The Graduate Center, CUNY

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The Thought Project - Episode 58 - Interview with Perry Halkitis Jun 10, 2019

Show notes

The Thought Project is honoring Pride Month and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots with a series on LGBTQ issues and the ongoing LBGTQ civil rights movement. Today, we host Perry N. Halkitis, a public health psychologist, researcher, educator, and advocate who is dean and professor of biostatistics and urban-global public health at the School of Public Health at Rutgers University. Halkitis earned a Ph.D. in educational psychology from The Graduate Center, CUNY in 1995. He talks about his latest book, The Public Lives of Gay Men from Stonewall to the Queer Generation, just out from Oxford University Press.

The Thought Project - Episode 57 - Interview with Brynn Tannehill Jun 06, 2019

Show notes

Brynn Tannehill is a Naval Academy graduate and aviator who earned her master’s degree in operations research from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 2008. She has since worked in the defense industry as a senior analyst and research scientist. After transitioning in 2012 she has been an activist and researcher on transgender issues, including serving as a board member of Service Members, Partners, Allies for Respect and Tolerance for All (SPART*A) and Trans United Fund. She is the author of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Trans (But Were Afraid to Ask) (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2019). She currently works for a nonprofit think-tank in the Washington, D.C., area where she lives with Janis, her wife of 19 years, and their three children. She spoke at The Graduate Center in February 2019 at an event hosted by the Center for the Study of Women and Society and the Public Science Project.

The Thought Project - Episode 56 - Interview with David Reynolds May 24, 2019

Show notes

This week’s guest is David S. Reynolds, a distinguished professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A cultural historian of the pre-Civil War period, Reynolds has written seminal books about abolitionist John Brown, whose raid on Harpers Ferry is approaching its 160th anniversary. Reynolds also wrote two other books about Walt Whitman, the “bard of democracy,” whose bicentennial birthday is being celebrated this month, particularly in New York, where he was born and established himself as a poet and writer. Reynolds is giving an invited talk at Whitman’s birthplace in Huntington, New York, on May 31 — the bard’s birthday. An interview with Reynolds is also due to air on NPR’s All Things Considered on May 30.

The Thought Project - Episode 55 - Interview with Robert Smith May 21, 2019

Show notes

This week’s guest is Professor Robert Courtney Smith, a sociology faculty member at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a faculty member at the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College. He is the author of Mexican New York: Transnational Worlds of New Immigrants (California, 2006), which won the American Sociological Association's 2008 Distinguished Book Award and a CUNY Presidential Award. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council, and other foundations, and he has been both a Russell Sage Foundation fellow and a Guggenheim Foundation fellow. A committed public sociologist, he is supporting an effort in New York state that will allow undocumented persons to obtain a driver’s license. Find out why Smith asserts that American children are being emotionally harmed by states that do not permit the undocumented to drive. Tune in.

The Thought Project - Episode 54 - Interview with Patrizia Casaccia May 16, 2019

Show notes

This week’s guest is Dr. Patrizia Casaccia, the Einstein professor of biology and biochemistry at The Graduate Center, founding director of the Neuroscience Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center, and the Co-director of a joint CUNY-Mount Sinai Glial Center. She received her medical degree with honors from the University of Rome, and a PhD degree in Neurobiology from State University of New York (SUNY) Health and Science Center Brooklyn. She trained at Cornell Weill Medical Center in New York and at the Skirball Institute for Molecular Medicine at NYU. Casaccia’s lab is working to uncover how factors like stress, the bacteria inside our intestinal tract, environment and other influencers can trigger or contribute to the progression of neurological diseases. Her team, for example, has identified links between obesity and the progression of multiple sclerosis; natural disaster and infant mental health; and exposure to stress and reduced proliferation of the cells that create the protective sheath around our nerves. Dr. Casaccia recently was awarded $9.17 million Research Program Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (National Institute of Health), The award is known as NINDS 35 Grant that will be applied to the research of mechanisms regulating the function of glial cells in healthy brains and how these cell’s dysfunction contributes to the development of neurological diseases and mental disorders.

The Thought Project - Episode 53 - Interview with Jesse Merandy May 10, 2019

Show notes

This week’s guest is Jesse Merandy (Ph.D. '19, English), director of the Digital Media Lab at the Bard Graduate Center. Merandy, a self-proclaimed "Whitmaniac" is also the vice president of the Walt Whitman Initiative and member of the New York City Digital Humanities Steering Committee. He recently completed The Graduate Center’s first all-digital dissertation, “Vanishing Leaves: A Study of Walt Whitman Through Location-Based Mobile Technologies.” Merandy developed the interactive game of “Vanishing Leaves” that a participant downloads to a phone app, enabling them to walk with Whitman through his beloved neighborhood in Brooklyn Heights. Merandy’s groundbreaking digital study—a homage to Whitman—comes just before the poet's bicentennial birthday, which will be celebrated in Brooklyn and elsehwere on May 31st.

The Thought Project - Episode 52 - Interview with Rocio Gil May 01, 2019

Show notes

This week’s guest is Rocio Gil, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY and an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College. She is author of Fronteras de Pertenencia Borders of Belonging, an ethnography about transnational indegenous communities living in Mexico and the United States. Her current work is based on the Texas-Coahuila borderland, where she conducted ethnographic and historical research about racialization and the relations between the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people and their two home countries: Mexico and the United States. Following graduation, Ms. Gil will return to Mexico. She will join the faculty at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa and will continue working with the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people. Gil is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at The Graduate Center.

The Thought Project - Episode 51 - Interview with Ammiel Alcalay Apr 18, 2019

Show notes

This week’s guest, Ammiel Alcalay, is a poet, translator, critic, scholar, and activist who teaches at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Along with Anne Waldman and others, he was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and he organized, with Mike Kelleher, the OlsonNow project. Most recently, through The Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in English and the Center for the Humanities, he launched Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a series of student- and guest-edited chapbooks of archival texts emerging from the New American Poetry, one of the premier initiatives in graduate-level primary research about poets and poetry, situated in an American university . Alcalay’s books and publications include Scrapmetal (Factory School, 2006); from the warring factions (Beyond Baroque, 2002), a book-length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica; Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (City Lights, 1999); After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and The Cairo Noteboooks (Singing Horse Press, 1993). His translations include Sarajevo Blues (City Lights, 1998) and Nine Alexandrias (City Lights 2003) by the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic; Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (City Lights, 1996); and a co-translation (with Oz Shelach), of Outcast by Shimon Ballas (City Lights, 2007). Alcalay spearheaded the writing of Za Sarajevo (For Sarajevo), the first English writing about first-person accounts of Sarajevo during the siege, which included an essay by journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic and an interview with filmmaker Ademir Kenovic.

The Thought Project - Episode 50 - Interview with Blanche Wiesen Cook Apr 09, 2019

Show notes

This week’s guest, Blanche Wiesen Cook, is a distinguished professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she also teaches in the women's studies program. Cook is the author or editor of seven books including the seminal trilogy of Eleanor Roosevelt — the only trilogy published about an American woman — which she completed 35 years after embarking on what she presumed to be a one-volume biography. Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3: The War Years and After, 1939-1962, the final volume, was completed in 2016. Until she took on the Eleanor Roosevelt project, Cook considered herself a “hard historian,” or a military historian. In 1981, she published the controversial The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare, which made The New York Times best-sellers list. Eisenhower’s and Roosevelt’s legacies serve to inform the public’s understanding of contemporary events. Cook is the expert historian to help us contextualize today’s events in a world that seems challenged at every turn.

The Thought Project - Episode 49 - Interview with Heath Brown Apr 05, 2019

Show notes

This week’s guest is Heath Brown, an associate professor at The Graduate Center and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Brown discusses the two-year investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose report was submitted to Attorney General William Barr on March 22. Just two days later, Barr sent a four-page memorandum to Congress summarizing the report’s findings that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Barr also declared that President Trump was not found liable for obstruction charges. Almost immediately, Congress began calling for the report's release. Listen to the conversation with Brown, who shares his insights into the current power struggle between the White House and Congress.

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