Current Scholars

David Abraham is Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Miami.  His specialties include immigration and citizenship law and political economy, particularly that of interwar Europe and Weimar Germany in particular.  He has published widely in law, history, and political science.  He has been the recipient of Humboldt Foundation and multiple other grants and has taught in France, Germany, Israel, Australia, and Northern Ireland.  Abraham was an ARC Fellow in 2019 and returns now for March 2023

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk is full professor of Economic and Social History at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She specializes in the history of labor relations, particularly women’s and child labor. Her publications include articles in Feminist Economics, the Economic History Review, the Journal of Global History and the International Review of Social History. She organized various interdisciplinary comparative projects, on the history of textile work, child labor, domestic workers and sex work, which all resulted in edited volumes (Brill, Ashgate, Peter Lang). In 2019 she published Women, Work and Colonialism in the Netherlands and Java. Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, 1830-1940 (Palgrave Macmillan), on the connections between developments in women’s work in the Netherlands and its most exploited colony, the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia).

For more information see: www.elisenederveen.com

Gary Alan Fine is the James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University. Previously he taught at the University of Georgia and the University of Minnesota. During his long career, he has been affiliated with the University of Cambridge, Oxford University, Australian National University, Sciences Po, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Iceland, and the University of Bremen. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has been a Fellow at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Several of his twenty books have received disciplinary awards in sociology and in folklore.

Fines's research has four distinct streams. He is interested in understanding controversial reputations and problematic collective memories of figures such as Joseph McCarthy, Warren Harding, George Wallace, and Benedict Arnold. This research was published in Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial. His current research involves shifting reputations and political positions of Southern segregationist politics and the examination of ruptures in political alliances. As an ethnographer he has recently published a book (Fair Share: Senior Activists, Tiny Publics, and the Culture of Resistance), an examination of senior citizen progressive activists and the way in which history and experience shapes social movements. His current ethnographic project is an examination of Civil War history enthusiast, and the way that American citizens engage with their past. His third stream of research involves the interpretation of rumor and contemporary legend, particularly political and economic rumor. Fine is the  co-author of The Global Grapevine: Why Rumors of Terrorism, Immigration and Trade Matter. Finally, he writes on microsociological theory, focusing on small group culture, and has recently published The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures and the Power of Commitment addressing the role of small groups in the public sphere.

Jan Willem Duyvendak is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He received his master’s degrees in both sociology and philosophy at the University of Groningen. His main fields of research currently are belonging, urban sociology, 'feeling at home' and nativism. In 2013-2014, Duyvendak was Distinguished Fellow at the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In Spring 2016 he was Research Fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies. From July 2017 - July 2019 he was Executive Committee Chair at Council for European Studies. Since 2018 he is director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (NIAS-KNAW). In 2021 he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and in 2022 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest books are Thuis. Het drama van de sentimentele samenleving (2017), Macht der gewoonten. Populisme in de polder (2022) and The Return of the Native. Can Liberalism Safeguard Us Against Nativism? (Oxford University Press (2022).

Joseph Heathcott is the Chair of Urban and Environmental Studies at The New School.  His work explores cities within a global, comparative perspective.  Much of his work over the past decade has been to connect humanities and social sciences with practice fields such as architecture, planning, policy, and urban design.  He is the author of Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic, forthcoming from Fordham University Press's Empire State Series, and with Angela Dietz, Capturing the City: Photographs from Streets of St. Louis (Missouri History Museum and University of Chicago Press, 2016).  He is also the editor of three volumes: The Routledge Handbook on Infrastructure Designs: Global Perspectives from Architectural History (Routledge 2022); with Jonathan Soffer and Rae Zimmerman, Urban Infrastructure: Historical and Social Dimensions of an Interconnected World (University of Pittsburgh 2022); and with Jeff Cowie, Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Cornell University Press 2003).  In addition to his scholarship, he is a practicing curator and artist, and has exhibited his work at the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum, MIT Galleries, Town Hall Galleries in Stuttgart, and the Museo Banco de México in Mexico City.  He has also held numerous visiting positions, including: the U.S. Fulbright Distinguished Chair for the United Kingdom; Senior Visiting Scholar at the London School of Economics; the Mellon Distinguished Fellowship in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University School of Architecture; and Senior Visiting Scholar at L'École Urbanine, Sciences Po.  Heathcott is past President of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, and currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association.  

TBA

Roberto Iacono is an Associate Professor in Economics and Social Policy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is also an Associate Professor (II) in Economics at the Business School of the University of South-Eastern Norway. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of Income Distribution (JID) and Fellow of the World Inequality Database (WID.World). He has been (2020-2021) Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Siena, Italy. He is a project participant of the RCN-funded project "Make Taxation Fair" (FRIPRO, NOK 11.8 million, 2021-2026). He holds a PhD in Economics from the Department of Economics at NTNU (graduation year 2015). His latest research is at the intersection between Public Economics, Labor Economics and Political Economy, with a focus on (i) measurement of economic inequality and (ii) policy-relevant questions related to the «Nordic model» of economic development and welfare. He teaches at the highly interdisciplinary department of Social Work at NTNU, giving lectures (in Norwegian) on Economics of the Welfare State, Social and Welfare Policy, and Quantitative Methods. At USN, he teaches Microeconomics and Macroeconomics (in Norwegian).

Victoria K Haskins FAHA is a Professor of History and former (founding) director of the Purai Global Indigenous History Centre at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has published extensively on the history of Aboriginal domestic service in Australia, and works more generally on histories of gender, labour and colonialism. Her publications include Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (Bloomsbury, 2018), with Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie and Frances Steel; Living with the Locals (National Library of Australia, 2017), with John Maynard; Colonization and Domestic Service (Routledge 2014), with Claire Lowrie; and Matrons and Maids: Regulating Indian Domestic Service in Tucson 1914-1934 (Arizona University Press, 2012). She is lead series editor for the Bloomsbury Academic series, Empire’s Other Histories, and lead Chief Investigator for the ARC Discovery Project Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain 1780-1945.

Adele Kudish is Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, and is a comparatist by training. Her research focuses on the representation of women in European and American prose narratives, with a focus on French and English novels. Her first book, The European Roman d'Analyse: Unconsummated Love Stories from Boccaccio to Stendhal, was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Academic. Her new project, tentatively called Women, Fashion, and Money in Early 20th Century Fiction, historicizes women’s economic powers and limitations in the realms of fashion and the increasingly-global garment industry of the early 20th century, and illustrates how literary works constitute a form of critique of class and capitalism. She is thrilled to be an ARC Distinguished CUNY Scholar in Spring 2023. 

Adriana Espinosa is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at The City College of New York and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and is the founder of the Applied Research in the Health and Adaptation of Minoritized Populations (ARHAMP) laboratory at The City College of New York. Dr. Espinosa leads an interdisciplinary research program that examines multi-level determinants of health risk behaviors (e.g., tobacco, alcohol, and substance use) and chronic health conditions (e.g., alcohol use disorder, cancer) over the life course. She is PI of a NIH-funded R21 grant for a project examining tobacco use among Black adolescents, and co-I of a NIH-funded study examining the effectiveness of psychosocial treatments for cocaine use among Black adults. Dr. Espinosa is also PI of an institutional grant for a project that examines health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic among Hispanic adults, and co-PI of two U54 CCNY-MSKCC partnership funded randomized controlled trials addressing disparities in cancer treatment among Asian, Black, and Hispanic individuals.

Debbie Sonu is Associate Professor of Education in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Hunter College and doctoral faculty the PhD Program in Urban Education at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research is in the areas of critical childhood and curriculum studies. 

Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, C.U.N.Y. She is a past President of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. She has published four books: Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation (Polity 2018); The Future of Whiteness (Polity 2015); Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford 2006), which won the Frantz Fanon Award for 2009; and Real Knowing: New versions of the Coherence Theory (Cornell 1996). She has also edited or co-edited 11 books, including The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, (2018) with Paul Taylor and Luvell Anderson; Feminist Epistemologies co-edited with Elizabeth Potter (Routledge, 1993); Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield 2003); Thinking From the Underside of History co-edited with Eduardo Mendieta (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Identity Politics Reconsidered co-edited with Michael Hames-Garcia, Satya Mohanty and Paula Moya (Palgrave, 2006); and Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader co-edited with Mariana Ortega (SUNY 2009). She has also published over 100 articles. Besides CUNY she has taught at Syracuse University and has had visiting appointments at Brown, Cornell, Australian Catholic University, Aarhus University, and Florida Atlantic University, and she also taught for the Decolonial Institute in Spain and in South Africa. She has written for the New York Times, Aeon, the NY Indypendent, and other publications. In 2021, she was listed as the third most influential philosopher by Academic Influence. She is originally from Panama but lives today happily in Brooklyn. For more info go to www.alcoff.com

Swapna M. Banerjee is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. Her research lies at the intersection of gender, class, race, and ethnicity in colonial South Asia and it focuses on women, servants, children, fathers, masculinity, domesticity, and family. Her recent monograph, Fathers in a Motherland: Imagining Fatherhood in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 2022) interrogates the strong connection between fatherhood and masculinity. Her book Men, Women and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2004) employed the lens of employer-servant relationships to understand the construction of national identity in colonial Bengal. She is the co-editor of Mapping Women’s History: Recover, Resistance and Activism in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Stree-Samya, 2022). On a fellowship from the Australian Research Council, she is currently working on a collaborative research project, Ayahs and Amahs: Transcolonial Servants in Australia and Britain, 1780-1945 (https://ayahsandamahs.com/). It historicizes the travelling Indian ayahs and Chinese amahs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her works appear in many edited volumes and journals. Her other projects include male domestic workers and intimate labor and a close biographical study of Baby Halder. a contemporary female domestic worker from India.

Banerjee was named the Endowed Chair in Women's and Gender Studies (2016-18) of Brooklyn College. She teaches courses on gender, race, empire; gender, family, nation-state; women in Modern India; Modern South Asia; British imperialism, and Indian nationalism.

She is affiliated with PURAI: Global Indigenous and Diaspora Research Studies at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. She serves on the editorial board of the Routledge Studies in the Histories of Children and Youth and the Bloomsbury Press new series, “The Other in Empire.” She is a member of the Board of Directors of an UN-registered NGO, Women’s Founder’s Collective.