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 is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Hunter College and is a member of the doctoral faculties of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center.  She is the director of the Language Acquisition Research Center, which has been funded by the NSF and NIH.  She is also the director of the Hunter College Gender Equity Project, which has been funded by NSF, NIH, and the Sloan Foundation. Dr Valian works in the psychology of language and gender equity.  In language, Dr Valian works in two areas.  One area is first language acquisition, where Dr Valian performs research with the aim of developing a model of acquisition that specifies what is innate, how input is used by the child, and how the child's syntactic knowledge interacts with knowledge in other linguistic and extra-linguistic domains.  To approach those questions she uses a variety of methods, including computer-assisted corpus analysis, comprehension experiments, elicited imitation experiments, and elicited production experiments.  Dr Valian's second language area is the relation between bilingualism and higher cognitive functions in adults; she published a major review to explain the inconsistencies in the literature.  With Irina Sekerina, Dr Valian co-hosted a two-day NSF-sponsored workshop on bilingualism and executive function across the lifespan. In gender equity Dr Valian performs research on the reasons behind women's slow advancement in the professions and proposes remedies for individuals and institutions.  She is currently particularly interested in who receives awards and prizes, and invitations to speak at conferences.  In a 2014 Chronicle of Higher Education article on 'What book changed your mind?', Valian's book, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women was one of 12 non-fiction books published in the last 30 years that was showcased.  Her current book with Abigail Stewart, titled, The Inclusive Academy:  Diversity and Excellence, will be published by MIT Press.  Dr Valian's audiences have ranged from natural scientists, such as chemists and astronomers, to theater actors and directors.  Her evidence-based approach has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Nature, Scientific American, The Women's Review of Books, and many other journals and magazines.  She has also appeared on NPR, the BBC, and TheNewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
 

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 Fall 2017 & Spring 2018 ARC Research Praxis Award winners:


Kelsey Chatlosh is a Ph.D. student in cultural anthropology and Digital Fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She holds a B.A. (2012) in anthropology and American studies, with a minor in Hispanic languages and literatures from The George Washington University. Her future dissertation research will examine how inequalities of race, gender and class motivate and structure women Afro-Chilean activists’ articulations of belonging to the Chilean nation and the African diaspora, in the context of a purportedly racially homogenous country. Her work as a Digital Fellow is focused on digital tools and platforms for qualitative research, oral interviews and sound data, with an emphasis on ethics and decolonizing and feminist methods. 




Philip Johnson is a doctoral student in the Political Science program at the Graduate Center, and teaches at Hunter College. His research focuses on theories of violence, and on how and why systems of violence form and function. Recent work looks at detention facilities in the War on Terror, and the connections between state and criminal violence in Mexico. He is currently developing a project that examines the targeting of undocumented migrants and other marginalized groups by criminal organizations in Mexico.







Jojo Karlin is a doctoral student in the English program at the Graduate Center and a GC Digital Initiatives Digital Fellow. Jojo’s research examines letters and letter writing before and after the rise of telecommunications. She looks at how letters act as elaborations or elongations of writers’ understanding of two separate time-spaces and how letters’ physical displacement operates on a notion of correspondence through asynchronous synchronicity or copresence. As a Pine Tree Fellow, she hopes to investigate the preservation of correspondence in a digital humanities context.
 






Mary Catherine Kinniburgh is a doctoral candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, whose research focuses on the intersections of book history, new media, and poetics. In particular, her work examines the simultaneous rise of reprographic technologies after World War II and renewed poetic interest in occult themes, including mysticism, alchemy, and poetics of dictation. She is invested in negotiating the methods of bibliography and book history from a digital perspective, and how this process may be informed by practices such as critical making, collaboration with archival institutions on special collections pedagogy, and media archaeology. Mary Catherine is also an editor for Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and a two-time recipient of the Diane di Prima Fellowship for archival research. She created and coordinates the Collaborative Research Seminar, a working group for primary source research at the Center for the Humanities, and teaches workshops in digital skills and physical computing as a Digital Fellow and lead fellow for the GC Maker Space. She holds an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and a B.A. in English and Medieval Studies from University of Virginia as a Jefferson Scholar.


Christopher Maggio is a doctoral student in Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is primarily interested in using quantitative methods to study issues related to contemporary immigration in the United States. His past and current research largely relates to policies at the state and local level impacting immigrants and ethnic minorities in the U.S., studying outcomes including social/civic engagement and mental health. He is also currently working on several quantitative projects with faculty at the Graduate Center related to early indicators of college success and affordable housing, and has worked in other research areas such as gender and sexuality and public health. He holds a BA in Economics and an MA in Applied Quantitative Research, both from NYU. He plans to use the ARC Research Praxis Fellowship to study the experiences of immigrants and the 2nd generation in new destinations of the United States, particularly looking at the South and Midwest through a comparative lens. These experiences include social and educational mobility, residential segregation, and perceptions of discrimination.


Laxman Timilsina is currently pursuing his Ph.D in Economics at the Graduate Center. He is interested in learning how society distributes opportunity and if that has an impact on overall inequality. And if such opportunities if distributed equally or provided to the most vulnerable will help them escape poverty? He is interested in researching about the impact of wealth we accumulate (inheritance or gift) from our parents. How much advantage we inherit from our families’ wealth and status directly impacts the opportunity that society provides to us which undermines fairer competition and upward mobility. Such advantages could not only be passed on through wealth but as education, health and political connection (power) among others. He believes inequality should be primarily viewed as ex ante and hope to learn and research about such topics as he moves in his education life and beyond. 


Sara Vogel is a doctoral student in the Graduate Center's Urban Education program. She is interested in conducting applied research at the intersection of computer science education, bilingual education and social justice pedagogy, in partnership with educators and school communities. She aims to put students' diverse languaging practices, cultural backgrounds and interests at the center of teaching and learning with digital media and technology. As an instructor at  the Hunter College School of Education, she guides pre- and in-service teachers to reflect on the theory, history, and policy of bilingual education in ways that support their development of equitable and transformational classroom practice. In collaboration with the NYC-based Hive Research Lab, she also founded the CS Education Visions project, which has surfaced the diverse visions that formal and informal educators have for universal computer science education initiatives.


Read about past student fellows.

ARC embraces the vital work of the Graduate Center’s eminent scholars, doctoral students, and research centers, which is the backbone of the Graduate Center’s international reputation. Those efforts energize the following five areas of study. Click each research area to go to the corresponding web page.

Inequality: Research on the structural foundations of increasing inequality across our society and ways to mobilize communities around various alternatives.

Immigration: Interdisciplinary research on the social, cultural, and political impacts of international migration, with special attention on the role of immigration in New York City and comparative studies on how immigration and ethnic diversity are experienced in different nations.

Multilingualism: Interdisciplinary research on complex social, cultural, and policy issues raised by multilingualism.

Digital Initiatives: Research in a broad range of digital projects and digital resources, including data mining and the digital humanities.

Urban Studies: Critical issues facing large cities around the world and the role played therein by public, nonprofit, and business organizations.

Please note that, in addition to ARC’s support of these research areas, essential work is under way in the Graduate Center’s interdisciplinary committees and initiatives.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Tel.: 1.212.817.7544
Email: arc@gc.cuny.edu