cuny

2025 CUNY Adjunct incubators awardees

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We are honored to announce the 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator Awardees. The projects represented here reflect just some of the creative, critical, and community-engaged work that is happening right now at CUNY. And this year, we have an unprecedented number of faculty awardees from our community colleges, showcasing the immense work across our 2-year, 4-year, and graduate schools. Faculty will embark on their projects in the summer of 2025, and we look forward to hearing more about their progress later next year. 

Since 2019, the Gittell Collective and the Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center have honored the scholarly and creative work of our university’s adjunct faculty through the CUNY Adjunct Incubator. Now under the auspices of Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2), the initiative continues to support and highlight the significant, critical and community-engaged scholarship and pedagogy work of adjuncts teaching across CUNY. Meet our 2025 Awardees and learn about their grant-funded projects and scholarship:

Tusia Dabrowska

Design, Queens College; Film, John Jay College

Tusia Dabrowska is a Polish American artist who works at the intersection of storytelling, performance and media. Tusia teaches courses in Design at Queens College and in Film and Videography at John Jay College. 

“As a 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will continue to investigate the symbolic and political meaning of the newly erected border in the Białowieża forest. My research will focus on the refugee experience. This work will build toward a three channel, immersive iteration of ‘I No Longer Believe We Are Good People.’” 

Seth Fein

Film, LaGuardia Community College

Seth Fein is a historian and filmmaker. He operates Seven Local Film, which he founded in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he lives. He teaches Film at LaGuardia Community College. 

“My video essay will connect the lives and careers of Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) and Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) across the borough in which they both lived and worked. Working between archival research and original footage, expository and participatory narration, ‘Noguchi and Cornell through Queens’ engages the past and present of place to consider each of these seminal-yet-outlier artists differently by contemplating their ‘outerborough’ worlds together.”

Naziat Hassan

Queensborough Community College

Naziat Hassan is a licensed mental health counselor at Queensborough Community College, with expertise in treating individuals, adolescents, adults, and families facing mood disorders, trauma, and substance abuse.

“As a 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will uplift underrepresented communities by raising awareness around mental health and well-being through culturally sensitive education, advocacy, and community outreach. By highlighting the unique challenges these populations face, I aim to create spaces for open dialogue, reduce stigma, and promote access to resources that support mental and emotional health.”

Diana Higuera-Cortés

Languages and Literatures, Lehman College

Diana Higuera-Cortes is a PhD student in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures (LAILaC) program at the Graduate Center-CUNY. A former CUNY Humanities Alliance fellow, Diana teaches Spanish at Lehman College. 

“As a 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will develop La Loteria Niuyorkina: A pedagogical game/toolkit to explore Spanish varieties though the Linguistic Landscape of New York City. The project will engage students from Lehman College and Queens College in the study of the public spaces they navigate everyday as well as an exploration of common Spanglish words and expressions that shape their identity.”

Alex Ho and Joy Liu

Department of Ethnic and Race Studies, Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC)

Joy Liu is a Therapist/ Clinical Social Worker. A former Museum educator, Joy now teaches in the Department of Ethnic and Race Studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). 

Alex Ho is an ethnic studies and media arts educator with ten years of education experience and a film and media Alex teaches in the Department of Ethnic and Race Studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). 

“As a 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardees, we will collaborate and explore family histories and cultural identities through a collaborative autoethnographic process of dialogue, artmaking, and oral history collection.”

Alice Kallman

Mina Rees Library, CUNY Graduate Center

Alice Kallman is an adjunct reference librarian in the Dissertation Office at the Mina Rees Library at CUNY Graduate Center. Over the course of studies, she worked at the New York Public Library, and then with an oral history project at the Queens Public Library. Alice also works part time at the Queens Public Library in the Correctional Outreach department doing reentry programming for individuals returning home from incarceration.

“As a 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will continue developing my ongoing project to document Syrian culinary superstitions. This will take the form of further interviews with Syrians in the diaspora – increasing my scope of research from just Syrian Jews to Syrians of all religions. I will also work on my website/digital archive that aims to hold the linkages within collected stories. Finally, I will use this funding to create a physical experience to display my findings, something between an exhibition, family meal, and immersive audio experience as guided by the research process.” 

Jerald Isseks

Guttman Community College

Jerald Isseks is a critical educational scholar, an organizer and a writer who teaches in the First-Year Experience program at Guttman Community College. 

“As a 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will continue developing a participatory research program for first-year students at Guttman Community College. Specifically, this will involve organizing a regular end-of-semester event where student researchers can present their work to the academic community, eliciting interest and support for action campaigns they’ve conceived to confront local and institutional issues of injustice.”

Hannah Weiss

Urban Planning and Policy, Hunter College

Hannah Weiss is an adjunct lecturer in Urban Planning and Policy at Hunter College. 

“As a 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will collaborate with people who have navigated eviction and nonprofit attorneys striving to fulfill the promise of Right to Counsel (RTC). Through case studies and narrative, I hope to highlight the human element that is lost when data dominates eviction discourse, and light a fire under leaders to fund RTC and re-imagine housing court.”

Natalie Willens

LaGuardia Community College

Natalie Willens is an educator, artist, organizer, and Ph.D. candidate in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center. They have published poetry, essays, and photography on the intersections of art and activism, and are working on a multi-year project with LaGuardia Community College students to creatively archive underfunded LGBTQ+ spaces in New York City.

“As a 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will work with students and community organizers to produce a public exhibition of our photographs and oral histories that highlight the essential work of underfunded LGBTQ+ spaces in New York City. The exhibition will have three main goals: To highlight the powerful collaborative work of CUNY students/faculty and community organizers, to respond to the ever-increasing erasure of LGBTQ+ spaces that serve the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community, and to secure sustainable funding for the organizations that cultivate these life-saving spaces.”

Desislava Zagorcheva

LaGuardia Community College

Dessie Zagorcheva is an author and educator with a Ph.D. in International Relations from Columbia University. She teaches courses in Global Politics and American Government and Politics at CUNY. Her research focuses on global challenges to democracy. She is passionate about using her expertise to educate and inspire students to engage more actively in politics.

“As a 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator awardee, I will develop my project on enhancing Media Literacy Skills. This is a multidisciplinary project which has three main objectives first, to highlight the importance of media literacy and the challenges faced by educators in this field; second, to compile and make widely available best practices in media literacy instruction from various public colleges; and third, to create a comprehensive repository of resources for students, teachers, and librarians. By fostering media literacy and critical thinking we aim to cultivate a generation of well-informed citizens who can make sound decisions for themselves and their communities.”

The CUNY Adjunct Incubator is co-sponsored by PS2 at the Center for the Humanities through generous grants from the Sylvia Klatzkin Steinig Fund and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Post originally published by The Center for the Humanities.

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator Grants

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The CUNY Adjunct Incubator supports and highlights the significant, critical and community-engaged scholarship and pedagogy work of adjuncts teaching across CUNY. Co-sponsored by the Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2) housed at the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective, the Adjunct Incubator aims to:

  • Call public attention to adjuncts’ valuable contributions at CUNY;
  • Support CUNY adjuncts and their teaching, scholarly, creative, and activist work;
  • Promote their arc toward professional success and economic well-being; and
  • Advocate for more paid, full-time, tenure-track positions for adjuncts to advance toward.

We will award $4,000 each to ten CUNY adjuncts developing independent scholarship and/or public projects in the humanities or humanities-related social sciences. Scholarship and/or public projects to be completed during the summer of 2025. 

DEADLINE:

Sunday, October 27, 2024 by 11:59 pm

WHAT:

For this cycle, we wish to prioritize community-facing and -building work, broadly construed. Project focus might include (but not limited to): public education (especially CUNY), public health, housing, labor, liberation movements.

Our rubric for evaluation is as follows:

  1. Public engagement: Does this project demonstrate a deep awareness of the reciprocal methods, ethics, and goals of community-oriented practice? Does it consider the compensation of communities in which it engages, and provide a robust grasp of existing research and genealogies of its subject of study?
  2. Urgency: Does this project address an emergent social (environmental, health, educational, etc.) need in meaningful ways?
  3. Creativity: Does the application think about an intellectual or practical problem through a previously unexamined perspective or with an innovative set of tools?
  4. Feasibility: Does the project seem manageable and are we the right organization to help the applicant fulfill their goals in a rich and nuanced way?

In addition to covering costs associated with scholarly research, this grant can support travel related to professional and/or curriculum development, and research and development of a public-facing project such as: archival research, oral histories, digital/interpretative platforms, online or print publications, performances, and panels, conferences, and exhibitions, etc. The scholarship work and/or public projects are to be completed during the summer of 2025. For examples of past grant-funded projects, visit 2021 projects here, 2020 projects here, and 2019 projects here):

ELIGIBILITY:

Current adjuncts at any CUNY College.

*Please note that if you are a current doctoral fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY who also holds adjunct position/s, before applying, please contact the Office of Financial Aid at financialaid@gc.cuny.edu  to ensure that receiving this grant will not adversely impact your existing award package.

EXPECTATIONS:

  • You will be in charge of managing your research or project, from conception to completion. This includes managing the budget e.g. honoraria for community participants and others, and any taxes i.e. deduct 33%
  • We request a blog post about your project and a brief, one-page, narrative report on research progress and impact by September 12, 2025. 
  • We invite recipients to think about sharing their work with wider publics and welcome proposals for public panels or online events related to your work.

APPLICATION:

Fill out the application form, and upload as a single PDF file to the form (name your file as follows LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_CAI2025):

  1. a one-page letter of interest (which can include a description of your research or public project, a timeline, and your methodological tool-kit),
  2. CV,
  3. a brief, budgetary outline.

Questions? Please reach out to us ps2@gc.cuny.edu

SELECTION PROCESS: 

Recipients will be decided by an interdisciplinary advisory committee. The 2025 CUNY Adjunct Incubator Advisory Committee is comprised of Celina Su, Dasharah Green, Kendra Sullivan, Mary N. Taylor, Prithi Kanakamedala, and Ujju Aggarwal.

For any queries, reach out to Prithi, PS2 faculty coordinator ps2@gc.cuny.edu

The CUNY Adjunct Incubator is co-sponsored by PS2 at the Center for the Humanities through generous grants from the Sylvia Klatzkin Steinig Fund and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

About the Gittell Urban Studies Collective: The Gittell Urban Studies Collective engages communities, fellow scholars, and activists focused on issues related to cities, social justice, community participation and development, political engagement and social movements, and democratic governance, both domestically and abroad. Read more here

About the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY: The Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center encourages collaborative, creative, and engaged work in the humanities and social sciences. While providing students, faculty, and community partners with grants, fellowships, and professional support, we also produce innovative projects and programs, digital and print publications, and infrastructure for public scholarship from a justice-forward framework at CUNY and across NYC.  Read more here.