For questions about the PublicsLab, please contact publicslab@gc.cuny.edu.
Kandice Chuh, Interim Faculty Lead (AY 2021-22)
Kandice Chuh is a professor of English, American studies, and Critical Social Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also a member of the M.A. in Liberal Studies faculty, and affiliate faculty to the Africana studies program. She is currently Executive Officer of the PhD Program in English, and in the past served as Coordinator of the American Studies Certificate Program and acting associate director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. The author of The Difference Aesthetics Makes: on the humanities ‘after Man’ (2019), which won the Association for Asian American Studies Humanities and Cultural Studies Book Award, and Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique (2003), which won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Award, Chuh is co-editor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001). President of the American Studies Association from 2017-18, Chuh is a member of the Association for Asian American Studies and the Modern Language Association. She is at work on a collection of essays titled The Disinterested Teacher, and her current research focuses on Asian racialization in the era of globalization. Chuh teaches courses on aesthetic theory, queer of color critique, women of color feminisms, decolonial studies, and Asian and Asian American racialization.
Stacy M. Hartman, Director
Stacy Hartman is the director of the PublicsLab at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. At the PublicsLab, she manages the Mellon Humanities Public Fellowship program, which trains early career graduate students in the humanities in the methods and practice of public scholarship. The first interdisciplinary cohort of 12 public fellows begins in September 2019. In addition to the fellowship program, Dr. Hartman is responsible for developing the PublicsLab internship program, managing a robust slate of events related to public scholarship, and serving as the managing editor of the program’s website. Before coming to The Graduate Center in 2018, she was the project manager of Connected Academics at the Modern Language Association. She is currently co-editing a volume titled Mission Driven: Reimagining Graduate Education for a Thriving Humanities Ecosystem. She holds a PhD in German Studies from Stanford University. She can be reached at shartman2@gc.cuny.edu.Bianca C. Williams, Faculty Lead*
*Dr. Williams is on leave for AY 2021-22.
Bianca C. Williams (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Lead of the PublicsLab at CUNY Graduate Center. Williams is an ethnographer of race, gender, and emotion in higher education and organizing communities, with a focus on Black women’s affective lives. The investigative thread that binds Williams’ organizing, teaching, and research is the question “How do Black people develop strategies for enduring and resisting the effects of racism and sexism, while attempting to maintain emotional wellness?” She has written about Black women, travel, and happiness; radical honesty as pedagogy; white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and emotional labor in higher ed; and anxious writing. Williams is the author of the award-winning book The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (Duke U 2018), and co-editor of the book Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (SUNY 2021). Williams received the 2016 AAA & Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology, and the Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship Award in 2021. She is currently the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at Well-Read Black Girl.
Conor Tomás Reed, Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Justice in Higher Education, 2022-2023
Conor Tomás Reed (all) is a Puerto Rican/Irish gender-fluid scholar-organizer of radical cultural movements at the City University of New York, and the 2022-2023 Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Justice in Higher Education in the PublicsLab at the CUNY Graduate Center. Conor’s forthcoming book New York Liberation School chronicles the rise of Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Studies and movements at the City College of New York and in New York City, as well as CUNY’s post-9/11 oppositional relationship to US imperialism. Conor is also developing the quadrilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean with co-editors Diarenis Calderón Tartabull, Makeba Lavan, Tito Mitjans Alayón, Violeta Orozco Barrera, and Layla Zami. Conor is the current co-managing editor of LÁPIZ Journal and a contributing editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, as well as a co-founding participant in Free CUNY and Rank and File Action (RAFA). Conor’s work can be found in print and online via AK Press, ASAP/Journal, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Distributaries, El Centro Press, The New Inquiry, Verso Books, Viewpoint Magazine, Wendy’s Subway, and elsewhere.
Patrick Smyth, Postdoctoral Fellow in Humanities Entrepreneurship, 2021-2022
Patrick Smyth is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Humanities Entrepreneurship at the PublicsLab and is starting Iota School, a business offering accessible technical training for humanists. Patrick’s work focuses on citizen technology, critical infrastructure, accessibility, and technical pedagogy. His dissertation, Negotiated Access: Haccessibility, Autonomy, and Infrastructure in the Age of the Abstraction, asks how we can exercise our values from within systems that alienate and exploit. It received the Alumni and Doctoral Faculty Prize for the Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year from the PhD program in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Patrick is a blind hacker and programmer who codes in Python, Lisp, and for the web, and his apps and other technical work have received attention in national publications such as PC Magazine and Phi Beta Kappa. From 2019 to 2021, Patrick coordinated Foundations for Research Computing, a cross-campus program that taught research computing skills to over 3,200 researchers at Columbia University. Patrick was a 2010 Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Berlin and is a Software Carpentry certified instructor. He also bakes a decent apple pie and brews a mean cup of tea.
Justin Beauchamp, Program Assistant
Justin Beauchamp is a PhD student in the Sociology program, where their research interests are related to the role of higher education in the public good. As the Program Assistant for the PublicsLab, Justin supports its programming, administration, website, and social media. Prior to The Graduate Center, Justin served in various roles in student life/student affairs at multiple institutions, and has taught undergraduate courses in sociology, leadership development, inquiry and critical thinking, and interdisciplinary studies. They hold a master’s degree in College Student Personnel from Bowling Green State University and a bachelor’s degree in Social Identity Development from the University of Connecticut.
Advisory Committee
Herman Bennett, Professor of History
Duncan Faherty, Associate Professor of English and Director of Early Research Initiatives
Jennifer Furlong, Director of the Office of Career Services
Sarah Hildebrand, Doctoral Candidate in English
Helen Koh, Director of Institutional Giving and Strategic Initiatives
Rachel Kousser, Professor and Executive Officer of Art History
David Olan, Professor of Music and Associate Provost
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