Each academic year the Center appoints six doctoral student fellows from the Graduate Center, CUNY and six CUNY faculty fellows from throughout CUNY. Fellows are drawn from programs in the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. Faculty fellows receive a two-course release for the year of their fellowship (to be distributed across the fall and spring semesters at the discretion of their department), and student fellows receive a stipend of $10,000. ONLY full-time CUNY faculty are eligible for faculty fellowships, and ONLY Level III CUNY doctoral students are eligible for graduate fellowships. Deadlines for these fellowships are announced below once they are determined.

A central aspect of the Center’s activities is a weekly seminar that meets every Wednesday morning from 10 AM-12 PM. This seminar is a chance to bring student and faculty fellows together with distinguished visiting scholars around the annual theme. All students and faculty fellows are expected to attend in person throughout their fellowship year.

The Center also offers a Postdoctoral Fellowship position every one to two years (see below for details).

Information on becoming a Visiting Scholar at the Center can be found here.

You can read about CPCP annual seminar themes here.

You can read about past fellows here.

CPCP Seminar theme 2025-2026: Mobility: Transit and Transformation

Crises of mobility have become a key integer of social struggle in the world system. Whether one considers the explosion of different forms of movement—and the unending state efforts to classify them as deserving or undeserving, as economic, environmental, or asylum-based—or the production of immobility, in carcerality, wagelessness, enclosure, or via the securitization of borders, mobility and its discontents are central to radical activism across local and transnational communities. How do shifts in forms of mobility inform or mediate the conditions of social change? What are the links between transit and transition? Do contemporary logics of mobility, at different scales, temporalities and intensities, represent counter-hegemonic realms of possibility, political imagination, and new ways to think and express transformation?

For the 2025-2026 seminar, CPCP invites applicants to examine mobility and immobility from a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches. What are the relevant conditions of material change for organizers and scholars? How should we understand mobility: as a way to rethink political economy, as the inevitable undoing of the nation-state, as an ontological condition? What methodologies are adequate to understanding the movement (or not) of people across the planet, and what happens when we broaden the frame to include the things that people move with and against: commodities, capital, viruses, racialized infrastructures, ecologies, abolition imaginaries and practices? The seminar will explore the possible parameters of praxis and the production of knowledge that attends them. How can mobility itself be mobilized?

THE CUNY GRADUATE CENTER DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIP COMPETITION FOR THE 2025-2026 ACADEMIC YEAR

Applications Due: Wednesday, January 15, 2025 no later than 5:00 p.m.

The application guidelines, components, and instructions can be found here. Please review the Center for Place, Culture and Politics Dissertation Fellowship description and additional requirement on page 4.

THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS FACULTY FELLOWSHIP APPLICATION FOR THE 2025-2026 ACADEMIC YEAR

Applications Due: Friday, February 7, 2025 no later than 5:00 p.m.

The application form and instructions can be found here.

The Center for Place, Culture and Politics Faculty Fellowship is open to faculty from any discipline whose research articulates with topics that have contemporary urgency, regardless of period or methodological approach. The Center runs a lively weekly seminar in which we discuss fellows’ work-in-progress. We also host distinguished lecture series and other special programming, and sponsor conferences organized around annual themes. Recent yearlong topics have included “Urban Uprisings,” “Mobilizations and Migrations,” “Consciousness and Revolution,” and “The Agrarian Question Today.”

We invite faculty fellow applicants to provide a statement (1,500 words) on their research that highlights the linkages of their research with the Center’s ongoing interdisciplinary agenda (see below for complete application instructions and application form). Kindly note: acceptance of the award is contingent on being able to attend the CPCP’s Wednesday morning (10am-12pm) seminar during the academic year.

THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP

The Center is not currently accepting applications for the postdoctoral fellowship.

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