Advanced Research Collaborative

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ABOUT USVISITING FELLOWSCUNY FELLOWSSTUDENT FELLOWSRESEARCH AREASARC EVENTS

DISTINGUISHED VISITING FELLOWS

Every year ARC invites scholars and researchers outside of CUNY to apply to participate in its activities as Distinguished Visiting Fellows. Visiting Fellows present papers at the annual ARC seminar and participate in the general intellectual life of the GC, give presentations to the public where appropriate, and share their work-in-progress with doctoral students in research praxis seminars. The Distinguished Visiting Fellow program provides scholars and researchers a stimulating environment in which they conduct their own research, access the GC’s research centers and institutes, and collaborate with doctoral students and other leading scholars.

Distinguished Visiting Fellows receive $72,000 for two semesters or $36,000 for one semester.

Below are profiles of the 2016-2017 Distinguished Visiting Fellows:

Vicky Chondrogianni is an assistant professor in Bilingualism at the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on cross-linguistic aspects of language acquisition and processing in typically developing monolingual and bilingual children and in children with language impairment. She is the (co-)author of various publications on the relationship between language production and comprehension in children with typical and with impaired language development acquiring a number of different languages (Greek, English, Dutch, Danish and German). She is Associate Editor for Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism (John Benjamins) and on the editorial board of Second Language Research (Sage Publications). She has recently co-edited a special issue in Frontiers in Psychology evaluating behavioural and neuroscientific evidence on the effect of naturalistic exposure on language learning. She is the Deputy Director of Bilingualism Matters, a knowledge exchange and research centre at the University of Edinburgh. She received her Ph.D in Second language acquisition from the University of Cambridge in 2008. She will be with the Graduate Center for the Fall 2016 term.

Alexandre Duchêne, is a Professor of the Sociology of Language, Head of the Department of Multilingualism Studies at the University of Fribourg. His research focuses on language and social inequalities, language and political economy and on the division of labor in late capitalism. He is the past-President of the Francophone Association for Sociolinguistics (RFS) and co-Chair of the Committee on World Anthropologies of the American Anthropological Association. He was a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure (ENS) in Lyon (France) and at the University of Jyvaskyla (Finland). His recent publications include Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit (with Monica Heller, 2012, Routledge); Language, Migration and Social Inequalities (with Melissa Moyer and Celia Roberts, 2013, Multilingual Matters), Mehrsprachigkeit verwalten? Spannungsfeld Personalrekrutierung beim Bund (with Renata Coray, Emilienne Kobelt et al.., 2015, Seismo Verlag) and Spéculations langagières (with Michelle Daveluy, 2015, a special Issue on the journal Anthropologie et Sociétés). He is currently the Principal Investigator of a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) research project entitled: A web of Care: Linguistic resources and the management of labour in the healthcare industry (2015-2018).

Cornelia Kristen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bamberg, Germany, and head of the migration unit of the German National Education Panel Study (NEPS). She received her PhD from the University of Mannheim in 2004 and has been a researcher at the University of Leipzig and a professor at the University of Göttingen before her appointment at the University of Bamberg. Her major research interests lie in the fields of migration and integration. Recent publications include an edited volume on ethnic educational inequalities in Germany and several articles on integration patterns and processes of immigrants and their offspring including language use and acquisition, education, and ethnic segregation. She brings to CUNY her current work on hiring discrimination and selective migration.

Henrique Espada Lima is an Associate Professor of History at the Universidade Federal de Santa Caterina (Brazil), where he teaches, supervises and conducts research on historiography and theories of history, contemporary labor history, and world slavery and abolition. His holds degrees in psychology and literature and a doctorate in history (Universidade de Campinas, 1999). His research has focused on contemporary historiography and global micro-history, as well as on labor and family history, particularly concerning the lives of former slaves in nineteenth-century Brazil. He is the author of A Microhistória italiana: escalas, indícios e singularidades (Civilização Brasileira, 2006) as well as edited volumes and numerous book chapters and articles on microhistory, the social history of forced labor, domestic work, and the questions of freedom and enslavement in the Atlantic World. He served as coordinator of the Brazilian Academic Network of Labor Historians from 2007 to 2010. He has held numerous visiting scholar positions, including as a Visiting Professor at Universidade Federal do Pará (1995-1996), a Visiting Scholar at the International Research Center \ "Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History? (RE:Work) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2011-2012), a Resident Fellow at the Institut d'Etudes Avancées de Nantes (2013), and a Visiting Scholar at the Program of Latin American Studies at Princeton University (2015).

Henrik Lebuhn is an Assistant Professor for Urban and Regional Sociology at Humboldt University Berlin and a co-editor for PROKLA - Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft. His areas of interest include cities and migration, border regimes, urban citizenship, urban social movements and participatory politics. Before coming to Humboldt University, he taught at Freie Universität Berlin, at the San Francisco Art Institute and at UC Berkeley. He is the author of ‚Cities in Motion’ (Stadt in Bewegung), a study on conflicts over public space in Berlin and Los Angeles (2008). Most recently, he co-edited a special issue of the International Journal for Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) on urban citizenship and the right to the city in Berlin and Tel Aviv (Fall 2015). He will be with CUNY for the Fall term 2016 and will be working on a comparative project on urban citizenship and immigrant rights in Berlin and New York.

David Scott My work, especially since Refashioning Futures (1999) and Conscripts of Modernity (2004), has been concerned with the reconceptualization of the way we think the story of the colonial past for the postcolonial present. This has involved a variety of kinds of inquiry (taking the Caribbean as my principal “field” of engagement), into tradition and generations, dialogue and criticism, self-determination and sovereignty, tragedy and temporality, and transitional justice and liberalism. I’ve recently completed a book called Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (based on lectures I gave at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, in November-December 2013), and am now working on a biography of Stuart Hall. I am also working on a study of the question of reparations for the historical injustice of New World slavery. I continue to edit Small Axe, and direct the Small Axe Project, which is involved in a number of special initiatives around visual, translation, literary, and historiographical issues.

Elana Shohamy is a Professor at Tel Aviv University School of Education where she teaches and researches co-existence and rights in multilingual societies within four inter-connected areas: Language Testing, Language Policy, Migration and Linguistic Landscape. She authored The power of tests (2001), Language policy (2006), and the co-editor two books on Linguistic Landscape. Elana is the editor of Vol. 7 of Language Testing and Assessment of the Encyclopedia of Language and Education (Springer, 2009 and 2017) Elana served as an editor of the journal Language Policy (2007-2015) and is currently the editor of the new journal Linguistic Landscape (Benjamins). Elana is the winner of the ILTA lifetime achievement awarded by ILTA (International Language Testing Association in 2010) for her work on critical language testing. Her current work continues to focus on various issues within the above topics, within the framework of multilingualism.

Paul Statham is Professor of Migration and Director of the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR) in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS). Paul is a political sociologist and his current research focuses on: the political accommodation of Islam and Muslim minorities in their Western societies of settlement; and mobility, migration and cultural interaction between Europe and SE Asia (Thailand), with a focus on lifestyle, retirement and marriage. He has written collaborative monographs, edited volumes, more than 60 articles in refereed journals and books. His books include Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe (Minnesota UP 2005), The Making of a European Public Sphere (Cambridge UP 2010), and The Politicization of Europe (Routledge 2013). Paul was formerly a Professor at the University of Bristol and the University of Leeds, UK. He was a Researcher at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), Germany, and completed his doctoral research at the European University Institute (EUI) in San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy.

Julia Szalai is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Policy Studies and Recurrent Visiting Professor at the Nationalism Studies Program and the Department of Political Science of the Central European University, Budapest. She obtained her PhD in Sociology in 1986 and her degree of Doctor of Science (DSc) in Sociology in 2007, both from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her recent research has been centered around the formation of the post-communist welfare states with a focus on the intersecting relations of class, gender and ethnicity in shaping poverty and social exclusion. In this context, she studied the social recognition movements and the struggles for changing redistribution of Roma communities of Central and Eastern Europe. By investigating Roma non- and underrepresentation in economics and politics, her research addressed issues of discrimination and the rise of differentiated citizenship as indicators of the malfunctioning of democratic institutions in the region. By extending research on ethnic/racial differentiation in education, her studies revealed how the transference of authoritative cultural norms contributes to the deprivation of the poor – and especially the Roma poor – of successful participation in labor, economic advancement and social mobility and how it reinforces relations of social marginalization and exclusion. Her recent English-language publications include: ‘Fragmented Social Rights in Hungary’s Postcommunist Welfare State’. In: A. Evers and A-M. Guillemard: Social Policy and Citizenship: The Changing Landscape (Oxford University Press. 2013); Migrant, Roma and Post-Colonial Youth in Education across Europe: Being ‘Visibly Different’. (Eds. with Claire Schiff, Palgrave Macmillan 2014); Faces and Causes of Roma Marginalization in Local Contexts: Hungary, Romania, Serbia. (Eds. with Violetta Zentai, Center for Policy Studies, Central European University, 2014); ‘Disquieted Relations: West Meeting East in Contemporary Sociological Research’. Intersections, No. 2 (2015), pp. 12-37.

Linda Tropp is a Professor of Social Psychology, UMass-Amherst. Her research focuses on expectations and outcomes of intergroup contact, identification with social groups, interpretations of intergroup relationships, and responses to prejudice and disadvantage. She received the 2012 Distinguished Academic Outreach Award from the University of Massachusetts Amherst for excellence in the application of scientific knowledge to advance the public good. Tropp has also received the Erikson Early Career Award from the International Society of Political Psychology, the McKeachie Early Career Award from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, and the Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Tropp is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. She has been a visiting scholar at the National Center for Peace and Conflict Studies (New Zealand), the Kurt Lewin Institute (Netherlands), the Marburg Center for Conflict Studies (Germany), Pontificia Universidad Católica (Chile), the University of California, Berkeley (USA), and the International Graduate College on Conflict and Cooperation (Germany, UK, Belgium), where she taught seminars and workshops on prejudice reduction and intervention. She has worked with national organizations to present social science evidence in U.S. Supreme Court cases on racial integration, on state and national initiatives to improve interracial relations in schools, and with non-governmental and international organizations to evaluate applied programs designed to reduce racial and ethnic conflict. She is co-author of “When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact” (March 2011, Psychology Press), editor of the “Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict” (June 2012, Oxford University Press), and co-editor of “Moving Beyond Prejudice Reduction: Pathways to Positive Intergroup Relations” (February 2011, American Psychological Association Books) and “Improving Intergroup Relations” (August 2008, Wiley-Blackwell).

Read about past Distinguished Visiting Fellows

DISTINGUISHED CUNY FELLOWS

Every year ARC invites tenured CUNY faculty to apply for a fellowship with ARC. Similar to Distinguished Visiting Fellows, Distinguished CUNY Fellows present papers in the annual ARC seminar, participate in the GC intellectual community, and work with students in research praxis seminars on areas of common interest. The fellowship provides them with course releases and an office at the GC in which they can pursue their research in a collaborative context working alongside their peers and doctoral students.

Distinguished CUNY Fellows receive three course releases per semester for a maximum of two semesters.

Below are profiles of the 2016-2017 Distinguished CUNY Fellows:

Christopher Bonastia is Professor of Sociology at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and serves as the Associate Director of Honors Programs at Lehman. Bonastia’s research focuses on the politics of racial inequality. He has published two books: Knocking on the Door: The Federal Government’s Attempt to Desegregate the Suburbs (Princeton University Press, 2006) and Southern Stalemate: Five Years without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia (University of Chicago Press, 2012). The latter was a 2013 nominee for the Library of Virginia Literary Award in Non-Fiction. PBS Newshour used Southern Stalemate as its sole source for a widely distributed handout, targeting students in Grades 7-12, on the school closings in Prince Edward County, Virginia. In addition, Bonastia was a consultant to This American Life for an episode in its “House Rules” report (November 2013) on federal housing desegregation efforts under former HUD Secretary George Romney. Since 2013, Bonastia’s work has been published in Sociological Forum, Kalfou, Contexts and History of Education Quarterly (forthcoming, November 2016). His current book project examines tensions between New York City’s liberal self-image and its persistent unwillingness to address racial and economic segregation in schools and housing.

José J. Cao Alvira was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In August 2006, he obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University under the supervision of professors Yi Wen, Tao Zhu and Karl Shell. Previous to his doctoral degree, he studied at the University of Puerto Rico, University of Barcelona, University of Texas at Austin, University of Vienna and Harvard University. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics and Business at Lehman College lecturing on Corporate Finance, Investments and Microeconomics. His research interests are on financial econometrics, numerical methods, and banking in development countries. Previous to joining Lehman College, he was an Associate Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business Administration of the University of Puerto Rico, where he held several administrative positions including being Chair of the Graduate School. He is a 2016-17 Fulbright U.S. Scholar, and has served as a visiting professor in several academic research centers, and as an economic and financial adviser to numerous public and private enterprises.

Ava Chin is an associate professor of creative nonfiction and journalism at the College of Staten Island. She is the author of the award-winning food memoir Eating Wildly: Foraging for Life, Love, and the Perfect Meal, which won 1st Prize in the M.F.K. Fisher Book Awards, was a Goodreads Choice Semifinalist, and was a Library Journal pick for “Best Books of 2014.” She is also the editor of the essay anthology Split: Stories From a Generation Raised on Divorce. Her writing about nature, arts, and culture has appeared in The New York Times (as the “Urban Forager”), the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Marie Claire, Saveur, and the Village Voice, among others. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, and an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. A former slam poet, she is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, and a 2016-2017 Fulbright to China. Her current work addresses late 19^th Century Chinese transnational history and the Chinese Exclusion Act laws. The Huffington Post named her one of "9 Contemporary Authors You Should Be Reading."

Margaret M. Chin was born and raised in New York City and is herself a child of Chinese immigrant parents. She is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center. Margaret received her BA from Harvard University and her PhD from Columbia University. She is currently a Faculty Associate of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, and a member of the CUNY Mapping Asian American New York group, and the CUNY Asian American / Asian Research Institute. Margaret’s honors include an American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellows Award, a NSF Dissertation Grant, a Social Science Research Councils Post Doctoral Fellowship in International Migration, and a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship for junior faculty. She was the Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society (2015-2016). Her specialties include immigration, family, work, Asian Americans, and children of immigrants. She authored Sewing Women: Immigrants and the NYC Garment Industry, an illuminating ethnography on the Chinese and Korean garment sectors, which received an Honorable Mention from the Thomas and Znaniecki Annual Book Award for best book on Immigration from the ASA International Migration Section. And she is currently working on a book manuscript on Asian American professionals which elaborates on her article, “Asian Americans, Bamboo Ceilings, and Affirmative Action” (Contexts - Winter 2016).

Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He is the author of Extinction: A Radical History (O/R Press, 2016), The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature (2013) and Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Michigan, 2007). He is also co-editor of four essay collections: Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (Haymarket, 2015), Democracy, the State, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009); Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (Michigan, 2009); and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Duke, 2007). A former editor of Social Text Online and of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom, he is currently completing work on a book entitled Extreme City: Climate Change and the Urban Future for Verso Books.

Lourdes Dolores Follins is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Kingsborough Community College, where she has been teaching since 2004. She earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Social Work from New York University in 2003. Before entering the academy, Lourdes Dolores worked with and on behalf of people of color as a social worker, a psychotherapist, and an organizational consultant for 15 years. Her honors include a National Institute of Mental Health (2008-2012) Minority Research Fellowship and a 2015-2016 CUNY Chancellor’s Research Award. Lourdes Dolores’ research interests are in two broad areas: (1) health disparities faced by LGBT people of color and (2) faculty inclusion, equity, and diversity at community colleges. Her projects in progress include a co-edited book about the health of Black LGBT people in the US, a co-edited book about Black LGBT health across the globe, and a faculty-led, multi-site study of historically underrepresented faculty at three of CUNY’s community colleges.

John Goering’s research and teaching focuses upon housing, race and fiscal policy issues. After receiving his Ph.D. from Brown University, he authored several dozen articles as well as authored and edited eight books, including: Housing Desegregation and Federal Policy (University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Mortgage Lending, Racial Discrimination and Federal Policy (Urban Institute Press, 1996); Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Experiment (2003); Fragile Rights within Cities, (2007); and Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty (Oxford University Press, 2010 with Xavier Briggs). The latter book received the Brownlow award from the National Academy of Public Administration in 2011. For two decades, he directed evaluation research on housing, neighborhood change, and civil rights issues at US HUD and served with President Clinton’s White House Initiative on Race. Before joining the CUNY faculty in 1999, he taught at the University of Leicester, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Graduate Center of CUNY. John served on the editorial boards of the Urban Affairs Review, New Community, Housing Studies, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. He has served as a consultant for HUD, the New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, MDRC, the Urban Institute, and Abt Associates. He is currently focused with colleagues at the London School of Economics upon the effects of budget retrenchment upon housing programs and human welfare in the United States and England.

Bill Haddican is Associate Professor of Linguistics at CUNY Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his PhD in 2005 from New York University and taught previously at the University of York, before joining CUNY in 2011. His work focuses on models of language variation and change and formal syntax, particularly in dialects of Basque and English. Beginning in the Fall of 2016, he will be a co-PI on an NSF-funded project examining language change in New York City English.

Marnia Lazreg is professor of sociology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College of the City University of New York. She is the recipient of a number of fellowships at the Bunting Institute (Harvard University); the Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women (Brown University); the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (Italy); and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She carried out research and published in the areas of human rights, social class, cultural and decolonization movements, social development, and gender in the Middle East and North Africa. She is particularly interested in the transformations of meanings incurred by social theory when it travels to non-Western cultural milieux. Her work has been translated into a number of foreign languages, including Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian and Turkish. She lectures extensively in the United States and around the world, and has been a contributor to radio programs. Her books include, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, 2008) and Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women (Princeton, 2010). She has just completed a book length manuscript on Foucault’s Orient: The Conundrum of Culture.

Miki Makihara I have been interested in the use and conception of language and how these relate to other aspects of social life, and in particular, to social identity, intergroup relations, and political and economic changes. My research combines formal linguistic analysis and interpretive ethnography. I am currently working on the “Rapa Nui Cultural and Linguistic Heritage Project,” to explore memory, social change, and language through oral history narratives. This NSF-NEH financed project will also build community resources for the documentation and revitalization of the Rapa Nui language by creating a digital archive of oral history narratives.

Sara McDougall is Associate Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) and appointed in French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her first book, Bigamy and Christian Identity in late medieval Champagne (U Penn, 2012) examined the earliest known prosecutions for bigamy in medieval Europe. Her second book, Royal Bastards: The birth of illegitimacy, investigates ideas of illegitimate birth and the early history of the exclusion of those men and women deemed illegitimate from inheritance and from succession. The book will be published by Oxford University Press in December of 2016. She has also published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Law and History Review, and Gender & History. She is currently co-editing with Sarah Pearsall Marriage's Global Past a special issue of Gender & History forthcoming in 2017, and also, with Clive Emsley, a 6-volume Cultural History of Crime for Bloomsbury Press. She was a Mellon fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2014-2015.

Angela Reyes is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at Hunter College, and Doctoral Faculty in Anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She works on theories of semiotics, discourse, racialization, and postcoloniality. Her current research is on ideologies of elite mixed language in the Philippines and how the circulation of such ideologies connects to the ongoing renewal of colonial systems of inequality. Her books include Language, Identity, and Stereotype Among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007), Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America (co-edited with Adrienne Lo, Oxford University Press, 2009), and Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event (co-authored with Stanton Wortham, Routledge, 2015). She was a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow (2002-2003), Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow (2006-2007), and Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow (2009-2010). She is Associate Editor of Language in Society and Associate Editor of Linguistic Anthropology of American Anthropologist. She received her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania in 2003.

Robert Courtney Smith (Ph.D. political science Columbia, 1995) is a Professor of Sociology, Immigration Studies and Public Affairs at the School of Public Affairs, and in the Sociology Department, Graduate Center, CUNY. His first book, Mexican New York: Transnational Worlds of New Immigrants (2006, University of California Press), won the American Sociological Association’s 2008 overall Distinguished Book Award, and three other sectional prizes (for immigration; community and urban sociology; and Latino/a sociology) and a Presidential prize from CUNY. This book drew on 18 years of ethnographic research, working extensively with undocumented people. His second book, Horatio Alger Lives in Brooklyn, But Check His Papers (California, forthcoming) examines the puzzle of why most Mexicans in New York are at least modestly upwardly mobile, but also shows how having, gaining or lacking legal status disrupts this otherwise positive integration. He is at work on a third book (with Andy Beveridge) This Is Still America! Contested Political Integration in Port Chester, based on work as an expert on a voting rights trial for the US Department of Justice in US. v Village of Port Chester, which resulted in the first ever cumulative voting scheme in New York. A fourth book (with the Seguro Popular Research Team), How We Should Communicate with Immigrants: Lessons from the Seguro Popular Project is under review at California. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the SSRC, the Spencer Foundation, the W.T. Grant Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others. Prof. Smith has combined public and intellectual work. He is the founding Lead Faculty for the School of Public Affairs Mexican Consulate Leadership Program (since 2007). He is also a cofounder and now Board Chair of Masa (masany.org), a fifteen year old nonprofit in New York promoting educational achievement and committed leadership with Mexican immigrants and their children. He was named 2008 Youth Advocate of the Year by Association Tepeyac (then the largest Mexican oriented nonprofit in New York) and was cited with Masa and Executive Director Aracelis Lucero by the City Council in 2014 for Masa’s work in the Mexican community. Smith is the Coordinator and Lead on the DACA Access Project/Mexican Initiative on Deferred Action, a $1.25 million service and academic project that will legalize at least 500 new people via DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and screen for other forms of relief, such as U visas, and for DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of US citizen children. It also seeks to establish a ten year project studying the long term effects of having, gaining or lacking legal status.

Virginia Valian Current research in my laboratory investigates two-year-olds' knowledge and use of language, second language learners' performance on similar tasks, native speakers' performance on similar sentences with different tasks, the role of input in syntax acquisition, gender differences in mathematics problem-solving. We are also investigating what interventions work best in improving gender equity in different types of organizations. In first language acquisition, my laboratory investigates the mechanisms of acquisition, including: the role of input; the separation of competence and performance; the contribution of domain-general and domain-specific processes; and learnability and theories of learning. In artificial language learning, we study the roles of frequency, reference, and prosody. In human sex differences in cognition and achievement the focus is on the contributions of biology, cognition, and social structure, and the implications of sex differences for professional achievement. First and second language acquisition. In our work with two-year-olds we tape and transcribe their spontaneous speech, ask them to imitate sentences, test their memory of sentences, and ask them to understand sentences. In our work with non-native adult speakers we perform similar studies; we also measure their ability to read sentences presented very quickly on a computer screen (RSVP). In our work with native adult speakers we perform RSVP experiments, various pencil-and-paper experiments, and various problem-solving experiments. Gender differences in math. We ask high school and college students to solve math problems of various types, mental rotation problems, and inference problems. All materials are computer-based. Gender equity. We have various projects. One is to create web-based tutorials using voice-over narration with slides. Another is to create "report cards" rating science and humanities organizations according to their representation of women. A third is to create manuals analyzing interventions to improve the status of women in science.

Elena Vesselinov is Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. A 2004 Ph.D. from the University at Albany, Vesselinov studies housing in Europe and in the U.S.

Read about past Distinguished CUNY Fellows

Student Fellows

Each year ARC invites GC doctoral students to apply for an ARC Research Praxis Award. Students are required to be in the second year of their doctoral program with the intention of pursuing a dissertation research topic in one of the research themes of any given year. Throughout the period of the award, students work with ARC Distinguished Fellows in the research praxis seminar to learn how they conduct their research and to share research insights which can help them in their dissertation. These insights, as well as the perspectives of their peers who are focused on similar disciplines, are intended to foster student intellectual creativity and early entry into the research process. Students also blog on the ARC Student Research Commons on their research projects as well as on critical issues of the day.

Below are short bios of the Spring 2016 ARC Research Praxis Award winners:

Sumru Atuk is currently pursuing her Ph.D in Political Science and working toward completing the Women's Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center. She is a political theorist who is invested in contributing to the theorization of violence against women with a grounded theory based on extensive field research. She believes in the importance of interdisciplinary research that goes beyond disciplinary confines due to her research interests and political perspective. In her research she analyzes the "making" of the category of women and femininity by the political rhetoric and institutional/legal practices. She investigates how the latter reinforces hierarchical gender dynamics of the society and justifies violence against women in general, femicide in particular. Her current research primarily focuses on femicide in Turkey and involves Mexico as a secondary research site.

Arita Balaram is an activist/scholar pursuing a PhD in the Critical Social/Personality Psychology program at the Graduate Center. She is interested in stories that circulate within diasporic communities, across migratory geographies, and through generations. Her current research integrates visual methodologies such as identity mapping to explore how Indo-Caribbean youth in the U.S. engage in acts of self-assertion and recovery in a context where ideas of home, belonging, and community have been contested for generations. More broadly, she is interested in the utility of psychological theory for doing community building and healing work.

Priscilla Bustamante is a doctoral student in the Critical Social/Personality Psychology program at the Graduate Center. Her work draws upon critical race theories, quantitative and qualitative participatory research methods, and a strong commitment to ameliorate the various interconnected circuits of privilege and oppression. She is currently exploring the complexities surrounding diversity ideologies, discourse and praxis in elite educational institutions. By examining diversity in relation to places of in/exclusion, racism, whiteness, and situated knowledge, her work highlights the ways in which privilege is privately maintained while diversity is publicly embraced, the powerful resistance of those on the margins, and a critical reimagining of inclusion. Additionally, she is working on a research project examining the human impact of discretionary arrests and broken windows more broadly. This work focuses on the processes of dehumanization interwoven in policing in New York City as well as their structural, material, social and psychological consequences.

María Cioè-Peña is a doctoral student in the Urban Education department and a Presidential MAGNET Fellow. She is a former elementary school teacher whose passion for children and social justice in education pushes her to fight for equity and full inclusion for children of diverse backgrounds and abilities. With a B.A. in English and a M.S.Ed. in teaching urban students with disabilities, María’s research focuses on bilingual children with dis/abilities and their ability to access multilingual learning spaces within NYC public schools. Her interests are deeply rooted in language practices and dis/ability awareness within schools and families.

Lucas Corcoran is a doctoral student in the English department, focusing on composition/rhetoric studies, and he teaches first year composition at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Lucas’s primary research focuses on developing pedagogies that combine translingual and dialogic approaches to the writing classroom. Lucas also has a keen scholarly interest in applied linguistics, translanguaging, and the history of critical pedagogy.

Deshonay Dozier is a doctoral candidate in Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Broadly, her research engages the cultural critique and alternative development practices of people of color in the Los Angeles region. Dozier’s dissertation research maps the contested racialized relations of property and policing between elites and the homeless in Skid Row. Deshonay holds a Bachelor’s in Child and Adolescent Development with a Minor in Sociology from California State University, Northridge and a Master’s in Psychology from CUNY. Dozier’s research has been supported by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, Institute for Human Geography, and USC Wallis Annenberg Research Grant. Deshonay has taught and assisted courses in ethnic studies, psychology, and urban affairs. Currently, she holds a Mellon Teaching Fellowship at LaGuardia Community College.

Luke Elliott-Negri is a PhD student in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation research builds on a long tradition in the discipline, dating back to Marx and Engels, which attempts to explain “American exceptionalism” with respect to the formation of left third parties. He is studying two contemporary parties, bringing a micro-level approach to what has been primarily a macro-level literature. He has also contributed to two policy reports on paid sick leave legislation, and has a chapter in a forthcoming edited volume on why social movements succeed and fail.

Isabel Gil-Everaert is a PhD student in the Sociology department at the Graduate Center. Her main research interests are international migration, inequality, qualitative methods, urban sociology, geography, and gender. She is working on a project focused on the journey of Central American migrants through Mexico. Through ethnographic work, her aim is to understand the strategies of migrants in transit, as well as the complex relationships between the most important actors in the transit migration phenomenon. She focuses on the local communities through which migrants cross, the migrant shelters and human rights organizations that support migrants, and the migrants themselves as key actors to understand migratory journeys.

Kalina Gjicali is a Ph.D. student in Educational Psychology specializing in Learning, Development, and Instruction at The Graduate Center. Prior to her doctoral studies, she completed her M.A. at Teachers College, Columbia University in Cognitive Studies in Education and her B.A. at Hunter College in Psychology and Sociology. Kalina is an immigrant from Albania who experienced school as an English language learner. Throughout her years in public school systems, she found comfort in the subject of mathematics since mathematical number symbols are a universal language. Suitably, her research focuses on the impact of cognitive (e.g., language comprehension, executive function) and social-cognitive constructs (e.g., attitudes, norms) on mathematics learning for ethnically diverse and language minority children. She uses advanced quantitative statistical methods to understand the influence of such factors on early numeracy competencies in the childhood years and mathematics performance in adolescence. Currently, she is working on a research project that explores the relationship between early language communication and numeracy skills of children from low-income families living in urban communities.

Nora Goldman is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is interested in the relationship between language, power, and social categories like race and gender. At the ARC, she is researching the language ideologies surrounding multilingualism in American politics. The project was inspired by the public response to a brief exchange between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio about their Spanish proficiencies during a Republican primary debate in February of 2016. The YouTube comments posted on clips of this debate reveal how speakers use Spanish in their construction of multilingualism, American-ness, and ethnic identity and authenticity. Her other current project concerns feminist discourse on Twitter, examining how authors’ participation in a discourse of female empowerment affects certain linguistic variables.

Ian Haberman is a doctoral student in the economics department at the Graduate Center and a recipient of the Five-year Graduate Center Fellowship. He received a masters degree in applied economics from Illinios State University (Go Redbirds!) and a bachelors degree in philosophy and economics from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities (Go Golden Gophers!) Ian currently teaches intermediate economics courses at Hunter College and is research assistant to Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman. Ian's current research investigates the decomposition of income inequality using Spatial Econometrics. This allows for better estimation of income inequality decomposed into two components: Inequality due to individual effort and inequality due to an individual's unique set of opportunities. Additional research interests include inequalities that arise due to gender, race, and other socio-economic factors; and how intervention methods, such as Microfinance, impact a nation's economy, the families that live within it, and the households they make up. For more on Ian's research and thoughts, check out his website[link] and follow him on Twitter @IanHaberman

Marc Kagan is a Ph.D. student in the History Department. In earlier lives he was a communist political activist, a transit worker, a union officer, and a high school social studies teacher. His research focuses on the history of Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents New York’s subway and bus workers, from the time of the City’s fiscal crisis in 1975 to the near present, as a basis for examining larger questions about this era of growing economic inequality. Why have these workers, with so much potential power, been unable to repulse neoliberal austerity, and what lessons and ideas can be derived from the causes of their failure? Related research examines the relationships between union leaders, appointed staff, lower-level officers and stewards, and ordinary shop-floor workers at Local 100 and more broadly. To what extent do they share similar goals and constraints? How do they measure and articulate success and failure? Can we talk about these groups as coherent entities over time and space?

Rakhee Kewada is a Zimbabwean-born PhD student in the Geography Program in Earth and Environmental Science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research interests include: Infrastructure, Development, Ports, Sino-African relations and the Indian Ocean. Rakhee’s current research tracks the relation between the redevelopment of the port at Dar es Salaam and the construction of the new mega-port in Bagamoyo in Tanzania. The research sheds light on processes of uneven regional development as a result of transnational capital flows from an Africanist perspective by analyzing the different development strategies on the part of China Merchant Holdings Ltd. in Bagamoyo as compared to the World Bank/ UK Department for International Development (DFID) led investment at the Port of Dar es Salaam.

Stephanie Love is a Ph.D. student in linguistic anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds a B.A. (2007) in anthropology and political science and a M.Ed. (2011) in Language, Literacy and Culture (Curriculum and Instruction) from University of Washington, Seattle. Her research interests include North African migration and diaspora, ethnography of death and burial rituals, Arabic sociolinguistics, heteroglossia and multilingualism in contexts of cultural contact, schooling, literacy, and questions of racial formation, nationalism and language in Europe. She has published her research in Current Issues in Language Planning, International Journal of Multicultural Education, and two book chapters on Italian literature. She is a graduate teaching fellow at Brooklyn College.

Maura McGee is a PhD student in the Sociology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her areas of interest are urban sociology, immigration, race and ethnicity, and environmental sociology. Her current research examines the intersection of immigration and gentrification in Brooklyn and Paris. Using qualitative and comparative methods, she studies how ethnic/racial minorities and immigrants navigate changes in the retail landscape in gentrifying neighborhoods in the two cities. She focuses on local shopping streets and the social spaces that comprise them to interrogate the ways in which processes of gentrification may disrupt important networks of social and economic capital.

Sarah Molinari is a doctoral student in Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, who is researching the politics of debt and citizen struggles amid Puerto Rico’s current debt and economic crisis. Her work examines how the debt crisis is shaping emerging social movements, citizen coalitions and alternative political parties such as the Partido del Pueblo Trabajador (Working People’s Party) in Puerto Rico. Anti-debt coalitions in Puerto Rico and the US mainland have sought to influence negotiations between creditors and the state to demand that citizens’ basic needs and public goods are prioritized before the debt and bondholders. At the same time, Sarah’s research examines how the debt crisis is renewing debates about Puerto Rico’s political status and sovereignty in relation to the US federal government and financial markets. Sarah received her BA from Fordham University and worked for four years as a research assistant and oral historian at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. Her work has been published in Anthropology Now, the FocaalBlog and Souls.

Teresa Ober is a doctoral student in the Educational Psychology program at the Graduate Center, CUNY, specializing in Learning, Development, and Instruction. She has prior classroom experience as a primary school educator and her past research pursuits have included the study of cognitive theories as applied to the area of reading comprehension. Her current research interests include cognitive development and the emergence of early language and literacy skills. As an ARC student fellow, she hopes to better understand how educational technologies can be used to improve the learning of academic skills, as well as resilience and self-regulated learning, both within the United States and abroad.

Karen Okigbo is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology program at the Graduate Center. Karen serves as a Research Fellow at CUNY’s Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies (CLACLS) and the Office of Research, Evaluation & Program Support (REPS). In 2009, she earned a Bachelors in Politics from Princeton University. She also holds Masters degrees in Sociology from North Dakota State University and Social Policy from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on issues pertaining to immigration, race, ethnicity, and education. She plans to use the ARC Research Praxis Fellowship to explore and analyze the assimilation experiences of Nigerian immigrants at historically selective colleges and universities.

Mert Peksen is a doctoral student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program (Geography Specialization) at the Graduate Center. His research interests include forced migration, borders, migrant detention and deportation, and the spatial implication of changing migration control strategies in Turkey and Europe. His current research explores the spaces of the Aegean Sea and the Turkish-Greek border. Focusing on the changing border control strategies in Europe and on the overlapping involvement of various local, national, and global actors in managing refugee flows in the area, he is investigating the processes through which the Aegean Sea has turned into a highly complex border zone. He analyzes the consequences of the policies implemented by the European Union, and Turkish and Greek nation-states regarding the mobility of refugees. Furthermore, he suggests taking a more bottom-up approach in understanding the current refugee reception crisis, and investigates the local responses to the influx of refugees,

Rachel Rakov is currently working towards her PhD in the Linguistics Department at The Graduate Center at CUNY. She studies computational linguistics, with a focus speech processing. Some of her previous work includes training a computational model to distinguish between sarcastic and sincere speech based on intonation in human speech. Her current work involves investigation of modeling speech prosody (intonation) for the purpose of distinguishing between native and nonnative English speech. Using several different approaches to modeling pitch curves, Rakov seeks to identify whether there are common types of intonation patterns in the speech between and among native and nonnative English speakers. She will then use information intonation patterns to build an automatic system to distinguish between native and nonnative English speech. A deeper understanding of intonation patterns could lead to technological improvements such as automatic speech systems that are more effective at recognizing the speech of nonnative speakers, or automated computer systems that can assist nonnative speakers in their production of the English language in a more individualized and targeted way.

China Sajadian is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her preliminary dissertation research examines how Lebanon’s current policy against creating refugee camps for Syrians impacts rural property relations and labor arrangements in the Biqa Valley. Her ethnographic inquiry will trace new assemblages of local, municipal, state-level, and international development actors involved in negotiating rent agreements, access to informal housing, housing-for-labor arrangements, and infrastructure rehabilitation. She will contextualize her ethnographic investigation within a longer history of rural social life, property relations, and labor migration in the borderland region between Syria and Lebanon. As a 2016 Summer Fellow at the newly established Middle East Political Economy Summer Institute, she aims to contribute to a growing scholarly focus on political economy in Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean Studies. She holds a BA in Government from Smith College and an MA in Anthropology from Columbia University, where she was a recipient of the U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship. She previously worked as a researcher for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Lebanon and has also researched and worked in Palestine and Jordan. She is currently a Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Brooklyn College.

Mara Getz Sheftel is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the life course trajectories of post-1965 immigrants to the United States. Using quantitative methods she specifically looks at the labor market outcomes, economic status, living arrangements and morbidity and mortality outcomes of low status elderly immigrants trying to understand how mechanisms of gender, race and ethnicity, legal status, geographic location and lifetime income and wealth inequality intersect to determine immigrant well-being at the end of their life course. This research is an important contribution to the literature on assimilation trajectories of immigrants because definitive conclusions about outcomes can only be made at this final stage in one’s life course. Recently, Mara has specifically looked at the relationship between naturalization, as a measure of immigrant incorporation, and the health of immigrants at older ages, using a counterfactual approach, finding a different relationship depending on age of migration. In addition, using demographic methods she has investigated the persistence of the immigrant health advantage at older ages, finding evidence of a crossover effect among foreign born Mexican immigrants whereby disability rates among the working age population are lower than native born groups, but among the highest once they reach older ages. Mara has a BA from Northwestern University and an MA in Public Policy from Hebrew University.

LaToya Strong is a scholar-educator-activist. She is a former New York City public school teacher and has worked in both formal and informal science education settings. LaToya is a 3^rd year doctoral student in the Learning Sciences strand of the Urban Education program here at the Graduate Center. Her research interests focus on the ways in which coloniality has mediated and structured the teaching, learning and research of science education. Specifically, she is looking at the intersection of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness in the science classroom and how these systems can be disrupted. Her work is situated in BlackCrit, critical race theory, decolonizing theories, and critical feminist theories.

Susie Tanenbaum is a fourth-year doctoral student in the sociology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She earned a Master’s degree in urban studies at Queens College, and her Master’s thesis was published as the book, Underground Harmonies: Music and Politics in the Subways of New York (Cornell University Press, 1995). A lifelong Queens resident, Ms. Tanenbaum worked as program director and associate director of the Jackson Heights Community Development Corporation, where she designed initiatives with neighborhood youth and local artists to foster a shared public culture in a community experiencing significant demographic change. Currently, as director of immigrant and intercultural affairs in the Queens Borough President’s Office, she promotes immigrant integration and multicultural civic engagement in partnership with diverse community advocates and nonprofit leaders. Ms. Tanenbaum has a particular interest in ethnography, and with a background in public service she aims to contribute to the sociological literature on immigration, race and ethnicity, and urban policy. As a doctoral student, she has researched claims-making activities in a local Muslim community, and she has conducted a case study on demographic representation at Community Board meetings. Her dissertation will critically examine the construction of multiculturalism in Queens, focusing on several strategic sites of negotiation in “district-level political fields.” Susie Tanenbaum earned a Bachelor’s degree in English literature from Oberlin College, and she attended the United Nations International School.

Nga Than is a PhD student in the Sociology department at the Graduate Center. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany. Her research interests include international migration, urban sociology, social inequality, race and gender. She is working on a project that compares integration experiences of two Vietnamese migrant groups in Germany: former refugees, and former contract workers. The first group migrated to West Germany as war refugees after the Vietnam War, while the later migrated to East Germany as contract workers under the auspices of the East German government right before the end of the Cold War. She plans to use the ARC Research Praxis Fellowship first to strengthen her methodological understanding in linking theory and empirical research, then to further explore her research by focusing on integration experiences of the 1.5 and 2^nd generation Vietnamese in Germany.

Luis Guzmán Valerio graduated magna cum laude from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, with a B.A. in Modern Languages (French and German). He went on to pursue a Certificate in Hispanic Studies and an M.A. in Translation, also from U.P.R., Río Piedras. He earned the M.Phil. degree in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Languages and Literatures from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and is currently a doctoral candidate in the same program where he is specializing in Hispanic Linguistics. He defended his dissertation proposal in the Spring, 2016. His doctoral dissertation is titled Perspectives from the Streets and the Classrooms in the Same ‘Hood: Linguistic Landscapes of Sunset Park, Brooklyn and studies the linguistic landscape at the intersection of societal multilingualism, language policy, and bilingual education. Luis is also an Inter-University Program for Latino Research / Mellon Fellow for the 2016-2017 academic year.

Laurel Wright, MPH, MA is a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at CUNY Graduate Center & The City College of New York. As part of a research team led by Dr. Sasha Rudenstine, Laurel's research interests attend to the intersections of diverse identity categories and health-related outcomes as they emerge within patient-provider dynamics. Currently, Laurel's research employs mixed-methods data collection strategies to model co-existing identities among patients within a community-based mental health clinic. In addition, Laurel will serve as the 2016-2017 Psychological Evaluation Extern with The Gender & Family Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, facilitating clinical evaluations with gender expansive youth and their families. Laurel plans to use the Spring 2016 ARC Fellowship as an opportunity to integrate research and clinical practices to improve provider knowledge and service provisions for underrepresented populations.

Nishant Yonzan I am a doctoral student in Economics at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. I am interested in studying inequality through the wealth and income lens. Among other things, I would like to quantifying inequality, understand and measure peoples’ perception towards inequality, and improve the role of policy in mitigating issues that arise due to inequality. I am currently studying the effect of nudges to reduce the inefficiencies related with (re)distribution. Redistributive policy is a primary tool to limit the increasing divide due to inequality. It can be made better if we could weed out the inefficiencies that exists in the use of these resources. I am trying to understand what role availability of information plays in peoples’ decision in using these redistributed resources. I particularly want to answer – can we optimize, using information or education, the consumption of resources. I am trying to do a randomized control trial to answer this issue.

Read about past student fellows.