We are honored to announce the 2026 CUNY Adjunct Incubator Awardees. The projects represented here reflect just a fraction of the creative, critical, and community-engaged work happening right now at CUNY. This year, our 8 awardees span a varied field of both teaching and disciplinary specializations. They are doctoral students at the CUNY Graduate Center in 6 disciplines, and adjunct in 7 different departments across 7 CUNY campuses. The awardees will begin their work in the Fall of 2026, and we will hear more about their progress later next year.
Since 2019, the Gittell Collective and the Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center have honored the scholarly and creative work of our university’s adjunct faculty through the CUNY Adjunct Incubator. The initiative continues to support and highlight the significant, critical and community-engaged scholarship and pedagogy work of adjuncts teaching across CUNY.
Meet our 2026 Awardees and learn about their grant-funded projects and scholarship:
Holden Taylor
Adjunct | English, Baruch College and Medgar Evers College
Holden Taylor is an adjunct at both Medgar Evers and Baruch College. He is also a tenant organizer, founder of the Brooklyn Eviction Defense Tenant Union and a coordinator for the new City Wide Tenant Assembly. He is an PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and, through the Adjunct Incubator, leading the new Rent Theory Working Group.
“As a 2026 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will convene a working group of tenant unionists and scholars to begin producing empirical housing research that is grounded within organized tenant activity. This is an effort to democratize scholarship but, perhaps more importantly, center democratic participatory organization in empirical research rather than, as it usually is, an adjunct concept.”
Patrick Dedauw
Adjunct | Urban Studies MA, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies
Patrick DeDauw teaches in the Urban Studies MA at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. He is a PhD candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences (Geography) at the CUNY Graduate Center and has worked in strategic research education in the labor movement.
“As a 2026 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will develop and refine curriculum materials for strategic power research by unions and community-based organizations. In collaboration with participating organizations in Montréal, I will work with facilitators and student researchers to identify the best approaches to teaching systematic collective inquiry into regional power landscapes. Honing this kind of training, the project seeks to help organizations implement approaches to research that democratize strategic capacity for structure-based organizing, base building, and transformative campaigns.”
Pranabes Dutta
Adjunct | Economics, Baruch College
Pranabes Probeshika Dutta (Pro) is a PhD candidate in Economics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Their research focuses on the intersection of LGBTQ+ identity and economic outcomes, with particular attention to how stigma and discrimination shape wealth accumulation among LGBTQ+ individuals. Dutta’s broader interests include labor economics, development, and political economy, and their work critically engages with questions of structural exclusion and marginalization. They have taught at CUNY, NYU, and Fordham University, and actively serve on the board of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, as well as the CUNY LGBTQI+ Council. Through both scholarship and service, Dutta aims to contribute to a more inclusive and equitable understanding of economic life.
“As a 2026 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will combine machine learning and micro-econometric tools to analyze structural stigma, housing burden, and homelessness among LGBTQ+ individuals in the United States using the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) and the Housing and Urban Financialization (HUF) datasets. Through this project, I will translate complex quantitative data into an accessible, open-access public data platform and policy report to support community organizations, housing advocates, and public health practitioners addressing emergent LGBTQ+ housing instability.”
Mary Madsen
Adjunct | Political Science, Hunter College and Baruch College
Mary Carnett Madsen is pursuing her PhD in Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she studies public housing, political participation, and urban politics and planning. With a BA in English Literature and History from the University of Houston and an MS in Public Policy from Drexel University, Mary has taught politics, public policy, and writing from high school through the undergraduate level; she currently teaches at Hunter College and Baruch College. She also serves as Coordinator for Organization and Planning for The Adjunct Project, an affiliate of the Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council.
“As a 2026 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will build The APV Room, a community digital archive documenting how Houston’s punk community occupied vacant units and organized DIY shows at the Allen Parkway Village public housing development in the 1990s, and, alongside the legitimate residents, fought HUD-backed demolition. This project preserves a history that has never been documented and speaks to enduring questions about who has the right to occupy urban space and make real the world they imagine.”
Natasha Tiniacos
Adjunct | Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, City College | Master of Arts in Interpreting and Translation, Hunter College
Natasha Tiniacos is a poet, scholar, and literary translator from Maracaibo, Venezuela, based in New York. She is a PhD Candidate in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research is focused on critical disability studies, medical humanities, and U.S.-Latin America. She is the author of Against the Regime of the Fluent / Contra el régimen de lo fluido, translated by Rebeca Alderete Baca (Ugly Duckling Presse), as well as Historia privada de un etcétera (Los Libros del Fuego) and Mujer a fuego lento (Equinoccio, USB). She is also the Spanish translator of Gabriel Dozal’s The Border Simulator / El simulador de fronteras (One World). Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, The Baffler, and Fence. Eternally curious about sound and synthesis.
“As a 2026 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will produce and host Human & Something Else, a podcast about disability, illness, and care that connects critical disability research and the medical humanities with the lived realities of our CUNY community. Four or five conversations, made with contributors, people living with disability, illness, or pain, and caregivers in their own right, to narrate their experiences in English or Spanish, in their own words. The conversations will yield an audio archive, an open glossary of those words, and a closing listening event.”
James Tolleson
Adjunct | Anthropology and Global Studies, City College
James Tolleson is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He lives in West Harlem with his partner and 2-year-old daughter and teaches courses in anthropology and global studies at City College.
“As a 2026 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will conduct research on the politics and labor of parenting in relation to left-wing social movements. I will collaborate with parent-organizers to explore ideas, practices, policies, and political visions that seek to make raising children a public good and intertwined with broader anti-capitalist and anti-fascist projects.”
Charlie Markbreiter
Adjunct | Borough of Manhattan Community College
Charlie Markbreiter is the author of Rapid Onset (Bloomsbury, 2027) and Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella (Kenning, 2022). He is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the co-author of Jaw Filler (Montez, 2026) a detective novel, and blogs at Charlie’s Blog.
“As a 2026 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will complete Rapid Onset: Anti-Trans Culture and U.S. Imperial Decline. This book is based on my dissertation, and will be published by Bloomsbury fall 2027.”
Maddalena Romano
Adjunct | Geography and Environmental Sciences, Hunter College
Maddalena Romano is a doctoral candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center, an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College, and Senior Data Solutions Strategist at the NYC Department of Transportation. Her interdisciplinary research bridges geographic information systems (GIS), artificial intelligence, emergency management, and environmental equity, with an emphasis on developing accessible, human-centered technologies that support resilient communities. Her published research explores communication barriers in emergency management software development, while her professional work advances data-driven approaches to equitable infrastructure planning. Through her scholarship and teaching, she seeks to connect academic research with practical solutions to urban environmental and social challenges.
“As a 2026 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will develop an open, reproducible geospatial decision-support framework for identifying appropriate climate-adaptation strategies for New York City rooftops. I will publish a peer-reviewed journal article, which will then be expanded into a public-facing and accessible methodological guide.”
The CUNY Adjunct Incubator Project is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and a generous grant from the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
