The Center for the Humanities’ CUNY Adjunct Incubator, co-sponsored by the Gittell Urban Studies Collective, is a framework for supporting the significant scholarly, creative, and pedagogical work of adjuncts teaching in the humanities and humanistic social sciences across CUNY. Providing social, logistical, financial, and professional support for the production and circulation of knowledge by CUNY adjuncts, this platform promotes the crucial work of part-time faculty across CUNY community and senior college campuses.

Learn more about the program here.

CUNY Adjunct Grant-Funded Projects & Scholarship 

In 2018, the CUNY Adjunct Incubator awarded grants to 13 CUNY adjuncts from 6 CUNY colleges to develop a wide-range of deeply impactful public and applied projects in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. These projects range from addressing the needs and amplifying the successes of CUNY student-parents, to writing and performing new musical compositions for 3D-printed instruments, to photo-documentation of the erasure of Kurdish language from Kurdistan/Turkey, to food provision mapping that elucidates eating habits, access, and food inequities, and many more projects taking the form of concerts, dance, music, workshops, books, film, performance, classes, independent scholarship, and events. Read more about these grant-funded projects and the vital research and work by these outstanding CUNY adjuncts:

As part of a research project supported by the CUNY Adjunct Incubator, Graduate Center PhD candidate Angelika Winner outlines the thinking and methods behind her ethnographic study of food provisioning practices in Newark, NJ. Taking a critical approach to the dominant narrative that links the notion of food deserts with obesity rates, Winner seeks to develop an intersectional and dynamic understanding of food environments, eating habits, access, and their entanglements with food inequities.

Gabrielle Kappesand Aaron Botwick, Adjunct Professors in the English Department at Lehman College, CUNY, are developing “Creating a Literary Commons: Engaging Students in Digital Archives,” which is designed to enable students to better grasp the relationships between literature, culture, and history by drawing connections between the digital archives of 18th through the 20th century literature and aspects of the current digital communications revolution.

Through a series of scaffolded assignments, students will engage with and explore 18th through the 20th century digital archives and ultimately produce a multi-modal essay on a shared CUNY Academic Commons website—one that includes prints, letters, and other historical documents, along with objects held in the collections of various museums and libraries—written for a public audience.

Demet Arpacik (Middle and High School Education, Lehman College, CUNY), in Visual Documentation of the Clearance of Kurdish Language from the Linguistic Landscape of Kurdistan/Turkey, gathers visual data via photography to document the changing linguistic landscape of the several Kurdish cities in the Kurdistan region of Turkey – Diyarbakır, Batman, Şırnak, Mardin – during this particularly turbulent time.

Jason Fox, an Adjunct Professor in Film & Media at at Hunter College, CUNY is developing a research project, “The Right to the Image: Syrian Film Collective Abounaddara’s Emergency Cinema,” which is a collection of essays that offers a critical introduction to the groundbreaking videos and activism of Abounaddara, the anonymous Syrian film collective.

Harry Stafylakis (Music, City College of New York, CUNY) in Innovating Technology In Art: Developing Contemporary Music for 3D-Printed Instruments, aims to create a new musical composition, Singularity, 2018, for 3D-printed string octet and orchestra.