Initiatives & Committees

The Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) extends the Graduate Center’s global reach and prominence as an international hub of advanced study. Specifically, ARC promotes interdisciplinary research and partners with the Graduate Center’s forty research centers, institutes, interdisciplinary committees, and other academic initiatives. Through its Distinguished Fellowship Program, a research-focused initiative, ARC will offer even more possibilities for collaboration between campus-based and Graduate Center faculty, in addition to visitors, doctoral students, and postdoctoral colleagues. Winners of these semester- or year-long fellowships will focus on ARC’s seven areas of study: Inequality, Immigration, Digital Initiatives, Transnational Non-state Actors, Human Ecodynamics, Urban Studies, and the Humanities. Further, ARC offers support in the shape of ARC Studentships in a wide variety of disciplines to Graduate Center doctoral students pursuing research as well as to postdoctoral students who have completed their initial projects.

 

Initiatives & Committees

21st Century City for All

Through 'Toward a 21st Century City for All,' we engage leaders from diverse communities to air their views about these issues, discuss their differences, and move towards a shared policy framework for governing the city toward more broadly shared prosperity.

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Graduate Center Digital Initiatives

Graduate Center Digital Initiatives (GCDI) draws together a diverse array of digital projects at the CUNY Graduate Center that focus on the incorporation of technology into academic research and teaching. Featured project clusters and areas of strength include the digital humanities, digital scholarly communication, data mining, data repositories, open access journals, spatial humanities and social sciences, network analysis, teaching and learning in a digital age, and digital archives. Taken together, these exciting projects at the CUNY Graduate Center are exploring the ways in which traditional scholarly activities are being reshaped by the new methodologies made possible through data-driven inquiry.

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Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS) 

The Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS @ the Graduate Center) provides a home for theoretical research in the sciences that cuts across a wide range of subjects but remains unified by the search for a mathematical description of the world around us.

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Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative

Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative. This initiative intends to animate a critical engagement with American Studies at and beyond the Graduate Center. The framing rubric for this effort to invigorate and document Americanist discourse at the Graduate Center underscores our intent to interrogate both the genealogies of revolutionary action and thought embedded in the histories of Americanness and the field of American studies, and the potential to think through this field to foster revolutionary thinking toward the generation of new politics, socialities, and cultural practices.

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The Committee for the Study of Religion 

The Committee for the Study of Religion exists to promote interdisciplinary research on religion and religions. It develops various historical and comparative research projects that address religion and the sacred, and their complex and diverse manifestations in modern societies. In addition to the ‘world religions’, our concerns extend to modern spirituality and new religions. The Committee encourages research into the globalization of religion and global religions. Questions surrounding secularism, secularization and post-secular society are also considered by the Committee.

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The Committee on Globalization and Social Change

The Committee on Globalization and Social Change (CGSC) at the Graduate Center is an interdisciplinary working group composed of a core group of CUNY faculty interested in reflecting on globalization as an analytic category for understanding social change as well as on the intersecting social changes commonly associated with the category globalization.

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The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies 

Science Studies is an interdisciplinary field that fosters dialog among humanists and scientists. Traditional questions in the humanities are being reinvigorated by emerging scientific research. For example, new findings from neuroscience are reanimating age-old philosophical debates about whether minds are mere matter, and the nature of morality. Discoveries in microbiology, findings that our bodies contain multitudes of bacteria, fungi, and other creatures, are leading historians of science, like Donna Haraway, to argue: We have never been human.

The relationship between science and justice is also central to our intellectual project: How does science get done? Who is included? Who is excluded? These questions have been conventionally asked with respect to race, class, sexuality, and gender. An emerging cohort of scholars are pushing these questions beyond strictly human realms to explore the entanglements connecting us to multiple species.

The CUNY Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies seeks to cultivate critical friendships across conventional disciplinary divides. We are bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines including philosophers, literary critics, artists, historians, ethnographers, as well as natural scientists to interrogate issues of common interest and concern.

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