The Consortium was founded by Dr. Arien Mack, Alfred and Monette Marrow Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research, where she has edited Social Research since 1970. She established the Social Research conference series in 1988, and she continues to direct it through the Center for Public Scholarship at the New School.
Mack is also the founder and director of the New School’s Journal Donation Project, which operated from 1990 when the Berlin Wall came down until the end of 2018. The Project made thousands of academic and research journals available to libraries and universities in countries where access to those publications was difficult for either political or economic reasons and often for both.
As a research psychologist, her most recent work focused on perception,
cognition, and attention. Her publications include more than 60 articles and the coauthored volume Inattentional Blindness (MIT Press 1998).
In 2007, she launched Endangered Scholars Worldwide, dedicated to drawing attention to the plight of scholars, students, and researchers around the world whose lives and livelihoods are under threat due to the nature of their work or political positions.