News and Events
Graduate Center scholars innovate, advance social justice, and promote public debate through their work. Our hundreds of free, public events with prominent GC scholars and artists as well as guests are designed to spark conversation, inspiration, and action.
Featured News

April 19, 2022
With 'Migration Music,' Pianist Han Chen Explores Stories of Immigration
- Student News
- GC Stories

April 18, 2022
Using Hard Data to Tell Human Stories
- Alumni News
- GC Stories

May 2, 2022
Exploring the Layers of Language
- Alumni News
- GC Stories
Upcoming Events
Join us for an upcoming event.
Thursday, May 19, 2022
ARC Seminar: Kevin Gee
4:00 pm — 5:30 pm
Online
Thursday, May 19, 2022
The Abraham Accords
4:00 pm — 5:30 pm
Online
Friday, May 20, 2022
For What? For Whom? An Evening of Collective Storytelling Featuring Kamau Ware of the Black Gotham Experience
5:00 pm — 7:00 pm
1218: Segal Theatre
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Tastes Like War: Grace M. Cho in Conversation with Patricia Clough
7:30 pm
Online
Recent Books

The Battle Nearer to Home
The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City
Despite its image as an epicenter of progressive social policy, New York City continues to have one of the nation's most segregated school systems. Tracing the quest for integration in education from the mid-1950s to the present, The Battle Nearer to Home follows the tireless efforts by educational activists to dismantle the deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities that segregation reinforces. The fight for integration has shifted significantly over time, not least in terms of the way "integration" is conceived, from transfers of students and redrawing school attendance zones, to more recent demands of community control of segregated schools. In all cases, the Board eventually pulled the plug in the face of resistance from more powerful stakeholders, and, starting in the 1970s, integration receded as a possible solution to educational inequality. In excavating the history of New York City school integration politics, in the halls of power and on the ground, Christopher Bonastia unearths the enduring white resistance to integration and the severe costs paid by Black and Latino students. This last decade has seen activists renew the fight for integration, but the war is still far from won.
Published July 2022
Stanford University Press

Les entretiens de Baton Rouge
In 1990-91, while teaching at the University of Baton-Rouge, Louisiana, Edouard Glissant participated in a series of conversations with his medievalist colleague Alexandre Leupin. These conversations reveal his long-standing opposition to systems of thought and to fixed ideologies, as well as his interest in what philosophers generally scorn-landscapes, the blues, minorities. He envisages the collision between the European Middle-Ages and the reign of Louis XIV as a drama between two concepts of the world: the language of rationality at its height-a system of thought transmitted by Catholicism-versus Creolization-epitomized by Rabelais, Montaigne, and the Pleiade poets-which introduced and developed critical thought, secularism, the legal system, democracy, the abolition of slavery, the rights of man and woman. Throughout his personal story, Edouard Glissant exalts literature and particularly poetry which escapes the doctrine of determinism, develops the idea of "eccentric" thought, and seeks what is new and amazing in the story of human and cultural relationships today. Edouard Glissant is a distinguished professor of French at the Graduate Center.
Published May 2022

Sex Is as Sex Does
Governing Transgender Identity
What the evolving fight for transgender rights reveals about government power, regulations, and the law
Every government agency in the United States, from Homeland Security to Departments of Motor Vehicles, has the authority to make its own rules for sex classification. Many transgender people find themselves in the bizarre situation of having different sex classifications on different documents. Whether you can change your legal sex to “F” or “M” (or more recently “X”) depends on what state you live in, what jurisdiction you were born in, and what government agency you’re dealing with. In Sex Is as Sex Does, noted transgender advocate and scholar Paisley Currah explores this deeply flawed system, showing why it fails transgender and non-binary people.
Published May 2022
NYU Press

The Thought Project
The Thought Project shares the knowledge, research, and innovation of Graduate Center scholars with the world. Through a podcast and a Medium blog, The Thought Project allows Graduate Center faculty and students to discuss how their scholarship goes beyond academia and affects the public good.
Podcast Episodes
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