2019 CUNY Adjunct Incubator Projects

The Center for the Humanities’ CUNY Adjunct Incubator, co-sponsored by the Gittell Urban Studies Collective, is a framework for supporting the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY. Providing social, logistical, financial, and professional support for the production and circulation of knowledge by CUNY adjuncts, this platform promotes the crucial work of part-time faculty across CUNY community and senior college campuses.







CUNY Adjunct Grant-Funded Projects & Scholarship

In 2018-19, the CUNY Adjunct Incubator awarded grants to 13 CUNY adjuncts from 6 CUNY colleges to develop a wide-range of deeply impactful public and applied projects in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. These projects range from addressing the needs and amplifying the successes of CUNY student-parents, to writing and performing new musical compositions for 3D-printed instruments, to photo-documentation of the erasure of Kurdish language from Kurdistan/Turkey, to food provision mapping that elucidates eating habits, access, and food inequities, and many more projects taking the form of concerts, dance, music, workshops, books, film, performance, classes, independent scholarship, and events. Read more about these grant-funded projects and the vital research and work by these outstanding CUNY adjuncts:

Enhancing CUNY-Wide Capacity to Promote the Success of Student-Parents

This project seeks to develop institutional and pedagogical policies and practices aimed at better serving the needs of student-parents at CUNY. Click here for more information about this project.



Creating a Literary Commons: Engaging Students in Digital Archives

This project is designed to enable students to better grasp the relationships between literature, culture, and history by drawing connections between the digital archives of 8th- through 20th-century literature and aspects of the current digital communications revolution. Click here for more information about this project.



Innovating Technology In Art: Developing Contemporary Music for 3D-Printed Instruments

This public research project is to create a new musical composition, Singularity, 2018, for 3D-printed string octet and orchestra. Click here for more information about this project.






Ethnography of Food Provisioning in Newark, NJ: Food Practices, Health Status, Social Identities, and Place of Residency

This project is an ethnographic study of food provisioning practices in Newark, NJ, seeking to develop an intersectional and dynamic understanding of food environments, eating habits, access, and their entanglements with food inequities. Click here for more information about this project.



The Right to the Image: Syrian Film Collective Abounaddara’s Emergency Cinema

This project is a collection of essays that offers a critical introduction to the groundbreaking videos and activism of Abounaddara, the anonymous Syrian film collective, framing the ethical, political, and aesthetic insights of their work within the transformative effects of new digital technologies in war reporting and social justice campaigns. Click here for more information about this project.



g1(host): lostatsea

This project is an unfolding of the term “ghost,” which grapples with what it means to live within conditions shaped by the “afterlife” of slavery. This project will take the form of a four-part performance installation which is driven by this fundamental query: what remains of the Middle Passage as force, gesture, and affect? Click here for more information about this project.





Securitizing Resistance in Gafsa: Stratified Vulnerability and Surplus Labor Accumulation

This project builds upon the multi-method qualitative research she has conducted in Tunisia over the past six years on the colonial origins, architecture, and imperial imbrications of Tunisia’s security state. Click here for more information about this project.



Successful Lessons: Best Practices by Adjuncts in Literature & Composition/Rhetoric

This project is a three-part pedagogy workshop series led by composition/rhetoric and literature adjunct faculty in the English Department at John Jay College, CUNY to provide a forum for and foster collaboration between adjunct faculty. Click here for more information about this project.



The Musical Seeds Project: Intersections of Ecology, Music, and Dance

This project is a series of educational events that seek to expand the ways in which we think about growing and harvesting plant life through the perspectives of cross-cultural communities. Click here for more information about this project.




Bridging Mathematics and Computer Science

This project is a series of events and workshops bringing together faculty from the Mathematics and Computer Science departments at Queens College, CUNY to discuss interdisciplinary approaches to computer science and mathematics by putting them in conversation around mutual relevance. Click here for more information about this project.


Click here to read about the 2020 CUNY Adjunct Incubator recipients and their projects.


The CUNY Adjunct Incubator Advisory Committee is comprised of: Ujju Aggarwal, Celina Su, Kendra Sullivan, and Mary N. Taylor.


The CUNY Adjunct Incubator is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities through generous grants from theSylvia Klatzkin Steinig Fund and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

About the Gittell Urban Studies Collective:
The Gittell Urban Studies Collective engages communities, fellow scholars, and activists focused on issues related to cities, social justice, community participation and development, political engagement and social movements, and democratic governance, both domestically and abroad.

Anchored by the Marilyn Jacobs Gittell Endowed Professor in Urban Studies, the Gittell Collective works to honor Marilyn Jacobs Gittell and build upon her legacy, by:

About the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY:
The Center for the Humanities encourages collaborative and creative work in the humanities at CUNY and across the city through seminars, publications, and public events. Free and open to the public, our programs aim to inspire sustained, engaged conversation and to forge an open and diverse intellectual community.

The CUNY Adjunct Incubator is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanitiesand the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the Graduate Center, CUNY. The Center for the Humanities thanks the Sylvia Klatzkin Steinig Fund for their generous support.

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Participants