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.
Frank Barry's Bio
Distinguished Practitioner
Frank Barry
Leader-in-Residence 2025–2026
Frank Barry is a Bloomberg Opinion Columnist and Editorial Board Member covering national affairs, with a special focus on polarization. He served as Chief Speechwriter on the Bloomberg 2020 presidential campaign after having been Director of Speechwriting and Public Affairs for New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, where he also helped design and implement a variety of government reform initiatives. He is the author of two books: Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey Into the Heart of American Democracy (2024), and The Scandal of Reform: The Grand Failures of New York's Political Crusaders and the Death of Nonpartisanship (2009).
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.
Gregory Conti's Bio
Public Scholar
Gregory Conti
Associate Professor of Politics, Princeton University
Gregory Conti is a political theorist and intellectual historian. His research focuses on the history of modern political thought, particularly in Britain and France, and on the lessons that can be drawn from that history for contemporary debates. In his academic work, his primary interests concern how ideas of democracy, liberalism, and representative government developed over the course of the long nineteenth century. He has also addressed, among other subjects, toleration and freedom of speech, the rise of the referendum, the thought of John Stuart Mill and its reception, religion and politics, the rule of law, and modern French political theory. Additionally, he writes regularly for general audiences on such topics as free speech, political ideologies past and present, and the state of universities. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and editor-at-large of Compact magazine.
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.
Jonathan Derbyshire's Bio
Public Scholar
Jonathan Derbyshire
US Opinion Editor, Financial Times
Jonathan Derbyshire is currently the Executive Opinion Editor of the Financial Times. At the beginning of March, he moved to New York to take up the position of the FT's US Opinion Editor. He joined the paper in 2016, having previously served as Managing Editor of Prospect magazine and Culture Editor of The New Statesman. In addition to editing the FT's opinion pages, he regularly contributes book reviews, columns, and obituaries. Before becoming a journalist, he pursued graduate work in philosophy, spending two years on a Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship at the École des Hautes Études in Paris. He has also taught at several British universities.
Joseph Dorman's Bio
Distinguished Practitioner
Joseph Dorman
Leader-in-Residence 2025–2026
Joseph Dorman is a documentary filmmaker whose work explores historical and political ideas. He is currently working on a film about the 1873 Colfax Massacre. His film Arguing the World, about four eminent New York intellectuals, won a Peabody Award. Other films include Moynihan (2019) on the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Colliding Dreams (2016) about the history of the Zionist idea, and Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness (2011). He wrote the script for The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Journey, which was named the best documentary of 2001 by the National Board of Review.
Joseph has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and published two books: Arguing the World (2001) and When Ideas Mattered: The Nathan Glazer Reader (2017). He is an adjunct professor of film at New York University and a practicing therapist in New York City.
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.
Amana Fontanella-Khan's Bio
Public Scholar
Amana Fontanella-Khan
Opinion Editor, The Guardian US
Amana Fontanella-Khan is the Opinion Editor at The Guardian US and the author of Pink Sari Revolution. Her work has appeared in The Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, Slate, Christian Science Monitor, Conde Nast Traveller and other outlets.
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.
Youbin Kang's Bio
Postdoctoral Fellow
Youbin Kang
The City College of New York
Youbin Kang is a Moynihan Postdoctoral Fellow at The City College of New York. A sociologist by training, they earned their Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where their dissertation examined the historical evolution of public transportation funding and labor relations in New York City and Seoul from the mid-1970s to 2022. Their research, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council broadly explores urban infrastructure, labor policy, and the political economy of mobility.
Kang’s work has been published in academic journals as well as in public-facing outlets such as Jacobin Magazine and N+1 Magazine. They are also an award-winning educator recognized for teaching excellence in sociology. Born in South Korea and raised in New Delhi and Cairo, Youbin’s global upbringing informs their perspective on class mobility and transnational labor. They completed their undergraduate studies at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, obtained their masters at the University of Cambridge, and were a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell.
Ron Kassimir's Bio
Distinguished Practitioner
Ron Kassimir
Leader-in-Residence 2025–2026
Ron Kassimir has worked for over 30 years at the intersection of social science research, philanthropy, higher education, and knowledge utilization, assuming increasing levels of leadership and responsibility throughout his career. He dedicated a decade to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), serving as a Program Director for its initiatives in Africa and a dissertation fellowship program. Following that, he transitioned to senior higher education administration at The New School, where he held the positions of Associate Dean and later Associate Provost for Research.
Kassimir was subsequently invited back to SSRC in a senior role at the organization-wide level, ultimately becoming Vice-President for Programs. His career has encompassed a blend of intellectual leadership, cross-disciplinary collaboration, organizational strategy, and fundraising. Most recently, he served as a Senior Advisor at Columbia World Projects and held the position of Interim Director of its Center for Political Economy. He has consulted for foundations and non-profits, and he is currently engaged in writing on the impact of research on policy decisions.
Manjari Mahajan's Bio
Public Scholar
Manjari Mahajan
Associate Professor of International Affairs, The New School
Manjari Mahajan is Associate Professor of International Affairs and the Starr Professor and Co-Director of the India China Institute at The New School (New York City). Her research and teaching are on global health, politics of science and technology, international development, and philanthrocapitalism. Much of her empirical focus has been on India and South Africa, and on global organizations such as the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization.
Manjari’s work, which lies at the intersection of the disciplines of Science and Technology Studies, Public Policy, and Anthropology, has appeared in a range of academic journals and also been featured in blogs and popular media such as The Nation, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She has recently co-edited Constrained Expertise in India and China: Knowledge and Power in Policymaking, published by Amsterdam University Press (2025), and the blog, Pandemic Discourses. She has held fellowships at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany, and the Social Science Research Council in the United States. Her papers have received prizes from the Society for Social Studies for Science and the American Anthropological Association. She holds a BA from Harvard University and a PhD from Cornell University.
Dan Mathis's Bio
Public Scholar
Dan Mathis
Senior Advisor for Policy and Sustainable Housing, NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development
Dan Mathis is currently the Senior Advisor for Policy and Sustainable Housing at the NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development, where he provides advice and counsel on climate policy issues that impact the financed affordable housing sector as well as the broader housing market. He is a public servant and advocate focused on urban policy, environmental stewardship, and the impacts of climate change.
Dan is also a lecturer in Columbia University’s Sustainability Management program and was previously a policy fellow at Next100, a think tank where he focused on state and federal-level climate policy interventions aimed at protecting vulnerable communities. He is a graduate of Florida A&M University, the Hough Graduate School of Business at the University of Florida, and the University of Michigan Law School.
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.
Anne Mishkind's Bio
Postdoctoral Fellow
Anne Mishkind
The City College of New York
Anne Mishkind is a Moynihan Postdoctoral Fellow at The City College of New York. Her research interests include the history of political thought, education policy, and civic education. Her research examines contestation over identity, political ideology, and American values through the lens of contemporary U.S. education discourse. Her dissertation investigates U.S. education discourse as a window into broader debates about liberal ideals and their role in the formation of democratic citizens.
Prior to joining CCNY, Mishkind was a Visiting Professor of Political Theory at Deep Springs College. During her time at Yale, she was a Prize Teaching Fellow and served as both the Program Coordinator and an instructor in Yale’s Citizens, Thinkers, Writers program. She has a background in educational policy research that includes work with the American Institutes for Research, where she contributed to projects ranging from adult education to state academic standards development. Her teaching invites students to examine their own educational experiences as sites of political formation while developing frameworks for understanding contemporary debates about schooling and citizenship. She will receive her PhD in Political Science from Yale University in May 2025.
Brittany N. Montgomery's Bio
Public Scholar
Brittany N. Montgomery
Senior Advisor of Special Projects & Initiatives, Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Brittany N. Montgomery is committed to making cities better places to live. She is an expert in urban mobility systems and governance, with over 18 years of leadership experience delivering complex, cross-functional policies, projects, and programs for governments, non-profits, and private sector clients in Latin America, the U.S., and East Asia. From strategy and policy making to infrastructure delivery, technological innovation, and behavioral change, she has broad and deep knowledge of urban systems. Her writing explores the links between anti-corruption policies, administrative oversight, bureaucratic behavior, and the ability of governments to deliver infrastructure.
Montgomery currently works to provide New Yorkers better commutes, as Sr. Advisor of Special Projects & Initiatives at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She previously served as an Advisor to the Secretary of Mobility in Bogotá, Colombia under Mayor Enrique Peñalosa. As an Ambassador to the BCG Henderson Institute, Montgomery wrote Untangling Conflict: An Introspective Guide for Families in Business, published with Penguin Random House in 2022, becoming an Amazon India Business bestseller. She holds a PhD in Political Economy of Development from MIT, a Master of City Planning and M.S. in Transportation from U.C. Berkeley, and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from MIT. She is an alumna of CORO Leadership NYC and the Boston Consulting Group.
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.
Naomi Schaefer Riley's Bio
Public Scholar
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focusing on child welfare as well as a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. She is a former columnist for the New York Post and a former Wall Street Journal editor, as well as the author of seven books, including No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives, (Bombardier, 2021). Her book, Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America (Oxford, 2013), was named an editor’s pick by the New York Times Book Review.
Harry Siegel's Bio
Public Scholar
Harry Siegel
Senior Editor, The City
Harry Siegel is one of the pre-eminent journalists covering New York City, presently working as a senior editor at the investigative news outlet The City, a columnist (since 2013) at the New York Daily News, and the creator and a co-host of the FAQ NYC podcast. He is also a contributing writer for the policy magazine Vital City, a founding member of the Flaming Hydra newsletter collective, and a member of the New York Editorial Board.
Siegel, who covered national politics in previous stints as a senior editor at Politico, Newsweek, and the Daily Beast, has written about urban affairs and much more for a wide variety of prominent outlets. He makes frequent national and local media appearances to discuss his work and areas of expertise starting with but by no means limited to New York City.
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.
Tevi Troy's Bio
Public Scholar
Tevi Troy
Senior Fellow, The Ronald Reagan Institute
Tevi Troy is a Senior Fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute, a Senior Scholar at the Straus Center at Yeshiva University, a former Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and White House aide, and a best-selling presidential historian. His latest book is The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between American Titans of Industry and Commanders in Chief, named by The Economist and The Week as one of the best books of 2024.
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.