Postdoctoral Fellow

Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma
Email: mprasad1@gc.cuny.edu
“Migration and Production of Space: Labour, Capital and the State in Kerala, India”

Bio: Mythri is a critical geographer whose research interests primarily revolve  around migration and urban transformation in contemporary India. She received her PhD from the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Building on political economy, radical geography and ethnographic methods, her doctoral research traces the different types of recruitment of migrants and local Malayali workers that reflect political contests and settlements between trade unions, corporate construction companies and recruitment agencies.  She is currently working on her book manuscript based on her dissertation. Among her recent publications are two articles: “Cards and Carriers: Politics of identification in Kerala, South India” in Contemporary South Asia and “The Cultural Politics of Wages: Ethnography of construction work in Kochi, India” in Contributions to Indian Sociology.

Faculty Fellows

Saadia Toor

Email: Saadia.Toor@csi.cuny.edu

 

Filip Stabrowski

Email: fstabrowski@lagcc.cuny.edu

Bio: Filip Stabrowski is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-Coordinator of Urban Studies at LaGuardia Community College, and has a faculty appointment in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. An urban geographer by training, he has conducted research in Warsaw, London, and New York City, and has written about immigrant housing and gentrification, community development and the political economy of “affordable housing,” and Airbnb and the emergence of “platform urbanism.” He is currently researching the impact of ecommerce on the geography of package delivery in New York City.

Judith Kafka

Email: judith.kafka@baruch.cuny.edu

Bio: Judith Kafka is Associate Professor of educational policy and history of education in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, where she is the Faculty Director for the Bachelor of Science in Public Affairs program. Dr. Kafka is also consortial faculty at the Graduate Center in Urban Education.  Her research focuses on urban education and the historical roots of current educational policies and practices. Dr. Kafka is particularly interested in the ways in which public education serves to both interrupt and reinforce social and economic inequalities in the United States. Her current project explores historical structural and spatial dimensions of educational inequality in the borough of Brooklyn.

Geert L Dhondt

Email: gdhondt@jjay.cuny.edu

Bio: Geert Dhondt’s teaching and research focuses on the economics of crime and justice.  He is particularly interested in the relationship between race in the post-segregation era, the logic of neoliberal capitalism, and the criminal justice system.  The National Institute of Justice awarded Geert a grant to study the empirical relationship between prison cycling and crime rates.  Geert received a distinguished service award in 2012 and a distinguished teaching award in 2015 at John Jay College, City University of New York where he is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department.  He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.  In his free time he is a PTA Treasurer.

Hosu Kim

Email: hosu.kim@csi.cuny.edu

 

Jesse W. Schwartz

Email: jwschwartz@gmail.com

Bio: Jesse W. Schwartz is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing & Literature Major at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, NY. He has held fellowships with the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) in Osnabrück, Germany, as well as at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of his interests include radical American history and literature, periodical studies, Marxism, critical race and ethnic studies, and Russian-American relations. His current project traces American cultural responses to transnational socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the intersection of racialization and radical politics, with a particular focus on representations of the Bolshevik Revolution within 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 and English Language Notes. He is also currently co-editing an essay collection on new directions in print culture studies forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic.

 

Cindi Katz

Email: ckatz@gc.cuny.edu

 

Alexandra Juhasz

Email: alexandra.juhasz@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Bio: Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Dr. Juhasz writes about and makes feminist, queer, fake, and AIDS documentary. Her current work is on online feminist pedagogy, YouTube, and other more radical uses of digital media and their archives. Her work as media artist, curator, and writer engages with linked social justice commitments, including COVID-19, AIDS, black queer and lesbian media, feminist and queer/trans film, and activist archives and collectives.

 

Dissertation Fellows

Amy A. Martinez

Criminal Justice 

Email: amartinez1@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Bio: Amy A. Martinez is a first-generation Xicana from southern California and currently a doctoral candidate in the Criminal Justice Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. Her dissertation examines the intersections among U.S. settler-colonial ideology and contemporary constructions of race, carcerality, and how that affects the hyper-policing and targeting of Mexican/Chicano gang members in Santa Barbara, California. Her research interests broadly include Mexican/Chicano Gang Culture; Juvenile/Criminal legal systems; Urban Ethnography; Mass Incarceration; Third World & Indigenous Qualitative Research Methods; U.S. (settler) colonialism; Police use of lethal force; Prison & Police Abolition.

Sheehan Moore

Email: smoore@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Bio: Sheehan Moore is a doctoral 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 was a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Hunter College and has held positions with the Climate Action Lab, the Advanced Research Collaborative, and the New Media Lab. His research is supported in part by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture. He has a BA in anthropology from McGill University.

Sara Cordón

Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures

Email: scordonhornillos@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Bio: Sara Cordón is currently a Ph. D. candidate at the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures department at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research examines how twenty-first-century Latin American and Spanish authors with sexual, ethnic, gender, or class identities traditionally excluded from the realm of literary distinction employ self-exhibition to engage with the public, thus redrawing the limits of literature. Her dissertation reflects critically on the commodification and manipulation of the contemporary authorial figure, as well as the possibilities of agency that certain non-hegemonic writers have been able to find in recent decades. Sara received her MFA in Creative Writing at NYU, her M.A. in Humanities at Carlos III University of Madrid, and her M.A. in Book Publishing at Salamanca University. She is the author of the novel “Para español, pulse 2” (Caballo de Troya/ Penguin Random House, 2018). She co-founded the non-profit bilingual New York based publishing company Chatos Inhumanos (www.chatosinhumanos.com).

Claudine E. Jean-Baptiste

Email: cjeanbaptiste@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Bio: Claudine E. Jean-Baptiste is a 6th year PhD candidate in French at the Graduate Center CUNY.  She is currently working on her dissertation thesis proposal titled “Memory, Violence and Detours: Strategies of Resistance to Color Invisibility in the French Republic”. Her thesis investigates the subjection of black bodies in France and their invisibility in the (post)colonial space while questioning why it is so hard for the memory of slavery to be recognized in the French Republic of today.

Labanya Unni

Email: lunni@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Bio: Labanya Unni is a PhD student at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research examines key works of translation, literary historiography, and critical meta-texts around the time of Indian Independence (1935-1989), and the different social, cultural, and ideological practices and discontinuities that go into the theorization of a new nation. Her interests include Indian history and historiography, postcolonial studies, Marxism, critical theory. She holds a master’s and MPhil degree from Delhi University, and presently teaches at Queens College.

Ola Galal

Email: ogalal@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Bio: Ola Galal is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Her research focuses on feminism, human rights, and justice in Tunisia. She holds an MA in sociology and anthropology from the American University in Cairo. Previously, she worked as a journalist covering the Middle East and North Africa, and her writings appeared in Mada Masr, Jadaliyya, and Bloomberg Newsweek.

Visiting Scholars

Maria Luisa Mendonça

Email: marialuisam222@gmail.com
International financial capital and speculation with farmland in Brazil

Bio: Maria Luisa Mendonça holds a PhD in Human Geography from the Department of Philosophy, Literature and Social Sciences at University of São Paulo/Brazil (USP), and is currently a research scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her research includes history and political economy of agriculture, food, land and water systems, and geopolitical processes of resistance by rural social movements in Brazil and internationally. Her book Political Economy of Agribusiness (Annablume, Sāo Paulo, 2018) demonstrates the central role of the food system in international relations as a result of a dialectical movement of economic crisis and expansion in connection with critical areas such as trade agreements, financial markets, environmental justice, and transnational activism. Her current research project anticipated a trend in financial capital to “migrate” to farmland markets in the Global South, especially after the subprime crisis in the United States’ real estate market in 2008. This research on financial markets and land speculation includes building an international network of scholars and social movements throughout Latin America, North America and Europe. She has published her work in refereed journal articles, in public educational reports and in journalistic outlets. Her experience includes documentary filmmaking, investigative journalism, and community based research. She has taught international political economy at University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and at the center for advanced research Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), and was a visiting scholar at Cornell University in 2013. Mendonça is a co-founder of the World Social Forum and has served in expert meetings on the Right to Food for UN-Women, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the United Nations Human Rights Commission. She is the founder of Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Network for Social Justice and Human Rights – www.social.org.br) in Brazil and the editor of the book “Human Rights in Brazil,” published annually since 2000.

Ujju Aggarwal

Email: uaggarwal@newschool.edu

Bio: Ujju Aggarwal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning at The New School. Her research focuses on public education, urban space, gender, and racial capitalism. She is currently completing her first book, The Color of Choice: Raced Rights, the Structure of Citizenship, and Inequality in Education, a historically informed ethnography of choice as it emerged in the post-Civil Rights period in the United States. Prior to joining The New School, Ujju taught at Sarah Lawrence College, was a Visiting Scholar at the Vermont Center for Fine Arts, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at University of Texas, Austin; and the National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation.

Kareem Rabie

Steve Lyons

The Natural History Museum and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow

Email: steve@thenaturalhistorymuseum.org

The Supreme Court of Red Natural History

Bio: Steve Lyons is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. He is also a core member of art/activist collective Not An Alternative, where he contributes to the ongoing project The Natural History Museum (2014-), a mobile and pop-up museum that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature. The Natural History Museum collaborates with Indigenous communities, environmental justice organizations, scientists, and museum workers to create new narratives about our history and future, with the goal of educating the public, influencing public opinion, and inspiring collective action. Recent essays about socially engaged art, left counter-power, and environmental justice have appeared in e-flux journal, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Museum Activism (Routledge, 2019), and The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (Routledge, 2021). He holds a PhD in Art History from Concordia University (2018) and was a FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humanities Center of the University of Pittsburgh from 2018 to 2020.