The Thought Project Podcast At The Graduate Center

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 program that seeks to improve urban education and places distinguished school administrators on a fast track to leadership positions in K-12. He is a steering committee member of the Proud Teacher Initiative, a network of teachers, principals, and school professionals supporting one another to take steps towards self-disclosing their LGBTQ identities.

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 Professor and Critical Pedagogy Librarian Emily Drabinski, and Assistant Professor and Head of Reference Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, who identify as queer and lesbian, individually and in their professional work.

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. Halkitis earned a Ph.D. in educational psychology from The Graduate Center, CUNY in 1995. He talks about his latest book, The Public Lives of Gay Men from Stonewall to the Queer Generation, just out from Oxford University Press.

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, Partners, Allies for Respect and Tolerance for All (SPART*A) and Trans United Fund. She is the author of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Trans (But Were Afraid to Ask) (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2019). She currently works for a nonprofit think-tank in the Washington, D.C., area where she lives with Janis, her wife of 19 years, and their three children. She spoke at The Graduate Center in February 2019 at an event hosted by the Center for the Study of Women and Society and the Public Science Project.

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 Brown, whose raid on Harpers Ferry is approaching its 160th anniversary. Reynolds also wrote two other books about Walt Whitman, the “bard of democracy,” whose bicentennial birthday is being celebrated this month, particularly in New York, where he was born and established himself as a poet and writer. Reynolds is giving an invited talk at Whitman’s birthplace in Huntington, New York, on May 31 — the bard’s birthday. An interview with Reynolds is also due to air on NPR’s All Things Considered on May 30.

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 CUNY Presidential Award. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council, and other foundations, and he has been both a Russell Sage Foundation fellow and a Guggenheim Foundation fellow. A committed public sociologist, he is supporting an effort in New York state that will allow undocumented persons to obtain a driver’s license. Find out why Smith asserts that American children are being emotionally harmed by states that do not permit the undocumented to drive. Tune in.

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 of New York (SUNY) Health and Science Center Brooklyn. She trained at Cornell Weill Medical Center in New York and at the Skirball Institute for Molecular Medicine at NYU. Casaccia’s lab is working to uncover how factors like stress, the bacteria inside our intestinal tract, environment and other influencers can trigger or contribute to the progression of  neurological diseases. Her team, for example, has identified links between obesity and the progression of multiple sclerosis; natural disaster and infant mental health; and exposure to stress and reduced proliferation of the cells that create the protective sheath a

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 Whitman Through Location-Based Mobile Technologies.” Merandy developed the interactive game of “Vanishing Leaves” that a participant downloads to a phone app, enabling them to walk with Whitman through his beloved neighborhood in Brooklyn Heights. Merandy’s groundbreaking digital study—a homage to Whitman—comes just before the poet's bicentennial birthday, which will be celebrated in Brooklyn and elsehwere on May 31st.

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 historical research about racialization and the relations between the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people and their two home countries: Mexico and the United States. Following graduation, Ms. Gil will return to Mexico. She will join the faculty at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa and will continue working with the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people. Gil is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at The Graduate Center.

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 Humanities, he launched Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a series of student- and guest-edited chapbooks of archival texts emerging from the New American Poetry, one of the premier initiatives in graduate-level primary research about poets and poetry, situated in an American university . Alcalay’s books and publications include Scrapmetal (Factory School, 2006); from the warring factions (Beyond Baroque, 2002), a book-length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica; Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (City Lights, 1999); After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (U

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 on what she presumed to be a one-volume biography. Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3: The War Years and After, 1939-1962, the final volume, was completed in 2016. Until she took on the Eleanor Roosevelt project, Cook considered herself a “hard historian,” or a military historian. In 1981, she published the controversial The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare, which made The New York Times best-sellers list. Eisenhower’s and Roosevelt’s legacies serve to inform the public’s understanding of contemporary events. Cook is the expert historian to help us contextualize today’s events in a

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 between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Barr also declared that President Trump was not found liable for obstruction charges. Almost immediately, Congress began calling for the report's release. Listen to the conversation with Brown, who shares his insights into the current power struggle between the White House and Congress.

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 implications for the future of democracy. Applebaum is currently professor of practice at the London School of Economics’ Institute of Global Affairs where she runs Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda. A former member of The Washington Post editorial board, she has also worked as the foreign and deputy editor of The Spectator magazine in London, as the political editor of the Evening Standard, and as a columnist at Slate and at several British newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. From 1988 to 1991, she covered the collapse of communism as the Warsaw correspond

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 opened its IlluminationSpace, a hands-on education center designed to enhance scientific understanding across New York City’s diverse communities. The IlluminationSpace offers an array of events and programs that make advanced scientific concepts accessible to ASRC visitors of all ages and backgrounds. To tell us more about the IlluminationSpace is Camille Santistevan, the associate director of public relations at the ASRC who runs this this new and exciting STEM education space.

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, Naomi Schor, and Diane Middlebrook — colleagues in the academy who tragically passed away between 2001 and 2007. During the writing of the book, Miller is confronted with her own mortality when she is diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer — perhaps confronting the end of her life without her dear friends. These friendships are complicated and interlocking, foundational to Miller’s life and her identities as a scholar and as a feminist, which were forged at the beginning of second-wave feminism during the 1970s.

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 relationship in more depth with historical context is Distinguished Professor Emeritus Ervand Abrahamian of Baruch College and The Graduate Center, where he taught Iranian and Middle Eastern history and politics. He is author of seven books and numerous essays and articles. Most noteworthy is his seminal book The Coup: 1953, The CIA, & Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, (New Press in 2013).

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 emphasis on housing, real estate and gentrification in New York City, which is captured in his new book: Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (Verso, March 2019). Stein’s book tour launches this evening in New York City. Stein reflects on the failed New York City Amazon deal in The Guardian penned on Feb. 23: “New York’s Dance with Amazon Shows Us How to Fight for a City’s Future.”

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 wife at his side, he denied that he was in the photos. All major figures in the Democratic party, including the party chair Tom Perez have called on Northam to resign. He has thus far refused to step down. To help us unpack these layers of racism as depicted in “Black Face” and its continued reappearances, now in politics as well, is Distinguished Professor Eric Lott, a cultural historian and author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism, Harvard University Press, 2017 and Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Oxford University Press (1993 and 2013), which won

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 into law by President Barack Obama in 2009. Arguably, the women’s movement and feminism itself was rebooted in the aftermath of the 2016 election when Hillary Clinton, considered one of the most qualified persons to ever run for the presidency, was defeated by Donald Trump, a candidate who ran for office noted for his personal denigration of women. In the shocking aftermath of this election, the women’s march took place in January 2017, the largest demonstration in US history that went global. Professor Lynn S. Chancer, a lifelong feminist scholar, sociologist and faculty member at Hunter College and the Graduate Ce

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. Professor Wissinger’s research focuses on technology, fashion and embodiment. Her current research of how wearable technology genders bodies, research though which she is affiliated with the think tank, Data and Society. She is author of  This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media and the Making of Glamor (NYU Press 2015).  During the podcast Professor Wissinger points to changes in the fashion “industry [that] has been trying to catch up with the changes in what is considered beautiful and fashionable that came about before social media was a force...fashion blogging made a space for totally different images to be fashionable t