Students
Cathy Borck
Cathy Borck is a doctoral student in the Sociology Program at the CUNY Graduate Center and a teaching fellow at Lehman College. Her primary research and teaching interests are in youth and education, methodology, and social theory.
Alan Bourke
Alan Bourke is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at York University (Toronto). His research interests include the praxis and poetics of qualitative methodologies, community and urban theory, access and equity in education, and community-university research collaborations. His current research centres on the methodological and epistemological dynamics enveloping collaborative research between academia and the public.
John D. Boy
John D. Boy is a doctoral student in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research concerns secularization and changes in patterns of religiosity in Europe, taking into account perspectives deriving from critical theory and feminist thought. He has taught at Hunter College and Queens College.
Marnie Brady
Marnie Brady is a doctoral student in sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Hunter College, where she teaches urban and introduction to sociology. Her interests are in theories of right to the city, critical consciousness, and popular power. In her dissertation work, she looks at urban social movement formation in the U.S.
Jesse Carlson
Jesse Carlson is a doctoral candidate in sociology at York University, in Toronto. He specializes in classical sociological theory, and is writing a broadly theoretical dissertation on the sociology of morality.
Nolen Gertz
Nolen Gertz is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, and an adjunct lecturer at New York City College of Technology (CUNY), where he teaches Intro to Philosophy and Ethics. His interests are in phenomenology and existentialism. In his dissertation work, he looks at the meaning of killing and what role it could play in just war theory.
Karen Gregory
Karen Gregory is doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and is a Teaching and Learning Fellow in the Office of General Education at Queens College, where she researches and writes about contemporary pedagogy, curriculum design, and assessment. As a graduate teaching fellow, Karen has taught Introduction to Sociology, Sociology of the Family, and Death and Dying, as well as worked as a teaching assistant in Stuart Ewen’s Introduction to Media Studies course. Her interests are contemporary social theory, sociology of labor, and visual sociology. In her dissertation, Karen looks at the work of psychics and tarot card readers in New York City. She enjoys photography, karaoke, and stand-up comedy and not-so-secretly dreams of combining sociology with performance.
Sebastian G. Guzman
Sebastian G. Guzman is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at the New School for Social Research. His research interests include class, power and social movements, with a focus on Latin America, and contemporary sociological theory. He is currently working on his dissertation proposal, which studies the legitimation of political leaders and the social order in Chile, with special attention to the tensions between technocratic and democratic claims to legitimacy.
Sam Han
Sam Han is currently an Instructional Technology Fellow at the Macaulay Honors College/CUNY and a PhD candidate in Sociology at The Graduate Center/CUNY. He is working on his dissertation, entitled “Technologies of Spirit: The Digital Milieu of Contemporary Religion.”
Jared Hanneman
Jared Hanneman is pursuing his doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center and an adjunct instructor at Hunter College and Pace University, primarily teaching Deviance, Research Methods, and Statistics. His research interests are in theoretical elaboration of the Gift, moral panics, public health, and structuralist/poststructuralist theory. His dissertation work is an examination of a new modality of the Gift in the unexamined gap between labor expended and wages received, particularly in educational institutions. He also spends his days caring for his 8 month old son, developing his language and music appreciation acquisition.
Elaine da Silveira Leite
Elaine da Silveira Leite graduated in social sciences from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), has a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering (UFSCar), is working toward her doctorate in sociology at UFSCar, yet is honing her training at New York University during the 2009-2010 academic year. Her field is economic sociology where she concentrates on corporate governance, financial markets, money, personal finance and popular investment.
Laura Lovin
C. Laura Lovin is a doctoral candidate in Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her interest are in visual cultures, theories of affect and spatiality, and gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity subjectivity formation. Her dissertation looks at the production of transnational urban spaces and subjectivities through visual art practices. She enjoys swimming, traveling and watching TV.
Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo
Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo is a doctoral student in Cultural Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, and an adjunct at Hunter College, where she teaches “Latina Women.” She is a documentary photographer and videographer. Her academic interests include migration, work, gender and media. She is interested in Latino communities and Argentina and enjoys being a mother and wife to an amazing set of “Pablos.”
Francesca Manning
Francesca Manning is a doctoral candidate in Geography at the City University of New York, and teaches Economic Geography at Hunter College. She is interested in capitalism and desires communism. She is interested in Marx, Spinoza, Hegel, and Lacan. She is working on projects to take land out of the market and into local collective control.
Laura Mauldin
Laura Mauldin is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center. Her interests are sociology of the body, health & illness, disability studies and science & technology studies. Her dissertation is an ethnography that begins inside a pediatric cochlear implant (CI) clinic and expands into the families that frequent the clinic and the affiliated agencies they depend upon. She is also a certified sign language interpreter and an avid bird watcher.
Tsedale Melaku
Tsedale M. Melaku is a doctoral student in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests focus on race, gender and sexuality, particularly the analysis of black female sexuality.
Justin Myers
Justin Myers is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he is currently writing his dissertation on the revitalization of indigenous food economies within the U.S. as a tactic of decolonization. His present research interests revolve around environmental justice movements, food movements, the commons, autonomous marxism and the neoliberal university. He enjoys riding his bicycle around Brooklyn and spends far too little time away from books and computers.
Michael D. Phillips
Michael D. Phillips is a student in the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is also enrolled in the American Studies and Film Studies Certificate Programs. He has taught courses on classics and mythology at Lehman College. His area of study is 20th-century American and German literature, film, and culture, with a special interest in the ways in which narratives constitute identities and the relationship between narrative and paranoia.
Lilia Raileanu
Lilia Raileanu is a PhD student at the Sociology Department, Rutgers University. With a background in Psychology and Social Theater, her research interests in Sociology lie within the areas of visual and expressive sociology, social phenomenology of time use, waiting and affect; childhood sociology. Her present research work is oriented towards phenomena of waiting in relation to the institutions of modernity.
Mitra Rastegar
Mitra Rastegar is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she is writing her dissertation on tolerance and sympathy in U.S. discourses on Muslims since 2001. Her last publication was “Managing ‘American Islam’: Secularism, Patriotism and the Gender Litmus Test” (The International Feminist Journal of Politics, Dec. 2008).
Erin Siodmak
Erin Siodmak is a doctoral student in Sociology but moonlights as a geographer. Erin enjoys teaching, the hit television drama “Sons of Anarchy,” and writing bios.
Alyson K. Spurgas
Alyson K. Spurgas is a doctoral candidate in the sociology program and gender studies certificate program at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She is a graduate teaching fellow at Queens College, where she teaches Human Sexuality and Body, Self & Society. Her research interests include the sociology and anthropology of medicine, health and illness, the body, sex, and sexualities, and she is inspired by cultural interrogations of technoscientific medicine and by anti-autopoietic biomediation. She is currently beginning the early stages of her dissertation research, which will extend debates over the medical production and biopolitical regulation of intersex/DSD and gender non-conformity in children.
Abe Walker
Abe Walker is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and an adjunct instructor at Queens College. He is a rank-and-file activist in the CUNY’s faculty union the Professional Staff Congress (AFT 2334) and a founding member of CUNY Contignents Unite! His interests include autonomist Marxism, militant research, and post-post-structuralism. In his free time he enjoys starting fights on listserves.
Aaron Weeks
Aaron Weeks is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the Graduate Center. His interests are in social and political philosophy, cultural studies, media, and history of thought.
Haj Yazdiha
Haj Yazdiha is a graduate student of sociology at Brooklyn College and the Operations Coordinator at Manhattan Charter School. Her interests are in urban education, race and ethnicity, and postmodern critical theory. In her Masters thesis, she looks at a public building in the Lower East Side that houses a public school and charter school to show how social identities are negotiated and carried out within a shared public space. In her free time, Haj enjoys strong coffee and exploring new neighborhoods.
Faculty
Patricia Ticineto Clough
Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies, CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College; author of The End(s) of Ethnography and Autoaffection.
Sujatha Fernandes
Assistant Professor of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College; author of Cuba Represent!
Bill Kornblum
Professor of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center; author of Blue-Collar Community, Growing Up Poor (with Terry Williams), the popular textbook Sociology in a Changing World, and At Sea in the City.
Eric Lichten
Professor of Sociology and Chair, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Long Island University—C. W. Post Campus; author of Class, Power and Austerity: The New York City Fiscal Crisis.
Randy Martin
Professor of Art and Public Policy, New York University; author of Performance as a Political Act, Financialization of Daily Life, and An Empire of Indifference.
Victoria Pitts-Taylor
Professor of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College, and Director of Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center; author of Surgery Junkies and In the Flesh.
Frances Fox Piven
Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center; author of the classics Poor People’s Movements, Regulating the Poor, and Why Americans Don’t Vote (with Richard A. Cloward).
Saadia Toor
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York; author of “Child Labor in Pakistan: Coming of Age in the New World Order” (The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2001), “A National Culture for Pakistan: the Political Economy of a Debate” (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 6, 2005), “Moral Regulation in a Postcolonial Nation-State” (interventions, vol. 9, 2007), and “Containing East Bengal” (Cultural Dynamics, vol. 21, 2009).
