CUNYcast: Recent Episodes
The City University of New York
A conversation about CUNY's ambitions for the coming years with Rachel Stephenson and Cathy N. Davidson of the new Office of Transformation.
Sidik Fofana started out writing rap songs as a kid, but it was fiction that really took hold when he was in college. It was a passion, if not a realistic career ambition, and so he kept at it while earning a masters in education at City College, and when he became a high school […]
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.
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.
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.
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.
For Derek Fordjour, an alumnus of Hunter College’s MFA program, the turmoil of 2020 was a canvas for a breakthrough year featuring two critically acclaimed exhibitions. He talks about his life and how he turned his work as a multidisciplinary artist into dazzling and emotional social observation.
A new year conversation with Dr. Bruce Y. Lee of the CUNY School of Public Health on the state of vaccines, the threat of the mutated virus and what the Biden administration needs to do to turn the tide of the pandemic.
Stan Wolfson looks back on his 60-year career as a New York newspaper photographer and photo editor--from covering the biggest news events to his 16 years as the photo editor for CUNY's digital and print publications.
Renowned author Walter Mosley, a City College creative writing alum, is the 2020 recipient of the National Book Foundation's lifetime achievement award. He talks about his life, his work, and the program he helped create at CCNY to open doors for minorities in the publishing industry.
Jessica Harris taught at Queens College for 50 years--and became the country's foremost authority on African American cuisine along the way. The author of a dozen books, she was honored this year with the James Beard Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award. She talks about it all on the CUNYcast.
How Harrison Sheckler, a pianist in the masters program at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, has brought together hundreds of singers and musicians for virtual performances that are bringing a little joy to this dispiriting year.