Project Leadership & Team
The project is led by Chase F. Robinson, Provost of the Graduate Center, Jessie Daniels, Professor of Public Health, Sociology and Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, and Matthew K. Gold, Associate Professor, English, City Tech-CUNY, Advisor to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives and Acting Executive Officer of the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies.

The project team includes this leadership as well as Jen Jack Gieseking, Visiting Assistant Research Professor and Project Manager of JustPublics@365, Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land and Wilneida Negron, Digital Fellows and Ph.D. Candidates at the Graduate Center, and Emily Sherwood, Project Assistant and Ph.D. Candidate at the Graduate Center, as well as team of interns, data visualization experts, and a social media event planner.

Chase F. Robinson (Co-Principal Investigator)
A specialist in early Islamic history, Chase F. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of History and Provost and Senior Vice President of the GC. He received his B.A. from Brown University in 1985 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993.  From 1993-2008 he was University Lecturer and Professor of Islamic History at the University of Oxford.  He is the author of several books, collected volumes, and over 30 articles on Islamic history and thought, and he has held fellowships from a number of organizations, including the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the British Academy, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.  At the GC, he has focused upon strategic initiatives that foster interdisciplinarity and academic excellence and that further the GC’s public mission.  These include an award of $2.5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish three centers of interdisciplinary excellence in science studies, globalization, and religion; the creation of the Initiative in the Theoretical Sciences; and the spearheading of the “Digital GC,” which will position the GC as a national and international leader in theorizing and establishing multi-platform scholarly communication of advanced learning, scholarship, and research.  He can be found on Twitter @chasefrobinson.

Jessie Daniels (Co-Principal Investigator)
An internationally recognized expert on Internet manifestations of racism, Jessie Daniels is Professor at the Graduate Center and Hunter College.  She is the author of two books about race and various forms of media, White Lies (Routledge, 1997) and Cyber Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), as well as dozens of peer-reviewed articles in journals such as New Media & Society, Gender & Society, American Journal of Public Health, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Since 2007, Daniels has maintained a scholarly blog, RacismReview (with Joe R. Feagin), which regularly gets 200,000 unique visitors each month and has received well over two million visitors since it began. Her current work focuses on the ways gender, sexuality, race, and political economy influence feminist blogging; a recent piece about this research appears in the edited volume, Cyberfeminism 2.0 (Peter Lang, 2012).  She has been awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for 2012-2013. Forbes magazine recently named her one of “20 Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter.”  She can be found on Twitter @JessieNYC.

Matthew K. Gold (Co-Principal Investigator)
A key scholar in the emerging field of digital humanities, Matthew K. Gold is Associate Professor of English at New York City College of Technology.  At the Graduate Center, he serves as Advisor to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives, Acting Executive Officer of the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies (MALS), Director of the CUNY Academic Commons, Co-Director of the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, and Director of the “Looking for Whitman” project. He teaches in both the MALS program and the Doctoral Certificate Program in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. He is editor of Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota, 2012) and has published work in The Journal of Modern Literature, Kairos, and On the Horizon, as well as in the edited collections From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup (University of Minnesota, 2010) and Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy (iDC, 2010). His digital humanities projects, including “Looking for Whitman” and “Commons In A Box,” have been supported by grants from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He was recently elected to the Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. He can be found at mkgold.net and on Twitter @mkgold.

Jen Jack Gieseking (Project Manager)
Jen Jack Gieseking (PhD, Environmental Psychology) is Visiting Assistant Research Professor. She is working on her first book, Queer New York: Lesbians’ and Queer Women’s Experiences of Social and Spatial Justice in New York City, 1983-2008, and has published articles and chapters on the co-production of space, identity, and in/justice. She is interested in the co-production of urban space and identity with a special focus on sexuality and gender; cognitive and mental mapping methodologies; theories of the geographical imagination; the intersection of the productions of history, myth, and memory, space, and time; and expressions and experiences of justice, oppression, and the everyday. She has held fellowships with The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, Summer Institute for Geographers of Justice, The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and the Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellows Program. Jack can be found at jgieseking.org or on Twitter at @jgieseking.

Morgane Veronique Richardson (Social Media Event Planner) 
Morgane Veronique Richardson is a fourth wave antiracist feminist and social media strategist – approaching her generation’s inherited economic, environmental, and social issues with innovative flair, a progressive mindset, and practical implementation. In 2008, she founded Refuse The Silence: Women of Color in Academia Speak Out to reconcile the existing hegemony within elite academia with the desire for diverse campuses.   And in 2009, she co-founded a successful social media firm, MixtapeMedia, which works on pro-social campaigns for clients such as the United Nations. Morgane’s reflections on women, race and education have been published in numerous blogs and magazines including, Bitch, Feministing, Burlington Free Press, and Chronicles of Higher Ed. In 2010, she was featured as one of More Magazine’s “New Feminists You Need To Know.” She holds a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology and The History of Art and Architecture from Middlebury College and an M.A. in Gender and Peace Building from the United Nations University For Peace. Morgane can be found at morganerichardson.com or on twitter at @morgane_r

Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land (Digital Fellow)
Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land is a PhD student in Sociology and Criminology at the Graduate Center CUNY, and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY. Her work focuses on studies of race, criminalization, and social control in Western Canada. Her current work is on the dynamics of settler colonialism in the history of left wing social reform movements and present-day New Democratic Party (NDP) criminal justice policy. She has been a regular contributor to Canadian Dimension Magazine and an organizer with Copwatch. Bronwyn holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Toronto and a BA in International Development Studies and Economics from McGill University. Bronwyn can be found at opencuny.org/bronwyndl and on Twitter at @bronwyn_dl.

Wilneida Negrón (Digital Fellow)
Wilneida Negrón is a political science comparativist and technology strategist with over ten years of experience in the nonprofit and public sector.  Her work explores the intersection between technology, governance, democracy, and social justice. Her dissertation takes a look at the relationship between macro-social features of political systems and the political use and effects of digital media in emerging democracies in East Asia and Latin America. She is the author of The Non-Profit Guide to Internet Marketing, a toolkit to help nonprofits launch low-cost but high-impact search engine and social media optimization strategies and works with national and international groups on social justice and program development projects. She is fluent in Spanish and Mandarin and holds a Masters in Public Administration. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in political science at the Graduate Center CUNY. Wilneida can be found at wilneida.com and @wilneidanegron.

Emily Sherwood (Project Assistant)
Emily Sherwood is a Doctoral Candidate in the Ph.D. Program in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She holds an Instructional Technology Fellowship from Macaulay Honors College and is the Project Assistant for JustPublics@365. Her teaching experience includes courses in Early British Literature, Shakespeare, and Shakespeare on Film at Hunter College. Emily is a member of the planning committee for the Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance. Her dissertation focuses on ways that women define themselves beyond the socially privileged category of wife in medieval and early modern literature and culture. She can be found on Twitter @emilygwynne and esherwood.org.

Kaitlyn O’Hagan (Intern)
Kaitlyn O’Hagan is a senior at CUNY Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College studying History and Public Policy. She is passionate about education policy, especially issues of access, equity, diversity and integration at the local level. In addition, her coursework has  convinced her of the value of new media in education. Her historical research has been focused on American women’s history, and she is currently working on her thesis: “Ellen White’s Benevolent Millennialism.” She can be found on twitter at @kaitlynohagan.