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

March 20, 2023
A new job yields an unexpected alumni network
- GC Stories
- Alumni News

March 8, 2023
End of the English Major? Hardly!
- GC Stories
- Faculty News

March 8, 2023
Student Shows What’s ‘Fresh, Fly, and Fabulous’ About Hip-Hop Style
- GC Stories
- Student News
Upcoming Events
Join us for an upcoming event.
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Can Democracy Survive in the U.S.? Jamelle Bouie and Corey Robin in Conversation, Moderated by Katrina vanden Heuvel
6:30 pm
Hybrid (see description for details)
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Linguistics Colloquium: Professor Jason Shaw, Yale University
4:15 pm — 6:15 pm
Hybrid (see description for details)
Friday, March 24, 2023
Information Flow in Bacterial Chemotaxis
9:30 am — 4:00 pm
Hybrid (see description for details)
Friday, March 24, 2023
Jewish Politics in Spinoza's Amsterdam
10:00 am
Online
Recent Books

American Born
An Immigrant's Story, a Daughter's Memoir
An incisive memoir of Rachel M. Brownstein’s seemingly quintessential Jewish mother, a resilient and courageous immigrant in New York.
When she arrived alone in New York in 1924, eighteen-year-old Reisel Thaler resembled the other Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe who accompanied her. Yet she already had an American passport tucked in her scant luggage. Reisel had drawn her first breath on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1905, then was taken back to Galicia (in what is now Poland) by her father before she turned two. She was, as she would boast to the end of her days, “American born.”
Published March 2023
University of Chicago Press

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley
A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence
A paradigm-shattering biography of Phillis Wheatley, whose extraordinary poetry set African American literature at the heart of the American Revolution.
Admired by George Washington, ridiculed by Thomas Jefferson, published in London, and read far and wide, Phillis Wheatley led one of the most extraordinary American lives. Seized in West Africa and forced into slavery as a child, she was sold to a merchant family in Boston, where she became a noted poet at a young age. Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, she composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, praised warriors, and used her verse to variously lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. “Can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?” By doing so, she added her voice to a vibrant, multisided conversation about race, slavery, and discontent with British rule; before and after her emancipation, her verses shook up racial etiquette and used familiar forms to create bold new meanings. She demonstrated a complex but crucial fact of the times: that the American Revolution both strengthened and limited Black slavery.
In this new biography, the historian David Waldstreicher offers the fullest account to date of Wheatley’s life and works, correcting myths, reconstructing intimate friendships, and deepening our understanding of her verse and the revolutionary era. Throughout The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, he demonstrates the continued vitality and resonance of a woman who wrote, in a founding gesture of American literature, “Thy Power, O Liberty, makes strong the weak / And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak.”
Published March 2023
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Cognitive Ontology
Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences
The search for the 'furniture of the mind' has acquired added impetus with the rise of new technologies to study the brain and identify its main structures and processes. Philosophers and scientists are increasingly concerned to understand the ways in which psychological functions relate to brain structures. Meanwhile, the taxonomic practices of cognitive scientists are coming under increased scrutiny, as researchers ask which of them identify the real kinds of cognition and which are mere vestiges of folk psychology. Muhammad Ali Khalidi present a naturalistic account of 'real kinds' to validate some central taxonomic categories in the cognitive domain, including concepts, episodic memory, innateness, domain specificity, and cognitive bias. He argues that cognitive kinds are often individuated relationally, with reference to the environment and etiology of the thinking subject, whereas neural kinds tend to be individuated intrinsically, resulting in crosscutting relationships among cognitive and neural categories.
Published January 2023
Cambridge University 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.
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