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 Alumni 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.
Tatiana Carayannis's Bio
Distinguished Practitioner
Tatiana Carayannis
Leader-in-Residence 2024–2025
Dr. Tatiana Carayannis is the program director of the Social Science Research Council’s Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (the UN’s “think bridge”) and the Understanding Violent Conflict program--programs aimed to strengthen the evidence base of UN policy, including on frontier issues. She also runs initiatives on China’s engagement with the UN and the Global South. She has had visiting appointments at LSE and NYU and has been research director and co-PI for several international research collaborations. A leading scholar of international organizations, conflict management, and Central Africa, her books are The Third UN: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think (Oxford University Press, 2021); Understanding the Central African Republic (Zed, 2015); and UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice (Indiana University Press, 2005). Current research includes the globalization of war networks, including the use of new technologies, and international responses. She has been interviewed by the BBC, France24, Al Jazeera, CGTV, The Financial Times, the NY Times, among others. She was a USIP Jennings Randolph Fellow and has lectured at multiple universities in the US and internationally. Tatiana holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from The City University of NY Graduate Center and an MA from NYU.
Bill Cunningham's Bio
Distinguished Practitioner
Bill Cunningham
Leader-in-Residence 2024–2025
Bill Cunningham has a long career in New York politics and government, as well as in the private and not for profit sectors. Since 2021, Cunningham has run his own consultancy, working with companies and organizations in need of communications and political strategy. In 2019, Bill served as Senior Vice President for Communications at The Doe Fund (TDF) as that organization expanded its services for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals.
Prior to his work at TDF, Cunningham joined DKC, a public relations and crisis communications firm, as Managing Director in January 2006, after serving Mayor Michael Bloomberg for five years. As the Mayor's Communications Director, Cunningham helped shape the media outreach of the Mayor's Office as well as over 50 city agencies. He advised the Mayor on a broad range of subjects including policy, politics and communication strategies. Cunningham's career in public service dates to 1975, when he served on the senior staff of New York Governors Hugh L. Carey and Mario M. Cuomo. He was Chief of Staff for the late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan and managed his last campaign in 1994.
In addition to the campaigns of Senator Moynihan and Governors Carey and Cuomo, Bill has been a senior advisor to campaigns at all levels of politics. He has also served as Executive Director of the New York State Democratic Committee.
In the private sector, Cunningham has worked as a consultant, advising trade associations, major corporations, professional service firms, and organized statewide and regional public information campaigns. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from Brooklyn College and an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
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.
Nicolas Guilhot's Bio
Public Scholar
Nicolas Guilhot
Professor, European University Institute (Italy); Fellow, Remarque Institute
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.
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.
Charles Nathan's Bio
Postdoctoral Fellow
Charles Nathan
The City College of New York
Charles Nathan received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University in 2023. His work examines the politics of nostalgia, memory, and the urban/rural divide in the history of political thought. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, History of Political Thought, and Theory & Event. He is currently working on a book project about the concept of the golden age in ancient political thought.
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.
Klaus Welle's Bio
Distinguished Practitioner
Klaus Welle
Leader-in-Residence 2023–2025
Klaus Welle is the former Secretary-General of the European Parliament, a role in which he served from 2009 to 2022. He Chairs the Martens Centre’s Academic Council. He is also a Guest Professor in practice at the London School of Economics and a Visiting Professor at KU Leuven.
After obtaining a Degree in economics from the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany, Klaus Welle worked at the CDU Central Office in Bonn, before coming to Brussels where he served as Secretary-General of the European People’s Party (EPP) from 1994 to 1999, Secretary-General of the EPP-ED Group in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2003, Director-General for Internal Policies at the European Parliament from 2004 to 2007, Head of the Cabinet of the President of the European Parliament from 2007 to 2009, and Secretary-General of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2022.
Avery Williams's Bio
Postdoctoral Fellow
Avery Williams
The City College of New York
Avery Williams is a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin with focuses in political theory and American political thought. He works primarily on moral theory, authoritarianism, political psychology, and the history of political thought. His dissertation treated the political psychology of tyrants in the thought of the early Socratics. His current research attempts to bring classical understandings of tyranny into dialogue with later perspectives—most notably early modern philosophy, the thought of the Frankfurt School, and democratic theory.