CUNY Podcasts: Recent Episodes
CUNY Podcasts
A conversation about CUNY's ambitions for the coming years with Rachel Stephenson and Cathy N. Davidson of the new Office of Transformation.
CSI and Graduate Center professor Ava Chin uncovers her family's remarkable history and reveals the deeper history of exclusion that defined the Chinese American experience for a century in "Mott Street."
Sidik Fofana, a high school teacher who earned his masters in education at City College, wrote fiction on the side for a decade. He finally got his first book published -- and was awarded a prestigious Whiting Award for Emerging Writers.
Crystal Hana Kim says the Korean War is so deeply ingrained in her family’s history–but so remote for Americans today–that it became the driving force for her to become a writer. “I wanted to force it into our cultural consciousness because it’s known as the Forgotten War,” Kim tells Joe Tirella on this episode […]
As CUNY’s first director of inclusive and adaptive sports, Ryan Martin has quickly built a program featuring men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball teams that compete against colleges from around the country. Martin is a national leader and advocate for adaptive sports and a veteran wheelchair basketball player himself. Born with spina bifida, he lost both […]
Queens College alum Nira Burstein talks about making "Charm Circle," her intensely persona, award-winning documentary about the fractured emotional landscape of her parents' lives in the house in Flushing where Burstein grew up.
On this latest episode of CUNY Uncut, Danny Chicon-Ramirez joins Hannah Kavanagh in discussing the importance of proper race representation in media, how the lack thereof perpetuates negative stereotypes and promotes implicit bias—and how those biases in turn impact every facet of our own personal lives. From there, we try to answer this seemingly age-old question: How can we actively deconstruct racial misrepresentation and where do we go from here?
Alyssa Kitt (GC ’22) joins host Hannah Kavanagh on this latest episode of CUNY Uncut to discuss how her illustrious burlesque career has shaped her views on body positivity, sexual pleasure, confidence, and desire.
Emily Portalatin-Mendez (Lehman ’23) appears on this latest episode of CUNY Uncut to discuss how cryptocurrency and blockchain works, the benefits of investing in it, how Web 3.0 and the metaverse fits into all of this, as well as how different cryptocurrency companies plan on mitigating the environmental and classist issues associated with it—all the while Hannah and the listeners plunge themselves into the unknown.
An immersive new exhibition at Queensborough Community College's renowned Kupferberg Holocaust Center documents the vastness of the Nazi's system of genocide. The center's Laura Cohen and Cary Lane discuss the exhibit and the emotional toll of creating it.
Nearly six decades after he dropped out, Ciro Scala went back to City College, earned two degrees and started a workshop program to help first-generation college students navigate some of the same kinds of challenges that sidetracked his hopes for a college degree.
Timothy Hunter (Baruch MPA ’23 and City Tech ’20) and Djenabou Barry (City College MPA ’22 ’20 and Guttman ’19) join me in discussing how they founded the incredible CUNY-led initiative Strategy for Black Lives as well as how they utilized both their community networks and their studies at CUNY to contribute to the BLM movement--all the while learning more about themselves and the world around them.
Brooklyn College professor emerita Virginia Sánchez Korrol talks about her role as historical consultant for Steven Spielberg's reimagined "West Side Story" and how she helped portray New York’s Puerto Rican community of the 1950s with more authenticity and nuance.
Zohra Saed, a distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, and Mayha Ghouri, a CUNY Law School alumna, have mounted a high-stakes campaign to help an imperiled Afghan writer and his family flee Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Student leader Dave Basnet--a Hunter senior who was just named a Rhodes Scholar--joins Hannah to discuss his experiences being a DACA recipient from Nepal, the various trials and tribulations he faced when solidifying his legal status, and what could be done to make the immigration process more accessible to undocumented people.
National Book Award finalist Grace Cho talks about "Tastes Like War," a memoir of her quest to understand her mother's journey from Korean War bride in the Pacific Northwest to her struggle with schizophrenia.
In "Sparring with Smokin' Joe," CUNY journalism professor Glenn Lewis recalls the epic rivalry between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali -- one that transcended sports, became a cultural and racial touchstone and ultimately defined Frazier's life inside and outside the ring.
CUNY Student Trustee Juvanie Piquant (City Tech ’22) joins me in discussing mental health, how we’re feeling about the stress and anxiety surrounding this fall semester, and how we care for ourselves during difficult times — uncensored, unedited, uncut.
Jimmy Carter is often thought of as a failed one-term president, but in his new political biography of Carter, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, CUNY's Kai Bird argues that Carter was a much more consequential president than he's given credit for.
Ralph Blumenthal's "The Believer" tells the beguiling story of John Mack, a renowned Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize winner whose career came to be defined by his study of people who said they'd had encounters with aliens. Mack believed them, and his life was never the same.
As he prepares to retire after a prodigious career spanning nearly 50 years, a conversation with the founding father of many of CUNY's most innovative and consequential programs of this century.
CUNY's School of Public Health has launched CONVINCE USA, part of a global project to reduce ungrounded fears and misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines and persuade the resistant that the shot is safe, effective--and necessary to end the pandemic. Dr. Scott Ratzan talks about the challenges and the strategies.