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The Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) extends the Graduate Center’s global reach and prominence as an international hub of advanced study. Specifically, ARC promotes interdisciplinary research and partners with the Graduate Center’s forty research centers, institutes, interdisciplinary committees, and other academic initiatives. Through its Distinguished Fellowship Program, a research-focused initiative, ARC will offer even more possibilities for collaboration between campus-based and Graduate Center faculty, in addition to visitors, doctoral students, and postdoctoral colleagues. Winners of these semester- or year-long fellowships will focus on ARC’s seven areas of study: Inequality, Immigration, Digital Initiatives, Transnational Non-state Actors, Human Ecodynamics, Urban Studies, and the Humanities. Further, ARC offers support in the shape of ARC Studentships in a wide variety of disciplines to Graduate Center doctoral students pursuing research as well as to postdoctoral students who have completed their initial projects.
Dr. Richard Wilkinson
Dr. Richard Wilkinson, ARC’s first Distinguished Visitor in Inequality Studies, has played a formative role in international research on the social determinants of health and on the societal effects of income inequality. He will lecture at the Graduate Center during the last week in November and meet with faculty, students, policy makers, community groups, and other constituencies concerned with disparities in education, housing, health care, civil rights, and wealth, to discuss the social consequences of inequality gaps and policy levers for reducing them. His public lecture on “Inequality: The Enemy Between Us?” will begin at 6 p.m. on Thursday, November 29, in Proshansky Auditorium. Joining him as discussant will be Toni L. Griffin of the J. Max Bond Center, Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, City College, CUNY.
Wilkinson is coauthor with Dr. Kate Pickett of one of the seminal contemporary studies of inequality—The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone. The book, which won the 2010 Bristol Festival of Ideas Prize and the 2011 Political Studies Association Publication of the Year Award, provides a brilliant archive of data on the ways in which inequality gaps breed social problems ranging from school dropouts to health concerns to violence and crime and low interest in voting. First a student of economic history at London School of Economics, Wilkinson went on to train in medical science and had a long teaching career as a professor of social epidemiology. Now professor emeritus at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at University College of London, and a visiting professor at the University of York, Wilkinson is also a cofounder with Pickett of The Equality Trust, an independent, evidence-based campaign working to reduce income inequality in order to improve the quality of life in the UK.