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New Stars in Faculty
Firmament
Well-known as one of CUNY’s most visible analysts of the metropolitan political and socio-economic scene is the Graduate Center’s John Mollenkopf. The most recent of the 10 books he has authored or co-authored is particularly timely as New York City re-invents its future: Place Matters: A Metropolitics for the 21st Century. His 1983 book Contested City is a considered a classic in the field of urban political science. Mollenkopf’s research projects have attracted more than $3 million in extramural funding from such groups as the Russell Sage, Mellon, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations. His B.A. is from Carleton College, and he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government at Harvard. He taught several years at Stanford before coming in 1981 to the Graduate Center, where he was Political Science Executive Officer from 1981-87. A veteran of 10 years at the Graduate Center is professor of psychology Michelle Fine. Skillful at attracting outside grant money—she has garnered 20 years of continuous funding—and the author or co-editor of nearly two dozen books, Fine has gained national esteem in the fields of urban education, prison educational reform, feminist research in psychology, and in qualitative research methodology. Addressing the Trustees at their June meeting, Fine said her activism was influenced by what her grandfather often said: “You measure your wealth in how much you change the world.” Fine earned her B.A. at Brandeis and all three of her advanced degrees at Columbia Teachers College. At the Graduate Center she has been involved in the development of the new Ph.D. Program in Urban Education. A frequent award winner and visiting professor, Fine was most recently honored by the American Psychological Association for her research in women’s studies. The one newcomer to CUNY among the five is the Russian mathematician Victor Kolyvagin, a leader in the field of number theory, algebraic geometry, and representation theory. He arrives from Johns Hopkins University, where he held an endowed chair. His discovery of “Euler systems” has been described as one of the most significant breakthroughs in number theory in the last 50 years. Kolyvagin was educated in Moscow, receiving his Ph.D. from the State University in 1981; he taught in Moscow for five years before coming to the U.S. He will also become the first holder of the Mina Rees Chair in Mathematics at the Graduate Center, which honors its founding President. Hunter College’s new holder of CUNY’s highest academic rank is professor of film and media studies Stuart Ewen. A long-time chair of his department, Ewen has been teaching at the College since 1977. His Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, from 1976, is widely accounted the first major scholarly study of the American history of advertising (a 25th-anniversary edition appeared last year). Ewen’s study All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (1988) provided the foundation for Bill Moyers’ PBS series “The Public Mind,” and his more recent PR! A Social History of Spin (1996) offered a pioneering look into the influence of public relations in American life. Nicholas Freudenberg is currently the Director of the Program in Urban Public Health at Hunter College, where he has been teaching since 1979 (he is also a Hunter alumnus, class of ‘75). A leading innovator in the field of public health for 20 years, Freudenberg has specialized particularly in the delivery of health care to underserved populations. His first book, Not in Our Backyards: Community Action for Health and the Environment (1983) continues to influence public health scholars in shaping community health care policy. Among the many subjects his research has illuminated are the self- management of asthma, HIV prevention, the structural determinants of substance abuse, and the impact of education on family health |
