Cen Liu is a Ph.D. student in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research focuses on collecting practices, the history of science and technology, and theatrical culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Through their convergence, she investigates the epistemologies about local urban orders and the global cultural landscape of the period. She is also interested in how the archives as both repositories of memories and palimpsests of forgetting sway the narratives of history, and how theatre and performance as a site and a methodology can offer new ways of producing knowledge at the interstices. She is currently a Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Department of Theatre and Speech at City College of New York. She has previously worked at the Morgan Library & Museum as a research fellow.

Reflection post: The Mystery of the Archive and the Performance of the Open Future

Dohyun Gracia Shin is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance at the City University of New York Graduate Center, as well as a graduate teaching fellow at the City College of New York and a pansori student. Her research focuses on theatre works that portray gender and sexuality within a matrix of power and considers how bodies regarded nonnormative in theatre might playfully challenge hegemonic and oppressive forces and structures. Her research interests lie in representations of women and LGBTQ in contemporary Korean theatre, contemporary adaption of pansori/changgeuk, and the US-American Gothic theatre.

Erin Elizabeth Lilli is a PhD candidate in Environmental Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and an adjunct lecturer in Urban Studies at Queens College since 2016. Her current research focuses on the material conditions and experiences of gentrification had by long-term Black residents and homeowners in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Course site: Gentrification Housing & Urban Restructuring | URBST 265/URBST 7603-002

Reflection post: OA/OER is a Liberatory Political Act

Georgie Efegenia Humphries is a Ph.D. student in Earth and Environmental Sciences. She conducts her research in nutrient biogeochemistry and marine microbiology in coastal/estuarine systems under the supervision of Dr. Dianne I. Greenfield at the Advanced Science Research Center. Georgie additionally teaches Environmental Science Laboratory courses at Queens College. 

Course site: Environmental Science Laboratory | Library for Environmental Science Labs (99/100)

Reflection post: STEM Without OER: Inaccessible or Not Credible

Inma Naïma Zanoguera is a Ph.D. student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Spanning academic, creative, and journalistic genres, her writings explore humanity’s resilience, particularly in the face of colonial oppression, and its manifestations in the literary arts. Her aim is to understand and amplify historical and contemporary instances where the (seemingly) totalizing influence of colonialism and liberalism falters and leaks, foretelling possibilities of otherwise living, knowing, and being. Based between Brooklyn and Mallorca, she sporadically works on projects related to sports and activism/community, primarily around the Sahrawi diaspora. Despite all the books, she can trace most of what she’s learned to the creative, spiritual, and embodied practices of running on the trails or swimming endless laps at your local swimming pool.

Course site: black iberian routes | OES cataloguing Atlantic entanglements from the Early Modern to the present

Reflection post: Knowledge, Power, and OER

Madison Schindele is a doctoral student in Musicology at the Graduate Center and an adjunct lecturer at Queens College. Her research focuses on vocal music through lenses of cultural disability and feminist theory. She is pursuing a certificate in Women and Gender Studies while at the GC and holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory and Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Course site: MUSIC 1, SUMMER 2025

Reflection post: Mixing & Matching Open Educational Resources

Manon Hakem-Lemaire is a third-year doctoral student in comparative literature, specializing in 19th-century travel writing, at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has been teaching composition and world literature at Baruch College since Fall 2020. During the pandemic, she became one of those people who got a lockdown puppy.

Course site: ENG2850 GMWA- Great Works of Literature II – Fall 2022

Reflection post: Increasing Engagement via Zero Cost

Miriam Laytner is a Ph.D. student in cultural anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also a Mellon Humanities Public Fellow. In her role as a Mellon Fellow, she helps research institutions across New York City to develop events and agendas that raise public engagement with social science research for such institutions as New York Academy of Sciences–Anthropology Section and the Institute for Religion Culture and Public Life at Columbia. Her dissertation research focuses on the intersection of faith-based movements, environmentalism, and the climate crisis in the United States. Prior to attending graduate school, Miriam worked for many years as a scuba instructor and hiking guide in the Caribbean, Alaska and Australia. Miriam holds a B.A. in History from Barnard College and an M.A. in Oral History from Columbia University. She is a proud New Yorker.

Course site: People, Plants and Place – Fall 2022

Reflection post: Open Access Requires Access: An Irony of OER

Nadia Augustyniak is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center. Her dissertation examines psychological counseling in Sri Lanka’s public health sector, focusing on how gender and class relations as well as everyday ethics of care shape therapeutic practice. She teaches medical anthropology and ethnography of South Asia at Queens College.

Course site: Medical Anthropology

Reflection post: Reading at the Margins of Open Access

Natasha Ochshorn (she/her) is a Graduate Worker in English in her third year at the Graduate Center. She is working on a dissertation about loss and fantasy literature.

Course site: Speculative Fiction and “Society” | Engl 1012

Reflection post: Opening Up

My name is Peter Susanszky. I am currently a third-year student in the Philosophy Ph.D. program, where my main area is logic in all its forms. I also like photography. And cats.

Reflection post: Contributing to Open Access

Robert B. Wrigley is a Ph.D. candidate in historical musicology at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Lehman College. He holds a MA in Musicology from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University and a BA in Music from the University of Puget Sound. He is the co-chair of the 2022 Graduate Students in Music Conference at The Graduate Center. His research interests include liturgical music, the history of the theory and aesthetics of music, topic theory, and the reception of Joseph Haydn.

Course site: Introduction to Music | MSH 114

Reflection post: Defending Music Appreciation Against Its Devotees

Samuel Teeple is an adjunct lecturer at the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College, and a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation investigates the music of Jewish Berlin in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and, more broadly, Jewish contributions to German music. Before moving to New York, he earned two Master’s degrees in tuba performance and music history from Bowling Green State University. Outside of research and teaching, he is a lead developer of the GC Music Teaching Hub, an online repository of open-source teaching materials developed by CUNY graduate students.

Course site: MUSIC 1 (“Exploring Music”)

Reflection post: “Researcher first, teacher second”: Time-Saving Suggestions for Open-Access Teaching

Sharanya Dutta is a fourth-year English Ph.D. student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research focuses on contemporary Anglophone South Asian novels—specifically nostalgia and dissent, states of emergency and exception, and the relationship between theory, language and the novel form. Her work exists at the intersection of postcolonial studies, transnational and world literatures, theories of the global south, and affect theory. She teaches First-Year Writing and Great Books at Baruch College.

Course site: ENG2850 Great Works II

Reflection post: Slowness, Limits, and Open Play

Silvia Rivera Alfaro is a student at the Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures and a GC Digital Fellow. She is co-founder of Indisciplinadxs: Feminist Linguistics Circle, an international Spanish-speaking community of professionals and activists working on language, gender, and sexuality.

Pressbooks here: Marking Gender in Spanish – Simple Book Publishing

Reflection post: Teaching Spanish Language and Gender with Open Resources

Stephen Gomez-Peck is a doctoral candidate in music theory at the Graduate Center CUNY. His research investigates how form operates as a stylistic marker in hip-hop music. Stephen teaches music theory and history classes at Hunter and Queens Colleges, CUNY, and loves long distance running and cycling.

Course site: Music Theory Fundamentals

Reflection post: Opening Music

Taylor Culbert is a Ph.D. candidate in theatre and performance at the Graduate Center. Her dissertation focuses on early modern European animal entertainments, querying how humans and non-human animals responded to and collaborated with one another, while considering animals as active agents in shaping theatre and performance history. 

Course site: World Theatre History III

Reflection post: Performing History with OER

Vivek Sharma is a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. His research interests lie at the intersection of social media text analysis, natural language processing, and data extraction and processing. Vivek is also dedicated to the development of innovative web-based applications. His current research focuses on identifying propaganda techniques through advanced deep learning models, with the aim of developing robust detection frameworks.

Course site: Principles of Computer Architecture

Yunhua Zhao is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research concentrates on the area of machine learning for software engineering, especially software quality assurance and mining software repositories. She taught discrete mathematics, and during the Open Knowledge Fellowship process, she finished her class syllabus for the course entitled Introduction to Discrete Structure at Brooklyn College using Open Access resources.

Course site: Introduction to Discrete Structures

Reflection post: Teaching Computer Science with Open Resources