CUNY Newswire

The following students enrolled in CUNY Baccalaureate (CUNY BA) have been selected as the new Fall 2012 Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellows and will be formally inducted into the Fellowship on November 7 in a ceremony at the CUNY Graduate Center. Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellowships for CUNY BA studetns are funded through a donation [...]

Nusrat (Jerin) Arifa, a 2009 graduate of CUNY BA for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies and a National Organization for Women board member and chair of the National Young Feminist Task Force, is one of three recipients of this year’s Berger-Marks Foundation Award of Distinction.

Herman L. Bennett, who has served on the GC faculty as professor of history since September 1, 2009, is to be honored with the 2012 Equity Award from the Committee on Minority Historians of the American Historical Association (AHA). The prize recognizes individuals and institutions that have achieved excellence in recruiting and retaining underrepresented racial [...]

Professor Polly Thistlethwaite’s appointment as Chief Librarian of the Mina Rees Library at the Graduate Center, effective July 1, 2012, was approved by the CUNY Board of Trustees at its September 24 meeting. She has served as Acting Chief Librarian since August 2011. Thistlethwaite joined the Graduate Center’s library faculty in 2002 as the Associate Librarian [...]

The Christian Science Monitor has named Charter Schools and the Corporate Makeover of Public Education, by doctoral faculty members Michael Fabricant (Prof., Hunter, Social Welfare) and Michelle Fine (Dist. Prof., GC, Psychology, Urban Education), one of the year’s 15 must-read books about K–12 education in the United States. The Monitor says, “This book provides an [...]

Four new members of the Emerging International Leaders and U.S. Diversity Fellows Program have joined the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (CPCS) at the Graduate Center, CUNY, for the fall semester. They bring with them an impressive array of skills and knowledge and a clear sense of purpose.

Dr. Benjamin R. Barber has joined the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (CPCS) as a Senior Research Scholar as of July 2012, said Kathleen D. McCarthy, CPCS founding director. He is working with CPCS to introduce this global Interdependence Movement to alumni from the CPCS International Fellows Program. He is particularly focused on the role of cities in transnational cooperation, which is the central theme of his forthcoming book If Mayors Ruled the World (Yale University Press).

In recent months, Graduate Center professors, along with the centers with which they are affiliated, have been awarded grants totaling more than $2.8 million in federal funding through the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). While many of these grants fund projects centered on the best use of technology and technologic innovations, all are designed to increase access to, and ensure the best use of, the information gathered.

Barbara Ann Naddeo (Associate Professor, City, History) is the winner of the 2011 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for Vico and Naples: The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory, published by Cornell University Press. A significant achievement for a historian, the prize has been awarded annually since 1993 by the American Philosophical Society (APS) [...]

Doctoral faculty and graduate students in archaeology in the GC Anthropology Program have collaborated with an international team of geneticists and biologists in a study of the arctic fox in Iceland.

Four doctoral students at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, are among ninety-seven scholars selected nationwide for 2012 Ford Foundation Fellowships in Predoctoral and Dissertation competitions.

A fruitful collaboration between Graduate Center Distinguished Professor Marvin Carlson and visiting Fulbright scholar Dr. Safi Mahmoud Mahfouz promises to yield the first translations into English of three plays by Ibn Daniyal, a significant thirteenth-century Egyptian playwright. These plays “are by far the most important dramas surviving in Egypt between Pharaonic times and the nineteenth century,” said Carlson. Publication is expected at the end of this year.

The Graduate Center’s Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) announces a ARC’s 2013–14 Distinguished Fellowship program and invites senior scholars to apply by October 31, 2012.

“The State of the Unions 2012: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States,” the September 2012 annual report of the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies and the Center for Urban Research, records “significant erosion” in organized labor in the private sector in New York City and the growing gap between private and public sector unionization rates. The report, coauthored by the director of the Murphy Institute, Graduate Center Professor of Sociology Ruth Milkman, and Laura Braslow, a doctoral student in sociology, was picked up by the New York Times in a September 3 article.

“Impossible Grace,” a poem written by Distinguished Professor Meena Alexander has inspired the first Al-Quds Composition Award, to be presented by the newly established College of Music at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. The winning composition will receive two public performances in Jerusalem in October under the artistic direction of Anke Rauthmann, director of the Berlin Lyric Opera.

A book by doctoral faculty member Jonathan Kalb, professor of theatre at Hunter College, has won the Theatre Library Association’s 2012 George Freedley Memorial Award.

Provost Chase Robinson has recently unveiled a range of digital initiatives that have begun to expand and deepen the Graduate Center’s commitment to the use of technology in its researh and teaching missions. Part of Provost Robinson’s vision to enhance digital scholarship, the initiatives range from the appointment of doctoral students with advanced technological sckills as Digital Fellows to a Provost’s Digital Innovations Grants program, along with the inauguration of a GC Digital Scholarship Lab.

The CUNY Graduate Center has awarded 2012-13 dissertation fellowships totaling $1,307,430 in stipends and tuition remission to seventy level-three doctoral candidates. “In this time of financial constraint,” said Associate Provost Louise Lennihan, “I am especially pleased that we were able to increase the total number of awards, raise the stipends of major awards, and add tuition coverage to many smaller awards.”

The latest list of job opportunities and graduate school acceptances for students in CUNY’s individualized degree, CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies

100 graduating students will participate. Guests are coming from all over the U.S., as well as from Antigua, Costa Rica, Croatia, France, Haiti, Panama, Senegal, St. Vincent, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.