Six new faculty members have been appointed to the Graduate Center, bringing new strengths to the departments of anthropology, history, earth and environmental sciences, sociology, philosophy, and urban education. One new appointment, Graham Priest, joins the GC-based central faculty at the rank of distinguished professor. These appointments are effective September 1, 2009, unless otherwise noted.

Graham Priest, newly appointed distinguished professor of philosophy, is the most prominent contemporary champion of dialetheism, the view that some claims can be both true and false. He is known for his in-depth analyses of semantic paradoxes, and his many writings relate to paraconsistent and other non-classical logics. He has taught in Australia at the University of Melbourne since 2001 and has authored numerous books, most notably Beyond the Limits of Thought (Oxford University Press, 1995), An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent (Oxford University Press, 2006), all of which are now in their second printings. His recent publications are Towards Non-Being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Doubt Truth To Be a Liar (Oxford University Press, 2006). Over the course of his prominent career, he has published articles in nearly every major journal on philosophy and logic. Priest was a frequent collaborator with the late Richard Sylvan, a fellow proponent of dialetheism and paraconsistent logic. He has held visiting research positions at many universities, including the Australian National University, the Universities of Cambridge, New York, Pittsburgh, São Paulo, Kyoto, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the London School of Economics.

Herman Bennett, appointed professor of history, 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.

Vinay Gidwani has been appointed professor of earth and environmental sciences. Operating at the interface of ecology, labor relations, and political systems, Professor Gidwani has done groundbreaking work on changes to local labor markets and how ecologies impact regional and national politics, particularly in the Indian context. His research and teaching are interdisciplinary in nature. His work synthesizes a wide range of intellectual currents, including agrarian studies, economics, environmental science, postcolonial criticism, and Marxist geography, using these to understand natural environments and spatial relations. In his recent book Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), he examines how the historical rise to dominance of the Patel caste from western India’s Gujarat region, whose dispersion now commands a global presence, seems to challenge assumptions about the basic workings of capitalism. He holds a Ph.D. in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley.

Wendy Luttrell has been appointed professor of urban education, and comes to the Graduate Center from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is a leading authority on how urban American schooling shapes and reinforces beliefs about race, identity, knowledge, and power. Her first book School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling (Routledge, 1997), the recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, was based on first person accounts of women, both white and African-American, who were returning to the classroom as adult learners. The ASA also recognized Luttrell’s 2003 book Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens (Routledge) with an Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship Award for its analysis of how pregnant women and young mothers are educated and the stigmas they face. A highly sought-after lecturer and speaker, Luttrell has won accolades for her abilities as an effective teacher. She edited the forthcoming volume Qualitative Educational Research: Readings on Reflexive Methodology and Transformative Practice (Routledge, 2009). She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Ruth Milkman joins the Graduate Center in December 2009 as professor of sociology and associate director of the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies. With a current research focus on the sociology of labor, Milkman has also published extensively on gender and work. Her prizewinning book Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Illinois, 1987) is still widely read and cited, and is considered a classic work in both women’s labor history and the sociology of gender. Milkman also published a study of U.S. auto workers, Farewell to the Factory (California, 1997). Her most recent book is L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006) which has been widely discussed in the academic community, as well as the labor movement, for its account of immigrant organizing and the conditions under which union revitalization occurs. Collaborating with Rutgers economist Eileen Appelbaum, Milkman is currently at work on a study of paid family leave and is also part of a large project surveying labor law violations in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. After more than twenty years at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she taught sociology and directed the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment from 2001 to 2008, Milkman returns to the Graduate Center, where she began her distinguished career. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Gary Wilder has been appointed associate professor of anthropology. His book The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005), traces empire-wide networks of science, administration, public opinion, and literature that linked colonial reformers in French West Africa to a black public sphere in Paris. His current research project, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, Utopia examines post-World War II initiatives by African and Caribbean legislators to reconstitute France as a postcolonial federal democracy. Wilder was awarded a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, only one of ten awarded nationally in 2006, which allowed him to spend a year as a Visiting Fellow at the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School. He holds a joint Ph.D. in anthropology and history from the University of Chicago and comes to the GC from Pomona College.

Photo credits: Priest by Ian North; Bennett by Keith Yazmir,Gidwani by A. Poyo; Lutrell by Janet Smith; Milkman courtesy of Ruth Milkman; Wilder by Rachel Lindheim