Featured Faculty News from our 2016 department newsletter, Homo Politicus. Access the newsletter archive here.

Professor George Andreopoulos’ most recent book is Private Military and Security Companies and the Quest for Accountability, with John Kleinig, eds., (Routledge 2015). At the 2015 ISA Annual Convention, he was elected President of the Comparative and Interdisciplinary Studies Section of the Association (CISS/ISA). In addition, he was selected as a Senior Visiting Scholar at the University Seminars Program of the Alexander Onassis Foundation (USA) for the fall semester of 2015. As part of this appointment, he  visited three campuses: University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of North Carolina-Asheville and the World Affairs Council of Western North Carolina, and delivered lectures on a broad variety of themes, including: “The Greek Crisis and Its implications for the Future of Europe”, “From Humanitarian Intervention to the Responsibility to Protect,” and “States of Emergency: Lessons from the European Human Rights Regime,” “Trials and tribulations: the fall of the Greek junta and the quest for accountability,” and “Human Rights in Greece. Challenges and Prospects.”

Professor Peter Beinart hosted a collection of “Conversations in the Commons” events at the Graduate Center to discuss pressing issues in American politics. Events included: “Understanding Election 2016” with Joy-Ann Reid of MSNBC and Reihan Salam editor of the National Review (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk-sFxHwHak);  “How Has Barack Obama Changed America?” with David Remnick editor of the New Yorker; “Election 2016 Update” with Glen Thrush of Politico and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times and CNN, and “Islam in America” with Daisy Khan of the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality & Equality and Arsalan Iftikhar, author of Islamic Pacifism: Global Muslims in the Post-Osama Era.

Professor Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner spent Oct-Nov 2015 and Feb-Mar 2016 in India, interacting with academic and societal actors as part of a continuing foreign policy project to analyze the relationship between domestic (development) factors and external postures in the nations of the global south. In October she spoke at the University of Mumbai where she also discussed plans to hold a mini-workshop on the global south, to be co-sponsored by the Global South Caucus of the International Studies Association, which she founded and chaired from 2011 to 2016.  She has edited a new book entitled Seeking to Lead: Diplomatic Strategies of Rising Nations in the Global South, forthcoming from Palgrave-Macmillan. In the book, there are contributions from scholars from the global south, including two Graduate Center alumni: Paul Adogamhe and Diana Cassells. Students interested in joining the Global South Caucus of ISA should go here [http://www.isanet.org/ISA/Caucuses] for more information.

Executive Officer Alyson Cole’s article “The big microaggression lie: The real story behind the right’s phony war on political correctness” was published in the Salon in January 2016. [http://www.salon.com/2016/01/02/the_big_microaggression_lie_the_real_story_behind_the_rights_phony_war_on_political_correctness/]. 

In April 2015, Professor Cole co-organized the daylong symposium “Risquer la Vulnérabilité: Risking Vulnerability,” at the Graduate Center. The event aimed to identify what vulnerability means in the contemporary social sciences and humanities and included renowned international academics in the fields of Law, English, Political Science, and Philosophy [http://www.gc.cuny.edu/News/All-News/Detail?id=30382].

Professor Michael Javen Fortner’s book Black Silent Majority: the Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment received the New York Academy of History’s 2016 Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York history.

Professor Janet Gornick was featured in a number of public events at the Graduate Center this academic year. She moderated a debate on social and economic inequality between New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Nobel Prize-winning economist and distinguished professor of economics at the Graduate Center, Paul Krugman (the debate is available at: [http://www.cuny.tv/show/cunytvspecial/PR2005096]); discussed Heather Boushey’s new book: Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict [http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/Calendar/Detail?id=34633]; and explored the complex relationship between globalization and inequality with Graduate Center Professors Branko Milanovic and Paul Krugman [https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/Calendar/Detail?id=34638].

Professor Anna Law, who is teaching at the GC for the first time this semester, won a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to further research on women asylum seekers. For more information on the research, see:  [http://www.unlawfulentries.com/blog/2016/2/nsf-law-and-social-science-1556551-collaborative-research-how-do-immigration-courts-decide-gender-based-asylum-claims].

Distinguished Professor Frances Fox Piven in the last year gave invited talks in Berlin and Paris, at Penn State University, the University of California at Berkeley, the Eastern Sociological Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Association of Applied Anthropology, where she also received the Malinowski Award. She published a series of articles co-authored with Lorraine Minitte, a GC alumnus, on the new welfare state policies that are being pioneered in middle income countries, as a reflection both of popular turmoil and their relatively exposed state structures.  Most of this has been published in the chapter “Poor People’s Politics” of the Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty. She has also published essays in Perspectives on Politics, Dissent, and in a collection on urban politics edited by James DeFilippis. Recently, she also participated in a talk show on MSNBC to discuss Bernie Sanders’ campaign and what it means for the United States. The full screening of the talk is available at:  [http://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/a-democratic-socialist-talks-sanders-625121859651]. 

Professor Emeritus Peter Ranis’ book Cooperatives Confront Capitalism: Challenging the Neo-Liberal Economy is scheduled to be published by Zed Books (London) in August 2016. He published the article “Eminent Domain: Building Toward Worker Cooperatives in the United States” in the journal Perspectives on Global Development and Technology. He presented a paper on “The Use of Eminent Domain in Establishing Worker Cooperatives in the United States” for the Research Workshop on Empresas Recuperadas (Recuperated Enterprises) at the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Buenos Aires, Argentina, October 27-29, 2015. He reviewed the book by Amanda Latinne, The Mondragon Cooperatives for Working USA in The Journal of Labor and Society, September 2015.

Professor Stanley Renshon has recently published articles on the electoral primaries: “9/11: What would Trump Do?,” Politico Magazine, March 31, 2016. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/donald-trump-2016-terrorist-attack-foreign-policy-213784 , and “You don’t know Trump as well as you think,” USA TODAY, March 25, 2016. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/03/25/donald-trump-narcissist-business-leadership-respect-column/82209524/.  

Professor Corey Robin published the essay “The Trials of Hannah Arendt” in The Nation in June 2015 on the controversy over Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. [http://www.thenation.com/article/trials-hannah-arendt/]. This past fall, his dialogues with distinguished French historian Patrick Boucheron  were published in France as L’exercice de la peur. Usages politiques d’une émotion. It has since been reviewed in such outlets as Slate (France) and has been the subject of an interview in Libération. In October 2015, he delivered the keynote address at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of U.S. Intellectual History, which was subsequently published as a lengthy essay, “How Intellectuals Create a Public,”  in The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 2016. In February he delivered the keynote address “The Political Theory of Capitalism” at the Political Science Graduate Conference at the University of Pennsylvania, and in March he delivered a public lecture at Brown University’s Cogut Center for the Humanities: “The Capitalism of Clarence Thomas.”

Professor Thomas Weiss gave a keynote in Geneva on “The Imperative to Change” for a retreat by UN Under-Secretaries-General at the World Economic Forum in April 2016. He was awarded “Distinguished 2016 IO Scholar” at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association in March 2016.  

His recent publications include the third edition of Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (Polity), and a book he co-edited, Emerging Powers and the UN: What Kind of Development Partnership? (Routledge). In October 2015 he was the cosponsor of the UN Day of “The Global South, 1945 and 2015” at SOAS University of London resulting in a special issue (July 2016) of Third World Quarterly for which he is guest editor. Professor Weiss was also named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in April 2016, a prestigious award which will fund his research exploring the concept of a world without the United Nations.

Professor Susan Woodward was a member of a Roundtable on “Europe: Internal Crisis and External Challenges,” with Jacques Rupnik, Jan Svejnar, and Milica Uvalic, Association for the Study of Nationalities annual convention, Columbia University, April 24, 2015. She was the discussant of an article by Graciana del Castillo and Alvaro de Soto, revisiting their 1994 article, “Obstacles to Peacebuilding,” at the Bunche Institute panel, November 16, 2015. She made a presentation and critique of Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, for the Graduate Center’s Committee on the Study of Religion, February 3, 2016. She made a formal contribution, in the affirmative, to the debate: “Humanitarian organizations should be implicated in the post-conflict development process of global crises,” at conference on Humanitarianism Exposed, 10th annual conference on Peace, Conflict, and Justice, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, February 6, 2016. She was interviewed by Politika, a premier Serbian daily newspaper, “Conversation of the Week” series, 10 October 2015, “Yugoslav Lessons for Syria and Ukraine.”

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