Diversity and Inclusion
A culture of diversity and inclusion promotes respect, engenders creativity, and encourages intellectual risk-taking. Establishing such a culture is intrinsic to the CUNY Graduate Center’s mission.
We are proud to be part of the City University of New York, the world’s largest public, urban university and one of the most diverse and inclusive. The CUNY Graduate Center is committed to promoting diversity and works to ensure our students and faculty reflect the varied demographics of New York City.
Our Commitment to Diversity

The Graduate Center ranks among the top 10 institutions awarding doctorates to members of underrepresented minority groups, according to federal data. To further enhance our diversity, we are creating new pipelines to the Ph.D. for diverse students. Through our first initiative — the Humanities Teaching Alliance with LaGuardia Community College, which is supported by the Mellon Foundation — Graduate Center doctoral students serve as mentors to students at one of the nation’s most diverse and inclusive community colleges.
Institutionalizing diversity in our values and our outcomes is one of the priorities of our strategic plan.
Our faculty and students have long demonstrated their commitment to examining and articulating the needs of minority populations through their scholarship and advocacy.
The Graduate Center is home to more than 30 research centers and institutes, many of which are devoted to addressing issues affecting diverse and underrepresented populations through their research and events. Such centers include the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies; the Center for the Study of Women and Society; CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies; and the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality.
New Initiatives

Attracting exceptional students from underrepresented backgrounds and making them feel welcome in our community are top priorities. We have provided new sources of funding and encouraged our programs to redesign their recruitment strategies with the aim of creating a community of talented and diverse students. Our departments are empowered to work individually with students to establish academic plans that will support their scholarly and career ambitions.
In concert with our student diversity initiatives, we have established new hiring practices that will allow us to recruit and retain outstanding and diverse faculty members and administrators.

Facts and Figures
Review the Graduate Center's student diversity, as well as other diversity facts and figures.
Review diversity facts and figuresGuiding Force
Fostering diversity and inclusion is at the core of the Graduate Center's mission.
— Martin Ruck
Senior Advisor to the President for Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity News
May 23, 2023
Art History Ph.D. Candidate Wins Multiple Prestigious Fellowships
Sonja Elena Gandert’s awards include a $42,000 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship.
- GC Stories
- Student News
May 1, 2023
Celebrating Graduate Center Scholars During AAPI Heritage Month
The Graduate Center recognizes the work of our alumni and faculty during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
- GC Stories
- Faculty News
- Alumni News
Apr 27, 2023
Life Writing: Literary Biographies from the English Program
Students, alumni, and faculty discuss what they learned in the process of chronicling an author’s life.
- Student News
- Alumni News
- Faculty News
- Research News
Apr 13, 2023
What humans can learn from scorpions
Alumna Lauren Esposito blazes a trail as a scorpion researcher and advocate for LGBTQ scientists.
- GC Stories
- Alumni News
GC Books Addressing Diversity

Reorienting Hong Kong’s Resistance: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism
Wen Liu (Editor), Christina Yuen Zi Chung (Editor), Jn Chien (Editor)
The book brings together writing from activists and scholars that examine leftist and decolonial forms of resistance that have emerged from Hong Kong’s contemporary era of protests. Practices such as labor unionism, police abolition, land justice struggles, and other radical expressions of self-governance may not explicitly operate under the banners of leftism and decoloniality. Nevertheless, examining them within these frameworks uncovers historical, transnational, and prefigurative sightlines that can help to contextualize and interpret their impact for Hong Kong’s political future. This collection offers insights not only into Hong Kong's local struggles, but their interconnectedness with global movements as the city remains on the frontlines of international politics.
Wen Liu is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology (2017) from the CUNY Graduate Center. Liu is broadly interested in issues of race, sexuality, and affect, she has published in journals such as American Quarterly, Feminism & Psychology, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Subjectivity.
Published June 2022
Palgrave Macmillan

Abolition Geography Essays Towards Liberation
New collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration
Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geographypresents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.
Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.
Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.
Published May 2022
Verso