FYIs

Congratulations to Professor Martin D. Ruck (Psychology, Urban Education) and alumni Isabelle M. Elisha (Ph.D. ’16, Psychology), associate director for the psychology program at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, and Juliana E. Karras (Ph.D. ’18, Psychology), an assistant professor at San Francisco State University, whose paper “Looking Within: Elevating Black Scholarly Contributions to Empirical Approaches in Developmental Science” was published in the May-June issue of American Psychologist.

“Through examinations of the psychological effects of Blackness on the development of cognition, competence, identity, and social functioning, Black psychologists outline pathways and provide tools for ecological culturally rooted methodologies,” they write. “These multidisciplinary approaches run in contrast to dominant trends in the field and thus broaden developmental science’s reach and influence. In the 1950s, developmental research by Black psychologists was instrumental to the fight for civil rights. Today, it continues to provide a basis for advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.”

Alum Sooran Choi (Art History Ph.D. '18) has won a grant from the Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative at CUNY to direct a Cross-Gender-Ethnic-Korean-Asian Studies Initiative at Brooklyn College, where she teaches in the Art Department.  As part of that initiative, she is running a symposium to foreground Korean studies while taking an intersectional approach to the subject.  The symposium will be held Saturday and Sunday, April 22-23, online.  More information can be found here.

Luisa Valle who finished her dissertation in 2022, received an Honorable Mention from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) for her dissertation "The Beehive, the Favela, the Castle, and the Ministry: Race and Modern Architecture in Rio de Janeiro, 1811 to 1945." Congrats to Luisa! All the LASA awards are listed here.