Featured Student News from our 2019 department newsletter, Homo Politicus. Access the newsletter archive here.

Ankita Aggarwal (level I) published “The Political Project of the MGNREGA” in Economic & Political Weekly.

Sumru Atuk (level III) co-authored “What’s in a Hashtag? Feminist Terms for Tweeting in Alliance” with Professor Alyson Cole in philoSOPHIA. 

Harry Blain (level II) published four op-eds via Foreign Policy in Focus, two of which were syndicated through Common Dreams and Counterpunch. He also presented a paper on civil liberties in the United States during WWI at a conference organized by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute in Moscow, participated in a DC-based seminar on American foreign policy, and conducted preliminary archival research on the Pinkerton Agency at the Library of Congress.

Lou Charbonneau (level I) published “Multilateralism Under Threat” in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN Association of the United Kingdom 2019).

Walter Fields (M.A.) was mentioned in The New York Times for his advocacy in local education politics in New Jersey​. 

Samuel Hellmann (M.A.) gave a talk at LaSalle College in Singapore as part of the 13th Asian Cinema Studies Society Conference. His talk, “Filming Temporality and The Spatial Horizons of Utopia”, discussed the reproduction of urban space in Chinese language films from the Maoist period and the present day. He also received the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship from the Taiwan Ministry of Education to study advanced Mandarin Chinese at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei.

Sarah Kostecki (level III) received a dissertation year fellowship from the Graduate Center for the 2019-2020 academic year. She contributed statistical support as well as writing, editing, and proofreading to the 2019-2020 UN Women flagship report Progress of the World’s Women: Families in a Changing World. She presented her dissertation research and another ongoing research project at the European Network for Social Policy Analysis (Espanet) Annual Conference in September held at Stockholm University in Sweden. 

Drake Logan (level III) was awarded the Gittell Collective’s Dissertation Fellowship for the 2019-2020 academic year.

Pierre Losson (level III) received the Best Graduate Student Paper Award from the New York State Political Science Association. 

David Monda (level I) was awarded the Summer 2019 – CUNY Office of Research Johannesburg Graduate Student Research Fellowship to study the impact of xenophobia on the ability of migrant Africans to establish small businesses in Johannesburg. He was also awarded the American Political Science Association (APSA) Lee Ann Fujii Travel grant to attend the Annual APSA Conference for 2019 in Washington D.C. 

Michelle Morazan (level III) received the Dean K. Harrison award for the academic year of 2019-2020. 

Kamran Moshref (level III) received a Dissertation Fellowship from the Committee on Globalization and Social Change and a WAC At Large Fellowship at Brooklyn College.

Tyler Olsen (level I) published “Capitalism Set the Fires in the Amazon Rainforest” in Jacobin.

Alison Parks (level III) received the 2019 American Association of University Women fellowship, the Mellon Graduate Research fellowship, a Graduate Center Dissertation Fellowship, and the Graduate Center Award for Excellence in Teaching. 

Wilford Pinkney (level III) published “Changing The Conversation On Bail Reform” in Law 360 and his research was featured in “St. Louis Wants Judges Thinking Beyond Cash Bail” in Next City. He was also recently appointed the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Children, Youth & Families in Saint Louis, MO. 

Christopher Putney (M.A.) presented a paper at APSA entitled “The Metapolitics of Illiberalism and Constitutional Decay: The Alt-Right in American Political Development” for the panel “(Neo)Liberalism in the Age of Donald Trump.” He also authored a project on postcolonial domestic empire entitled: “Empire, Republicanism, and Territorial Expansion: Report on the History and Legacy of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787” for the Program on American Citizenship, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Saira Rafiee (level I) was interviewed by 112BK on “Faux Feminism: Wolves in Allies’ Clothing.

Brahim Rouabah (level I) published “Reclaiming the narrative of the Algerian Revolt” in Front Fanon Foundation, Africa is a Country, and HuffPost Maghreb. He was also invited to speak on “African Revolts” at the People’s Forum NYC on August 31st. 

Dean Schafer (level II) presented “Do Popular Norms Matter for Democratic Backsliding?” on the panel “Does Popular Support for Democracy Matter?” at the APSA annual meeting.

Sally Sharif (level II) published “The Art of Winning a Peace Agreement: The Case of the FARC” in Political Violence at a Glance. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia over the summer. Sally presented her research on the DDR program with the FARC to the Faculty at UniAndes upon completion of her position. She received the Scholarship for Political Science Research to attend the ICPSR summer program at the University of Michigan and was EITM certified for machine learning methods. At APSA 2019, she presented, “When are Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) Programs Successful? Introducing the DDR-18 Dataset (1980-2018).”

Osha Smith-Gittelman (level II) presented “’And These Are the Disposables:’ Social Cleansing in Colombia and Mexico,” at the Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Conference at City College of New York in March.

Merrill Sovner (level III) published “Sustaining Civil Society: Lessons from Five Pooled Funds in Eastern Europe” in Philanthropy in Focus.

B Stone (level III) presented “Pathologies of Power: An Ordinary Language Analysis of ‘Addiction’” at the Terms of Engagement public workshop of the International Research Network, “Vulnerable and Dynamic Forms of Life.” B was also the graduate student host of the Methods Café at the APSA annual meeting.

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