CUNY Newswire

Hunter College President Jennifer J. Raab has announced that the Artist’s Institute, a project of Hunter College, has been awarded an $80,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The two-year grant will be used to continue the work of the Institute, which was created as a new, experimental platform for thinking about contemporary art.

Vita Carulli Rabinowitz, Hunter’s Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, is the winner of the 2011 Cornaro Award, which is given each year to an Italian American woman who holds a PhD and has “achieved excellence in her chosen field.” The award, presented by the New York Lodge of the Sons of Italy in America, is named for Elena Lucrezia Cornaro, who earned a doctorate in 1678, the first woman in history to do so.

Hunter College President Jennifer J. Raab has announced that the Union Settlement Association and Dr. Melony Samuels of Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger are the recipients of the inaugural Joan H. Tisch Community Health Prize. The newly established prize will be administered by the Hunter College Foundation and is earmarked for a not-for-profit organization and individual for distinguished accomplishment in the field of urban public health.

Hunter Professor Kathleen Nokes, assistant dean for graduate studies and director of the graduate nursing program at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing, has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant in public/global health. Under the grant, Dr. Nokes will work at Durban University of Technology in South Africa during July and August.

Mariano Wainsztein, an IMA graduate student at Hunter, has won an award from the National Board of Review for his documentary The Animal in You, which he filmed, directed and edited.

Hunter College Distinguished Lecturer Colum McCann has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his latest novel, Let the Great World Spin. McCann’s novel was selected from 10 shortlisted titles by a panel of judges, who described his book as “a genuinely 21st century novel that speaks to its time but is not enslaved by it.” The prize of over $140,000 is one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes.

For the second year in a row, Hunter’s master’s program to prepare Latin teachers for secondary schools has produced the winner of the National Latin Exam Graduate School Scholarship. The first-place finish carries an award of $2,000 for post-graduate study.

Will the next big thing be the Gorilla Diet? Not really, but research conducted by Hunter Professor of Anthropology Jessica M. Rothman has produced intriguing new findings about the eating patterns of wild gorillas. Dr. Rothman is the head of the Primate Nutrition Lab and spends three months a year carrying out fieldstudies in Uganda. Her latest results, which have been published by the Royal Society of London, shows that at times the gorillas’ menu looks a lot like a human weight-loss diet and at other times meets the recommendations of the American Heart Association.

Graduate students from the Urban Affairs and Planning Program at Hunter College have released their detailed report “Beyond the Backlash: Equity and Participation in Bicycle Planning.” The Hunter College bicycle studio spent nine months studying the history and practices of bicycle planning, identified the challenges facing the expansion of bicycle lanes, and made recommendations that would affect the roles of the city’s Department of Transportation (DOT), cycling advocates, and community boards. In response to recent controversies over bike lanes, the group proposes new approaches to serve the needs of current and future cyclists and ensure the longevity of bicycle planning under future administrations.

Nancy Foner, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter and the CUNY Graduate Center, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a leading center for independent policy research and one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies.

The Princeton Review has just named Hunter one of the “greenest” colleges in the United States. On April 20—in time for the April 22 celebration of Earth Day—the famed Review released the second annual edition of its “Guide to 311 Green Colleges,” which includes Hunter among those top-raters. Published in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council, the Guide “focuses solely on colleges that have demonstrated a notable commitment to sustainability,” explains the Review.

Hunter College fencing star Stella Shifrin will compete this weekend in one of the major events of her sport, the U.S. Fencing Association’s Senior National Championship—a meet limited to the 50 best fencers in the United States.

Pooja Shah, a senior in the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, has been named a 2011 Merage Foundation American Dream Fellow, one of only 10 nationwide. Shah is the fourth Hunter College student to receive a Merage Fellowship, created in 2004 to assist immigrants in achieving the American Dream.

Hunter College has named Harper Montgomery, one of the nation’s leading experts in Latin American art, the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Professor in Latin American Art. Dr. Montgomery will join Hunter in the fall of 2011.

Hunter Senior Poet Tom Sleigh has won the inaugural John Updike Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters. The $20,000 prize, given to an outstanding writer in mid-career, comes just three years after Sleigh took home the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, one of the world’s most prestigious and lucrative poetry prizes. The Academy has also selected Hunter Distinguished Lecturer Colum McCann, winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction, as one of this year’s recipients of its coveted Arts and Letters Awards in Literature. The award, honoring exceptional accomplishment in any literary genre, comes with a $7,500 prize.

A stellar group of journalists and media will receive the 2010 James Aronson Awards for Social Justice Journalism at a public ceremony to be held at Hunter College on March 30.

Hunter has been giving these awards since 1990. Selected by the College’s Department of Film & Media Studies and a committee of journalists, media professionals, scholars, and activists, the winners are chosen for “ambitious reporting, vivid writing, and clear-eyed focus on the American ideal of justice for all.”

The violence in Libya dominates the news now, but Bahrain continues to be the site of protests, and one of those observing events in that small island nation is Laura Vriens (’10), whose Fulbright fellowship took her there last fall to study economic development. Vriens, a Macaulay Honors graduate with a major in political science and minor in Arabic, has reported her insights on the Huffington Post and in an interview on NPR’s “Brian Lehrer Show.”

Meena Alexander, Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, has been selected for a Fulbright Specialists project in Italy at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscori during March 2011, according to the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

For the third consecutive year, the Princeton Review has named Hunter College one of the top ten “Best Value” public colleges in the nation for 2011. Based on surveys of administrators and students at 650 public and private colleges and universities, the selection criteria covered more than 30 factors in three areas: academics, cost of attendance, and financial aid. Hunter was once again the only CUNY school on the list.

Janet Garcia, a senior in the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter, has won the 2010 Undergraduate Student Paper Award from the nation’s leading criminology organization. The paper, “Alternative-to-Incarceration Programs: Addressing the Shortcomings of Correctional Services,” deals with a question that is especially contentious in New York and other states now: Is maintaining a large, costly prison system the best way to deal with crime, or are less expensive, more effective alternatives available?