Special Collections and Archives (SCA) is pleased to announce that Queens College is now represented in the Reveal Digital Student Activism Collection. The completed collection will contain approximately 75,000 pages drawn from repositories around the country. The collection captures the voices of students across the great range of protest, political actions, and equal-rights advocacy from the 20th and early 21st century United States.
Queens College Library was selected to participate in this project based on the richness of its student activism materials. SCA carefully collated and packed approximately 600 items and sent them off to Reveal Digital to be scanned and cataloged. The Queens College collection includes student publications created by Black and Latinx students, as well as papers from the collections of alumni Mark Levy, Harvey Silver, Elliot Linzer, Michael Wenger, Andrew Berman, and Phyllis Padow-Sederbaum, and faculty members Michael Wreszin and Oscar Shaftel. Issues such as academic and student freedom, civil rights, high school organizing, and the anti-war movement are well represented.
Oscar Shaftel Papers (SCA-0052), Box 1, Folder 9, https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.35516329Queens College Student Publications Collection (SCA-0003), Box 14, https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.35516608 Andrew Berman Papers (SCA-0023), Box 1, Folder 12, https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.35516140 Harvey Silver political literature and ephemera (SCA-0086), Box 1, Folder 2, https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.35516176
The mission of Reveal Digital is to develop Open Access primary source collections from under-represented 20th-century voices of dissent, crowdfunded by libraries. Collections are made available through JSTOR, a database that provides access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources.
To learn more about Queens College Special Collections and Archives, book a research appointment, or inquire about instruction sessions, please email QC.archives@qc.cuny.edu.
Seeking Candidates as Full-Time Substitute Librarians, and as Part-Time Adjunct Librarians
Queens College Library (QCL) supports student success and faculty development through its resources, services, and spaces in accordance with the college’s educational mission. QCL seeks creative, collaborative, and user-centered librarians to support teaching and learning in the schools of Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences, and Math & Natural Sciences. Our librarians will work with Library and College partners to improve services and outreach to students and faculty across academic departments. QCL encourages innovation in librarianship and expects librarians to possess strong interpersonal and creative skills, and the desire to develop new areas of expertise.
As members of the Library Faculty, these public service positions will combine core librarianship and teaching responsibilities, such as research assistance and library instruction, with subject specialist and technology-based services to students and faculty.
The Library and College embrace the diversity of the borough of Queens and welcomes such diversity in its students and personnel. QCL promotes a hybrid work schedule for full-timers (80% on-site, 20% remote), and all positions may include evenings and weekends.
These positions are open until filled – review of applications begins September 18th.
For details and to apply for a position, see our Employment page or these direct links:
Welcome to the July 2023 edition of QC Research Highlights!
This month, as always, we’re featuring some recent faculty publications. While this series doesn’t always feature a theme, this month, we have some articles related to community support and cultural relevance. Please enjoy, and thanks as always to the authors!
All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works.
Grace Pai (Elementary and Early Childhood Education), in her article “Creating a Culturally Relevant Statistics Assignment on z-scores,” stresses that cultural relevance, if it is to be more than a mere buzzword, must be based on a specific understanding of the students in question. She describes the process of creating a culturally relevant statistics assignment, which starts by approaching the subject matter as a meaningful way to address problems that the students care about. In this case, students used statistics to interpret the response to a question about safety on the 2017 NYC School Survey, in the wake of a recent killing in a New York City school. Students worked with survey responses describing how safe the respondents felt, clearly connecting the statistical analysis they were doing to the process of decision-making. Further, this work led to a conversation about school safety in which students considered how they could be agents of change. Pai provides thoughtful pedagogical recommendations for developing similar assignments.
The article “Development and Modification of a Culturally Tailored Education Program to Prevent Breast Cancer in Korean Immigrant Women in New York City,” was a collaborative effort by several authors, including Sung Eun Choi (Fitness, Nutrition, and Exercise Science) as well as Jin Young Seo (Hunter College), So-Hyun Park (Hunter College), Minkyung Lee (Santa Clara Valley Medical Center), and Shiela M. Strauss (Hunter College, New York University). To address the rising rates of breast cancer among Korean-American women and the underutilization of healthcare services among that population, the authors developed the Korean Breast Cancer Risk Reduction Program, a community-based and culturally-tailored educational program. They did a pilot study at Korean Community Services of Metropolitan New York, which is in Queens. They worked with participants on changing their diets and increasing physical activity; additionally, they created brochures and offered free trainings. The participants responded positively and made suggestions to improve the cultural relevance of the program (for instance, by developing meal suggestions compatible with a traditional Korean diet).
The article “Expanding the Conceptualization of Support in Low-Wage Carework: The Case of Home Care Aides and Client Death” has many authors; one of them is QC’sSherry Baron (Barry Commoner Center for Health and the Environment). The other authors are Emma K. Tsui (CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy), Marita LaMonica (CUNY Graduate School of Public Heath & Health Policy), Maryam Hyder (Barnard College), Paul Landsbergis (SUNY School of Public Health), and Jennifer Zelnick (Touro College). The authors of the study interviewed home healthcare workers in New York City about the support structures they access to deal with client death. Agencies offered some forms of support via coordinators, training programs, other types of programmatic support, and the union. However, this support was often inadequate and not all workers knew they could access it. Instead, many relied on personal support from family and friends or their religious communities, or blended support from co-workers or the deceased’s family and friends. Blended support, however, was often discouraged by the agencies for privacy reasons and to maintain boundaries. The authors propose a model of work stress that takes these different types of support into account. Further, they point out that healthcare workers are very often women from marginalized communities, thus, they may be seeking support from communities that are already strained. The authors have some recommendations for worker- and community-focused solutions.
This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all.
Welcome to the June 2023 edition of QC Research Highlights!
This month, as always, we’re featuring some recent faculty publications. Please enjoy, and thanks as always to the authors!
All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works.
The article “Cosmogenic Ages Indicate No MIS 2 Refugia in the Alexander Archipelago, Alaska” was the work of a group of authors, includingAlia Lesnek (Earth and Environmental Science), along with Caleb K. Walcott (University at Buffalo), Jason P. Briner (University at Buffalo), James F. Baichtal (Tongass National Forest), and Joseph M. Licciardi (University of New Hampshire, Durham). The article is about the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, one of several ice sheets covering North America during the Last Glacial Maximum. The researchers were interested in improving the mapping of the ice sheet by studying when deglaciation occurred in the Alexander Archipelago, in southeastern Alaska. They sampled bedrock and boulders in the area for beryllium surface exposure dating in University at Buffalo’s Cosmogenic Isotope Laboratory. Looking at the northern areas of the region, which had previously been mapped as free of ice during the time period in question, this study found evidence that at least some of these areas were actually covered in ice and didn’t experience deglaciation until later. The article also discusses the implications of this for plants and humans.
Amy Hsin (Sociology) and co-author Sofya Aptekar (CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies) wrote “The Violence of Asylum: The Case of Undocumented Chinese Migration to the US.” Chinese undocumented migrants are an understudied group, so the researchers wanted to see how the legal violence of immigration law affects this population specifically. While US asylum policies make Chinese migrants more often eligible for asylum than migrants from Central America or Mexico, the asylum system is very expensive and can take years to navigate. Thus, a network of migrant legal services has arisen in the Chinese community, but raids on these services have led to increased scrutiny and a decline in asylum approval rates. The authors of the article interviewed many participants in the system, including undocumented/formerly undocumented Chinese migrants and those who work with them, such as legal workers, teachers, community organizers, and more. The article examines what has been called the “architectures of repulsion,” barriers put in place to make migration more difficult. The experiences of the participants demonstrate how the legal structure creates widely varying levels of difficulty based on differing socioeconomic statuses, as well as favoring certain types of migration over others.
The article, “The Rise and Fall of Dopamine: A Two-Stage Model of the Development and Entrenchment of Anorexia Nervosa,” by Jeff Beeler (Psychology) and co-author Nesha S. Burghart (Hunter College), proposes a model for the role of dopamine in eating disorders. So far, research has shown a link between anorexia and dopamine, but it’s not yet clear whether dopamine is increased or decreased, nor whether abnormal dopamine levels are a risk for anorexia or a result of it. The authors suggest that there are two stages; in the first stage, weight loss triggers an increase in dopamine production, while in the second stage, as anorexia becomes more entrenched, repeated exposure causes dopamine to decrease, much like it does in the case of addiction. If correct, this model has important implications for treatment, as the first and second stages could be treated differently. The authors recommend further studies to test this hypothesis.
This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all.
May is Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month. We selected featured resources to celebrate the diverse and vibrant traditions and cultures of Asian American and Pacific Islanders in honor of their achievements and contributions to society.
The AAPI Heritage Month 2023 guide provides open and licensed QCL resources highlighting the AAPI people’s experiences and voices. You can find more information of interest in the Asian Studies guide. Below are a few featured resources, including facts, books, digital archives, and streaming media.
AAPI Heritage Month coincides with “two key milestones: the arrival of the nation’s first Japanese immigrants (May 7, 1843) and Chinese workers’ pivotal role in building the transcontinental railroad (completed May 10, 1869)” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023).
In the United States, the estimated population of Asians alone or combined in 2021 was 24 million, and the estimated population of Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders was 1.7 million (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023).
The visualized total population of Asian Alone (left) and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Alone (right) by State. Data Source: U.S. Census Bureau; 2017-2021 American Community Survey, 5-Year Estimates. Social Explorer prepared the visualization.
“RISE is a love letter to and for Asian Americans – a vivid scrapbook of voices, emotions, and memories from an era in which our culture was forged and transformed, and a way to preserve both the headlines and the intimate conversations that have shaped our community into who we are today.”
“From the number one bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere,” Our Missing Hearts is “a deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear.”
“Five girls. Three generations. One great American love story. You Bring the Distant Near explores sisterhood, first loves, friendship, and the inheritance of culture – for better or worse.”
New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2021
“Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, TASTES LIKE WAR is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history to understand herself and the cultural roots of her mother’s condition.”
“Bruce Lee embodies the intermixture of cultures that results from transnational flows of people, ideas, and capital.” This book highlights “Bruce Lee’s influence beyond martial arts and film” as an “Asian and Asian American icon of unimaginable stature and influence.”
Visit us to find more featured books in “Cultural Awareness Month Displays” at Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library, 3rd floor Commons.
Digital Archives and Websites
Asian American Arts Spotlight: “American artists of Asian heritage bring a combined legacy to their work, and varieties of Asian thought and spiritual practice have had a profound and lasting influence on a remarkable number of Western artists. Influence has been a two-way street between contemporary American art practice and Asian cultures, past and present.”
Tagging and Transcription for Chinese Heritage Records: “The records are a major resource for the study of Chinese immigration and Chinese American travel, trade, and social history from the late-19th to the mid-20th century. Because many documents relate to individual immigrants, they are invaluable for the study of Chinese and Chinese American family history.”
National Park Service Celebrates Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month: “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have a rich heritage thousands of years old and have both shaped the history of the United States and had their lives dramatically influenced by moments in its history. Every May during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and throughout the year, the National Park Service and its partners share those histories and the continuing culture thriving in parks and communities today.”
The Center for Asian American Media: “The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) Collection contains 63 films that speak to the Asian experience through the lens of history.” The collection contains “a diverse array of subjects from a variety of geographic locations” and “biographies that show a glimpse into the life of young Asian Americans who struggle with identity, adversity, and overcoming complex obstacles in order to achieve their goals, and even the smallest wins in life.”
Queens College Library video collections on AAPI: Using QCL online catalog OneSearch and streaming video databases to find more video collections of interest.
Welcome to the May 2023 edition of QC Research Highlights!
This month, we’re featuring the following works by faculty authors, on many different subjects! Thanks for reading, and as always, thanks to the authors who have contributed their works.
All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works.
Dan Lee (Mathematics) researches geometrical analysis and is particularly interested in mass in general relativity. He and coauthor Lan-Hsuan Huang (University of Connecticut) have an article, “Trapped Surfaces, Topology of Black Holes, and the Positive Mass Theorem,” in which they build on Roger Penrose’s work analyzing black holes with geometrical and topological approaches. One of the things that’s interesting about Huang and Lee’s article is that it shows how mathematics and physics work together. This article deals with trapped surfaces (regions from which light cannot escape; that is, they are inside black holes), but focuses more specifically on marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTS), which lie at the intersection of the trapped region and its horizon. The article lays out the theorems that have been used to understand the topology of black holes, including Hawking’s theorem that under certain conditions, a MOTS must be a topological sphere, and the positive mass theorem, which has several implications, including that the sources for Einstein’s equations should not behave as if they were traveling faster than light. The authors have shown that this works differently at higher spatial dimensions.
Jeffrey Halperin (Psychology) specializes in the treatment of children with ADHD. He is one of the authors of the article “Distinct Thalamic and Frontal Neuroanatomical Substrates in Children with Familial vs. Non-Familial Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),” along with four coauthors: Rahman Baboli and Meng Cao (both from New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University) and Xiaobo Li (New Jersey Institute of Technology). This article is about the relationship between ADHD and the physical structures of the brain; specifically, it examines the differences between children with ADHD whose parents have also been diagnosed with it (familial), and other children with ADHD (nonfamilial). The researchers recruited a large group of participants and use MRI imaging to study their brains. Compared to the neurotypical subjects, the subjects with ADHD (both familial and non-familial) tended to have a smaller cuneus – a region of the brain associated with processing visual information. Between the two groups that had ADHD, the familial group tended to have a larger thalamus than the non-familial group. This is a part of the brain involved in the circuit of brain areas that manage attention and cognitive processing. With this and a few other differences, the study suggests that familial ADHD may be more severe than non-familial.
For this first time, this column would also like to feature a work that wasn’t written in English! That is, “Mas yo resto: Entrevista con Nancy Morejón,” an interview conducted by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario (English), whose specialty is nineteenth through twenty-first century US Latinx and Caribbean literature and culture. She is also the editor of the journal Small Axe. This interview, conducted in Spanish, is with Nancy Morejón, a well-known Cuban poet, essayist, and critic. In this interview, they discuss Morejón’s life and writings. She began publishing poetry at the age of seventeen, and when El Puente, a group that published new writers, published her work along with that of several other writers of note. She studied French at the University of Havana and wrote her thesis about Aimé Césaire, whom she ended up meeting many years later. Morejón’s work was influenced by Césaire, Nicolás Guillén, and many others. The interview goes on to discuss Morejón’s work and philosophy, including the importance of multilingualism.
Finally, Kevin Birth (Anthropology), who studies the relationship between time and culture, has an article on the pedagogy he uses to help students think of time as culturally contingent: “Teaching Time; Disrupting Common Sense.” His course considers the difference between conventional expressions of time (calendars, clocks, and so on) and the experience of time. He asks students to think creatively about concepts and representations of time. He uses several fascinating strategies to encourage students to think more critically about time and highlight how time is constructed in a cultural context. His assignments use creative due dates based on obscure historical calendars, leap days, natural astronomical cycles, and the lives of plants, as well as relative time measures (“two weeks from now”). Among other things, he asks students to consider the clock both as a cultural artifact and a machine that can be manipulated, and demonstrates the differences between the length of the hour at different historical times with the “world’s worst drum solo.” The class considers capitalist metaphors for time, scientific paradoxes involving time, and more. In any case, as we draw toward the end of the semester, it may be useful to remember that all our measures of time are arbitrary and culturally contingent.
This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all.
The Alexander Kouguell Collection follows the life and career of Professor Emeritus Alexander Kouguell (1920-2022), whose nearly 70-year tenure and career are documented in a newly processed collection at the Queens College Special Collections and Archives.
Headshot of Alexander Kouguell with his cello (Box 9)
Alexander Kouguell was born in Crimea on March 27th, 1920 to parents Arkadie and Marie Kouguell (nee Malinskya). Both his parents had been child piano prodigies, and met at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory whilst studying music. His father’s career as a composer, as well as worsening political conditions, had prompted a brief move to Constantinople (now Istanbul), Turkey, and later Beirut, Lebanon where the family remained for nearly 25 years.
Alexander Kouguell received a diploma from the Ecole Normale De Musique de Paris in cello in 1938, his bachelors and master’s degrees from the American University in Beirut in 1941 and 1943 respectively, and enrolled at Columbia University for a PhD in Comparative Literature in 1944. In this time, he continued his career in music, which led his first position as a professor of cello at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore.
Picture of Kouguell @ 26 years (Box 7)Paul Bauzelaire post-cardsHoneymoon photos (top) and parents photos from 1980 (bottom two rows)
Uncertainty regarding his continued funding would bring him back to New York, where he met musician Leo Kraft. Kraft recommended he apply for a position at the newly minted Music Department at Queens College. He became a professor at the Queens College Department of Music, later renamed the Aaron Copland School of Music, when the area surrounding Queens was still farmland—a far cry from the metropolitan borough it is today. His family followed him soon after in 1956, with the collection even including his parents’ naturalization papers.
Kouguell’s career afforded him the opportunities to play nationwide and internationally with groups such as the New York Chamber Soloists, the Musica Aeterna Orchestra, and the Silvermine Quartet. Hotel brochures, concert programs, and even audio recordings of concerts are available upon request in his collection. True to the deep respect he commanded in the community, the collection holds many music manuscripts of pieces that were dedicated to Alexander.
Leo Kraft piece dedicated to him (top); Kouguell in an orchestra playing (Box 6) (bottom)
Although his career and Queens College papers are a testament to his cultural impact, what makes Kouguell’s collection exceptionally special are his personal papers which outline not only his life but also the connections that made him a valued member of the Queens College community. Exchanges with his impressive mentors in France can be found in the same subseries as their obituaries, denoting the passage of time and the impact his mentors had on him.
His eclectic collection includes photographs of his honeymoon, an audio recording of him gently guiding his oldest son’s piano lesson, a brief biography of his parents, and photographs that show the steady progression of his family from the 1940’s through the present. All of the notes that color a person’s life is existent in his collection. The heart of the Kouguell collection lies in the remembrance that the measure of a person’s life is traced through their legacy, but their impact can be felt in the treasures they leave behind.
The Alexander Kouguell Papers are now open for research. To make an appointment to view the collection, please contact the archives at qc.archives@qc.cuny.edu.
by: Kimiko Hahn, Distinguished Professor & Assistant Director, MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation
Event: National Poetry Month in the Archives: The Chapbook Collection And the Launch of Award-Winning Chapbook Lest We All Get Clipped by Joseph Gross Date & Time: April 24, 2023, 7pm Location: Rosenthal Library’s Tannenbaum Room 300i
QC MFA alum Joseph Gross will read from his debut poetry chapbook Lest We All Get Clipped. In this collection, he explores our innate divinity through both ecclesiastical and (extra)ordinary experiences. The poems wrestle with faith, expression, and urban life “because / in the city / there’s not much / distance between / ravage & ravish.” After the reading, fellow alum and publisher Peter Vanderberg will speak about how and why he started this press.
The Birdhouse Chapbook Prize is awarded to an alum from the MFA program and published by Ghostbird Press. Founder Peter Vanderberg, a poet and educator, was inspired by CUNY’s Chapbook festivals ten years ago and has been publishing for nearly as long. He recognized the importance of the chapbook as a format that often publishes a writer’s first collection, often presents theme-based work as well as texts that may be offbeat and/or experimental. Ghostbird publishes all genres and includes art alongside the texts. Their lineup includes early work by writers such as Rajiv Mohabir as well as an unusual hybrid collection by former New York State poet laureate Alicia Ostriker. Last year, Vanderberg generously donated all of the Ghostbird chapbooks to the QC Chapbook Archive and many will be on display.
The Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation is a unique program that was founded nearly twenty years ago by professors in the English Dept. Students work closely with award-winning full-time faculty writers and benefit from taking classes that include cross-genre work. In such a way, the students get to know classmates outside their genre of focus and become adept in commenting on texts outside their genre of focus–whether poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or translation. And, speaking of literary translation, the QC MFA is one of two programs in the country that has a dedicated MFA track. Whether a student is from the United State or from another country, they feel at home in Queens, the most linguistically diverse place on the planet. Multivocal and multigenre and multifaceted are characteristic of this graduate creative writing program. The Birdhouse Chapbook reading is always a marvelous window into the community of alum, students, and professors.
This reading coincides with poet and QC professor Kimiko Hahn’s craft class “A Chapbook for Every Genre.” She will introduce the event.
Please join us in celebrating the launch of Ghostbird’s latest chapbook, Joseph Gross’ Lest We All Get Clipped.
