Structure of HA Team

HA fellows are selected from current GC doctoral students in years 3-5 of their program in any humanities or humanistic social science discipline. HA fellows join the project for 1-2 years. HA staff at the GC include full-time staff at the Teaching and Learning Center and the Futures Initiative and part-time personnel employed solely for HA-related work.

Key Offices

• Futures Initiative: The HA was founded out of a collaboration between the Futures Initiative and the TLC. The FI oversees the CUNY Peer Leaders, supports the work of the Senior Research Associate, and participates in strategic oversight and partnership with the HA.
• Teaching & Learning Center: The Teaching and Learning Center supports GC students’ development as educators in CUNY and beyond. The HA and the TLC have had close ties since their inception. The HA & the TLC were both created in 2016, and have expanded and flourished in partnership with one another. Luke Waltzer is director of both the HA and the TLC, and Luis Henao Uribe has been based in the Teaching and Learning Center since 2018. In addition to sharing staff, the HA and the TLC often draw from each other’s resources and work collaboratively on projects and programs aiming to support the pedagogical development of GC students.
• Provost’s Office: Our Principal Investigator, David Olan, was formerly the Associate Provost and Dean for Academic Affairs, and is now Professor of Music. He was also the PI for the PublicsLab, a past project also funded by the Mellon Foundation.
• Room 3317: Not an office, rather a GC workspace available for all HA fellows to use. This is a big space with computers and desks available. Shared with fellows from other programs.

Seminars and Public Events

The Seminar at the GC is the key space for sense-making for the fellows. During weekly meetings, fellows discuss principles and readings related to teaching, the state of higher education, professionalization, and other topics. The Seminar is a space for community building and collaborative learning. Fellows share their experiences at their assigned campus projects, forming a community of practice and enacting the reflective praxis that is key to successful teaching and learning.

The Humanities Alliance facilitates and supports additional spaces for public reflection around the topics and themes of the program: teaching and learning in community college contexts, mentorship in higher education, humanities training, and professional development, among others. This programming extends the reflection process beyond the Seminar’s confines and toward a broader audience.

Notes on Campus Culture

As an institution primarily focused on supporting graduate research and granting graduate degrees, the GC cultivates a culture of scholarly critique. In coursework and dissertation research, GC doctoral students are encouraged to read with a critical eye and position their original scholarship as timely and necessary interventions into existing scholarship and academic practice. GC students are often incredibly passionate about their work, committed to its urgent importance, and dedicated to its success. While individual departments differ in this respect, as a whole, GC students in the humanities or humanistic social sciences have limited opportunities in their degree-related activities to collaborate with each other or with scholars, faculty, or staff from other disciplines: individual, single-authored scholarship is encouraged and rewarded, and collaborative projects, while celebrated, may not always be fully valued or prioritized. Despite this, many GC students are collegial and supportive of one another, rejecting the aggressive competitiveness that often characterizes graduate programs at other universities. GC students provide a tremendous service to the university, teaching as many as 150,000 undergraduates a year in graduate teaching fellowship and via adjunct appointments. As students in an expansive public university serving NYC’s working-class, BIPOC, and immigrant populations, GC students are often keenly aware of issues of social injustice within CUNY, NYC, and academic and public spheres more broadly; and of the importance of fighting to address such issues in scholarship, teaching, and beyond.