The Department of Sociology and Anthropology Faculty
Email: Eva.Chou@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-3981
Eva S. Chou, a Professor of English and Interim Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department, received her B.A. from Harvard College in English Literature and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in Chinese Literature. She is interested in works of art both as creative works and in their relation to China’s sense of identity. She has published in three scholarly areas: classical poetry, modern literature, and most recently, ballet in China.
For the classical period, Professor Chou published a study of the towering Tang-dynasty poet Tu Fu, Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context (Cambridge University Press, 1996), as well as many articles on other classical poets and on literary history in journals such as Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. For the modern period, she published a study of the key modern writer Lu Xun, Memory, Violence, and the Queue: Lu Xun Interprets China (Association for Asian Studies Publications, 2012), as well as many articles in journals such as The China Quarterly and Asia Major. Both Tu Fu (Du Fu) and Lu Xun are often taught in Baruch’s Great Works of Literature syllabi. Her current project turns to the topic of ballet in China, which like many aspects of Chinese culture, draws heavily from its literary past. She is writing a history of ballet in China.
At Baruch, she has taught Writing I and I (ENG2100/2150), Great Works of Literature (ENG 2800), Asian American Literature (3032), Contemporary Asian Literature in Translation (3950), Post-colonial Literature (3030), and Anglophone Post-colonial Literature (3036).
Email: gregory.snyder@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: (646) 312-4484
Location: VC 4-251
Gregory J. Snyder is a sociologist and ethnographer who studies subcultures. His research focuses on urban subcultures such as graffiti writers, hip hop artists, musicians and professional skateboarders, with an emphasis on subculture theory, urban space and issues of social justice.
His first book, Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York’s Urban Undergound, (NYU Press, 2009) has received critical acclaim in both the New York Times, and the journal of Contemporary Sociology.
Professor Snyder has recently completed his second book titled, Skateboarding LA: Professional Street Skating in Public Space, (NYU Press, 2017)
His most recent article, “The City and the Subculture Career: Professional Street Skateboarding in LA“, introduces the idea of “subcultural enclaves” as a mechanism for attracting participants to urban centers, which foster “subculture careers” and appears in the international journal, Ethnography (Sage, 2012)
Professor Snyder was the recipient of the 2009-2010 Whiting Fellowship for excellence in teaching. The award came with a full year release from classes during 2009-2010 and a research grant to continue working on his ethnographic study of professional street skateboarders.
He has a Ph.D in Sociology, and an MA in Liberal Studies, from the New School for Social Research, and a BA in History, from the University of Wisconsin, Madision.
He joined the department of sociology and anthropology at Baruch College in the Fall of 2007, where the classes he teaches include, Introduction to Sociology, Urban Sociology, Race and Ethnic Relations, and Social Class in American Life.
Greg grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but has been a New Yorker since January 7, 1992.
Graffiti Lives Video Trailer on Youtube directed by Indie filmmaker Jacob Waxler
Email: glenn.petersen@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646 312-4469
Fax: 646 312-4461
Office: VC4-263
Glenn Petersen is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs. He has worked as an ethnographer in the Central Pacific’s Micronesian islands since the early 1970s, when they were a colony of the United States, and has gone on to represent the Federated States of Micronesia at the United Nations. In recent years he has revisited his experiences fighting in the American colonial war in Vietnam and his newest book is War and the Arc of Human Experience. It is an ethnography of war and in it he explores what leads young people to enlist in the military; how the reasons they enlist shape the ways they experience combat; and how these combat experiences shape the rest of their lives.
He’s been teaching at Baruch College and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center since 1977. He teaches anthropology and geography at Baruch; at the Graduate Center he teaches in the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology and in the Master’s Program in Liberal Studies (MALS), where he specializes in international affairs. He did his undergraduate studies at California State College, Hayward, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Prof. Petersen is an ethnographer, and in addition to his field research in the Pacific islands he has worked in Central America and the Caribbean. He has concentrated especially on Pohnpei in the Eastern Caroline Islands and writes on nearly every aspect of social and cultural life there, but focuses particularly on aspects of traditional chieftainship and social organization there, on the Micronesians’ pursuit of independence, and on the Micronesians’ contemporary political status as a small island nation-state located in a strategically vulnerable position.
In addition to serving as a member of the Federated States of Micronesia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations he taught international affairs at the University of Puerto Rico, where he has also conducted comparative research on Puerto Rico’s political status, and has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian National University. His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institutes of Health, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, among other sources.
Prof. Petersen is especially committed to undergraduate teaching, particularly his introductory anthropology courses at Baruch. He also teaches the college’s human geography and world geography courses; seminars on the anthropology of peace and war and the anthropology of contemporary world issues; and the core course on “the peopling of New York City” for the CUNY Honors College. For Baruch’s Feit Interdisciplinary Seminars program he has co-taught a seminar on Darwin with a paleontologist, on the press and democracy with a journalist, on decolonization and post-colonialism with an English professor, and the character of war with a psychologist.
He works actively to develop the skills of new teachers in his own department, in the college, and throughout the CUNY system. He participates in the college’s writing initiatives and has participated in national programs on higher education and citizenship. A veteran who saw considerable combat duty in Vietnam, he has served as the faculty advisor for Baruch’s veterans club. He is also deeply engaged in the affairs of Baruch’s Faculty Senate and the campus chapter of the university’s faculty union, PSC-CUNY.
Among the international conferences he has recently participated in are the “Migration, Network and Colonial Legacies in Pacific Islands,” at the Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, “Island State Security Conference” at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu; “Power and Hierarchy in the History of Civilizations,” at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia; “Global Perspectives on Island Archaeology,” University of Auckland, New Zealand; “Political Culture, Representation and Electoral Systems in the Pacific,” University of the South Pacific, Port Vila, Vanuatu; “Narrating Colonial Encounters: Germany in the Pacific Islands,” the University of Washington; “The Eighth Annual Symposium on Democracy,” Kent State University; “Pacific Worlds and the American West,” the University of Utah; the Pacific Science Congress, Tahiti, the Symposium on “Disorder” at the University of Sydney, Australia, and the “Thinking Mountains” conference at the University of Alberta.
Among his books are:
One Man Cannot Rule a Thousand: Fission in a Ponapean Chiefdom; Ethnicity and Interests at the 1990 the Federated States of Micronesia Constitutional Convention; and Lost in the Weeds: Theme and Variation in Pohnpei Political Mythology; and Traditional Micronesian Societies: Adaptation, Integration, and Political Organization. War and the Arc of Human Experience appeared in 2021, published by Hamilton/Rowman & Littlefield.
Among his recently published articles are:
“Micronesian Ethnography from a Disordered Soul.” Anthropology & Humanism 44 (1), 112-126, 2019.
“The Abyss Stares Back.” As You Were: The Military Review, 9. http://militaryexperience.org/as-you-were-the-military-review-vol-9/the-abyss-stares-back/ , 2018.
“Led Astray by Too Much Kava.” In L. Zimmer-Tamakoshi, ed. First Fieldwork. University of Hawaii Press, 2018.
“Federated States of Micronesia.” In S. Levine (Ed.), Pacific Ways: Government and Politics in the Pacific Islands. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016.
“At the Intersection of Chieftainship and Constitutional Government: Some Comparisons from Micronesia.” Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 151(2), 265-275, 2015.
“American Anthropology’s ‘Thailand Controversy’: An Object Lesson in Professional Responsibility.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 30(2), 528-549, 2015.
“Everyday Danger: War Trauma in the Absence of Drama.” Blue Nostalgia: A Journal of Pos-Traumatic Growth, 2, 16-32, 2015.
“A Few Steps from Swagger to Terror.” Voices of War. War Writers Campaign. 2014.
“The Possibilities of Violence and the Skills to Avoid It: On Warfare and Its Absence in Traditional Micronesia.” Anthropologica, 56(2), 315-326. (2014).
“The Moral Compass of an Anthropological Career.” Anthropology Now, 4(3), 75-84. (2012).
Email: BKatzRothman@gc.cuny.edu
Phone: 646 312-4470
Fax: 646 312-4461
Location: VC 4264
Website: barbarakatzrothman.com
Barbara Katz Rothman, PhD, is Professor of Sociology, Public Health, Disability Studies and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she also runs the Food Studies concentration.
Her books include IN LABOR; THE TENTATIVE PREGNANCY; RECREATING MOTHERHOOD; THE BOOK OF LIFE; WEAVING A FAMILY:UNTANGLING RACE AND ADOPTION, and LABORING ON, and most recently, A BUN IN THE OVEN: How the Food and BIrth Movements Resist Industrialization. She is Past President of Sociologists for Women in Society; the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and of the President of the Eastern Sociological Society.
Her professional honors and awards include the Lee Founders Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Jesse Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association, the mentoring award of Sociologists for Women in Society, the Award for the Promotion of Human Welfare of the Southern Sociological Society, and a particular source of pride, an award for “Midwifing the Movement” from the Midwives Alliance of North America.
She has been a participant in the Scholars-in-Residence Program of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she conducted research for her book Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption; a Marie Goepert Mayer Professor at the Universitat Osnabrueck in Germany; a Leverhulme Professors at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom; a Visting Professor at the Charite Hospital and Medical School in Berlin; and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and a visting Professor at the International Midwifery Preparation Program of Ryerson University in Toronto Canada,
She received her PhD in Sociology from New York University, but her undergraduate and Master’s degree are from Brooklyn College. Having been a faculty member at Baruch College and the Graduate School since 1979, she considers herself both a true CUNY product and member of the CUNY community.
For more information about her current work, including current blogs and media information, see http://www.BarbaraKatzRothman.com
Selected Publications (Books only):
A Bun in the Oven: HOW THE FOOD AND BIRTH MOVEMENTS RESIST INDUSTRIALIZATION, New York University Press, 2016
Email: carla.bellamy@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646 312-4482
Fax: 646 312-4461
Office: VC4-259
Carla Bellamy is a Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York and chair of the Columbia University Seminar on South Asia. Her ethnographically-based research focuses on the lived realities behind the increasingly politicized terrain of religious identity in contemporary India and the effects of economic liberalization on everyday religious practices and lives. She has authored articles and book chapters on these topics as well as The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place (University of California Press, 2011), and she is currently developing a New Delhi-based ethnography examining the reasons for and consequences of the surge in popularity of Shani, a Hindu planetary deity historically associated with misfortune.
Professor Bellamy is chair of the Columbia University Seminar on South Asia. At Baruch, she has served as Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and she is active in Baruch’s Faculty Senate, where she currently chairs the Budget and Finance Committee and College Wide Undergraduate Curriculum Committee.
Trained in the field of Religious Studies, Professor Bellamy holds a PhD in South Asian Religion from Columbia University and an MTS in World Religion from Harvard Divinity School.
Email: Ken.Guest@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646 312-4477
Fax: 646 312-4461
Location: VC 4-258
Follow on Twitter @kenguestanthro
Ken Guest is a professor, author, and public speaker based in New York City.
Ken is Professor of Anthropology at Baruch College, CUNY where he teaches courses on globalization, cross-cultural interaction, immigration, religion and New York City.
Why Cultural Anthropology is Important?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir6P1oYj2rk
He is author of four books, including the best-selling Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age (WW Norton 2014) and the highly regarded God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York’s Evolving Immigrant Community (NYU Press 2003).
H is media appearances include television (CCTV, NY1, Sinovision, Telemundo) and radio segments (BBC, NPR Morning Edition, Marketplace, The Brian Lehrer Show) and his research has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, The Taipei Times and other media outlets.
Ken’s more than 20 years of ethnographic research in China and the United States traces the immigration journey of recent Chinese immigrants from Fuzhou, southeast China, who, drawn by restaurant, garment shop, and construction jobs and facilitated by a vast human smuggling network, have revitalized New York’s Chinatown. His writing explores the role of Fuzhounese religious communities in China and the United States; the religious revival sweeping coastal China; the Fuzhounese role in the rapidly expanding U.S. network of all-you-can-eat buffets and take-out restaurants; and the higher education experiences of the Fuzhounese second generation.
A native of Florida, Ken studied Chinese at Beijing University and Middlebury College. He received his B.A. from Columbia University (East Asian Languages and Cultures), an M.A. from Union Theological Seminary (Religious Studies), and the M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. from The City University of New York Graduate Center (Anthropology).
Books
Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age
Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age
Email: robbieroot@gmail.com
Phone: 646 312-4481
Fax: 646 312-4461
Location: VC4-255
Robin Root is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (BA and MA, Chinese Studies); Harvard University (MPH, Population and International Health); and the University of California at Los Angeles (PhD, Anthropology).
As a medical anthropologist, Dr. Root examines the interface among socio-cultural anthropology, political economy, and global health in order to advance the social scientific understanding of risk and resilience as well as ethics and care, and to inform health and development programs. Using ethnographic and formal qualitative research methods, her work investigates how individuals and communities negotiate diverse risks to wellbeing; establish social networks; navigate illness-related stigmas; and seek treatment amidst larger scale structural vulnerabilities in culture-specific ways that inform our understanding of human diversity. In October 2007, she received the Steven Polgar Prize, which is awarded to a professional medical anthropologist for the best paper published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, the journal of record for the Society for Medical Anthropology.
A Fulbright Scholar in Malaysia, Dr. Root conducted ethnographic research inside factories and around export processing zones to investigate the Malaysian government’s labeling of factories as high risk for HIV/AIDS. Her publications describe how the globalization of capital, labor, and disease produced 1) a moral imagination of HIV risk that expressed Malaysia’s anxieties of a post-colonial modernity, 2) real threats to local, migrant, and immigrant women’s wellbeing. The research was supported by a National Institute of Mental Health AIDS Training Grant. In 2022, with local scholars, she will initiate a phenomenological study of breast cancer among conservative Muslim women in Kelantan, Malaysia to understand why women frequently present at late stages.
Since 2005, her research in eSwatini has become a longitudinal study of religion, specifically Christianity, as an under-theorized and highly politicized public health asset with untapped programmatic potential in an environment of extreme suffering and resilience. In different parts of the country and with local organizational partners, she has used a mixed methods approach, drawing on household survey, semi-structured questionnaire, and in-depth interview methods with diverse groups, including HIV positive individuals, pastors, chiefs, indvunas, traditional healers, clinic physicians and nurses, as well as AIDS support group leaders to examine: 1) perceived stigma among HIV positive individuals; 2) local churches as complex post-colonial institutions that may mediate (or exacerbate) health risks, structural vulnerabilities, and stigma; 3) an ethics of resilience. Religion and HIV/AIDS is a subject of heightened interest in academic and policy arenas, given that Christian faith-based organizations have become the double-edged sword in the war on AIDS; on the one hand lauded as the future of effective local care and, on the other, indicted as nothing less than a neocolonialist attempt to control the minds, bodies, and sexual/reproductive relationships of people in poor countries.
Prior to joining the Baruch College faculty, Dr. Root was a Visiting Scholar at New York University in the office of the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she launched an initiative to strengthen multidisciplinary HIV/AIDS research collaborations between universities and community organizations in New York City and South Africa. As a research associate at Harvard Business School, Dr. Root drew on her field research in Malaysia to co-author case studies with HBS faculty on marketing in the Middle East. She subsequently joined a health care consulting firm with a research team of physicians and senior executives to co-author Best Practices publications on hospital and clinical care management in the US that are used nationwide.
Awards: Dr. Root has received the Steven Polgar Prize, awarded to the best paper published in the journal of record of the Society for Medical Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2007). She received a Whiting Fellowship Award (2007) for excellence in the teaching of the humanities at Baruch College. At the Harvard School of Public Health, she was a student commencement speaker (1994) where she spoke on the importance of incorporating socioeconomic status into public health research and practice. She formerly co-chaired the Committee for Human Rights for the American Anthropological Association, where she also helped to establish a taskforce on Health & Human Rights.
Selected Publications:
Journal articles and book chapters
Root, Robin and Alan Whiteside. A qualitative study of community home-based care and antiretroviral adherence in Swaziland. Journal of the International AIDS Society 16:17978.
Root, Robin. “Free love: a case study of church-run home-based caregivers in a high vulnerability setting“. Global Public Health. 6 Suppl 2:S174-91, 2011.
Root, Robin. “Situating PLWHA Experiences of HIV-related Stigma in Swaziland”. Global Public Health: An International Journal for Research, Policy and Practice. 5(5): 1744-1692, 2010.
Root, Robin. “Being Positive in Church: Religious Participation and HIV Disclosure Rationale Among People Living with HIV/AIDS in Rural Swaziland.” African Journal of AIDS Research 8(3): 295-309, 2009.
Root, Robin. “Hazarding Health: Experiences of Body, Work, and Risk Among Factory Women in Malaysia.” Health Care for Women International. 30(10): 903-918, 2009.
Root, Robin. ‘Controlling Ourselves, By Ourselves’: Risk Assemblages on Malaysia’s Assembly Lines.” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 27(4): 405-434, 2008.
Root, Robin. “Mixing’ as an Ethnoetiology for HIV/AIDS in Malaysia’s Multinational Factories.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 20(3): 321-344, 2006. (Steven Polgar Prize)
Root, Robin. “AIDS as Occupational Hazard: Racial Mixing and Historical Space in Malaysia’s Multinationals.” History and Anthropology 17(1): 73-90, 2006.
Root, Robin and Carole Browner. “Practices of the Pregnant Self: Compliance With and Resistance to Prenatal Norms.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 25: 195-223, 2001.
Root, Robin and Alan Whiteside. Foreword. Religion and HIV and AIDS: Charting the Terrain. Edited by Beverly Haddad. Durban, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011.
Root, Robin and Carole Browner. “Anthropology/Sociology: The Cultural Context of Reproductive Health.” Encyclopedia of Public Health. Edited by Kris Heggenhougen. San Diego, CA: Elsevier Inc. 2008.
Reports and case studies
“That’s When Life Changed”: PLWHA Experiences of Church Run Home-Based Care in Swaziland. A Report for the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division, University of KwaZulu-Natal. October 2011. Click for PDF
Email: Carolle.Charles@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: (646) 312-4473
Location: VC 4256
Dr. Carolle Charles is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Baruch College. As a scholar her research and work concentrate on processes and agencies both in Haitian society and within the Haitian immigrant communities of North America. Her academic training and her experiences in transnational networking provide the depth and the scope of her scholarships.
Dr. Charles’s present scholarly work concentrate in three key areas of Gender, Race, Class and Ethnicity as they intersect with Immigration Processes. Bridging many disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, political science, history, gender and ethnic studies, her contribution is only to Haitian Studies, but also to the fields of Caribbean and Latin American Studies.
Lately, I have been exploring the relationships of Nation, Race, Immigration and Citizenship in the process of creating Identities. These new insights, particularly with the focus on Citizenship as a contentious process and not only as a political status, has led me to new explorations on the concept itself and embedded and embodied in many practices of inclusion and exclusion within and outside the State.
Dr. Charles is a 2000-2001 Fulbright recipient for Haiti. In 2012 she was elected as the President of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) and in 2017 she served as President of the Haitian Studies Association (HSA). Dr. Charles was on the editorial board of the Journals Gender and Society, a journal of feminism, Identity a journal of Transnationalism, and Wadabaguei, a journal of Caribbean studies.
Selected Publications:
Charles, C. (2014). A sociological counter-reading of Chauvet as an “outsider within: Paradox in the Construction of Haitian Women. Journal of Haitian Studies, Vol 20, 2, February 2014.
Charles, C. (2013). New York 1967-1971: Prelude to Ti Dife Boule: An encounter with Liberation Theology, Marxism and the Black National Liberation Movement. Journal of Haitian Studies, Fall 2013, Vol 19, No 2.
Charles, C. (2011). Reflections on being machan e machandiz Meridian Vol 11, No 1, 2011. Gina Ulysse editor Section on Haitian Women. Meridian, 11(1).
Charles, C. (2006). Political Refugees or Economic Immigrants? A new “old” debate within the Haitian Immigrant Communities but with Contestations and division. Journal of American Ethnic History, (Winter-Spring 2006), Vol 25, 2-3, 190-198.
In Linden Lewis Ed. The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean. “Popular Imageries of Gender and Sexuality: Poor and working class Haitian women’s Discourses on the use of their bodies” Florida University Press 2003.
In Percy Hintzen and Jean Rahier eds, The Invisible Others/Active Presences: Self-Ethnographies Problematizing Blackness. “Being Black Twice” Routlege Press 2003.
In Revista VERTICE/FLACSO, “Cuidadania, Raza y Nacion: Una Reflexion. Santo Domingo, DR. March 2001, 4 pages.
7. Gender and Poverty in Haiti. A UNDP report. New York, February 2000. 80 pages.
Charles, C. (1995). “Feminist action and research in Haiti”. Caribbean Studies, 28(1), pp 61-76.
Charles, C. (1995). “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti: The Duvalierst State, Transnationalism, and the Emergence of a New Feminism (1980-1990). Feminist Studies, 21(1).
Room: VC 4-265
Phone: (646) 312-4337
Email: Katrin.Hansing@baruch.cuny.edu
Dr. Katrin Hansing is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College (CUNY). Prior to her tenure at Baruch she was the Associate Director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University in Miami. As an anthropologist she has spent the last thirteen years conducting research in the Caribbean (especially Cuba) and Southern Africa and its diasporas. Her main areas of interest and expertise include: race/ethnicity, religion, migration, transnational relations, remittances, medical internationalism, youth, and civil society. Currently she is working on a new book project on contemporary Cuban youth.
Dr. Hansing received her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford and is the author of numerous publications including the book Rasta, Race, and Revolution: The Emergence and Development of the Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba (2006). She has worked as a consultant for think tanks and policy institutes, is often quoted in the international media and recently completed her first documentary film: ‘Freddy Ilanga: Che’s Swahili Translator’ about Cuban – African relations.
Email: Theodore.Henken@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646 312-3888
Fax: 646 312-4461
Location: VC 4-257
Blog: “El Yuma”
Professor Ted A. Henken is a tenured associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY) and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Black and Latino Studies, where he served as chairperson between 2010-2012.
A past winner of Baruch College’s Presidential Excellence Award in Distinguished Teaching (2007), Henken specializes in courses on contemporary Cuban culture and society, introduction to sociology, sociology of the Internet, contemporary Latin America, Latinos in the U.S., comparative race and ethnic relations, the sociology of religion, international migration, and comparative urban studies courses on Havana, New York, and New Orleans.
One of his most popular and original courses, “The City that Care Forgot: The Roots, Ruin, and Rebirth of New Orleans,” is an honors seminar that includes a week-long service-learning trip from “The Big Apple” to “The Big Easy,” where he has led his students on a variety of civic engagement and educational activities. Henken even co-wrote the article, “Civic Engagement in the City that Care Forgot,” with two of his students explaining their approach to service-learning and engaged scholarship.
During the spring 2018, Henken held the Alfonso Reyes Chair as a visiting professor of Latin American Studies at the Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique Latine (IHEAL) of the Sorbonne (Paris-3), where he taught two graduate-level seminars on comparative race and ethnic relations (between the US and Latin America) and the rise and fall of the “Pink Tide” in Latin America.
Henken earned his Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from Tulane University’s Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies and is a past president of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE, 2012-2014).
Henken has closely followed the political and socioeconomic impact of increased Internet access and social media use in Cuba since the turn of the century. In that vein, he co-edited the book, Cuba’s Digital Revolution: Citizen Innovation and State Policy, with Sara Garcia Santamaria (University of Florida Press, 2021). He has also published articles on the emergent independent digital media landscape on the island, including “The Opiate of the Paquete” (Cuban Studies 50, 2021), “Cuba’s Digital Millennials” (Social Research, 2017), “From Cyberspace to Public Space? The Emergent Blogosphere and Cuban Civil Society,” published in The Revolution under Raúl Castro: A Contemporary Cuba Reader (2015), and a 2011 Spanish language article about the polarization of the Cuban “blogosphere” in the journal Nueva Sociedad.
Additionally, Henken writes the annual “Freedom on the Net” and “Freedom in the World” reports on Cuba for Freedom House.
Henken’s research also focuses on the social implications of Cuban economic reform and the rise of the private, “self-employed” sector on the island over the last 30 years (1990-2020). He is the co-author with Archibald Ritter of the book, Entrepreneurial Cuba: The Changing Policy Landscape, originally published in 2015 by FirstForumPress, an imprint of Lynne Rienner Publishers. Called “encyclopedic, balanced, and laudable … the most comprehensive and profound on self-employment so far,” by the eminent Cuban economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago, the book looks at how Cuba has dramatically reformed its policies toward small private enterprise during the presidency of Raúl Castro, how Cuban entrepreneurs have responded with creativity and innovation, and what the U.S. can do to encourage greater reforms and empower the Cuban entrepreneurial class. Weaving in rich ethnographic research and extensive interviews done on the island between 2000 and 2014 with a variety of entrepreneurs, the book evaluates how and to what extent Raúl’s economic reforms differed from the much more rigid past policies of his “big brother” Fidel. The Spanish edition of the book (Editorial Hypermedia, 2020) features an epilogue that covers the 2015-2020 period with Miguel Díaz-Canel as Cuban president and Donald Trump in the White House.
Henken has published various scholarly articles and book chapters in this same research trajectory including, “Between the ‘Party Line’ and the ‘Bottom Line’: El Proyecto Artecorte and the Virtuous Circle of Entrepreneurial Solidarity in One Old Havana Neighborhood,” in the book, The Cuba-U.S. Bilateral Relationship New Pathways and Policy Choices edited by Michael J. Kelly, Erika Moreno, and Richard C. Witmer (Oxford University Press, 2019); “Self-Employed but Not Alone: Artecorte and Social Entrepreneurship in the New Cuba,” in the book Cuba Facing Forward: Balancing Development and Identity in the Twenty-First Century edited by David White, Lucas Spiro, Victor Silva, and Anya Brickman Raredon (Affordable Housing Institute, 2018), and “A Taste of Capitalism? Competing Notions of Cuban Entrepreneurship in Havana’s Paladares” (Human Geography 10: 3, 2017), co-authored with Gabriel Vignoli
Henken has travelled to Cuba over 30 times since 1997 in order to conduct research and interviews, attend conferences, and build bridges of mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States and Cuba. In March 2016, he was invited by the Obama White House to be present for the President’s historic state visit to the island. He has led educational, people-to-people visits to the island for U.S. business executives, filmmakers, and cruise ships, as well as serving as an on-camera consultant for the CNBC program “The Profit,” starring Marcus Lemonis, shot on-location in Havana for a show on Cuban entrepreneurship that aired in November 2016.
Henken has also promoted scholarly, student, and cultural exchanges with Cuba through Tulane University’s Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute and the non-profit cultural exchange group CubaNOLA Arts Collective, as well as participating in the planning and execution of Baruch College’s own study abroad courses in Cuba in 2012, 2013, and 2015. Additionally, in the mid-1990s, he worked for Catholic Social Services in Mobile, Alabama, helping to resettle Cuban refugees from the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay. Subsequently, he has served as an expert witness in more than a half-dozen asylum cases, writing affidavits of support to court officials in the Netherlands and the U.S. on behalf of Cuban refugees.
As a past President of ASCE, Henken has also been instrumental in building bridges of academic exchange and collaboration with Cuban scholars, public intellectuals, and independent civil society activists, hosting scores of Cuban visitors to the United States since 2013. Among the more notable of these guests have been the pioneering blogger and director of 14ymedio Yoani Sánchez, the social entrepreneur behind Proyecto Artecorte Gilberto “Papito” Valladares, the leading economist Omar Everleny Pérez, and Cuba’s most widely read contemporary novelist Leonardo Padura.
Henken has lectured on Cuba at major U.S. universities and think tanks including Columbia, Georgetown, Brown, Tulane, NYU, the University of Miami, FIU, the University of Texas at Austin, the Americas Society, the Brookings Institution, The Woodrow Wilson Center, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Dialogue, and the Cato Institute. He has been interviewed by leading international newspapers and media outlets on Cuba, including The New York Times, CNBC, CNN, PBS News Hour, The Wall Street Journal, CCTV, Al Jazeera, USA Today, Time Magazine, the AP, Reuters, The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR’s “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered,” “Marketplace,” and “On Point,” and the BBC’s “The World” program, among others. He has also served as a consultant on Cuba for the White House, the U.S. Department of State, the IMF, the GAO, USAID, the Mexican Foreign Ministry, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, PEN America, CNN, CNBC, NPR, and The Boston Red Sox.
In April, 2014, following the AP’s story on ZunZuneo, Henken was asked by the New York Times for his take on the pros and cons of this “Cuban Twitter” program set up by the USAID. You can read his answer to the question, “When is foreign aid meddling?” at the Times’ “Room for Debate” page, where he begins by saying, “When it undermines local voices.” A longer version of his response is available on his blog, “El Yuma.”
Henken is the co-editor of Cuba in Focus (ABC-CLIO, 2013), a volume on “all things Cuban” co-edited with Havana residents and independent scholars Miriam Celaya and Dimas Castellanos. The book is the result of a collaboration with a group of Cubans from the island who give their own analysis and critique of the Cuban Revolution and the heady changes that have taken place on the island since Raúl Castro took power in 2008. You can read the preface and see the table of contents here.
The book benefits from the participation of a host of perceptive and pioneering authors and activists, including the late Óscar Espinosa Chepe, his wife Miriam Leiva, renown blogger Yoani Sánchez, her husband journalist Reinaldo Escobar, Armando Chaguaceda, Regina Coyula, Henry Constantín, Marlene Azor Hernández, Rogelio Fabio Hurtado, Miguel Iturria Savón, and Wilfredo Vallín.
Henken’s previous book, Cuba: A Global Studies Handbook (ABC-CLIO, 2008), is a comprehensive overview and reference guide to the island’s history and culture.
Originally from Pensacola, Florida, Henken lives in the Village of Floral Park, Long Island, just east of New York City with his wife Tasha, their son Dimitrios Jackson, their daughter Magdalena María, and their dog Cosita.
He travels to Cuba as frequently as he can. However, while all of his trips have been quite fruitful some have included episodes that either made them not end very well! or never even get started!
Traveling to Cuba yourself? Here’s some unsolicited advice.
Click here to download Professor Henken’s (now quite outdated) underground guide to the island, “Notes from the Underground.”
Email: George.Gonzalez@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646- 312-4485
Location: VC4-271
George González is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology (Religion and Culture) at Baruch College-CUNY. Within religious studies, he specializes in religion and economy, secularism studies, theories and methods in the study of religion, and religion and society (Modern West). He is the author of several peer-reviewed and scholarly articles as well as a single-authored monograph entitled Shape-Shifting Capital—Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project. This first book is a critical analysis of the ‘spiritual’ turn in organizational theory and workplace practice.
Most broadly, Professor González’ research interests lay in the sociocultural legislation of Western metaphysics and the concrete and specific form of power that has attached to neoliberalism, as a historically specific kind of cosmology. In this, he pays special attention to cybernetic theory as a cultural dominant. He remains especially interested in approaching the study and criticism of what he calls postsecular capitalism through the framework of religious social change. Professor González’ has special interests in the work ethnography can do at the intersections of religion, science, and global capitalism and as a complement and corrective to critical theory. Professor González’ second major research project focuses on the American ritualization of consumer capitalism. Within the scope of this project, Professor González conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the famed radical performance community and choir, the Stop Shopping Church (a.k.a. Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping) between 2016 and 2021. He has also conducted historiographical research into American marketing history in tandem with the fieldwork. He is busy at work on a new manuscript tentatively titled The Religion of Everyday Life (Under contract with NYU Press) based on this research. It is due to publish in 2023.
Professor González is on the Editorial Board for Critical Research on Religion. He is also a Research Associate at the Center for Critical Research on Religion and Research Associate at theEdward Bailey Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion (U.K.). Professor González served on the inaugural steering committee for the Religion and Economy Program Unit at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) from 2016-2021. Professor González has reviewed for various scholarly journals and academic publishers in the study of religion.
Trained as a philosophical anthropologist (or existential sociologist), Professor González is committed to empowering students to better comprehend how power is reproduced in their own richly textured lives and teeming lifeworlds. As the son of Latin-American immigrants (from Peru and Cuba), a first-generation college student, and a native New Yorker, Professor González enjoys pursuing a research and teaching agenda at Baruch College that is firmly grounded and anchored in City life.
Professor González received his B.A. from Yale College (Comparative Literature), an M.A.R. from Yale Divinity School (Ethics), and a Ph.D. from Harvard Divinity School (Religion and Society). Prior to moving to Baruch in the Fall of 2018, he taught at Monmouth University (West Long Branch, NJ).
Professor González is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Eugene Lang Junior Faculty Fellowship (AY 22-23) and PSC-CUNY research grants (AY 20-21, 21-22, 22-23).
Click here to stay up to date with Professor González’ scholarly and professional activities.
Email: susan.chambre@baruch.cuny.edu
Susan M. Chambré was a faculty member at Baruch College from 1980 until 2016 when she became a Professor Emerita. Her previous positions were at Yeshiva University and as a Research Scientist doing policy research at the New York City Human Resources Administration. She received her B.A. from Queens College, CUNY and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Her research on civic engagement, nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, and public policy has been supported by the Aspen Institute, the Rockefeller Archives Center, the PSC-CUNY Grant Program and the AARP Andrus Foundation.
She served on the editorial board of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly from 1992 until 2016 and was the Vice President for Publications of ARNOVA, the Association for Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action. Her professional and community service has also involved serving on the boards of several community-based and national organizations, probono consulting for UJA-Federation’s Management Assistance Program and a regular contributor to Jewish Book World.
At the present time, her work-in-progress focuses on the dynamics of civic engagement and the impact of patient advocacy groups on the culture and politics of health policy in the U.S. She is a faculty affiliate of Baruch’s Center for Nonprofit Management and Strategy providing pro bono consulting on volunteer management. She serves as a peer reviewer for professional journals in Sociology, Gerontology and Nonprofit Management and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Applied Gerontology.
Selected publications:
Books:
Patients, Consumers and Civil Society, coedited with Melinda Goldner (Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 2008). Click for Introduction.
Fighting for Our Lives: New York’s AIDS Community and the Politics of Disease (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
Good Deeds in Old Age: Volunteering by the New Leisure Class (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987).
Articles:
Philanthropy in the United States | Jewish Women’s Archive (jwa.org). 2021.
“Has Volunteering Changed in the United States? Trends, Styles and Motivations in Historical Perspective. Social Service Review 94, 2020, pp. 373-421.
“Baby Boomers and the Long-Term Transformation of Retirement and Volunteering: Evidence for a Policy Paradigm Shift “(with F. Ellen Netting). Journal of Applied Gerontology, 37, 2018, pp. 1245-1320.
“AIDS Treatment Advocacy in the US, Brazil and South Africa: Diverse Actors, Strategies and Sectors.” Pp. 45-72 in Raymond A. Smith (ed.). Global HIV/AIDS Politics, Policy and Activism: Persistent Challenges and Emerging Issues. Vol 3 (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013).
“Who Volunteers? Constructing a Hybrid Theory” (with Christopher Einolf), International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 16, 2012, pp. 283-310.
“Volunteering.” The Encyclopedia of Retirement and Finance, Lois N. Vitt, ed., 2003, pp. 764-769.
“Beyond the Liability of Newness: Nonprofit Organizations in an Emerging Policy Domain.” (with Naomi Fatt). Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 31, 4, December 2002, pp. 502-524.
“The Changing Nature of ‘Faith’ in Faith-Based Organizations Secularization and Ecumenicism in Four AIDS Organizations in New York City.” Social Service Review, 75, 3, September 2001, pp. 435-455.
“Redundancy, Innovation and Fragmentation: HIV/AIDS Nonprofit Organizations in New York City, 1981-1992.” Policy Studies Journal, 27 # 4 (1999): 840-854.
“Civil Society, Differential Resources, and Organizational Development: HIV/AIDS Organizations in New York City, 1982-1992.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 26 #4 (December 1997): 466-488. Winner of the Best Article Award, Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, 1998.
“AIDS Funding and the Rhetoric of Scarcity.” Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 7, #2 (Winter 1996): 155-168.
“Funding the Fight Against AIDS in New York City: The Evolution of Private Funding, 1983-1992.” Health Affairs, 15, 1 (Fall 1996): 250-260.
“HIV/AIDS as a Chronic Disease: Emergence from the Plague Model.” with Christy L. Beaudin, American Behavioral Scientist, 39 #6 (May 1996): 684-706.
“Creating New Nonprofit Organizations as Response to Social Change: HIV/AIDS Organizations in New York City.” Policy Studies Review, 14, #1-2 (Spring/Summer 1995): 117-127.
“Uncertainty, Diversity, and Change: The AIDS Community in New York City.” Research in Community Sociology, edited by Dan A. Chekki. Volume 6, 1996, Westport, CT.: JAI Press, 1995: 149-190.
“Being Needful: Family, Love and Prayer Among AIDS Volunteers.” Research in the Sociology of Health Care, Volume 12, edited by Jennie Jacobs Kronfeld. Westport, Ct.: JAI Press, 1995: 113-39.
Email: MJPlekon@aol.com, michael.plekon@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: (646) 312- 4472
Location: VC 4266
Michael Plekon’s areas of specialization include the social history of American religious traditions and communities, social theory and its connections with theology, the social and theological thought of Søren Kierkegaard, contemporary Eastern Orthodox theology and theologians of the Russian emigration. He also has focused his writing on persons of faith in our time, their lives and writings. His most recent books examine changes in the American religious landscape, religious “nones” and “dones,” the decline but also revival of congregations and what all of this means for clergy and laity.
He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, as well as an honorary Fellow of the Fulbright Program, and of the American Scandinavian Institute and Lutheran World Federation at the University of Copenhagen’s Institute for Systematic Theology in 1979-80 and 1981, working on Kierkegaard’s social and theological criticism.
Having published many articles on Kierkegaard and other modern theologians, he has also edited, translated and published several volumes of the writings of theologians Paul Evdokimov, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Arthur Carl Piepkorn, and Nicolas Afanasiev, among others. His own books include a study of ten remarkable 20th century persons of faith in the Eastern Church, also one on the ordinary, diverse shapes of holiness in our time, and two others on American spiritual writers and on prayer in everyday life. There are two books on the shrinkage and the resurrection of communities of faith and one in progress on the future of the clergy The American writer and monk Thomas Merton has been the focus of a number of his articles and papers..He continues to write and lecture and is a reviewer for several blogs and journals. He has been a priest of the Eastern and Western churches and has served in five parishes over the past more than forty years in ministry.
He received his A.B. from The Catholic University of America and his M.A. and Ph.D from Rutgers University, where he was a student of Peter L. Berger.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
The Church has Left the Building
Michael Plekon. Saints as they really are…–American Voices, Lives and Paths to Holiness, University of Notre Dame Press, 2013.
Michael Plekon and John A. Jillions, editors, Jerry Ryan, translator, Antoine Arjakovsky, The Generation of Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration: The Journal The Way (1925-1940), University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming, 2013.
Michael Plekon, editor, Jerry Ryan, translator, Hyacinthe Destivelle, The Moscow Council of 1917-1918, University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming, 2014.
Olga Lossky, Towards the endless day: a life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (1907-2005), Michael Plekon and Jerry Ryan, trans., University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.
Hidden Holiness, University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.
Nicolas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, by Nicolas Afanasiev, trans. Vitaly Permiakov, Michael Plekon, ed., with introductory essay, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Tradition Alive: An Anthology on the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time, edited, translations, introductory essay, Sheed & Ward/Rowan & Littlefield, 2003
Living Icons: People of Faith in the Eastern Church and Holiness in Our Time, (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, paper, 2004).
“Relativism and Fundamentalism : An Eastern Church Perspective from the “Paris School” and Living Tradition,” in Relativism and Fundamentalism in Religious Traditions. ed. James Davidson Hunter, Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2010.