The Thought Project Podcast At The Graduate Center

Jean Halley is a professor of sociology at The College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She earned her doctorate in sociology at The Graduate Center of CUNY, and her master’s degree in theology at Harvard University. Among her recent publications include Seeing Straight, an Introduction to Gender and Sexual Privilege in 2017 and Seeing White An Introduction to White Privilege and Race, 2011.

Katherine Verdery is the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and distinguished professor of anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Since 1973, she has conducted field research in Romania, initially emphasizing the political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism. Two decades after the fall of communism under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Verdery discovered that she had been a subject of investigation. She captures this discovery in her impressive memoir, My Life As a Spy, published by Duke University Press.

Julie Hecht is a Ph.D. student in Animal Behavior and Comparative Psychology who works with Diana Reiss at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The New York Times observed that Julie “finds her bliss in canine urine.” She is also a science writer and author of the popular “Dog Spies” blog at Scientific American.

Frank Hentschker is professor of theatre and the executive director of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He came to The Graduate Center in 2001 as the Segal Center’s program director and was appointed to the doctoral faculty in 2009. Among the vital events and series he has founded at the Segal Center are the World Theatre Performance series, the annual fall PRELUDE Festival, and the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series. In this podcast, Hentschker discusses the Segal Center’s unique roles in New York City, within The City University of New York, and as a hub for endangered playwrights and rarely-seen plays. The Segal Center is also a publisher and curator of unique, international theatre.

Joy Connolly is senior vice president, provost, and distinguished professor of classics at The Graduate Center, the home of CUNY’s arts and sciences doctoral degrees and interdisciplinary master’s programs. In today’s Thought Project podcast, she discusses The Graduate Center’s plans to transform doctoral education in the humanities with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Luke Waltzer is the director of the Teaching and Learning Center at The Graduate Center, where he supports GC students in their teaching across the CUNY system and beyond and works on a variety of pedagogical and digital projects. Waltzer leads the GC's effort to assist Ph.D. students in preparing to enter classrooms across CUNY as effective teachers who also leverage a variety of technologies to deepen the learning experience. Teaching's effect on learning is not a static paradigm, and Waltzer is fully engaged helping prepare doctoral students for the classroom through a rigorous and professional approach.

Jesse Prinz is a distinguished professor of philosophy at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He is a notable expert in philosophy of psychology and a strong proponent of the emerging methodology known as experimental philosophy. He is author of The Conscious Brain; The Emotional Construction of Morals, Beyond Human Nature; and Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Before his arrival to The Graduate Center in 2009, he was the John J. Rogers Distinguished Professor in the department of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In this segment he discusses the philosophy of ethics and morality in America’s politics.

The Thought Project - Episode 14 - Interview with Gregory Smithsimon by CUNY Graduate Center

This week’s guest is Ruth Milkman a sociologist of labor and labor movements who has written on a variety of topics involving work and organized labor in the United States, past and present. Her most recent book is Unfinished Business: Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of U.S. Work-Family Policy (Cornell University Press, 2013), coauthored with Eileen Appelbaum. She has also written extensively about low-wage immigrant workers in the United States, analyzing their employment conditions as well as the dynamics of immigrant labor organizing. Milkman opines in this podcast on the Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees case before the US Supreme Court. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY and also serves as the research director of the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies.

This week’s guest is Linda Martin Alcoff who is a professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She specializes in epistemology, feminism, race theory and existentialism. Alcoff has called for greater inclusion of historically underrepresented groups in philosophy and notes that philosophers from these groups have created new fields of inquiry, including feminist philosophy, critical race theory, and LGBTQ philosophy. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Brown University. She was recognized as the distinguished Woman Philosopher of 2005 by the Society for Women in Philosophy and the APA. She is the author of 13 books, including The Future of Whiteness, published by Polity Press, 2015. She began teaching at CUNY in early 2009, after teaching for many years at Syracuse University.

This week’s guest is Polly Thistlethwaite, the chief librarian at the Graduate Center. She joined the GC in 2011 and since then has increased the Library’s participation in networks to bring meaningful access to the world’s academic and cultural heritage to CUNY scholars and students. Among these initiatives include a collaboration with the Manhattan Research Library Initiative that enables access for CUNY faculty and students to the NYPL and private libraries at Columbia and NYU. Polly’s early career work with queer archives and AIDS activism primed her present-day advocacy for public scholarship and open access publishing. She firmly believes that the academic output of the world’s universities should be freely available to everybody. She is co-author of Being a Scholar in the Digital Era, published in 2016 by Policy Press.

This week’s guest Dr. Michelle Fine, a distinguished professor of Critical Psychology, Women’s Studies, American Studies and Urban Education at the Graduate Center. She is also co-founder of the Public Science Project at the Graduate Center. Her primary research interest is the study of social injustice: when injustice appears as fair or deserved, when it is resisted, and how it is negotiated by those who pay the most serious price for social inequities. She studies these issues in public high schools, prisons, and with youth in urban communities, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Fine is known for her groundbreaking research through the framework of Participatory Action Research and Studies of Social Injustice and Resistance. Her work at the public science project is emblematic of this approach of traditional subjects of research become partners in the research.

This week’s guest is Manu Bhagavan, professor of history and human rights at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Professor Bhagavan is a specialist on modern India focusing on the 20th Century late-colonial and post-colonial periods, with particular interests in human rights, nationalism and questions of sovereignty. He is author of the critically acclaimed The Peacemakers: India and the Quest for One World published by Harper Collins in 2012.

This week’s guest Meena Alexander, is a distinguished professor of English, Hunter College and the Graduate Center. As a practicing poet, and scholar Professor Alexander has a special interest in postcolonial writings and contemporary poetry and poetics. These areas are tied in with her ongoing reflections on autobiographical writing, feminism, Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms, transnational migration, trauma, memory and identity.

This week’s guest Richard Alba, is a distinguished professor of sociology who became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. Author of numerous books and known for his scholarship on race and urban sociology, which has developed a comparative focus, encompassing the immigration of North American societies and Western Europe. Today he joins us to discuss his latest effort as a member of the New York City Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers.

This week’s guest Matt Gold, is an Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the Graduate Center, where he holds teaching appointments in the Ph.D. Program in English, the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies (MALS), and the doctoral certificate programs in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and American Studies. He serves as Advisor to the Provost for Digital Initiatives, Director of the CUNY Academic Commons, Co-Director of the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, and Director of the GC Digital Scholarship Lab. In all of these roles, he works to integrate digital tools and methods into the core research and teaching missions of the Graduate Center.

This week’s guest Heath Brown, is an associate professor of public policy at the Graduate Center and John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY. He obtained his PhD in public administration and public policy at the George Washington University and a Masters’ degree at the Elliot School of International Affairs, also at GW. He is author of four books, three of which apply to today's podcast conversation that includes Immigrants and Electoral Politics: Non Profit Organizing in a Time of Demographic Change; Pay to Play Politics: How Money Defines American Democracy and for today’s purposes, the Tea Party Divided: The Hidden Diversity of a Maturing Movement.

This week’s guest Tony Ro is a presidential professor of psychology and biology and director of the Ro Lab at Graduate Center. Ro and his colleagues are investigating the brain’s deeply complex cognitive and neuronal architecture, and its role in determining our attention, perceptions and action. Ro joined the Graduate Center in 2015 after 7 years at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at CUNY’s City College. Ro will direct a new Masters’ program in Cognitive Neuro Science in Fall 2018.

This week’s guest is Steve Romalewski, director of the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center. The CUNY Mapping Service is supporting a fair and accurate Census 2020 Count and is working with a coalition of civil rights groups, philanthropic foundations and others to map in “hard to count” communities in advance of the 2020 Census.

Interview with David Bloomfield, professor of Educational Leadership, Law and Policy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center. Professor Bloomfield specializes in education law, school district management, school reform and legislative matters.