CUNY Graduate Center

Stanley Renshon is a professor of political science at Lehman College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is also a trained psychoanalyst who has used these skills in his examination of four U.S. presidents: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump, whom Renshon examines in his latest book: The Real Psychology of the Trump Presidency. In this podcast, the first of two, Dr. Ren...

Health Brown is an associate professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He studies, among many other things, presidential transitions, which are governed by law. With the possibility that President Trump won’t be reelected in November, there is a question being asked for the first time in U.S. history: Will the presidential transition be pe...

This episode of The Thought Project features Graduate Center Distinguished Professor Richard Alba (Sociology), whose latest book, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream, is out this week. Alba’s voluminous research for the book began in 2015, represented by a New York Times opinion-editorial, “The Myth of a White Minority,” in which he argued that...

This week's guest is Steve Romalewski, director of CUNY the Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research at The Graduate Center. ​Romalewski spearheads the Census 2020 project in partnership with civil rights groups and philanthropic foundations that are leading the effort to ensure a fair and accurate census count for especially "hard to count" communities. The Mapping Service contributes onl...

This week’s guest is Graduate Center, CUNY Professor Wendy Luttrell. She’s a sociologist committed to social justice research, especially in the field of education, and currently serves as the executive officer of The Graduate Center’s Urban Education doctoral program. She also has appointments in the sociology, psychology, and women and gender studies programs. Her research focuses on how educati...

This week’s guest is Graduate Center, CUNY Ph. D. candidate Melva M. Miller (Social Welfare), executive vice president at the Association for a Better New York (ABNY). She is leading the organization’s Census 2020 initiative for an accurate count of New York City. She previously served as the deputy borough president of Queens. She has served in the Queens Borough President’s office since 2007 as...

This week’s guest is Brett Stoudt, is an associate professor at The Graduate Center where he heads the Critical Social/Personality and Environmental Psychology subprogram of the Ph. D. Program in Psychology. Stoudt, who is also a Graduate Center alumnus, has worked on numerous participatory action research projects with community groups, lawyers, and policymakers nationally and internationally. Hi...

This week’s guest is Eugenia Paulicelli, professor of Italian, comparative literature, and women’s and gender studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY and Queens College. She is the founder and coordinator of the Fashion Studies concentration within the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies at The Graduate Center. She is editor, co-editor, and author of several books and publications on the history and theo...

This week’s guest is Christopher Putney, a master’s student in political science at The Graduate Center, CUNY and a lecturer at Hunter College. His research is focused on American political development and political theory. He is the recent author of a London School of Economics blog post titled “Trump’s likely impeachment acquittal shows just how much the Constitution has decayed.” Putney discuss...

Dána-Ain Davis is a professor of urban studies and anthropology at Queens College and The Graduate Center and the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society. Davis focuses on black feminist ethnography and the dynamics of race and racism. She discusses her latest book, "Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy and Premature Birth" (NYU Press, 2019), which asserts that black women s...

Philip Luke Johnson is a Ph. D. candidate in political science at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is also a political science writing fellow at The Graduate Center and a former adjunct instructor at Hunter College. Johnson joined The Thought Project podcast for a wide-ranging discussion about the convergence and role of organized crime and state terrorism in Mexico, which is part of a growing global...

Our guest this week is Katina Rogers, co-director of the Futures Initiative at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is also the co-director of the CUNY Humanities Alliance, which was created in 2015 to support humanities education at LaGuardia Community College and prepare Ph. D. students for careers as faculty members and higher education leaders. With a new $3.15 million grant from The Andrew W. Mello...

This week’s Thought Project guest is Heath Brown, associate professor of public policy at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is author of several books including "Immigrants and Electoral Politics" and the "Tea Party Divided: the Hidden Diversity of a Maturing Movement." In 24 days the Democratic presidential primaries begin with the Iowa caucuses. Brown wei...

This week’s guests are Graduate Center Professor Matthew K. Gold (English and Digital Humanities) and Luke Waltzer, director of The Graduate Center’s Teaching & Learning Center. Both are deeply involved in the CUNY Academic Commons, an academic social network designed to connect faculty, students, and staff throughout the 25 campuses of The City University of New York. Gold is the director of the...

Graduate Center, CUNY Professor Van C. Tran (Sociology), a former refugee and a graduate of Hostos Community College, Hunter College, and Harvard, talks about the joy of returning to CUNY and fulfilling one of his dreams: to teach at The Graduate Center. He revels in his research of immigrant-rich New York City, where he has explored the experiences of second-generation Latinos. Another area of sc...

Charles Tien is a professor of political science at Hunter College and at The Graduate Center, CUNY and an expert on the U.S. Congress and national politics. In this episode of The Thought Project, he weighs in on the House Select Intelligence Committee’s impeachment inquiry into President Donald J. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. The inquiry is now in its second week of hearings.

Jean Halley is a professor of sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY and the College of Staten Island. She earned her doctorate in sociology at The Graduate Center and her master’s in theology at Harvard University. She is the author of several books, including her latest, Horse Crazy: Girls and the Lives of Horses, a blend of personal narrative and research into why girls fall in love with horses...

Merima Ključo, an acclaimed accordionist and vocalist Jelena Milušić have a new creation, which they will be performing at The Graduate Center this week. Their duo album, Lume, is a conceptual work consisting of 10 love songs from different parts of the world, five of which were composed by Ključo, based on Romanian, Croatian, Kosovarian, and Sephardic traditional pieces. In different languages, "...

Andrea Alù is the founding director of the Photonics Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY; Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at the Graduate Center, and a professor of electrical engineering at The City College of New York. Alù has received numerous awards and widespread recognition for his breakthroughs in invisibility cloaking — a technology that mak...

Kevin Gardner is the founding director of the Advanced Science Research Center (CUNY ASRC) at The Graduate Center, CUNY’s Structural Biology Initiative and the Einstein Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The City University of New York and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Gardner’s team at the CUNY ASRC explores critical questions about the structures and functions of molecules within cells to b...

Today’s guest is Professor Margaret Chin of Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has been at the center of the recent Harvard race-conscious admissions case in which the court ruled in support of Harvard’s “whole person review,” allowing for race to be considered as one factor among many in undergraduate admissions. Chin, a Harvard graduate, testified in the case and also contributed...

This week’s guest, Annette "Nina" C. Gray, recently joined The Graduate Center as associate dean for the sciences and the new executive director of the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY (CUNY ASRC). Gray earned her Ph. D. from Brown University, where she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellow, and completed her postdoctoral work at Brandeis University...

This week’s guest is Professor Ashley Dawson (GC/CSI, English). He currently works in the fields of environmental humanities and postcolonial ecocriticism. He is the author of two recent books: Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017) and Extinction: A Radical History​ (OR Books, 2016). He weighs in on the climate change debate, the impact of c...

Professor Charles Tien (GC/Hunter, Political Science) weighs in on the congressional impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s admitted efforts to secure from the Ukraine president an investigation of Vice President Joe Biden and his son for alleged corruption. A former congressional staffer, Tien studies American politics with a particular focus on U.S. Congress and the representation of women a...

This week’s guest is Distinguished Professor John Mollenkopf (Political Science and Sociology), who directs The Graduate Center’s Center for Urban Research. He also coordinates our interdisciplinary concentration in public policy and urban studies. He weighs in on the presidential election and the unusual number of mayors vying for the Democratic nomination.