taking a risk as a student. And so I really want to honor and see that risk, and it's nice that students are picking up on what I'm putting down when I say, “I appreciate you and I acknowledge that you're doing something that's challenging for you, that you’re doing for the first time.” And so I like to lead with a lot of compassion and open warmth, and I think Sarah Lawrence also provides that space inherently through that small student to faculty ratio. But it's cool and also overwhelming at times; whenever I see the number of students registering and showing up for my interviews I'm like, “Oh my god, really? This many people? Okay, let's go.” Last year, I got selected to be the senior class speaker, which was really overwhelming. They had been here longer than I had. I was three years in, they had been at Sarah Lawrence for four. It's obviously just such a good fit with Sarah Lawrence. There's something about this place and the ways that I connect with the students that is overwhelming but feels very right. 

What classes are you teaching next semester? 

I'm teaching a class on the mind-body interactions through the lens of the endocrine system. I've had a lot of students telling me they were wanting to take that one over the immune system one and I'm like, “Let’s not knock the immune system!” The immune system is also really cool! I'm also teaching an open level course in neuropsychology which is my bread and butter, it's what I got trained in to do. So it's about the brain and behavior and what we know about the brain's role in our behavior, which covers everything from language to vision to decision making, so kind of touching on different elements. And that one I love teaching. Of course I love teaching all of them, but that one in particular is very exciting to me. I get to kind of go back to my roots as a neuropsychologist. 

Any other classes you’re hoping to teach at some point? 

I definitely just want to expand out my horizons into more of those interdisciplinary courses, like the laughter course. I've really enjoyed thinking about that one and putting it together with my colleagues. It gets me to think outside the box and not get pigeonholed in one discipline. It’s really where I'm happiest, getting creative and using my brain in lots of different ways, being challenged; it's really fun. I equate being at Sarah Lawrence to a plane taking off, and now that I’m in flight, I just want to see what I can get good at through my teaching and bring more theory and greater pedagogical practice into my work. So my happiness class is kind of my tinkering class where I kind of play around with it every year to fine tune it and get it to a point where I'm really happy with it, figuring out how to teach it to Sarah Lawrence students specifically.  You can't really adapt a traditional syllabus or curriculum and try to enmesh it in here and hope it will work the same way.

It really is that broad amount of freedom and ability we are given to do such niche things that I think really makes the school. Besides teaching, what do you do in your free time?

I love doing yoga, reading for fun (mostly fiction, sometimes non-fiction, especially during the semester), going to concerts and comedy shows, and, as someone who lives in the city, taking advantage of all that NYC has to offer in terms of food and entertainment in general. 

Is there anything that's fascinating in your field that you've learned that people may not know? Or something that you find fascinating that others may not?

Something that surprised me recently that has changed the way I teach about the brain is from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett's recent book titled Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain​. The "half-lesson" that she sets up at the beginning of the book is that the brain is not for thinking, as we typically ascribe its function to be, in the sense of being able to do all of these "higher-order" things like reading, writing, painting, playing an instrument, doing math, etc. She says instead that the brain is wired for survival, and everything we do is a byproduct of that wiring. You'll have to check out the rest of the book for the remaining seven lessons, but it's well worth a read!