CUNY Newswire

A “spellbinding solo meditation that hovered between Arabic cantillation and expanded Western tonality, with hints of jazz” and the “most memorable moment of hte Divan’s New York residency,” wrote the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, of D.M.A. student Kinan Azmeh’s “Prayer: A Tribute to Edward Said,” performed at a January 29 chamber concert, one of several events ancillary to the Divan’s four-concert series at Carnegie Hall.

Faculty members in Industrial/Organization (IO) Psychology experienced remarkable success and recognition for their work over the past five years. Most recently, several members of the core doctoral faculty in IO Psychology are receiving extensive media coverage for their work on intelligent test development, specifically for testing applied by the National Football League (NFL). Harold Goldstein [...]

John Mollenkopf (Dist. Prof., GC, Political Science, Sociology) is to be awarded an honorary doctorate “in recognition of the quality of [his] work” by the University of Liège, a major public university in the French Community of Belgium. He will be presented with the “insignias of this distinction” during an academic ceremony on Saturday, March 23, [...]

Jennifer M. McMahon (English, 2000), currently serving as honorary assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong, has been honored with the National Book Award for Literary Criticism in the Philippines for her book Dead Stars: American and Philippine Literary Perspectives on the American Colonization of the Philippines (University of the Philippines Press, 2011; University of Hawaii Press, 2012).

JustPublics@365 is hosting the first of four 2013 Summits from March 1 to March 6. The week-long series of events is intended to engage academics in creating new kinds of knowledge streams (podcasts, videos, data visualizations) and connecting scholars, activists, policy makers, and the media to wider publics, while focusing on specific areas and ways to promote social justice and transform the world.

Meena Alexander’s (Dist. Prof., Hunter, English) poem “Acqua Alta,” set to music by the renowned Swedish composer Jan Sandström, was recorded on February 8 by the Renaissance Serikon Ensemble. A CD is forthcoming. Alexander explained that the impulse behind her poem lay in a question she was asked, “Why come to Venice?” at a reading [...]

New York State Education Department has given its stamp of approval, as of February 1, for a Ph.D. Program in Nursing at the Graduate Center. With this approval, the Graduate Center, CUNY, follows the national trend of converting the Doctor of Nursing Science (DNS) to the Ph.D. degree as the recognized research-focused doctorate in nursing. [...]

Distinguished Professor James Oakes (History) has won the 2013 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for his book, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (W.W. Norton, 2012), a groundbreaking history of emancipation.

Jia Ma, a doctoral candidate in biochemistry who will defend this spring, won the fifth annual Horst Schulz Prize, awarded by the Ph.D. Program in Biochemistry for the best peer-reviewed paper published in 2012 having a CUNY biochemistry doctoral student as first author. Ma was lead author of seven on “Fe2+ binds iron responsive element-RNA, [...]

At the January 28 meeting of CUNY’s board of trustees, Judith Stein, a member of the doctoral faculty in history, whose home campus is City College, was appointed Distinguished Professor, effective February 1, 2013. Dr. Stein’s field of scholarship is U.S. twentieth-century political economy and African American history. Her books include Pivotal Decade: How the [...]

Multiple sclerosis (MS), which leads to severe neurologic disability, affects more than 400,000 individuals in the United States and about 2.1 million worldwide, but the origin and pathogenesis of this degenerative, chronic inflammatory disease of the central nervous system are for the most part unknown. Promising research is being carried out in the lab of [...]

Alfonso W. Quiroz, professor of Latin American and Caribbean history, died on January 2, 2013. A member of the history program at Baruch College since 1986 and a member of the doctoral faculty since the early 1990s, he was dedicated to the study of corruption over the centuries in his native Peru, publishing Corrupt Circles: [...]

Graduate Center Professor of Art History Claire Bishop and GC Art History Alumnus Hal (Harold) Foster are the two sole winners of the College Art Association’s 2013 Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism.

More than thirty new faculty appointments were made to twelve doctoral programs and two certificate programs at the Graduate Center between October 16 and December 18, 2012. Listed below, after each name, are the faculty member’s home campus and fields of specialization. Africana Studies Certificate Program Jerry G. Watts, Graduate Center: Politics and Afro-American intellectual [...]

During the last quarter of 2012, the Graduate Center received twenty-six grants totaling $2,012,000. The listing below, for eight grants of $100,000 or more to six principal investigators (PIs), provides the names of doctoral faculty members serving as PIs and their Graduate Center affiliations, the awarding agencies, the project titles, and the grant amounts. This [...]

Mark E. Hauber, professor of biology and psychology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, and a team of young investigators, all co-PIs, from the United States, New Zealand, and the Czech Republic, have won a $1.2 million Human Frontier Science Program Young Investigator Award for their study of birds’ eggs. The funding will enable [...]

Dear Friends, It is my sad task to inform you that our beloved colleague Isaías Lerner, Distinguished Professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages (HLBLL), passed away on January 8. Isaías graced our lives; he was deeply loved and will be sorely missed by all who had the good fortune to know him. His [...]

The Graduate Center mourns the recent loss of five vital members of its community. Gustavo Archilla, who worked at the Graduate Center as assistant to the registrar Elmer Lokkins until retiring in 1970, died on November 27, 2012, at the age of 96. He was described in the New York Times as an inspiration to [...]

On his way from playing folk songs in San Antonio coffeehouses as a teenager to his fourteenth Grammy nomination forty-three years later, in 2012, singer-songwriter Steve Earle gained a reputation as a Renaissance man, outspoken iconoclast, and masterful storyteller. On December 3, before a roomful of fans in Elebash Recital Hall, the three-time Grammy Award [...]

MediaCamp, a partnership between the GC’s JustPublics@365 and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (CUNY J-School) is offering five free January workshops for all academics (students and faculty) wishing to acquire skills in various areas of digital media. The three-hour workshops are free but registration is required. They will take place at the CUNY J-School, [...]