CUNY Podcasts

Dec 07 2023 10 ep. 27 mins 168

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Smart voices, good stories and thought-provoking conversation from The City University of New York.

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CUNY’s Transformation SWAT Team

Dec 07 2023 26 mins

CUNY this year unveiled an ambitious plan for transforming into the nation’s foremost student-centered university system by the end of this decade. One of the ways the “CUNY Lifting New York” strategic plan is getting off the ground is with the help of a new Office of Transformation created by Chancellor Fé

Tales of the Eng Dynasty

Sep 19 2023 26 mins

Alvin Eng’s long, strange trip began in his family’s laundry in Flushing (presided over by his Cantonese opera-singing “Empress Mother”). From there, somehow, he became an adolescent punk rocker and then a downtown playwright and storyteller inspired by a delayed embrace of his Chinese heritage.

For Ava Chin, All Roads Lead to Mott Street

Aug 30 2023 35 mins

Her father’s absence when she was growing up made half of Ava Chin’s family history a family mystery. But when she finally met him in Chinatown, in her twenties, it sparked a years-long quest that not only uncovered her own family’s remarkable story but revealed the much deeper history of exclusion that defined the Chinese American experience for a century. Chin, a professor

The Emergence of Sidik Fofana

Jun 14 2023 29 mins

Sidik Fofana started out writing rap songs as a kid, but it was fiction that really took hold when he was in college. It was a passion, if not a realistic career ambition, and so he kept at it while earning a masters in education at City College, and when he became a high school teacher in Brooklyn. Last summer, more than a decade later, Sidik finally got his first book published

A Young Writer Born of a Forgotten War

Feb 01 2023 20 mins

Crystal Hana Kim says the Korean War is so deeply ingrained in her family’s history–but so remote for Americans today–that it became the driving force for her to become a writer. “I wanted to force it into our cultural consciousness because it’s known as the Forgotten War,” Kim tells Joe Tirella on this episode of CUNY Book Beat. “I went to public sc

Ryan Martin’s got game. And he’s putting CUNY adaptive sports on the map.

Jan 27 2023 23 mins

As CUNY’s first director of inclusive and adaptive sports, Ryan Martin has quickly built a program featuring men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball teams that compete against colleges from around the country. Martin is a national leader and advocate for adaptive sports and a veteran wheelchair basketball player himself.

Behind the Closed Doors of a Queens Family Story

Oct 31 2022 18 mins

Queens College alum Nira Burstein spent six years making “Charm Circle,” an intensely personal documentary that took Burstein and her camera inside her childhood home in Flushing on a quest to understand the emotional chaos of her parents’ lives. Burstein is one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, and “Charm Circle” has been ha

Illuminating the Nazis’ Vast System of Genocide

Apr 07 2022 30 mins

An ambitious new exhibition at Queensborough Community College’s renowned Kupferberg Holocaust Center offers a new way to understand the enormity of Nazi genocide by documenting the staggering number of sites across Europe where Hitler’s murderous army carried out his Final Solution. “The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide” is

A Backpack at 75: Ciro Scala’s Long Quest for a CCNY Degree

Mar 21 2022 27 mins

Nearly six decades after he reluctantly dropped out of City College, Ciro Scala went back in 2016 and earned both an undergraduate and master’s degree from CCNY’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. Now he’s fulfilling his lifelong dream of becoming a teacher, and he’s giving something back. He created a workshop program to help first-generation co

Bringing Authenticity to Artistry in Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story’

Dec 08 2021 35 mins

“West Side Story” is beloved for its music, dance and romanticism but has long been dogged by criticism of its stereotyping of Puerto Rican characters and the casting of white actors to play them in the 1961 movie. When Steven Spielberg set out to make a reimagined version, he and screenwriter Tony Kushner tapped Brooklyn College professor emerita Virginia Sánchez Korrol to