CUNY BA Community Newsletter #1

Dear CUNY BA Community,

We are delighted to welcome you to an exciting new year with CUNY BA, with a special welcome to our incoming students! This fall, we have the pleasure of inaugurating the CUNY BA newsletter which will keep you abreast of CUNY BA programs and initiatives, accomplishments, and resources. We hope that you enjoy hearing from us, and we hope to hear from you! 
A MESSAGE FROM KIM J. HARTSWICK, ACADEMIC DIRECTOR
As CUNY BA approaches its 50th year, it is an auspicious moment not only to reflect on its accomplishments but to look forward to its exciting future. CUNY BA’s unique position in the The Graduate School has provided CUNY BA with the opportunity to collaborate with graduate students as CUNY BA fellows. The fellows are taking on a variety of important initiatives that will enhance outreach to our students and to a wider academic community. The launch of this newsletter is one such enterprise that provides a platform to better communicate with our constituents, highlighting CUNY BA’s remarkable students, faculty mentors, campus coordinators, administrators, friends, supporters, staff and more. Please let us know what you think about our first issue—what other information you would like to see and how we may improve its content and presentation. In the meantime, I wish everyone a wonderful, inspiring and productive beginning to a new academic semester. Happy reading!Regards,Kim J. Hartswick
Academic Director

 

DEAN'S WELCOME: A MESSAGE FROM
BRIAN PETERSON

I am delighted to welcome both new and returning students to the 2019-2020 academic year. I hope you had time to rejuvenate over the summer and are ready for a successful fall semester! Over the past year, the CUNY BA team has developed new ways to deepen the connections amongst our community. Engaging students and faculty through focus groups and surveys, we learned that there is a shared desire for greater interaction between CUNY BA members along with the fostering of a deeper sense of community through activities and events. We are proud to launch this newsletter and look forward to launching a redesigned CUNY BA website later this month.  I am also excited to host Dean’s hours during this year. Dean’s hours provide an open forum to talk with me about your experiences in the CUNY BA program and at your home campus. Fall Dean’s hours will take place on Wednesday, September 11, 2019 from 5:00 – 6:30 pm and on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 from 5:00 – 6:30 pm in the President’s Conference Room at The Graduate Center, CUNY.I look forward to seeing many of you at the upcoming book talk featuring one of our very own CUNY BA students, Amber Scorah. (Details below) We are also pleased to be celebrating 25 years of giving by Thomas Smith. Tom’s generosity has provided 908 Smith Fellowships. We are looking forward to celebrating with Tom at the Smith Fellows Award Ceremony that will take place on Wednesday, November 6th at 6:00 pm in the Skylight Room at The Graduate Center, CUNY.I look forward to connecting with you during the term and wish each of you the very best for a productive and successful fall.

Regards,

Brian A. Peterson

Dean

 

UPCOMING EVENTS

New Student Orientation 

Come meet your fellow incoming students, administrators, and advisors and receive key information and resources about course registration, home campuses, faculty mentors, life credits, and more!

  

August 22, 2019, 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 5th Avenue, Elebash Hall

 

Book launch: Amber Scorah's Leaving the Witness:
Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life 
September 11, 2019, 7pm - 9pm
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 5th Avenue, Elebash Hall
Register here
CUNY BA student and third-generation Jehovah's Witness, Amber Scorah had devoted her life to sounding God's warning of impending Armageddon. She volunteered to take the message to China, where the preaching she did was illegal and could result in her expulsion or worse. As a proselytizer in Shanghai, using fake names and secret codes to evade the authorities, Scorah looked for targets in public parks and stores. Getting to know worldly people for the first time, she began to understand that there were other ways of seeing the world. When one of these relationships became an "escape hatch," Scorah's loss of faith culminated in her own personal apocalypse. Shunned by family and friends as an apostate, Scorah was alone in Shanghai and thrown into a world she had only known from the periphery—with no education or support system. A coming of age story of a woman in her thirties, this unforgettable memoir examines what it's like to start one's life over again with an entirely new identity.

 

Workshop: Applying to Graduate School

Interested in pursuing graduate school? Please join Associate Director of Admissions at The CUNY Graduate Center Gerry Martini and CUNY BA in late September for a workshop on how to best start preparing for the application process. We will cover important milestones in the application timeline and common application components (required standardized tests, letters of recommendation, etc), both for Masters and PhD programs. We have also invited CUNY BA alums who have gone on to graduate school to share their experiences and words of wisdom. Register for one of our two available dates:
September 23, 2019, 5:30pm - 8:30pm
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 5th Avenue, Rm. 7209

September 25, 2019, 12:30pm - 2:30pm
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 5th Avenue, Rm. 7209

Refreshments will be provided!
Register here. 

 

NEW AT CUNY BA
Introducing the CUNY BA Fellows ProgramThis newsletter is brought to you by the CUNY BA Fellows Program! Initiated in Spring 2019, The CUNY BA Fellows Program employs doctoral candidates from across the CUNY system to support CUNY BA students with navigating bureaucratic and administrative challenges and collaborate with CUNY BA’s administration and faculty mentors to develop initiatives that further enrich students’ experiences. This allows CUNY BA students to focus their energies on their scholarship while receiving support for their other myriad endeavors. Meet your CUNY BA fellows for 2019-2020! Teresa Curmi is a Ph.D. candidate in Psychology and Law at the The Graduate Center, CUNY and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she is a member of the Investigative Psychology Research Unit. She studies investigative decision making, and the administration and assessment of training for law enforcement officers. For CUNY BA, Teresa has done extensive data analysis toward devising a strategic plan for the fellowship. This fall, she will transition into the role of CUNY BA Fellows Coordinator. 

Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi is a Ph.D. candidate at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY in Industrial-Organizational Psychology studying illegitimate tasks, a new stressor construct in occupational health psychology literature. For CUNY BA, he has worked on survey and database administration. His years of exceptional teaching at Baruch College earned him the Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Teaching, which he will be honored with at Baruch College's Faculty Convocation this year. 

Joanna Smolenski is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at the Graduate Center, CUNY focusing on applied bioethics, moral psychology, and social and political philosophy. As a member of the CUNY BA Fellows team she has focused on organizing workshops for new and continuing students at CUNY BA. She has been appointed as an Ethics Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) and as a Bioethics in Biopharma Fellow by the GE2P2 Global Foundation for the 2019-20 academic year.
Manny Gonzalez is a doctoral candidate in Industrial-Organizational Psychology studying the ramifications of emotions in the workplace. He is the most recent fellow to join the CUNY BA Fellows Program. He applies his teaching, mentoring, and program design experience to the ongoing design of the CUNY BA peer-mentorship program. Please welcome Manny as he joins us for the 2019-2020 academic year. 

 

Ashna Ali was on the CUNY BA Fellows team through Spring 2019 managing editorial responsibilities before graduating from The Graduate Center, CUNY with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. Their research explored contemporary narratives of migration to Europe written by Anglophone and Italophone women of color. They will join the faculty of the English department at Bard High School Early College Manhattan this fall. We wish them the best! 

Chloë R. Edmonson served as Academic Advisor and as Fellows Coordinator for CUNY BA in 2018-2019 after graduating with a Ph.D. in Theater from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research historicizes the intersection of American drinking culture and immersive performance practices, and the essential relationship between intoxication, immersion, and performance. This fall, she will join the University of Central Florida’s School of Performing Arts as Associate Professor of Theatre teaching Theatre History. She will be sorely missed!

 

CUNY BA Peer Mentorship Program

CUNY BA will soon be piloting a peer mentorship program where more experienced CUNY BA students can volunteer to mentor newer CUNY BA students. Keep an eye out for more information on how to get involved with the initial CUNY BA peer mentor program!

 

COMMUNITY SHOUT-OUTS

  • CUNY BA Program Director Kim J. Hartswick and his colleagues received the PROSE Award for their book of scholarly essays Gardens of the Roman Empire from the Association of American Publishers, which annually recognizes the very best in professional and scholarly publishing. This volume brings together archaeological, literary, and artistic evidence about ancient Roman gardens through well-illustrated essays by eminent scholars in the field about diverse types of gardens from Britain to Arabia. 
  • Associate Professor of Psychology and City College Faculty Mentor Dr. Timothy Ellmore was awarded a 2-year $785,000 R56 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study how neural delay activity contributes to human short- and long-term memory. The results will lead to fundamental new insights into the brain mechanisms for how memories are consolidated, which will in turn inform how these processes break down in a variety of mental health disorders. 
  • CUNY BA student Kyle Aaron Reese (Queer Psychosocial Research, Brooklyn College, 2021), was awarded a Leadership and Democracy Fellowship with the Futures Initiative and was chosen for the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s 2019 Pearson Higher Education Scholarship. Kyle also works as a research assistant in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Brooklyn College, and has been invited to apply for a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program  supported by the National Science Foundation.
  • CUNY BA student Christianna Cox (Multimedia Communications, Baruch College, 2020) served on the CUNY Service Corps and was one of the more than 200 CUNY students who participated in relief efforts as part of the Puerto Rico Recovery and Rebuilding Initiative launched by Governor Andrew Cuomo in response to Hurricane Maria. These efforts were featured by Fox News 5. 
  • CUNY BA Faculty Mentor Dr. Sarah Bishop, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Baruch College co-authored “Contact isn't enough: attitudes towards and misunderstandings about undocumented immigrants among a diverse college population” in Ethnic and Racial Studies based on a survey she conducted at Baruch. The study was covered by CUNY SUM. 
  • As a final project for a class, CUNY BA student Samuel Ferri (Psychology and Design, Hunter, 2020) took a walk through the shopping mall named after Walt Whitman and published a short satirical comic tracing Whitman’s legacy in a modern retail center full of food courts and a different kind of Americana in The Brooklyn Rail. More of his artwork can be found on his website www.misconnected.com or on his Instagram account, @samsinkwell

 

ALUMNI NEWS

  • Charles A. McDonald (CUNY BA ’05, Cultural Studies and Revolutionary Discourse) defended his dissertation, "Return to Sepharad: Conversion, Citizenship, and the Politics of Jewish Inclusion in Spain," in May 2019, and earned his Ph.D in Anthropology and Historical Studies from The New School for Social Research. His dissertation received the Stanley Diamond Memorial Award for Best Dissertation in the Social Sciences. As of July 2019, he is the Samuel W. and Goldye Marian Spain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Jewish Studies at Rice University, where he will teach seminars on race, religion, and contemporary Europe; finish several journal articles; and work on his book manuscript, Return to Sepharad: Jews, Spain, and Europe's Moral Order. 
  • Vondel Mahon (CUNY BA ‘14, Medical Illustration) graduated from the Medical and Biological Illustration Program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine’s Department of Art as Applied Medicine (AAM) in May 2019. During his time there, he received the Chester Reather scholarship in Art as Applied to Medicine; the Vesalius Trust Research Grant; the William P. Didersh Scholarship; and the Ranice W. Crosby Scholarship. He has exhibited his work in several galleries and schools, and had his first solo exhibition, “When Art Meets Science,” at the 1448 Gallery in Baltimore, MD in June 2019. 
  • Rising director-playwright team of Reuven Glezer (CUNY BA ‘18, Literary Form and Writing) and Zeynep Akca present their Off-Broadway debut, “The Argentinian Prostitute Play,” written by Glezer and directed by Akca, at the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival this August. Performances will take place at Theatre Row for an exclusive three-day run on August 20th, 21st, and 24th at 8PM, 5PM, and 2PM, respectively. A talkback with the creative team will follow the August 21st performance.

 

We Want to Hear from YOU! 

Do you have news that you would like to share with the CUNY BA community about yourself, your faculty mentor, or someone else in CUNY BA? Please fill out our submission form and contact fellows@cunyba.cuny.edu with any questions. 
X