Faculty Committee
Gary Wilder, Director
Gary Wilder is a Professor in the Ph.D. Programs of Anthropology, P1040844_2History, and French and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). In 2007 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School which was funded by a Mellon New Directions Fellowship for the study of international law. His research on the French empire, French West Africa, and the Francophone Caribbean is located at the intersection of historical anthropology, intellectual history, and critical social theory. He is currently working on three sets of essays: on historical temporality; postcolonial justice; and the black Atlantic critical tradition.
Anthony Alessandrini
Associate Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College
tonyalessandrini@gmail.com
Anthony Alessandrini is an associate professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, and an affiliate faculty member of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2008-2009. His work focuses on postcolonial literature and theory and the connection between Middle Eastern literature and culture and postcolonial studies, with a particular focus on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. He is the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, and has published or forthcoming articles in Arab Studies Journal, Cultural Studies, Diaspora, Foucault Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, The Journal of Pan African Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Minnesota Review, and Reconstruction, as well as in the anthologies A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy, and World Bank Literature. We Must Find Something Different: Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics will be published in 2012. He is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine, an online publication focusing on the politics and culture of the Middle East.
Herman Bennett
Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center
bennett.herman@gmail.com
Herman Bennett is a renowned scholar on the history of the African diaspora, with a particular focus on Latin American history. Through his work, he has called for scholars to broaden the critical inquiry of race and ethnicity in the colonial world. He has written extensively on the presence of African slaves and freedmen in Mexican society during the colonial period and on the consequent interaction between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in colonial Mexico. His books include Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Indiana University Press, 2009) and Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Indiana University Press, 2003), in which he offers a social historical examination of free Afro-Mexican kinship practices in the mature and late-colonial periods. Bennett has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has lectured widely in Europe and the Americas, and comes to the Graduate Center from Rutgers University after starting his scholarly career at Johns Hopkins University. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in Latin American history from Duke University where he was a Mellon Scholar of the Humanities.
Claire Bishop
Professor of Contemporary Art, Theory and Exhibition History at the CUNY Graduate Center
cbishop@gc.cuny.edu
Claire Bishop has previously taught in the Curating Contemporary Art department of the Royal College of Art, London, where she continues to be Visiting Professor, and at Warwick University(UK). She is a frequent contributor to Artforum and a research advisor for Former West. Professor Bishop is interested in post-medium specific art since the 1960s (performance art, installation, conceptual art, video, participation) and exhibition history. Recurrent themes in her research are spectatorship and the relationship between art and politics.
Susan Buck-Morss
Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center
sbm5@cornell.edu
Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Science at CUNY Graduate Center beginning in fall 2010. She has held the Jan Rock Zubrow ’77 Professor of Government at Cornell University as a member of the graduate fields of Comparative Literature, German Studies, History of Art and Visual Studies, and the School of Art, Architecture and Planning. Her books include Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh University Press, 2009), Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (Verso, 2003), Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (The MIT Press, 2000); The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1989); and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School(Free Press, 1977; 2nd ed., 2002). Photo by: Don Pollard
Collette Daiute
Professor of Developmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center
cdaiute@gmail.com
Colette Daiute is Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Dr. Daiute does research on the social and cognitive development of children at risk in the U.S. and in international contexts. Colette Daiute has done research on children’s social conflicts, conflict resolution, children’s development in war and post-war contexts, children’s rights, literacy development, writing, and uses of interactive technology. Working from the perspective of socio-historical activity theory, Dr. Daiute is especially interested in children’s participation in social and intellectual practices as influenced by political and economic factors. Colette Daiute’s recent book publications include Human Development and Political Violence(Cambridge University Press, 2010), International Perspectives on Youth Conflict and Development(Oxford University Press, 2006), Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development of Individuals in Society(Sage Publications, 2004), and The Development of Literacy through Social Interaction(Jossey-Bass, 1993). She has published numerous articles in journals, such as the recent article, “Young people’s stories of conflict and development in post-war Croatia” in Narrative Inquiry, 2005. Dr. Daiute has also worked on the design of numerous programs for vulnerable youth, including violence prevention, literacy, and youth research curricula. She was, for example, the head academic consultant for the television series Ghostwriter. In addition to courses in her areas of research, she teaches and does workshops on narrative psychology, discourse analysis, qualitative research, and methods of inquiry into human development and globalization.
Grace Davie
Associate Professor of History at Queens College
Grace.Davie@qc.cuny.edu
Grace Davie is Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at Queens College. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Michigan. Grace has received awards from the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright. Her first book was Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855-2005 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has also published essays in The Journal of Southern African Studies, OD Practitioner, and Politique Africaine. Her current project, Webs of Power: Labor Union Corporate Campaigns in the United States, 1960-2015 (under contract from University of North Carolina Press, Justice Power Politics series), tells the story of civil rights activists, New Left radicals, and activist-researchers who used power mapping to develop new strategies and tactics for struggling labor unions in a period of rapid transformation, financialization, and anti-union repression.
Duncan Faherty
Associate Professor of English and American Studies, Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center
duncan.faherty@qc.cuny.edu
Duncan Faherty is Associate Professor of English at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, and is also the Coordinator of the American Studies Certificate Program at The Graduate Center. He is also the co-organizer (with Kandice Chuh) of the Revolutionizing American Studies initiative at The Graduate Center. He is the author of Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858 (U of New England P, 2007) and co-editor of the journal Studies in American Fiction. His work has also appeared in such venues as Early American Literature, American Quarterly, and Reviews in American History. His current book project examines the development of the early U.S. novel by focusing on the canonical interregnum of 1800-1820, and rethinking the ways in which these texts interrogate Circum-Atlantic political and economic networks. This project is particularly interested in thinking about how U.S. cultural production indexes wide spread anxieties about the Haitian Revolution as a means of rethinking its own revolutionary legacies. He is also at work on a project about the War of 1812 and narrative temporalities. His research interests include Eighteenth-century American literature; early U.S. literature and culture (1780-1850); American Studies; and circum-Atlantic Studies.
Mandana Limbert
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College
mandana.limbert@qc.cuny.edu
Mandana E. Limbert received her PhD in Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan in 2002 and joined the Queens College (CUNY) faculty the same year. She became a member of the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center in 2007. She has also been a fellow and visiting scholar at The University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender (1999-2000), New York University’s Center for Near Eastern Studies (2000-2001), the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (2001-2002), and Duke University’s Department of Cultural Anthropology (2008-2010). She joined the History department at North Carolina State University (2009-2010). In addition to numerous articles, Professor Limbert has co-edited “Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and their Temporalities” (2008), published by the School of American Research, Advanced Seminar Series. Her book, “In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town” was published by Stanford University Press (2010). And, with support from the American Council of Learned Societies (2007-2008), Professor Limbert has been writing her next book, “Oman, Zanzibar, and the Politics of Becoming Arab” on changing notions of Arabness in Oman and Zanzibar over the course of the twentieth century.
Uday Singh Mehta
Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center
umehta@gc.cuny.edu
Uday Singh Mehta, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center, is a political theorist whose work encompasses a wide spectrum of philosophical traditions. He has written on the relationship between freedom and imagination, liberalism’s complex link with colonialism and empire, and more recently on war, peace and non-violence. He is the author of two books, The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke (Cornell University Press, 1992), and Liberalism and Empire: Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago Press, 1999). He is currently completing a book on war, peace and nonviolence, which focuses on the moral and political thought of M.K. Gandhi. He received his undergraduate education at Swarthmore College, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Princeton University.
Justin Rogers-Cooper
Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, Faculty in the Master's in Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center
jrogers@lagcc.cuny.edu
Justin Rogers-Cooper is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College and faculty in the Master's in Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research and scholarship emerges from interdisciplinary frameworks in American studies, including publications on nineteenth and twentieth century literature, working-class culture, and racial capitalism. His primary projects concern the 1877 General Strike and James Baldwin. He is a regular guest on the podcast Nostalgia Trap.
Joan Wallach Scott
Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science at the institute for Advanced Study, Professor of History at the Graduate Center, CUNY
jws@ias.edu
Joan Wallach Scott is Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science at the institute for Advanced Study. She is an adjunct professor history in the GC. A historian who works in French history and women’s and gender studies as well as feminist theory, her most recent books are The Politics of the Veil, The Fantasy of Feminist History, Sex and Secularism (2017, Princeton University Press).
Naomi Schiller
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College, Affiliated faculty member in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
nschiller@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Naomi Schiller is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College and an affiliated faculty member in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research and teaching focus on politics, the state, social movements, climate justice, and qualitative methodologies. Naomi is author of Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela (Duke University Press 2018). She directed a short documentary film, On the Line, about food insecurity in the Lower East Side during the covid pandemic. She co-edited Disruptive Engagement: An Organizer’s Guide to Building Community Power for Justice in Land Use and Housing in New York City (CUNY’s Center for the Humanities 2023). Her current book project explores freedom dreams and climate crisis through a history of struggle in a small space on the waterfront of Manhattan’s Lower East Side known as Corlears Hook. Professor Schiller is a member of the Executive Committee of Brooklyn College’s Chapter of the PSC.
Julie Skurski
Julie Skurski earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1993 and came to the Graduate Center in January 2009 from the University of Michigan, where she taught in the departments of anthropology and history, and served as associate director of the doctoral program in anthropology and history. Her interests lie in the subjects of historical anthropology, race, gender, postcolonialism, popular religion, and Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic studies. Her books include States of Violence (2005), coedited with Fernando Coronil, and Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (2011), coedited with Coronil and others.
Jesse Schwartz
Jesse W. Schwartz is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing & Literature Major at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. He had held fellowships with the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst in Osnabrück, Germany, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities here in New York. His interests include radical American history and literature, periodical studies, Marxism, critical race and ethnic studies, and Russian-American cultural relations. He is currently at work on a project that traces the cultural responses to transnational socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the intersection of race and politics, with a particular focus on representations of the Bolshevik Revolution in US print cultures. A member of the editorial board of Radical Teacher, his work can be found there as well as in Nineteenth-Century Literature.
Support Staff
Sheehan Moore
Sheehan Moore is a PhD candidate in anthropology studying environmental crisis and state power on the US Gulf coast. His dissertation research examines responses to land loss in southern Louisiana, with attention to planning, dispossession, extraction, and shifting technologies of land governance. Sheehan has held research positions and fellowships at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; the Advanced Research Collaborative; the Climate Action Lab; and the New Media Lab. He has a BA in anthropology from McGill University.
2024/2025 Fellows
Oscar Aponte
Oscar Aponte is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation, Reclaiming Ancestral Lands: The Indigenous Peoples of Colombian Amazonia after the Rubber Boom, examines the reconstruction of the Indigenous societies that survived the Amazon rubber boom (1850-1930), with a specific focus on the Murui-Muina nation in the Colombian municipality of Leguízamo. Oscar has taught Latin American history at Lehman College and the City College of New York and is the producer and scripter of the documentary film The Way Back to the Maloca, which highlights the efforts of the Murui-Muina people to recover their traditional culture after rubber. His work is featured in Ethnohistory, The Journal of Transport History, Palabra Clave, and Revista Colombiana de Sociología.
Ria Banerjee
Ria Banerjee is an associate professor of English at Guttman Community College and consortial faculty at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her scholarly interests are in British and European modernism and writing pedagogy. She also works in media and film studies, and her project with the CGSC is based on contemporary global cinema. Her monograph, Spatiality and Cultural Politics in Forster, Eliot, and Woolf: Drafty Houses was published in 2024. In her free time, she blinks at cats and thinks about climate change.
Wen-shing Chou
Wen-shing Chou is Associate Professor of Art History at Hunter College, specializing in the art of China and Inner Asia. Her award-winning book, Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain (Princeton University Press, 2018), explores the Tibetan Buddhist transformation of China’s preeminent pilgrimage mountain during the Qing dynasty. Chou's current book project, “Shaping Time: Art of Rebirth in China and Inner Asia,” explores the visual and material culture of incarnation lineages within the Gelukpa Buddhist sphere of influence from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
D'Weston Haywood
D’Weston Haywood is Associate Professor of History at Hunter College, City University of New York. Haywood’s work centers on Black protest, Black intellectual history and Black political thought, and the intersections of Black culture, politics, public spheres, and the state. His award-winning book, Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement (UNC Press, 2018), traces this. The study conducts close readings of the Black press as a powerful tool of Black men’s leadership and gender and identity formation that shaped the 20th Century Black freedom struggle to wage a fight for racial justice and Black manhood. Yet, Haywood’s academic work also includes an innovative scholarly and pedagogical praxis he calls “Sonic Scholarship.” Fusing history and Hip Hop, his projects in this regard include, “The [Ferguson] Files: A Sonic Study of Racial Violence in America” (2016), examining a year of racial violence from the killing of Michael Brown to the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church, and “MADE MEN” (2020), examining the relationship between White Nationalism, white masculinity, and American politics in the Trump era. He is currently working on two book projects, one reconsidering the Cold War and Space Age through Elijah Muhammad’s Black Nationalism, and another reconsidering the rapper, Nas, in New York intellectual and urban histories.
Lucy Neave
Lucy Neave is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Australian National University. The author of two literary novels, Lucy is working on a monograph, Infrastructures of Crisis in 21st Century Global Literature, examining how contemporary global fiction intervenes in ideas of crisis and emergency, especially pertaining to the 'refugee crisis', climate change, and the pandemic. She's also working on a third novel, composed of three novellas, engaging with questions of complicity on the part of privileged western subjects in armed conflict. Her scholarship has been published in a range of scholarly journals, including Textual Practice, Journal of Commonwealth Literature and New Writing.
Chinonye Alma Otuonye
Chinonye Alma Otuonye is a PhD Candidate in cultural anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center. Her research examines social imaginations of place, notions justice and repair, and race. Her dissertation interrogates the temporal, ethical, and racialized underpinnings of Jewishness in ongoing agitations and imaginations of a Biafran nation-state. It analyzes the ways Jewish ideologies are mobilized and practiced in relation to an Igbo cosmology to remember alternate modes of social and political organization in opposition to growing discontent in Nigeria. Chinonye is an adjunct lecturer at Baruch College in the Black and Latino Studies department where she teaches courses on histories of racialized violence.
destry Maria Sibley
Destry Maria Sibley is an oral historian, digital media producer, and doctoral candidate in English. Her dissertation, a written text and accompanying podcast, reads contemporary American women’s life writing to recast the figure of the mother as an object of critical analysis, tracing the assimilation of neoliberal rationality into normative parenting discourses and asking how motherhood might be divested from epistemologies of liberal gender and identity formation. Destry has been the recipient of fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, PEN America, Mellon/ACLS, the American Association of University Women, and Humanities New York. She teaches seminars in literature and oral history at the City College of New York.
