Moynihan Center Fellows
Bold thinkers. Bridge Builders. Problem Solvers.
The Moynihan Center supports heterodox thinkers with diverse perspectives and promising students from diverse backgrounds. Fellows engage in the open exchange of ideas as part of a 21st century hub for academic excellence and leadership development within New York City’s flagship public college.
Through two signature fellowship programs and a rich slate of public events, the Center works to ensure that the next generation of public scholars and public servants reflects the diversity of viewpoints and lived experiences represented at City College and beyond.
Fellows
Emefa Addo Agawu's Bio
Public Scholar
Emefa Addo Agawu
Writer & Editor, Independent
Bio:
Emefa Addo Agawu is a Baltimore-based writer and editor. Previously, Agawu worked on The Ezra Klein Show, at the New York Times, producing long form interviews on topics like modern masculinity, Martin Luther King Jr.'s political philosophy, artificial intelligence, and communal living.
Agawu was also the inaugural Post Opinions fellow in the Washington Post’s Opinions section, where she also wrote editorials as a member of the paper’s editorial board. After George Floyd’s murder, Agawu wrote and produced a multimedia editorial series on public safety, for which she won the 2022 Burl Osborne Editorial and Opinion Award. She was also a finalist in the 2021 Online Journalism Awards 2021 Excellence in Social Justice Reporting.
Before working in journalism, Agawu worked on technology policy at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology and New America. Agawu’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Slate, Vox, CNN, and elsewhere.
Project:
Agawu will devote her fellowship year to writing an essay collection about attention. Driven by extensive original reporting, the essays will center people making unusual choices with their attention in an age of hyper-connectedness. Rather than focusing on specific devices and technologies that constitute our rapidly evolving digital landscape, Agawu will focus on the shifting emotional quality of our lives.
Agawu will write about parents who don’t use cell phones and society’s shifting ideas about where safety comes from; low-income workers whose jobs prevent them from being distracted for hours at a time; ‘cancel culture’ as a kind of corrupted hyperattentive regime and whether a more benevolent surveillance is possible; loneliness, AI companionship, imaginary friends, and the emotional implications of constant, personalized attention, and more.
Michael Beckley's Bio
Public Scholar
Michael Beckley
Associate Professor of Political Science, Tufts University
Bio:
Michael Beckley is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Director of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His research on foreign policy has received multiple "best of the year" awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association and appeared in numerous media including The Atlantic, The Economist, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Previously, Michael was an International Security Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, the RAND Corporation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He continues to advise offices within the U.S. Intelligence Community and U.S. Department of Defense. Michael holds a PhD in political science from Columbia University. His first book, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower, was published in 2018 by Cornell University Press. His second, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China, was co-authored with Hal Brands and published by W.W. Norton in 2022.
Project:
Beckley will work on a book manuscript and write several popular media essays and a policy report analyzing how global aging and automation are reshaping American domestic politics and foreign policy.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has seen itself as a champion of a rules-based international order built on liberal values. Yet this era of liberal hegemony was largely an artifact of the Cold War and its immediate afterglow. By contrast, a more transactional “America First” foreign policy was the norm for the United States prior to 1945 and appeals to many Americans today.
This appeal could grow in the years ahead as two global trends—rapid automation and population aging—decrease the United States’ strategic dependence on the rest of the world and increase the prevalence of economic nationalism and political polarization both within the United States and abroad. In response, the United States might become a rogue superpower: an economic and military colossus shorn of moral commitments and entirely out for itself. This shift to a more Machiavellian America could devastate dozens of countries that depend on US protection and an open global trade order.
Beckley’s project charts these trends to help policymakers manage the disruptions to come.
Stephen Eide's Bio
Public Scholar
Stephen Eide
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
Bio:
Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He researches social policy questions such as homelessness and mental illness. Eide has written for many publications, including National Review, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the New York Times, Politico, the Wall Street Journal. His first book, Homelessness in America: The History and Tragedy of an Intractable Social Problem, was published in June 2022. He was previously a senior research associate at the Worcester Regional Research Bureau. Eide holds a B.A. from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a PhD in political philosophy from Boston College.
Project:
Eide will conduct research on comparative mental health policy to investigate whether European mental health systems are more accountable, with respect to serious mental illness, than their American counterparts.
The project is inspired by Eide’s previous work, which has interrogated the interplay between mental healthcare and other public systems, such as police and corrections. American mental healthcare has a fragmented character that makes it difficult to access treatment, and also frustrates accountability. When a mental illness-related tragedy occurs, no one ever knows which official, program, or agency should have prevented it yet failed.
Eide argues that a more effective mental health system than America’s would not shift responsibility for serious mental illness onto so many other public agencies, and his research will investigate whether European mental health systems burden other agencies in the same way.
Christina Greer's Bio
Public Scholar
Christina Greer
Associate Professor of Political Science, Fordham University
Bio:
Christina Greer is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University, Lincoln Center (Manhattan) campus. Her research and teaching focus on American politics, Black ethnic politics, campaigns and elections, and public opinion. She is the author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dreamand co-editor of Black Politics in Transition: Immigration, Suburbanization, and Gentrification.
Greer writes a weekly column for The Amsterdam News, one of the oldest Black newspapers in the U.S., and is a frequent political commentator on several media outlets, primarily MSNBC, WNYC, and NY1. She is the co-host of the New York centered podcast FAQ-NYC, is a political analyst at thegrio.com and host of the podcast quiz show The Blackest Questions at thegrio.com.
Greer is a member of the boards of The Tenement Museum in NYC, The Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT, and Community Change in Washington, DC, and serves on the Advisory Board at Tufts University. She received her BA in Political Science from Tufts University and her MA, MPhil, and PhD in Political Science from Columbia University.
Project:
As a Moynihan Public Scholar, Dr. Greer will work on a comprehensive history of African American electoral leadership in New York City and New York State. The confluence of racial and Black ethnic diversity, unique borough politics, and coalition building in the economic center of the nation make New York a critical arena of study. Greer argues that while Chicago is rightly understood as the nucleus for national Black politics, public servants from New York—and elected officials, in particular—serve as canaries in the coal mine for African American political development.
Nicolas Guilhot's Bio
Joint Fellow: Remarque Institute, NYU - Public Scholar
Nicolas Guilhot
Professor, European University Institute, Florence, Italy
Bio:
Nicolas Guilhot is Professor of Intellectual History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and Research Professor at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He is a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He has served as co-director of the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at NYU and program officer at the Social Science Research Council. He was also a lecturer at the London School of Economics and a Fulbright visiting scholar at Columbia University. His interests include the history of political thought, international and current politics. In his work and in his writing, he strives to engage broad audiences beyond the academic community and in recent years has published frequently in non-academic outlets such as the New Statesman, the Boston Review, The Point, the London Review of Books Blog, Sidecar, and The Conversation. He is currently writing a book about conspiracy theories and the crisis of liberal democracy for Harvard University Press.
Project:
As a Moynihan Public Scholar, Nicolas Guilhot will finish writing A Story One Tells: Conspiracy Theories, Liberalism, and the End of History, a book that takes the idea of conspiracy as a symptom of the current malaise in liberal culture. It takes exception with the common wisdom about the crisis of democratic politics. It argues that the rise of conspiracism in politics is less an ideological assault on liberal democracy than a phenomenon inherent to contemporary liberalism and its self-understanding as the culmination of human history. The book offers a sweeping history of the idea of “conspiracy theory” from its little-known origins in Cold War liberalism to our era of “fake news” and QAnon drops. It shows how this idea was associated with a liberal demonology: totalitarian politics, messianic fantasies, “populism,” religious superstitions, even individual and collective psychopathology. It also reflected liberals’ increasing reluctance to assume that history could take the form of progress and that politics could make sure it did. If there is any lesson to be learned from this, it is that these narratives of despair and powerlessness will not be defeated by debunking, but by narratives of hope that elucidate the present by disclosing an inclusive future toward which all can strive.
Roya Hakakian's Bio
Public Scholar
Roya Hakakian
Journalist, Independent
Bio:
Roya Hakakian is an Iranian American journalist, lecturer, and writer. She is the author of several acclaimed books in English, and two collections of poetry in Persian. Her essays and other writings have been included in many anthologies, including the PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature. Deeply influenced by both the longstanding literary traditions of her birth country and its historical turmoils, she takes on the most pressing and difficult contemporary sociopolitical issues —exile, persecution, censorship— and injects them with relevance and urgency through her deeply observant and poetic sensibility to make these subjects accessible to all readers.
In addition to writing books, she also contributes essays and opinion pieces to journals such as the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic, among others. She’s been featured on major TV networks, including Fareed Zakaria GPS. She has worked in television news, at CBS 60 Minutes and the ABC documentary unit. She’s been a fellow at some of the leading think tanks in Washington, and serves on the editorial board of the American Purpose. Born and raised in a family of Jewish educators in Iran, Hakakian came to the US on political asylum.
Project:
Hakakian will work on a historical nonfiction book manuscript that tells the story of Hajj Sayyah, the Traveler, the first Iranian to become a naturalized US citizen. A self-fashioned Marco Polo, Sayyah left Iran penniless in 1859 to discover a world beyond his own country. Seven years later, arriving in the US, he was deeply transformed after encountering notions such as individual liberty and human rights. He later coined the original terms for the two concepts in Persian. In the US, he believed he’d found the utopia he’d been searching for. But in the end, he was betrayed by America (when he was dismissed for being a Muslim at the US embassy in Tehran), and was shunned in Iran for his "foreign" ideas.
150 years later, Sayyah’s tale remains as emblematic as it was then. Iranians are still fighting for human rights and democracy, taking the dangerous steps toward creating a secular form of governance. The US and Iran still remain at odds with each other, as a new generation, many of whom like Hajj Sayyah, dream of living under the rule of law in a free and democratic society.
Daphne Lundi's Bio
Public Scholar
Daphne Lundi
Deputy Director for Living Streets and Public Spaces, NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice
Bio:
Daphne Lundi is an urban planner and a policymaker. She is the Deputy Director for Living Streets & Public Spaces at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice (OCEJ), where she works to expand green infrastructure investments that mitigate the urban heat island effect, support stormwater management, and advance transit equity. Prior to joining OCEJ, she was an urban planner at the NYC Department of City Planning, where she worked on resilient land use and zoning policy for Brooklyn coastal communities impacted by Hurricane Sandy and managed projects undergoing Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) in southern and downtown Brooklyn.
Lundi is a founding member and board member of BlackSpace, a collective of Black urbanists that bridges the gaps between policy, people, and place to address inequality and injustice in the built environment. She is the co-creator of Laudi CoLab, an arts-based design practice, and is an advisory board member for the Octavia Project, a summer program for teen girls and non-binary youth that uses science fiction to explore computer science, writing, and city-making. Lundi received her BA in Sociology from Wellesley College and her MS in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin.
Project:
As a Moynihan Public Scholar, Lundi will leverage her experience as an urban planner, policy maker, artist and designer to develop a framework for how science fiction writing can and should inform city planning. The book project, conceived as both a primer and a provocation, aims to challenge the established frameworks of professional urban planners and invite new voices into a world that often alienates the very people it aims to serve.
Clara Mattei's Bio
Public Scholar
Clara Mattei
Professor of Economics, University of Tulsa
Bio:
Clara E. Mattei is Professor in the Economics Department of University of Tulsa and Director of its forthcoming Center for Heterodox Economics. She recently published The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (2022), a University of Chicago Press best-seller that has received international and cross-disciplinary acclamation, from the likes of economist Thomas Piketty, linguist Noam Chomsky, and historian Charles S. Maier. It was praised in the Financial Times as one of the ten best economics books of 2022; is now being translated in over ten languages; and has won the 2023 Herbert Adams Baxter Prize of the American Historical Association. Mattei’s work has been featured in The Nation, Nature, Dissent, New Statesman, etc. The author is a frequent contributor to the US Opinion page for The Guardian and for the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano. Mattei has appeared on countless podcasts, TV and radio shows, including Oxfam, NPR, BBC, Bad Faith, etc. Mattei appears regularly on Italian television, especially the national TV La7.
Project:
In the folk history of the twentieth century, the three decades that followed World War II constituted a “golden age of capitalism”: a period of continuous economic growth that produced rising wages for workers and established the US as a global hegemon. Intellectually, this era doubled as the economic age of Keynesianism—the deployment in the US, UK, and elsewhere of the brand of economic interventions associated with British economist John Maynard Keynes.
The Golden Hour proposes a new critical history of the golden era of capitalism, with two main interconnected threads. The first considers the unique social and economic circumstances of the postwar decades in western countries in order to reconsider whether Keynesianism was indeed a primary contributor to their prosperity. And just as importantly, was Keynesianism really that different from the doctrines that preceded it? Postwar policies, in countries like the US, UK and Italy, paralleled the neoclassical austerity policies of the earlier interwar period in their shared focus on squashing inflation; both periods, in turn, pursued wage restrictions as a means of advancing macroeconomic agendas. Reconsidering the timing of the Keynes renaissance, along with the exact nature of its economic policies, informs how the general public thinks about the economy in our still-Keynesian world.
Yascha Mounk's Bio
Public Scholar
Yascha Mounk
Professor of Practice of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins University
Bio:
Yascha Mounk is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Known for his work on the crisis of democracy and the defense of philosophically liberal values, he is a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Founder of Persuasion, and a Publisher at Die Zeit. He is the host of The Good Fight podcast and the author of four books: Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany; The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State; The People versus Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It; and most recently,The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.
Mounk received his BA in History from Trinity College Cambridge and his PhD in Government from Harvard University.
Project:
As a Moynihan Public Scholar, Dr. Mounk will develop a left-liberal critique of the identitarian turn in Western liberal democracies. The “identity synthesis” treats groups defined by their ethnic, religious, or sexual identity as the very building blocks of modern states. And while its origins are found in justifiable disgust with historic and ongoing discrimination and bigotry, the reification of identity runs the risk of creating a deeply fragmented society in which ascriptive identities severely constrain political alternatives. Instead of helping to defuse the rise of the far-right, Mounk argues, the identity synthesis may fuel it.
Laurence Pevsner's Bio
Public Scholar
Laurence Pevsner
Director of Speechwriting for U.S. Mission to the United Nations, U.S. Department of State
Bio:
Laurence Pevsner is the Director of Speechwriting for Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations and a member of President Biden’s cabinet. As part of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations Executive Office, Pevsner advises the Ambassador on messaging and policy and oversees everything in her voice, including over 250 speeches each year.
Previously, Pevsner was a Director at West Wing Writers, a speechwriting and strategy firm. He counseled CEOs, union leaders, foundation heads, and officials at all levels of government on strategic messaging, and amplified their ideas everywhere from The New York Times to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to the White House. During the 2020 election, Pevsner served in the Biden-Harris campaign’s writers room, scripting TV ads for the largest political paid media operation in history.
Pevsner is a member of Speechwriters of Color and Foreign Policy for America’s NextGen initiative, and a recipient of the State Department’s Meritorious Honor Award. He received his BA in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought from Amherst College, where he graduated magna cum laude.
Project:
As a Moynihan Public Scholar, Pevsner will draw on his career as a speechwriter and strategic communications advisor, as well as from case studies across history, religion, literature, cinema, and pop culture, to investigate and elucidate the efficacy and importance of apologies, both public and private. Through a series of essays culminating in a book project, he will explore how apologies shape our politics and our lives—from “cancel culture” to national reconciliation—and make the case for why the world needs to get better at saying sorry. He is also writing a novel that complements these themes by exploring the difficulty of apologizing for the sins we inherit.
Angela Saini's Bio
Public Scholar
Angela Saini
Journalist & Lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bio:
Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist and the author of four non-fiction books. She teaches in the Graduate Science Writing Program at MIT, presents radio shows for the BBC and podcasts for Science, and her writing appears in National Geographic, the Financial Times, and Foreign Policy. In 2019, she hosted a critically acclaimed two-part television documentary series for the BBC on the science and history of eugenics.
Her bestselling 2017 book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, has been translated into 14 languages. Her 2019 book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, was a finalist for the LA Times book prize, and named a book of the year by Library Journal, Vanity Fair, and NPR. Her latest book on the origins of male domination, The Patriarchs, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize.
Angela has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Oxford. She has completed fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Humboldt Foundation in Berlin, and she was a Logan Nonfiction Fellow in New York. She was appointed an honorary fellow of her alma mater, Keble College, Oxford, in 2023. She lives in New York with her husband and son.
Project:
Saini will conduct research and begin writing her fifth work of nonfiction, tentatively titled OTHER: Sex, Race, and Why Putting People in Boxes Doesn’t Work. The book seeks to understand and interrogate the act of human classification, and to show how the broad categories invented and employed by government agencies, institutions, and corporations can - sometimes counterintuitively - serve to reinforce bias.
Race and gender tick-boxes contain far less meaning than we imagine. They are weak shadows of biological reality; at worst, they perpetuate social stereotypes. Unsurprisingly, then, bureaucracies and data systems built on the shaky foundation of human classification have turned out to be riddled with errors, some so fatal that they’re exacerbating inequality. It has been estimated that around 720,000 black patients in the United States might receive earlier treatment for kidney disease if race were removed from medical algorithms. Women are far more likely to be accurately diagnosed with heart attacks if their gender is unknown because doctors associate heart attacks with men.
Coming from a progressive perspective, Saini will introduce a new approach to data gathering, design and policymaking that focuses more on the individual rather than relying so much on the crude tool of human classification.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins's Bio
Public Scholar
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
Assistant Professor of History, Wesleyan University
Bio:
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is an Assistant Professor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University. His work lies at the intersection between the academy and the public sphere. To this end, he uses his training in the history of global intellectual, political and economic thought during the twentieth century to address pressing contemporary issues such as: the New Cold War, religion and populism, the crisis of democracy, and what comes after the end of neoliberalism. Steinmetz-Jenkins has written substantially on the promises and perils of using history to understand the present. His writings have appeared in the top journals in the field of intellectual history as well as leading public facing publications such as The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Foreign Affairs. He runs an interview series for The Nation and serves as the essays and reviews editor for Modern Intellectual History. He is the editor of the new collection Did it Happen Here? Fascism and America, published by W.W. Norton. His forthcoming book is titled, Impossible Peace, Improbable War: Raymond Aron and World Order.
Project:
Steinmetz-Jenkins will complete his book manuscript about Raymond Aron, France's preeminent liberal thinker of the twentieth century. Aron was an academic sociologist and public intellectual during the Cold War, who refused to separate the academic from matters of ultimate public concern. The book, "Impossible Peace, Improbable War: Raymond Aron and World Order," offers the first account of the origins and evolution of Aron's thinking on World Order. It looks at the development of Aron's international thought in connection to the League of Nations, Nazi Imperialism, the Algerian Revolution, the European Coal and Steel Community, the Vietnam War, and American Cold War foreign policy. By placing Aron's thought in this wider international context, the book offers a model for how one famous intellectual grappled with the emergence of a new Cold War world order, much like intellectuals, academics and pundits are attempting to make sense of a world in transition today.
Mark Vandevelde's Bio
Public Scholar
Mark Vandevelde
Journalist, Financial Times
Bio:
Mark Vandevelde is a journalist at the Financial Times newspaper in New York, where he writes about the most powerful financial firms on Wall Street, the billionaires who control them, and the transformation that they have wrought upon America.
Vandevelde’s reporting has shown how lucrative deals struck on Wall Street have made emergency room doctors richer, Hollywood screenwriters poorer, and suburban housing more scarce. He has tracked the rivalries and alliances that upset the balance of power at some of the most powerful but least scrutinized institutions on Wall Street, and revealed how international money flows link foreign governments to some of the most senior US officials.
A frequent speaker on financial reform, he has appeared at conferences, on podcasts, and in academic forums, including as a guest speaker at Stanford Business School.
Previously, he was executive editor of FT’s op-ed page, which won seven awards during his tenure, including UK opinion page of the year.
Project:
“Private equity," the business of buying and selling entire companies using other people’s money, has become the defining idea of Wall Street. It has shaken the structure of human enterprise more forcefully than any financial innovation since the Dutch East India Company traded on the first stock market four centuries ago.
Built entirely on debt, today’s leading private equity firms each control a trillion dollars’ worth of assets. The largest, Blackstone, owns more theme parks than any company besides Disney, more railway arches than all of Britain’s train companies, and the biggest database of human DNA profiles outside any law enforcement agency on earth.
Vandevelde will work on a book-length manuscript offering a vivid account of how private equity has for five decades been remaking the global economy. He delves into the modern industry’s origins in the long boom of the 1980s, and its culmination in the catastrophic implosion of one of America’s largest insurance companies. He reveals how, following the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest firms bought up vast swathes of the global economy—from housing, to utilities, to tech—and the effects on communities around the world.