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

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.

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

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.

Juliette Blevins is a world-class phonologist and an advocate for endangered and minority languages, with expertise in Austronesian, Australian Aboriginal, Native American, and Andamanese languages. Her first book, Nhanda, an Aboriginal Language of Western Australia, was based on work with the last speakers of the language, which has now become extinct. Her book Evolutionary Phonology (Cambridge University Press, 2004) explores the nature of sound patterns and sound change in human language and presents a new theory synthesizing results in historical linguistics, phonetics, and phonological theory. As a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Blevins has worked on a range of major projects, from continued description of the Yurok language of northwestern California, to the role of analogy in grammar, to the reconstruction of proto-languages of two distinct language groups of the Andaman Islands. A major discovery by Blevins is an ancient link between Proto-Ongan of the south Andaman Islands and Proto-Austronesian, spoken six thousand years ago in Taiwan. Professor Blevins holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has taught at the University of Texas, Austin; the University of Western Australia; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Leipzig.

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.

Katherine Carl is Curator of the James Gallery and Deputy Director of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center. Her other projects include School of Missing Studies, an experimental education platform for emerging and local architects and artists to research the phenomena of transition in cities including Belgrade, Munich, and New York. She was Curator of Contemporary Exhibitions at The Drawing Center in 2005-2007. This follows her work at Dia Art Foundation (1999-2003); manager of the international artists exchange program ArtsLink (1996-1997); and program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts (1991-1995). She has taught art history, theory, and criticism and curatorial methods at Tyler School of Art (2010), Parsons (2009), Moore College of Art (2009) and New York University (2002-3). Carl received an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship in 2007 for completion of her dissertation (Aoristic Avant-Garde: Experimental Art in 1960s and ‘70s Yugoslavia) as well as numerous grants from The Trust for Mutual Understanding for her research and projects. Her co-edited books are Lost Highway Expedition Photobook (2007) and Evasions of Power (2011). Carl holds a PhD in Art History and Criticism from State University of New York, Stony Brook, and a B.A. from Oberlin College.

Professor Clare Carroll is both Chair of the Comparative Literature Department and Director of Irish Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. Her most recent book is Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (Cork University Press and Notre Dame University Press, 2003). She is also the author of Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Writing (Cork University Press, 2001) and The Orlando Furioso, A Stoic Comedy (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997). With Vincent Carey, she edited Richard Beacon’s humanist dialogue on the colonization of Ireland, Solon His Follie (1996). She is also the editor of the Early Modern Period in the Longman Anthology of British Literature (3rd edition, 2006) and of the Longman Cultural Edition of Othello and Tragedy of Mariam (2003). She has published a number of articles on the early modern Irish diaspora in Spain is now turning her attention to Rome. Her current research on “The Irish in Seventeenth-Century Rome” combines her interests in Italian and Irish cultural history. She has been awarded an Irish American Cultural Institute Fellowship to work on this project in 2006-2007.

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.

Professor Gold’s teaching and research interests center on the digital humanities, digital writing and rhetoric, open-source pedagogy, and new-media studies. Recent work has appeared in The Journal of Modern Literature, On the Horizon (co-authored with George Otte), and Kairos, as well as the edited collections From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup andLearning Through Digital Media. He is editor of the collection Debates in the Digital Humanities, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2012 as both a printed book and an open-access webtext. His projects include “Looking for Whitman” (http://lookingforwhitman.org), a multi-campus experiment in digital pedagogy sponsored by two NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants, and a recently awarded Title V Grant from the U.S. Department of Education. He serves as Director of the CUNY Academic Commons.

David Harvey, a leading theorist in the field of urban studies whom Library Journal called “one of the most influential geographers of the later twentieth century,” earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, was formerly professor of geography at Johns Hopkins, a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford. His reflections on the importance of space and place (and more recently “nature”) have attracted considerable attention across the humanities and social sciences. His highly influential books include The New Imperialism; Paris, Capital of Modernity; Social Justice and the City; Limits to Capital; The Urbanization of Capital; The Condition of Postmodernity; Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference; Spaces of Hope; and Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. His numerous awards include the Outstanding Contributor Award of the Association of American Geographers and the 2002 Centenary Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his “outstanding contribution to the field of geographical enquiry and to anthropology.” He holds honorary degrees from the universities of Buenos Aires, Roskilde in Denmark, Uppsala in Sweden, and Ohio State University.

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English, Women’s Studies, and Film Studies at the City University of New York, Graduate School and University Center, and at Baruch College, CUNY. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Shanghai University. His most recent publications are The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford University Press, 2010) and Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism ( University of Illinois Press, 2003). He has been the Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics since 2008.

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.

Jane Cicely Sugarman, Professor of Music, is an ethnomusicologist whose work focuses on music and identity formation within Albanian communities, but she also has a strong background in South Slavic, Turkish, and Arabic music. She is particularly known for her scholarship on music and gender, including the book Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings (1997), which was awarded the Chicago Folklore Prize by the American Folklore Society. Recent publications examine media privatization in the former Yugoslavia, musical activities in diaspora communities, and the role of music in nationalist movements and conflict situations. She is currently preparing a book on Albanian commercial music and issues of modernity. Known for work that is original in approach and meticulously researched, Sugarman received the Jaap Kunst Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2004. She holds a Ph.D. in Music from the University of California at Los Angeles.

John Torpey is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent: The East German Opposition and its Legacy (University of Minnesota Press, 1995); The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (edited with Daniel Levy and Max Pensky; Verso, 2005), and Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006). He is also an editor of and contributor to the forthcoming volume, The Post-Secular in Question (New York University Press). His articles have appeared in Theory and Society, Sociological Theory, Journal of Modern History, Social Research, Genèses: Sciences sociales et histoire, Journal of Human Rights, Dissent, Contexts, openDemocracy, Frankfurter Rundschau, The Nation, and The San Francisco Chronicle. His interests lie broadly in the area of comparative historical sociology. His current work revolves around the question of how we identify periods of major social change, such as those associated with the birth and reform of major world religions, and whether we are in the midst of such a period at present.