People

 

Director

Gary Wilder
gwilder@gc.cuny.edu

Associate Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center

He has a joint Ph.D. in history and in anthropology and is the author of The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2015).  His research on the French empire, French West Africa, and the Francophone Caribbean is located at the intersection of historical anthropology, intellectual history, and critical social theory.


 

Faculty Committee

Anthony Alessandrini
tonyalessandrini@gmail.com

Associate Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College

Anthony Alessandrini is an associate professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, and an affiliate faculty member of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2008-2009. His work focuses on postcolonial literature and theory and the connection between Middle Eastern literature and culture and postcolonial studies, with a particular focus on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. He is the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, and has published or forthcoming articles in Arab Studies Journal, Cultural Studies, Diaspora, Foucault Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, The Journal of Pan African Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the minnesota review,andReconstruction, as well as in the anthologies A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy, and World Bank Literature. We Must Find Something Different: Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politicswill be published in 2012. He is a Co-Editor of JadaliyyaEzine, an online publication focusing on the politics and culture of the Middle East.

Herman Bennett
bennett.herman@gmail.com

Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center

Herman Bennett is a renowned scholar on the history of the African diaspora, with a particular focus on Latin American history. Through his work, he has called for scholars to broaden the critical inquiry of race and ethnicity in the colonial world. He has written extensively on the presence of African slaves and freedmen in Mexican society during the colonial period and on the consequent interaction between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in colonial Mexico. His books include Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Indiana University Press, 2009) and Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Indiana University Press, 2003), in which he offers a social historical examination of free Afro-Mexican kinship practices in the mature and late-colonial periods. Bennett has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has lectured widely in Europe and the Americas, and comes to the Graduate Center from Rutgers University after starting his scholarly career at Johns Hopkins University. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in Latin American history from Duke University where he was a Mellon Scholar of the Humanities.

Claire Bishop
cbishop@gc.cuny.edu

Professor of Contemporary Art, Theory and Exhibition History at the CUNY Graduate Center

Professor Claire Bishop has previously taught in the Curating Contemporary Art department of the Royal College of Art, London, where she continues to be Visiting Professor, and at Warwick University(UK). She is a frequent contributor to Artforum and a research advisor for Former West. Professor Bishop is interested in post-medium specific art since the 1960s (performance art, installation, conceptual art, video, participation) and exhibition history. Recurrent themes in her research are spectatorship and the relationship between art and politics.

Susan Buck-Morss
sbm5@cornell.edu

Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center

Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Science at CUNY Graduate Center beginning in fall 2010. She has held the Jan Rock Zubrow ’77 Professor of Government at Cornell University as a member of the graduate fields of Comparative Literature, German Studies, History of Art and Visual Studies, and the School of Art, Architecture and Planning. Her books include Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh University Press, 2009), Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (Verso, 2003), Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (The MIT Press, 2000); The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1989); and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School(Free Press, 1977; 2nd ed., 2002). Photo by: Don Pollard

Amy Chazkel
amy.chazkel@qc.cuny.edu

Associate Professor of History, Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center

Amy Chazkel is Associate Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2011), co-winner of the J. Willard Hurst Prize of the Law and Society Association and recipient of Honorable Mention for the Best Book Prize of the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Other publications include articles on the history of penal institutions and illicit gambling in modern Brazil and co-edited issues of the Radical History Review that explore the privatization of common property in global perspective and Haitian history. She has held faculty fellowships and visiting scholar positions at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, the Institute for Latin American Studies/ Center for Brazilian Studies at Columbia, and the Center for the Humanities and the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at CUNY.  She currently serves as Co-Chair of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective. As CGSC faculty fellow, she will be working on a book project in progress that explores the social, cultural, and legal history of nighttime in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.

Kandice Chuh
kchuh@gc.cuny.edu

Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center

Kandice Chuh joined the CUNY Graduate Center in 2010 as a professor in the PhD program in English, and as a core member of the Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change.  With Duncan Faherty (Assoc. Prof, Queens/GC, English), Chuh is also responsible for the Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative launched at the Graduate Center in spring 2011.  From 1996-2010, she was a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was affiliated to the American Studies Department and the Asian American Studies Program.  The author of Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique (2003), which won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Award, Chuh is the co-editor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001), and has published in such venues as Public Culture, American Literary History, and the Journal of Asian American Studies.  Her current book project, The Difference Aesthetics Makes, brings together aesthetic philosophies and theories, minority discourse, and analysis of globalization’s impact on modern sociopolitical subjectivity.  Chuh is broadly interested in the relationship between intellectual work and the political sphere; disciplinarity and difference; and U.S. culture and politics as matrices of power and knowledge.

Collette Daiute
cdaiute@gmail.com

Professor of Developmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center

Colette Daiute is Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Dr. Daiute does research on the social and cognitive development of children at risk in the U.S. and in international contexts. Colette Daiute has done research on children’s social conflicts, conflict resolution, children’s development in war and post-war contexts, children’s rights, literacy development, writing, and uses of interactive technology. Working from the perspective of socio-historical activity theory, Dr. Daiute is especially interested in children’s participation in social and intellectual practices as influenced by political and economic factors. Colette Daiute’s recent book publications include Human Development and Political Violence(Cambridge University Press, 2010), International Perspectives on Youth Conflict and Development(Oxford University Press, 2006), Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development of Individuals in Society(Sage Publications, 2004), and The Development of Literacy through Social Interaction(Jossey-Bass, 1993). She has published numerous articles in journals, such as the recent article, “Young people’s stories of conflict and development in post-war Croatia” in Narrative Inquiry, 2005. Dr. Daiute has also worked on the design of numerous programs for vulnerable youth, including violence prevention, literacy, and youth research curricula. She was, for example, the head academic consultant for the television series Ghostwriter. In addition to courses in her areas of research, she teaches and does workshops on narrative psychology, discourse analysis, qualitative research, and methods of inquiry into human development and globalization.

Duncan Faherty
duncan.faherty@qc.cuny.edu

Associate Professor of English and American Studies, Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center

Duncan Faherty is Associate Professor of English at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, and is also the Coordinator of the American Studies Certificate Program at The Graduate Center. He is also the co-organizer (with Kandice Chuh) of the Revolutionizing American Studies initiative at The Graduate Center. He is the author of Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858 (U of New England P, 2007) and co-editor of the journal Studies in American Fiction. His work has also appeared in such venues as Early American Literature, American Quarterly, and Reviews in American History. His current book project examines the development of the early U.S. novel by focusing on the canonical interregnum of 1800-1820, and rethinking the ways in which these texts interrogate Circum-Atlantic political and economic networks. This project is particularly interested in thinking about how U.S. cultural production indexes wide spread anxieties about the Haitian Revolution as a means of rethinking its own revolutionary legacies. He is also at work on a project about the War of 1812 and narrative temporalities. His research interests include Eighteenth-century American literature; early U.S. literature and culture (1780-1850); American Studies; and circum-Atlantic Studies.

Sujatha Fernandes
sujathaf@yahoo.com

Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center

Sujatha Fernandes is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2003. Her research interests include hip hop culture, neoliberalism, state-society relations, urban public space, and the role of culture in social movements, with an area focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. She has been the recipient of various fellowships, including a Wilson-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship at PrincetonUniversity’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (2003-2006) and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities,CUNY Graduate Center (2007-2008). In 2008, she was awarded the Feliks Gross Award from the CUNY Academy for Arts and Sciences in recognition of outstanding research. She is the author of  Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press, 2006) and  Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela(Duke University Press, 2010). Her most recent book is  Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation(Verso, 2011). She is currently working on a new project exploring the unprecedented participation of everyday social movement actors in legislative advocacy in New York City.

Mandana Limbert
Mandana.Limbert@qc.cuny.edu

Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College

Mandana E. Limbert received her PhD in Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan in 2002 and joined the Queens College (CUNY) faculty the same year. She became a member of the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center in 2007. She has also been a fellow and visiting scholar at The University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender (1999-2000), New York University’s Center for Near Eastern Studies (2000-2001), the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (2001-2002), and Duke University’s Department of Cultural Anthropology (2008-2010). She joined the History department at North Carolina State University (2009-2010). In addition to numerous articles, Professor Limbert has co-edited “Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and their Temporalities” (2008), published by the School of American Research, Advanced Seminar Series. Her book, “In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town” was published by Stanford University Press (2010). And, with support from the American Council of Learned Societies (2007-2008), Professor Limbert has been writing her next book, “Oman, Zanzibar, and the Politics of Becoming Arab” on changing notions of Arabness in Oman and Zanzibar over the course of the twentieth century.

Uday Singh Mehta
usmehta@amherst.edu

Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center

Uday Singh Mehta, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center, is a political theorist whose work encompasses a wide spectrum of philosophical traditions. He has written on the relationship between freedom and imagination, liberalism’s complex link with colonialism and empire, and more recently on war, peace and non-violence. He is the author of two books, The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke (Cornell University Press, 1992), and Liberalism and Empire: Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought(University of Chicago Press, 1999). He is currently completing a book on war, peace and nonviolence, which focuses on the moral and political thought of M.K. Gandhi. He received his undergraduate education at Swarthmore College, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Princeton University. Photo by: Don Pollard

Megan Vaughnvaughan_150x200
mav26@cam.ac.uk

Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center

Megan Vaughan is a historian of Africa and of colonialism. Her first book, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth-Century Malawi (C.U.P. 1987) drew on extensive oral historical research in Malawi. In 1991 she published Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Polity and Stanford, 1991), an examination of colonial medical discourse and a critical discussion of the application of Foucault’s theories to colonial contexts. With the social anthropologist, Henrietta Moore, she carried our research on gender, rural livelihoods and nutrition in Northern Zambia which resulted in the publication of Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in Northern Zambia (James Curry and Heinemann, 1987), which won the Herskovits Prize. Her 2005 book, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth Century Mauritius (Duke University Press) is an examination of the creation of a slave society and the dynamics of race and ethnicity in one colonial context. It won the Society for French Colonial History award. She is currently completing a book with Walima Kalusa on death, belief and politics in Central Africa. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, past President of the African Studies Association of the U.K., and recipient of grants and fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the Arts and Humanities Council of the U.K. She has taught at the Universities of Malawi, Oxford and Cambridge. She serves on the editorial boards of the American Historical Review and Past and Present.


2014/15 Faculty Fellows

Joseph Entin
Entin photojentin@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Associate Professor of English, English and American Studies, City University of New York

Joseph Entin is author of Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and co-editor of Controversies in the Classroom: A Radical Teacher Reader (Teachers College Press, 2008). His essays and reviews have appeared in Working USA, MELUS, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, The Yale Journal of Criticism, American Quarterly, Criticism, New Labor Forum, and Radical Teacher. His current project examines the ways in which contemporary American fiction, film and television figure global human relations and collective belonging through stories of labor and migration. He is also co-editing an anthology of essays on post-1945 U.S. documentary culture and practice.

Caroline Rupprecht
Caroline Rupprecht Portraitcaroline.rupprecht@qc.cuny.edu

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College

Caroline Rupprecht, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College, specializes in 20th Century German Literature, Film, and Gender Studies. She is the author of two monographs: Womb Fantasies: Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Literature, Cinema, and Art (Northwestern UP, 2013) and Subject toDelusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender (Northwestern UP, 2006); as well as the translator of Unica Zürn’s Surrealist novella Dark Spring (Exact Change, 2000). Her current research focuses on W.G. Sebald and Yoko Tawada.

Irina Silber
Silber Photoirinacarlotta@gmail.com

Associate Professor of Anthropology, City College of New York

Irina Carlota (Lotti) Silber is associate professor of anthropology at City College of New York. Lotti’s overarching work explores postwar processes in one of El Salvador’s former warzones and a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation. This longitudinal project is also a study of the Salvadoran diaspora. Her work on aftermaths pushes her to think through the relationship between crisis and chronicity and informs a new ethnographic project, Luminous, which explores the everyday of childhood genetic difference. Her work has been supported by various grants including a Rockefeller Fellowship, and has been published in journals such as Gender & History, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Anthropology & Humanism, and The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. She is the author of Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador (2011),  which received the 2013 International Latino Book Award in the Best First Book, Nonfiction category. Lotti remains committed to pursuing various ethnographic genres and received a First Prize in Poetry from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association.

John Collins
john.collins@qc.cuny.edu

Professor in Anthropology at Queens College

2014/15 Dissertation Writing Fellows

Priya Chandrasekaran
Glob-Chandrasekaranrajalakshmi.priya@gmail.com

Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Priya Chandrasekaran joined the Program in Cultural Anthropology after a decade as an outdoor educator and leader of service learning programs in rural communities throughout the Global South. Her research, which focuses on women farmers and rainfed grains in the Himalayan foothills, analyzes how competing philosophies of human/nature are written into land, bodies, tastes, and (gendered/classed/raced) social relations, and correspondingly into law, intellectual property, plant genetic material, and social campaigns. She has taught Humanities and Anthropology at Pratt Institute and Hunter College, and has integrated technology and writing into environmental science courses at Baruch College. She is also a Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politic

Christopher Ian Foster
ianfoster@gmail.com

Doctoral Candidate in English, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Christopher Ian Foster is a Doctoral Candidate in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY and a Writing Fellow and Instructor at Queens College. His publication in the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism entitled “The Queer Politics of Crossing in Maryse Conde’s Crossing the Mangrove” came out in March, 2014. His dissertation project tracks twenty-first century African migritude Literature and its relationship to the black radical tradition. He is an organizer for the Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series at the Graduate Center.


Visiting Scholars at the Committee on Globalization and Social Change

Ayça Çubukçu05073631d230339ad3795bd003990d51-bpfull
a.cubukcu@lse.ac.uk
Ayça Çubukçu is Assistant Professor in Human Rights in the Department of Sociology and the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at London School of Economics and Political Science. She will be a Visiting Fellow of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change, the Graduate Center, CUNY during Fall 2014. Before LSE, Dr. Çubukçu taught for the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University and the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University. During the 2009-2010 academic year, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. A transdisciplinary scholar by training, Dr. Çubukçu holds a BA in Government with Distinction in All Subjects from Cornell University and a PhD with Distinction from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.

Aarthi VaddeDuke Profile
aarthi.vadde@duke.edu
Aarthi Vadde is Assistant Professor of English and International Comparative Studies at Duke University. She works in the overlapping fields of British and Anglophone literature with a particular interest in the novel, transnational modernism, postcolonialism, and contemporary issues of migration and globalization. Her current book project, entitled “Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism from the Late Colonial to Contemporary Era” looks at the conjuncture of modernist aesthetics and internationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. From there, it recovers a set of formal strategies and political aspirations that remain crucial for writers adapting the novel to the contemporary moment of globalization. Tracing convergences between formal experimentation and global thought in works that circulate across Britain, South Asia, and the Caribbean, this study diversifies the practices and practitioners usually associated with modernism’s evolution and its legacies. Scholarly articles have appeared (or are forthcoming) in such venues as NOVEL, Comparative Literature, Public Books, Modern Fiction Studies, Ariel, and The Cambridge Companion to British Literature after 1945. Vadde joined Duke from a postdoctoral fellowship in the English Department at Harvard and currently serves as book reviews editor (British and Anglophone literature division) for the journal Contemporary Literature.


Past Fellows of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change