CUNY Graduate Center

Imagine being identified as a male on your driver’s license but a female on your birth certificate. That’s the Kafkaesque experience of many transgender individuals including scholar and author Paisley Currah, whose important new book, Sex Is as Sex Does, examines how sex functions as a tool of government. Currah, a professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate...

In this Pride Month episode of The Thought Project podcast, we talk to Max Osborn, a recent graduate of the Criminal Justice Ph. D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center who has carved out a niche as a queer criminologist, studying how LGBTQ individuals are affected by the criminal justice system. For his doctoral dissertation, Osborn, who is transgender and uses he and they pronouns, interviewed 42...

Anne Valk, a specialist in women’s history and public history, joins The Thought Project for a Pride Month conversation that touches on the curtailing of LGBTQ rights and of women’s rights by the Supreme Court and state legislators. Valk is a professor of History and director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center. As a public historian, Va...

In this Juneteenth Thought Project episode, we talk to Britton Williams about the Black MAP Project and reinventing mental health care for the Black community. Just over 100 years ago, a white mob lynched and mutilated Mary Turner, a Black woman who was eight months pregnant, for criticizing the lynching of her husband. How did Turner’s family and community heal from this horror? Britton Williams,...

In this Pride Month podcast, we hear from the director and associate director of the CUNY LGBTQI+ Consortium, which advocates for and celebrates the CUNY LGBTQ community. Director Jacqueline Brashears (she/hers), a.k.a. Dr. Unicorn, is a biology professor at LaGuardia Community College. She is an LGTQ advocate and trans woman who has blogged about her transition. Associate Director JC Carlson (the...

The Russia-Ukraine war, now in its 11th week, continues to prove analysts wrong. This week on The Thought Project podcast, Julie George, a professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College and a visiting professor at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, explains why the conflict confounds her and other regional experts. “It's very hard to predict how the war will u...

Abe Silberstein is a master's student in Middle Eastern Studies, Anthropology, and History at the CUNY Graduate Center and the associate director of the North America office of the Abraham Initiatives, an Israeli organization founded in 1989 that “strives to fulfill the promise of full and equal citizenship and complete equality of social and political rights for Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens....

Last June, after more than a year of COVID-induced remote work, Emily Drabinski, interim chief librarian and critical pedagogy librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center, and her staff reopened the Graduate Center library to students and scholars on a limited basis. “Every student we saw, made my heart swell 18 sizes,” she says. The pandemic proved to her and others that the library is more than a port...

How did activists in Ireland convince an overwhelming majority of the country to vote in 2018 to reverse the country’s abortion ban that had been more or less in place for over a century? According to Graduate Center Ph. D. candidate Brenna McCaffrey (Anthropology), the change in public opinion was influenced by a relentless campaign led by women who put the issue of access to safe, medically appr...

CUNY Graduate Center Professor Ramona Hernandez and alumna Allison Guess (Ph. D. ’21, Earth and Environmental Sciences) join this episode of The Thought Project for a timely discussion of the Hispaniola Slave Rebellion of 1521. Hernandez is the director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and a professor of Sociology at City College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include...

Edwin Grimsley is a Ph. D. candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in biology. His dissertation, The Collateral and Cumulative Effects of Marijuana Criminalization, examines the racialized development of marijuana laws in the United States, and how the criminalization of marijuana possession disproportionately affects Black people. Prior to...

Joining The Thought Project today is Elaine Montilla, assistant vice president of information technology and the chief information officer at the CUNY Graduate Center. She was just named to the 2021 Outstanding 100 Role Model LGBT+ Executives list sponsored by Yahoo Finance. The list showcases leaders who are breaking down barriers and creating more inclusive workplaces. Montilla joined the Gradua...

When CUNY Graduate Center Professor Matthew K. Gold tweeted last month that he and his colleague Lisa Rhody received a nearly $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help their students learn digital skills and create digital projects, he drew an outpouring of support. Close to 20 colleagues from across The City University of New York and beyond congratulated him and Rhody...

David Bloomfield is a professor of Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center and of Education Leadership, Law, and Policy at Brooklyn College. A former general counsel of the New York City Board of Education, he is regularly consulted by the media for his expertise on education policy. He is the author of American Public Education Law, Third Edition and frequently pens op-eds, book chapters, and...

Philip Luke Johnson is a Political Science Ph. D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is also a lecturer in the undergraduate writing program at Princeton University. His dissertation research is supported by fellowships from the Graduate Center, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He has published article...

Today’s guest is physicist and engineer Professor Andrea Alù, who joined the Advanced Science Research Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY as the founding director of the Photonics Initiative. He is also the Einstein Professor of Physics at the Graduate Center and a professor of Engineering at The City College of New York. Broadly recognized as a leading scientist in optics and photonics, Alù and...

Today’s guest, Professor Candace McCoy, is a faculty member in the Criminal Justice Ph. D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Trained in law, she applies legal concepts to social science research on a variety of criminal justice operations and organizations. She has published widely and has held several fellowships for research and teaching. From 2016 to 2018, while on professional leave from th...

Today’s guest, Rachel B. Tiven, is an established civil rights leader and change-maker who is coming to the Graduate Center to get a Ph. D. in History. As a lawyer and nonprofit leader, she has become a leading voice on issues involving LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, and voting rights. In 2018, after serving as CEO of Lambda Legal, Tiven managed the voter protection hotline for the Georgia Demo...

Our guest today is Kevin Morris, a second-year Ph. D. student in Sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is also a quantitative researcher in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law. In that role, he examines the impact of laws and policies on poll access, with a particular focus on the restoration of rights and the maintenance of voter lists. This past June, he testi...

Today’s guest is Nathalie Etoke, a professor of French at the Graduate Center, CUNY, who specializes in literature and cinema of Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, Black French studies, queer studies in Africa and the Caribbean, and Africana existential thought. She is the author of three books: Writing the Woman's Body in Francophone Sub Saharan Literature; Melancholia: Africana the Indispensable Ov...

Today’s guests, Christopher Stults and J.L. Stewart, are co-authors of the recent article “Consensual Non-Monogamy Relationship Rules Among Young Gay and Bisexual Men: A Dyadic Qualitative Analysis,” published in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Stults is an assistant professor of psychology at Baruch College and at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he works with students in the Health Psychology and C...

Today’s guest is Elvis Bakaitis, interim head of reference at the Graduate Center's Mina Rees Library. They serve on the CUNY LGBTQ Council and are a member of the board of CLAGS: the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the Graduate Center. They are also the library liaison to Women's and Gender Studies master’s program at the Graduate Center. Bakaitis is the author and illustrator of Homos in Herstory an...

The guests for this Pride Month episode of The Thought Project include Mica Baum Tuccillo, a student in the Psychology Ph. D. program (Critical Social/Personality Psychology training area) at the CUNY Graduate Center and a research fellow in its Publics Lab. She supported and facilitated the Beyond Acceptance Research Collective, a queer youth research project under the auspices of the Graduate Ce...

On this episode of The Thought Project, Manu Bhagavan, professor of history at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Vivian Louie, professor of urban policy and planning and director of the Asian American Studies Program and Center at Hunter College, discuss the spike in hate crimes around the world, particularly the hatred and violence that have been directed toward Americans who are...

Rosa Squillacote and Milo Ward, students in the Ph. D. Program in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, share an interest in studying the New York City Police Department and policing in the U.S. Squillacote researches the limits of diversity within the NYPD and is an organizer for Mott Haven Families, an organization that aims to promote community safety through social support rather tha...