By Nga Than I had the pleasure of interviewing Eric Dean Wilson, author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, and Teaching Fellow in the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research through the Center for Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Eric gave insight on…

Via this series of interviews, Distributaries seeks to sketch out the contours of the public humanities ecosystem—the centers, institutes and initiatives undertaking the work of the public humanities—at the City University of New York. Apart from sharing the specific work these programs and centers do, we also wish to offer up their visions…

Mindscapes and the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY are pleased to announce the 2022 cohort of Graduate Research Assistants that will be working on public programming relating to Mindscapes, an international cultural program organized by the Wellcome Trust that aims to support a transformation in how we understand, address and talk…

  Via this series of interviews, Distributaries seeks to sketch out the contours of the public humanities ecosystem—the centers, institutes and initiatives undertaking the work of the public humanities—at the City University of New York. Apart from sharing the specific work these programs and centers do, we also wish to offer up their visions of…

Aurash Khawarzad The Public Humanities Map, created for the Center for the Humanities, is an attempt to frame the geographic scope and social connectivity of research projects being carried out by faculty in the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research. Humanities programs at CUNY have been at the forefront of…

Michelle May-CurryProject director, Humanities for All, National Humanities Alliance I entered the Graduate Education at Work conference wearing two hats. As a doctoral candidate completing a dissertation this summer in American Culture from the University of Michigan, I came excited to learn from my peers about the ways that they are utilizing their humanities research…

Ellen Meiser In August 2017, I sat with a group of classmates and faculty from University of Hawaii in a dimly lit hotel restaurant in Montreal. Plates and silverware clinked. A low hum of conversation filled the room. We were in Montreal for the annual American Sociological Association conference, and the meal was a…

Cihan Tekay There is nothing like a pandemic to make one question what an academic conference is for. Especially if you are one of the conference organizers. When CUNY went remote a year ago, I was in the final stretch of planning Graduate Education at Work in the World, as part of my…

Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Marco Saavedra In this blog post, we offer a written exchange about the practice of reading together as a form of community building and about our process of building a syllabus that doesn’t shy away from big words: ‘creation’, ‘love’, ‘inspiration’, ‘beauty.’ Our syllabus is not centered on specific topics…

Iris Cushing, Megan Paslawski, Zohra Saed, and Kendra Sullivan reverend angel kyodo williams, founder of Transformative Change, a center dedicated to taking care of the inner lives of leaders in social, racial, and broad-based justice movements, writes about purpose and meaning being two mutually reinforcing drivers in her life. To paraphrase, she says purpose…

Queenie Sukhadia The Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research is an initiative hosted by the Center for the Humanities that allows creative practitioners, activists and scholars to cohere and work together to undertake research, teaching and other public humanities projects driven by social justice goals. As I have mentioned…

Nadia Kalman Three white, privileged people sitting around a table in a radio studio do not guarantee a plurality of voices or respect for anyone who doesn’t share those privileges. . . . This is why we, as the least privileged in society, have to keep up the daily fight, to enter those spaces…

Queenie Sukhadia The Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research is an initiative hosted by the Center for the Humanities that allows creative practitioners, activists and scholars to cohere and work together to undertake research, teaching and other public humanities projects driven by social justice goals. As I have mentioned…

Carolyn A. McDonough with Virginia Heath In December 2019, the Center for the Humanities put out a call for research assistants (RAs) for a documentary entitled Mae West—The Constant Sinner, directed by Virginia Heath and produced by Grant Keir, the creative duo behind notable projects such as the BAFTA-nominated documentary From Scotland with Love….

Katherine E. Entigar August 2020 In 2018, I wrote a piece for Left Voice about the ecological nature of CUNY education, “I believe that CUNY is an educational ecology with relations flowing in many directions, meaning that what affects us as adjunct professors affects our students, which in turn affects their engagement in…

Queenie Sukhadia The Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research is an initiative hosted by the Center for the Humanities that allows creative practitioners, activists and scholars to cohere and work together to undertake research, teaching and other public humanities projects driven by social justice goals. As I have mentioned…

Queenie Sukhadia The Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research is an initiative hosted by the Center for the Humanities that allows creative practitioners, activists and scholars to cohere and work together to undertake research, teaching and other public humanities projects driven by social justice goals. As I have mentioned…

Sonia Adams In September 2020, the City University of New York announced that it had established a Commission to regenerate its Ethnic Studies programs across its campuses. The Mellon Foundation granted a 10 million dollar grant to CUNY to expand its academic curriculum in ethnic studies. Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez and Executive Vice…

Iris Cushing (September 2020) Before I came to the CUNY Graduate Center as a student, I came to the physical building as a small-press publisher, back when the Chapbook Festival was hosted on the “C level” of the building on 34th St. and 5th Ave. My press, Argos Books, set up a table…

The workshop “Hello, my name is Carolina Saavedra. I am the daughter of Natalia and Antonio, two farmworkers displaced by NAFTA. I learned traditional indigenous cuisine from my grandmother in Oaxaca; back in the US I studied French cuisine at the International Culinary Arts Center (ICC). Agriculture is ingrained into my DNA.” This is…

Queenie Sukhadia I formally created Academia for All––an Instagram account where I ‘translate’ scholarly humanities texts into bite-sized summaries for public audiences––in March this year. But this single, originary moment gathers hundreds of others, strewn across the years, within its folds. For instance, there was the moment when I turned the last page of…

André Luis Leite de Figueirêdo Sales There is no better time to affect change in our teaching styles than now; in order to do so, each one of us must spend some time thinking carefully about our own goals and desires as educational workers. Introducing the concept of prefiguration and its relevance to contemporary…

Queenie Sukhadia As the Distributaries Writer-in-Residence and someone who cares deeply about creating pathways for exchange and collaboration between those within the university and those outside of it, I have been tirelessly scouting out predecessors—those who have struggled with the questions before me and have put writing out in the world that may serve…

Nga Than This blog post uses the ideas “community of practice” and “emotional energies” to explore the challenges that students in Data Mining, a graduate methods course at Hunter College, faced when the class suddenly switched to online instruction mid-semester because of the COVID-19 Pandemic. First, using the idea community of practice, I argue…