CUNY Graduate Center

This week’s guest is James Muyskens, who has been serving as interim president of The Graduate Center since July. He is a distinguished educational leader with a commitment to public higher education as both a teacher and administrator. His recent appointment marks his return to The Graduate Center, where he taught philosophy at the start of his career and later served as a University Professor fo...

This week’s guest is Professor Susan Opotow, a member of the faculty at both The Graduate Center and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Opotow, along with several doctoral students and her co-editor Zachary Baron Shemtob, recently published New York After 9/11 (Fordham Press, 2018). The collection of essays and papers offers a detailed and interdisciplinary look at New York's ongoing recovery f...

Amber Scorah, a current CUNY BA student talks about her life and best selling memoir Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life(Viking, June 2019). Scorah shares a remarkable journey of leaving the Jehovah Witness faith while on mission in China. Leaving her faith as a third generation Jehovah Witness was fraught with a multitude of challenges. For beginners, severing her ties to t...

We continue our celebration of Pride Month and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots with a conversation with José Luis Jiménez, a New York City public school principal and a Ph. D. student in the urban education program at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He was recently selected for the Cahn Fellows Program for Distinguished Principals at Teachers College, Columbia University, a leadership progr...

This June marks not only Pride Month, but also the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots that kicked off the LGBTQ civil rights movement. To celebrate, The Thought Project podcast is hosting guests who share their pride-related stories. Today, we speak with three librarians from the Mina Rees Library at The Graduate Center, CUNY: Professor and Chief Librarian Polly Thistlethwaite, Associate Prof...

The Thought Project is honoring Pride Month and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots with a series on LGBTQ issues and the ongoing LBGTQ civil rights movement. Today, we host Perry N. Halkitis, a public health psychologist, researcher, educator, and advocate who is dean and professor of biostatistics and urban-global public health at the School of Public Health at Rutgers University. Halkit...

Brynn Tannehill is a Naval Academy graduate and aviator who earned her master’s degree in operations research from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 2008. She has since worked in the defense industry as a senior analyst and research scientist. After transitioning in 2012 she has been an activist and researcher on transgender issues, including serving as a board member of Service Members, Pa...

This week’s guest is David S. Reynolds, a distinguished professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY.  He is the author of Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  A cultural historian of the pre-Civil War period, Reynolds has written seminal books about abolitionist John...

This week’s guest is Professor Robert Courtney Smith, a sociology faculty member at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a faculty member at the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College. He is the author of Mexican New York: Transnational Worlds of New Immigrants (California, 2006), which won the American Sociological Association's 2008 Distinguished Book Award and a...

This week’s guest is Dr. Patrizia Casaccia, the Einstein professor of biology and biochemistry at The Graduate Center, founding director of the Neuroscience Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center, and the Co-director of a joint CUNY-Mount Sinai Glial Center. She received her medical degree with honors from the University of Rome, and a PhD degree in Neurobiology from State University o...

This week’s guest is Jesse Merandy (Ph. D. '19, English), director of the Digital Media Lab at the Bard Graduate Center. Merandy, a self-proclaimed "Whitmaniac" is also the vice president of the Walt Whitman Initiative and member of the New York City Digital Humanities Steering Committee. He recently completed The Graduate Center’s first all-digital dissertation, “Vanishing Leaves: A Study of Walt...

This week’s guest is Rocio Gil, a Ph. D. candidate in anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY and an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College. She is author of Fronteras de Pertenencia Borders of Belonging, an ethnography about transnational indegenous communities living in Mexico and the United States. Her current work is based on the Texas-Coahuila borderland, where she conducted ethnographic and hi...

This week’s guest, Ammiel Alcalay, is a poet, translator, critic, scholar, and activist who teaches at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Along with Anne Waldman and others, he was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and he organized, with Mike Kelleher, the OlsonNow project. Most recently, through The Graduate Center’s Ph. D. Program in English and the Center for the...

This week’s guest, Blanche Wiesen Cook, is a distinguished professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she also teaches in the women's studies program. Cook is the author or editor of seven books including the seminal trilogy of Eleanor Roosevelt — the only trilogy published about an American woman — which she completed 35 years after embarking...

This week’s guest is Heath Brown, an associate professor at The Graduate Center and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Brown discusses the two-year investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose report was submitted to Attorney General William Barr on March 22. Just two days later, Barr sent a four-page memorandum to Congress summarizing the report’s findings that there was no collusion...

Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Anne Applebaum spoke at The Graduate Center in March 2019 as a panelist at “The Free Press,” part of The Graduate Center’s “Promise and Perils of Democracy” series. In this edition of the Thought Project podcast, recorded just before the panel discussion, Applebaum talks about the rise in illiberalism and authoritarianism and its impli...

The Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at The Graduate Center, CUNY is an internationally known center of excellence in interdisciplinary scientific research and discovery in five related areas: nanoscience, photonics, structural biology, neuroscience, and the environmental sciences. Located in Harlem, the ASRC has a mission to promote science in the public interest. Late last year, the ASRC...

Nancy K. Miller is a distinguished professor of English, French, and comparative literature and teaches in the M.A. Program in Women's and Gender studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including, most recently, My Brilliant Friends (Columbia University Press, 2019), which tells the story of the deep friendships she formed with Carolyn Heilbrun...

U.S.-Iran relations are arguably at their lowest point since perhaps the 1979 Iranian Revolution. President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the multilaterally negotiated Iran Nuclear Deal in 2017 has brought on new tensions. John Bolton, the national security advisor, directed the Pentagon late last year to prepare military options to strike Iran. Joining us to explore this rel...

To explain the dynamics of gentrification and its relationship to real estate companies, city planners and labor unions and how it has taken hold in New York City and many other major cities in the United States is Samuel Stein, a geography Ph. D. candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY and an Urban Studies Instructor at Hunter College. His work focuses on the politics of urban planning with an emp...

Last week it was revealed that Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of the state of Virginia had been featured in his 1984 medical school yearbook with photos of one man in black face and another in a Klu Klux Klan white hood and robes outfit. In the wake of its revelation Northam initially apologized calling the photos “shocking,” but by the next day during a bizarre press conference with his w...

The Women’s movement for equal rights has been under continual siege by right-wing forces since the US Supreme Court ruled in a landmark decision in making access to first trimester abortions legal in 1993. Progress in equal pay has been slower, despite the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, thus resulting in Congressional efforts that passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act signed i...

To explain the fashion world and some of the recent controversies involving racism during an age when fashion trend setting Michelle Obama, one of the  most prominent African American woman on the planet, we are joined today by Elizabeth Wissinger, professor of Sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and The Graduate Center, CUNY where she teaches Fashion Studies and sociology. Pro...

Featured in this podcast is Joshua Brumberg, dean for the sciences at The Graduate Center, CUNY and also a professor of neuroscience in psychology at Queens College. Dean Brumberg is spearheading the GC’s Sciences initiative as projected in its strategic plan. Brumberg said: “World class science happens at CUNY and you can come to CUNY and become world class scientist.”

Professor Margaret Chin is a faculty member at Hunter College and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York where she has been engaged at the center of debate on affirmative action in the Harvard legal case and the New York City elite high school testing controversy as a result of her research and advocacy. Chin is a professor of sociology. She received her B.A. from Harvard Universit...