People

Directors || Postdoctoral Fellow || Faculty Fellows || Dissertation Writing Fellows || Visiting Fellows || Past Fellows

Directors


Ruth Wilson Gilmore,
Director 

Email: rgilmore@gc.cuny.edu

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She writes about racial capitalism; organized violence; organized abandonment; changing state structure; the aesthetics and  politics of seeing; labor and social movements; and the urgency of abolition as a green, red, and internationalist project of liberation. Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022); and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press 2007); and, co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference. (Duke 2021). Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition is forthcoming from Haymarket. Gilmore’s internationalist work features in the Antipode documentary Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2020). She co-founded many grassroots organizations. Awards include the 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize (shared with Angela Y. Davis, and Mike Davis), and the 2022  Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar Prize.

Peter Hitchcock, Associate Director

Peter Hitchcock

Email: phitchcock@gc.cuny.edu

Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is also on the faculties of Women’s Studies and Film Studies at the GC. He is the author of five books, including The Long Space, for Stanford University Press. His most recent publications include, “Accumulating Fictions” for Representations,“Immolation” for the Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, “How to Read a Discipline” for Comparative Literature, “Culture and Anarchy in Thatcher’s London” for an anthology on Hanif Kureishi, “( ) of Ghosts” in The Spectralities Reader, “The Space of Time: Chronotopes and Crisis” for Primerjalna Knjizevnost, “Defining the World” inLiterary Materialisms and “Everything’s Gone Green: The Environment of BP’s Narrative” for Imaginations. Forthcoming articles include an essay, “Viscosity and Velocity,” for an anthology on oil (Cornell), and an essay on communism titled “The Leninist Hypothesis” for Poetics Today. Forthcoming book projects include a monograph on the cultural representation of labor, a monograph on worlds of postcoloniality, and an edited collection on the New Public Intellectual. He is currently working on two research projects: one about seriality in politics and culture; the other on the aesthetics of commodities and financial instruments.

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Mary Taylor, Assistant Director

Email: mtaylor2@gc.cuny.edu

Mary N. Taylor

Mary N. Taylor is the Assistant Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a founding member of the LeftEast collective. Working at the intersection of  anthropology, urbanism, and dialogical art, her praxis investigates sites, techniques, and politics of civic cultivation, the production of political personhood, the ethics and aesthetics of nationalism/cultural differentiation, and the history of communist experiment. Dr. Taylor’s work has appeared in numerous journals. She co-edited Co-revolutionary Praxis: Accompaniment as a Strategy for Working Together (Aukland: St. Paul St. Gallery, 2015), and The Commonist Horizon: Futures Beyond Capitalist Urbanization (Common Notions, 2023). Her historical ethnography Movement of the People: Folk Dance, Populism, and Citizenship in Hungary (2021Indiana University Press), explores the tension between peoples’ movements  and populism in Hungary through the lens of a folk revival movement. She is currently working on a dialogical film project about liberation movement lives in the former socialist block.

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David Harvey, Director of Research

Email: dharvey@gc.cuny.edu

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the City University of New York (CUNY) and author of various books, articles, and lectures. His most recent books are A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (Verso, 2023) and The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles (Pluto Press, 2020). He is the author of Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Profile Books, 2014), one of The Guardian’s Best Books of 2011, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2010). Other books include A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Limits to Capital, and Social Justice and the City. Professor Harvey has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for nearly 40 years. His lectures on Marx’s Volumes I and II are available for download (free) on his website. He was director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics from 2008-2014. Follow him on Twitter

Postdoctoral Fellow

Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma

Email: mprasad1@gc.cuny.edu

Bio: Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research focuses on the politics of labor, migration, and urban transformation in contemporary India. It traces the different types of recruitment of migrant and local labor in Kerala that reflect political contests and settlements between trade unions, corporate construction companies, and recruitment agencies. Another strand of her research focuses on the politics of indigeneity in Arunachal Pradesh in the North-East of India in the context of urban land governance, dam building, and migration. She has published articles and essays in Antipode,Contemporary South Asia, Society and Space magazine,and Economic and Political Weekly.

Faculty Fellows

Anthony Dest

Email: Anthony.Dest@lehman.cuny.edu

Bio: Anthony Dest is assistant professor of anthropology at Lehman College. His research focuses on social movements, violence, racism, and state formation in Latin America. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Dissident Peace: An Ethnography of Struggle in Colombia. Anthony is also a member of the executive council of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) and the Colombia Freedom Collective, which supports the struggles of people incarcerated for their participation in the 2021 National Strike.

Javiela Evangelista

Email: jevangelista@citytech.cuny.edu

Bio: Javiela Evangelista is an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department. As a public anthropologist she engages in participatory research that counters inequalities, particularly at the intersections of citizenship and racialization in the Caribbean and the African Diaspora. Evangelista is developing her book manuscript, an ethnographic analysis of the largest case of mass statelessness in the western hemisphere, the contemporary denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. This research has been supported by a Fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY Foundation . Her work has also been featured at the Venice Biennale and in the Publication of Afro-Latin/American Research Association (PALARA), National Political Science Review and Interdisciplinary Team Teaching (Palgrave). At New York City College of Technology, Evangelista is the Co-Director of the Living Lab, a general education and experiential learning initiative. She also serves on the Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) Steering Committee.  She received her PhD in Anthropology from the Graduate Center, CUNY and her MA from the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University.

Maureen Ruprecht Fadem

Email: maureen.fadem@kbcc.cuny.edu

Bio: Maureen Ruprecht Fadem (she/her) is Professor of English at CUNY-Kingsborough and a postcolonial and gender studies scholar. She works on Ireland, primarily the North, and on the literatures of partition: historical texts representing the geopolitical (non)solution and that illustrate its imperialist, (neo)colonialist, carceral, and (racial)capitalist designs. She looks at the poetics of conflict, trauma, and silence, at political justice, especially longue durée forms often called “reparations,” and at social justice of race and gender. Her monograph Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian appeared in 2020; in 2021, Maureen published two books: Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’: The Case for Reparations and a co-edited collection, The Economics of Empire. She has recent Op Eds in Inside Higher Ed and an article, “Architecting the Carceral State” on radical deployments of the fragment in Walter Benjamin and Medbh McGuckian (2021). Maureen is working on two books—the edited collection Imperial Debt (Liverpool UP, 2024) and a (new) Routledge Companion to Toni Morrison (2025)—and two articles, one a comparative look at the circuitous, snowy epistemology of empire in Joyce’s “The Dead,” the other reading Mandel’s Station Eleven as a partition narrative signaling the end of capital.

Nerve V. Macaspac

Email: nervemacaspac@gmail.com

Bio: Nerve V. Macaspac (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, and a Doctoral Faculty at the Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center. His current research examines community-led peace zones as spaces of unarmed civilian protection amid active violent conflicts. He is a Co-Investigator for “Creating Safer Spaces,” a 5-year international and interdisciplinary research project funded by the United Kingdom Research and Innovation’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, and for “Building the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium,” a 4-year project establishing Southeast Asian Studies network in the SUNY and CUNY systems funded by the Luce Foundation. He received his Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California in Los Angeles), and MA in Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

Shreya Subramani

Email: ssubramani@jjay.cuny.edu

Bio: Shreya Subramani is a sociocultural anthropologist and assistant professor of Law & Society at CUNY John Jay College. Her ethnographic research explores how progressive criminal justice reform is productive of novel racializing processes that transform and expand carceral geographies in New Orleans. As a CPCP faculty fellow, Subramani will be workshopping her current book project. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork (2016-2019) in New Orleans, her book is a historical materialist critique of contemporary criminal justice reform as passive revolution. She elaborates the fragmentations and contradictions emergent in what is parochially referred to as “the reentry space,” a private-public institutional infrastructure for policy and service provisioning designed to facilitate the reentry of formerly incarcerated individuals back into city life. Doing so, reveals a terrain of political struggle that opens onto our contemporary conjuncture of racial capitalism and its manifold crises as well as their ongoing regulation and transformation.

Dissertation Fellows

Giacomo Bianchino

Email: gbianchino@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Bio: Giacomo Bianchino is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His work centers on the relationship between poetry and politics, particularly in the modernist attempts to construct a new “epic” poem. He is also a labor organizer, a freelance journalist and a writer.

Zahra Khalid

Email: zkhalid@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Bio: Zahra Khalid is a doctoral candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she studies cultural materialism and political economy, with particular interest in the interconnection between militarism and uneven development. Her dissertation project studies military-led speculative real-estate developments in Pakistan and associated “structures of feeling”—middle class desires, anxieties, and proclivities—to illuminate how housing becomes a site to materialize capital flows. It is based on 17 months of ethnographic and archival research. Zahra holds a Master’s in city planning, and a BSc. (honors) with a major in financial investments and accounting. She previously worked in the international development industry.

Laura Rivas

Email: lrivas@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Bio: Laura Rivas is a doctoral candidate in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation examines the impact of an insular culture of antislavery on the political territorialization of the Dominican state. Analyzing the tension between fugitivity and official rule, she considers historical practices of black flight into rural areas and the rearticulation of colonial ideas of progress in the postcolonial state to explain the fractured cartography and political instability of the early Dominican nation. Peasants’ autonomous lifestyle favored local forms of governance over a framework of national culture for the materialization of freedom and political rights. With the advent of the nation-state, revolutionary turmoil becomes a process through which peasants inserted themselves into a national project devised to either exclude or discipline them. Her research engages alternative articulations of sovereignty—in this historical setting and at different scales—that challenge the hegemonic, ethnonationalist variant at play in the Dominican Republic today.

Visiting Scholars

Christina M. Chica

Email: cchica24@ucla.edu

Bio: Christina M. Chica is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at UCLA as well as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and a Scholar-in-residence at the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a child of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador and an interdisciplinary sociologist with research and teaching interests that span transnational gender, sexuality, culture, race, ethnicity, political economy, and urban studies. Christina has used multiple methods to study placemaking among LGBTQ+, migrant, and racially marginalized populations across time and space. Their current project investigates the relationship between urban change and LGBT+ placemaking in Mexico City—especially how LGBT+ people and places have adapted to COVID-19. More broadly, she is interested in the process of forming beloved community—its trials, tribulations, failures, and successes—and its potential for grounding social relations rooted in wellness and social justice.

Lexington Davis

Email: lexiedavis4977@gmail.com

Bio: Lexington Davis (she/her) is a writer, curator, and art historian currently completing a Ph.D. at University of St. Andrews, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. Her dissertation is a transnational study exploring how 1970s feminist artists complicated the politics of domestic labor through engagement with working-class struggles. She has taught at Leiden University and has written for publications including Feminist Media Histories, Flash Art, Espace art actuel, and Metropolis M. In addition to her academic work, she has held curatorial and research positions at the New Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has previously curated exhibitions at apexart, NY; Neue Galerie, Innsbruck; the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest; and the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki. Her work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship; a Schlesinger Library Dissertation Grant, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; the Association for Art History, UK; Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds; and the Netherlands Institute in Athens.

Lexington Davis’s visiting fellowship is generously supported by Het Cultuurfonds, NL.

FTC Manning

Email: ftc.manning37@gmail.com

Bio: FTC Manning is a geographer by way of philosophy and political economy, working on ground rent, theories of the state, and the political economy of land dispossession / the land dispossession at the heart of political economy. They are the Treasurer of the board of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and a participant in local organizing groups fighting for homes, resources, and mutual aid with housed and houseless neighbors and sex workers. Other research foci include ontologies of law, colonial land transfer, racialization in the longue-durée, psychoanalysis, quantum epistemology, and trauma-informed pedagogy. You can find their work at https://opencuny.org/ftcmanning/.

Maria Luisa Mendonça

Email: marialuisam222@gmail.com

Bio: Maria Luisa Mendonça is a research scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of São Paulo (USP). Her research includes history and political economy of agriculture in Brazil and internationally. Her recent book Political Economy of Agribusiness (Fernwood Publishing, Halifax, 2023) demonstrates the central role of food systems in international relations as a result of a dialectical movement of economic crisis and expansion in connection with trade, financial markets, environmental justice, and transnational activism. Her research anticipated a trend in financial capital to “migrate” to farmland markets in the Global South, especially after the crisis in the United States’ real estate market in 2008. She has taught international political economy at University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and at the center for advanced research Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). Mendonça is a co-founder of the World Social Forum and co-director of Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Network for Social Justice and Human Rights – www.social.org.br). She is co-editor of the book Human Rights in Brazil, published annually since 2000. Her experience includes documentary filmmaking and investigative journalism, and she has served in expert meetings on the Right to Food at the United Nations.

Past Fellows