Faculty

R. David Addams is the executive director of the Oliver Program, an educational diversity non-profit for disadvantaged youth. He was a Belle Zeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brooklyn College, where he taught classes on law and public policy. He managed diversity initiatives at the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union. Receiving his B.A. from Princeton and his law degree from Columbia University, he taught constitutional law, evidence writing skills, criminal justice and public policy. In 1994, he received the New York State Governor's Award for African Americans of Distinction.

Patricia Antoniello is a professor of Health and Nutrition Sciences and director of the Shirley Chisholm Center for the Study of Women at Brooklyn College. Professor Antoniello is a co-founder of the Brooklyn Health Coalition Worksite Heart Health Project and is an experienced ethnographic researcher using anthropological methodology. She has worked on community based health care projects that study rural health service providers. Her research interests include an understanding of how integrative health care promotes health, social change and human rights in rural villages. Professor Antoniello has a PhD from Columbia University.

Eric Blackwell is a professor of Urban Planning and Economic Development at Long Island University in Brooklyn. He is the co-founded and former executive director of Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development as well as the co-founder and economic development director of the Fort Greene Strategic Neighborhood Action Partnership (SNAP). Professor Blackwell is a political advocate for greater home ownership for low-income people and the issuance of city-backed bonds to build affordable housing.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a public intellectual, regularly featured on television and radio.. Starting in the labor movement as a rank and file member of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, he eventually became.the highest ranking African American in the AFL-CIO. He served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of TransAfrica Forum, a national non-profit organization organizing, educating and advocating for policies in favor of the peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. After serving that role for four years, he was appointed Belle Zeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brooklyn College from 2005 to 2007. Fletcher was formerly the Vice President for International Trade Union Development Programs for the George Meany Center of the AFL-CIO. Combining labor and community work, he struggled to desegregate the Boston building trades. A graduate of Harvard University, Fletcher is a prolific author of dozens of articles. He co-authored The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941.

Juan D. Gonzalez is a civil rights advocate and renowned journalist. He was the Belle Zeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brooklyn College. As a journalist, he covered national and international events, including the U.S. Invasion of Panama, political troubles in Mexico and the Caribbean, the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. His columns have won him numerous awards and honors, including the 1998 George Polk Award for commentary. His articles have been published in Mademoiselle, The Nation, The Source and Hispanic Magazine. He is co-host of Pacifica Radio's news magazine show, Democracy Now. Of Puerto Rican descent, Gonzalez was a founder of the Young Lords Party and has been named to Hispanic Business magazine's annual list of the nation's 100 Most Influential Hispanics. He is a founding member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and UNITY, Journalist of Color. He was a recent President of the Association of Minority Journalists. An active member of the Newspaper Guild, he chaired the 1985 strike committees at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News and the 1990 N.Y. Daily News strike.

Hermon "Rock" Hackshaw is a political activist well grounded in community relations and public affairs. Professor Hackshaw is an experienced lecturer, community organizer and political consultant. He has taught at The College of New Rochelle, Manhattan Institute of Management, Bronx Community College and the Borough of Manhattan Community College. His political activities include a campaign for the New York State Assembly in 1998 as well as political consultation and advising to various candidates and elected officials. Professor Hackshaw is a graduate of Columbia University (B.A.) and Fordham University (M.A.).

Gerald C. Horne is a Professor of Communications and African-American Studies and the author of over twenty books. His recent publications include Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois, Class Struggle in Hollywood: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds and Trade Unionists, 1930-1950, and From the Barrel of a Gun: The U.S. and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980. Fire This Time was a finalist for the American Sociological Association's Robert Park Award in 1996. His present research projects include: Black Labor at Sea: Ferdinand Smith, from the National Maritime Union to the Communist Party to Jamaica; Race War! White Supremacy Vs. Blacks and Asians in the Japanese Attack on Hong Kong and the British Empire, 1930-1950, Black and Brown: African-Americans and The Mexican Revolution, 1910-20. Professor Horne earned his M.A. and PhD from Columbia University

Saru Jayaraman is a nationally recognized advocate for immigrant workers, who is regularly featured in The New York Times, on television and the radio. She is a graduate of Yale Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. With restaurant workers from the World Trade Center's Windows on the World, she co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York (ROC-NY)-- a workers' center focused on organizing immigrant restaurant workers in New York City. Along with many of the displaced World Trade Center workers and families of restaurant worker victims of 9/11, she launched a cooperatively-owned restaurant. ROC-NY is expanding to a national organization, based in major metropolitan areas. Jayaraman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Labor Law at Brooklyn College, and she lectures widely. She recently co-edited The New Urban Immigrant Workforce, (ME Sharpe, 2005).

Stephen Leberstein is one of the founders and long-time executive 
director of the Center for Worker Education at City College, where he retired as 
Professor of History in 2005. Professor Leberstein was the director the Center's
 Frances S. Patai Program on the Nazi Holocaust and now teaches on race, 
labor, radicalism and abolitionism at the Graduate Center
 for Worker Education. He also teaches labor history at the National 
Labor College and Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor
 Relations. Professor Leberstein is a member of the editorial board of Working USA: the
 Journal of Labor & Society. He has written on syndicalism at the
 turn of the 20th century and is interested in political repression and the attack
 on academic freedom, as both scholar and activist. He chairs the
 Academic Freedom Committee of the Professional Staff Congress, the 
faculty and staff union at CUNY, and served as a member of Committee "A"
 on Academic Freedom of the American Association for Academic Freedom
 from 2000 to 2006. His research on radicalism and academic labor in the 1930s and 1940s
 "Purging the Profs: The Rapp Coudert Committee in New York, 1940-1942," appeared in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U. S.
 Communism and led him to organize an effort to 
have the City University Board of Trustees apologize to the victims of 
that legislative investigating committee, which it did in 1981. About 50 
members of the faculty and staff at City College lost their jobs in that
 purge. 
 Professor Leberstein earned a Ph.D. in European history from the University of
 Wisconsin at Madison.

Betty Levin has been at Brooklyn College since 1986, where she has helped develop the Master’s of Public Health and Children's Studies programs. She is a founding editor of "Public Health Matters" in the American Journal of Public Health. She is a member of the Strategic Planning Committee, CUNY School of Public Health, Executive Board of PHANYC (Public Health Association of New York City), and founding member of the Pediatric Ethics Committee of New York Presbyterian Hospital. Professor Levin is a medical anthropologist with training in public health, best known for her research on ethical issues in Neonatal Care. She has studied ethical issues in other pediatric areas, HIV/AIDS, palliative care and "Urban Bioethics" (focus on race, class and urbanicity). Active in national professional associations (AAA, ASBH & APHA), she has promoted transdisciplinary work in the social sciences, bioethics, medicine and public health. Her current focus is public health education. She is a graduate of Barnard College (B.A.), Columbia University where she earned both an M.A. and PhD.

Ruth McChesney is a professor of Health and Nutrition Sciences at Brooklyn College. Professor McChesney has taught at Barnard College, where she served as a mentor in the Hughes Science Pipeline Project, a multi-faceted program that enhances all aspects of science education. She is an experienced researcher in epidemiology and a member of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Her research interests include reproductive and developmental biology, risk assessment of environmental effects on fertility and pregnancy. She has published several articles and papers in medical and science journals. Professor McChesney earned her PhD at the City University of New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Michael McCullough is an adjunct assistant professor of political science. He has longstanding interests in both the authoritarian and potentially liberating uses of information and information technology. In 1981, he wrote and co-produced "The Electronic Curtain," a WBAI report on politically-repressive uses of computers under authoritarian governments around the world. From 1982 to 1989, he edited and published Reset: News and Views on Citizen Computing newsletter. He co-founded the Computers for Social Change Conference held almost annually from 1986 to 1996 and co-edited Computers for Social Change and Community Organizing (Haworth Press, 1991), a compilation of work by conference participants. His work has appeared in Liberation, the Paris-based Terminal: Informatique, Culture, Society, the National Catholic Reporter, In These Times and Brazil's Caro Amigos. He is currently writing "Citizen Communication Revolution", a sequel to an essay he published in 1977 that proposed the use of information theory to revolutionize traditional democratic principles. McCullough received a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame, a master's in Latin American Studies from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in political science from the City University Graduate Center in 1995.

Genna Rae McNeil is professor of history at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and author of the prize-winning Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Groundwork has been praised by major publications: The Harvard Law Review noted it as outstanding scholarship [for which] the legal community is indebted, The New York Times declared, "Thanks now to Groundwork, Houston's contributions have been documented in scholarly manner," and Ebony hailed the biography as a "moving, long overdue testament to a singularly neglected giant of history." An expert on race and history, she has been featured on PBS, WHUR, and C-Span. Televised appearances include With All Deliberate Speed,"The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow", and "The Road to Brown." A graduate of the University of Chicago, she served as chairperson of Howard University's Department of History. McNeil is an award-winning teacher and writer, who has taught at Brooklyn College, Hunter College and Howard University School of Law. She is a former Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow and Schomburg Center Scholar.

Vernon Mogensen is an professor of political science at Kingsborough Community College an author of Office Politics: Computers, Labor, and the Fight for Safety and Health and has published several articles and book reviews in labor history journals. Professor Mogensen is the editor of Worker Safety Under Siege: Labor, Capital, and the Politics of Workplace Safety in a Deregulated World, a collection of works that raise issues on the significant challenges to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's ability to protect workers' safety and health. Professor Mogensen earned his PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Stanley Nelson is a documentary filmmaker with over twenty years of experience as a producer, director and writer of films and videos. Professor Nelson has served on prestigious committees including jury positions at the Sundance Film Festival and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. His documentary,The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, won the Freedom of Expression award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999. His documentary The Murder of Emmett Till, shown as part of PBS's American Experience series, won him an Emmy for best nonfiction direction. Professor Nelson has recently turned to more personal subject matter with PBS's A Place of Our Own, a look at his childhood summers spent at Oak Bluffs, the predominately black resort community on Martha's Vineyard. Professor Nelson is a graduate of the City College of New York (B.F.A.) and has studied at the American Film Institute and Columbia University. He was the Belle Zeller Professor at Brooklyn College, where he taught courses on politics, film and documentary filmmaking.

Immanuel Ness is the director of the Labor Policy Institute and Deputy Director of the Graduate Center for Worker Education. Professor Ness has been an organizer for several unions and his research focuses on worker resistance to oppression from historical and comparative perspectives. He has edited numerous encyclopedias, including the award-winning Encyclopedia of American Social Movements, Encyclopedia of Third Parties in America and forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 1500 to Present. Professor Ness is currently completing a book on labor migration and worker activism tentatively titled, From Migration Chains to Chains of Migration: New Corporate Despotism and Worker Resistance. He is also the editor of Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, a peer-review quarterly with Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. His articles have appeared in New Political Science, Labor Studies Journal, National Civic Review, The Nation, Z Magazine, Covert Action Quarterly, and In these Times. Professor Ness was a founder and coordinator of the Lower East Side Community Labor Organization, which received the Council of the City of New York Proclamation in May 2001. He received a B.A from New York University, an M.A. from Columbia University and a PhD from the City University of New York.

Lizette Nieves has served as a consultant to nonprofit organizations in strategic planning, program development and management. She is an instructor in Graduate Studies of Public Administration at Brooklyn College. She is the former Chief of the Staff for the NYC Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD), a NYC agency that is responsible for funding over a thousand community-based organizations. Professor Nieves served as Director for Special Projects at the After-school Corporation where she designed forums for superintendents and principals as well as pilot youth mentoring programs in the local high schools. She is interested in cultivating leadership in the non-profit sector and previously was a recruiter with a nationally recognized executive search firm as well as a consultant to non-profit organizations in strategic planning, program development and management. Clients have included Save the Children USA, Net Day, University of Minnesota and others. She was a Truman Scholar in1990 and the first student from the CUNY system to become a Rhodes Scholar in 1992. Professor Nieves is a graduate of Brooklyn College (B.A.) and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton University (M.P.A.).

Gerald M. Oppenheimer is an Associate Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University and Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Much of Dr. Oppenheimer's work since 1984 has focused on the HIV epidemic, an area in which he has undertaken both health policy and historical research. Most recently, with Ronald Bayer, he has launched an oral history of the experience of South African doctors and nurses committed to treating people with HIV/AIDS. The study is modeled on their book on American physicians, AIDS Doctors: Voices From the Epidemic (NY: Oxford University Press, 2000). In addition, Dr. Oppenheimer has begun research on a history of the Framingham Heart Disease Study (1948- ), part of a larger work on the history of the development, since 1945, of coronary heart disease epidemiology and its effect on U.S. scientific policy and American culture. He is a graduate of the City University of New York who earned a PhD in history at the University of Chicago, later receiving post-doctoral training in epidemiology at Columbia University.

Kevin Parker is a New York State Senator representing the 21st Senatorial District in Brooklyn. A lifelong Brooklyn resident, he has served the borough working in the government, unions and community-based organizations. A dedicated advocate for public education, Professor Parker serves on the Senate's higher education committee and has taught classes on African-American studies and political science at various CUNY campuses, including the Graduate Center for Worker Education. As the youngest member of the Senate, Parker brings a wealth of experience to his office. He has served as Special Assistant to Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, Legislative Aide to former New York City Council Member Una Clarke and Special Assistant to Assemblyman Nick Perry. As an undergraduate student at Penn State University, he organized students to fight racism. Professor Parker holds a M.S. from the New School for Social Research Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, and he is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in political science at the City University of New York.

Manolin "Manny" Tirado has over twenty years of public administration experience with several city and state agencies. His areas of specialty include statistics, economic development, transportation planning and electoral politics. Professor Tirado has also worked as a political consultant for several city and state elected officials, including the Bronx Borough President, Adolfo Carrion. Currently, Professor Tirado is a Transportation Planner for MTA New York City Transit and serves as treasurer of the Northern Manhattan Economic Development Corporation. A graduate of Columbia University and the Brooklyn College Graduate Center for Worker Education, Tirado teaches politics at several colleges in New York City.

Joseph Wilson is the director of the Graduate Center for Worker Education and selected the site and helped build the Center’s new 44,000 sq. ft. state-of-the art teaching facilities in lower Manhattan. A political science professor and labor scholar, Professor Wilson is the founder of Brooklyn College's Center for Diversity and author of the College's first Diversity Plan. He holds leadership positions on CUNY's Affirmative Action Committee, the Diversity Grant Committee, Black Faculty and Staff Association, Professional Staff Congress, PSC-CUNY Grants Research Executive Committee and the Presidential Search-Board of Trustee Committees for CUNY's Graduate Center and Brooklyn College. Professor Wilson received a dual masters in philosophy and politics from Columbia University in addition to a Ph.D. in political science, where he was a National Science Fellow. His publications include: Race and Labor Matters in the New U.S. Economy, Tearing Down the Color Bar, The Re-education of the American Working Class; Black Labor in America: An Annotated Bibliography, and was a major contributor to the PBS documentary A. Philip Randolph: Peace and Jobs. Professor Wilson has contributed to the Encyclopedia of Social Movements, The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers at Stanford University and as Schomburg Fellow founded the African American Labor Archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This oral, video and documentary history collection is currently housed at the New York Public Library. Professor Wilson serves as senior editor and board chair of Working USA: Journal of Labor and Society. As a race and labor scholar, he has won numerous teaching awards including Tow Professor (1993-95), Intel Mentor Award (1998-1999), Faculty Appreciation Awards, Excelsior Favorite Teacher in Political Science (1997, 1998, & 2000) and Broeklundian Award, (1998 & 2000).

John Yong is a practicing attorney in New York City specializing in criminal defense, personal injury, immigration and business litigation. Professor Yong has worked as a public defender for the Legal Aid Society, the last five years as a supervising attorney. While at the Legal Aid Society, he was elected to lead the 1000 member Legal Aid Society union. He Successfully negotiated a labor contract in 1988. Professor Yong has defended more than a thousand Chinese and Asian Americans in litigations concerning criminal defense, immigration, personal injury, and commercial transaction. He has argued cases of illegitimate police violence, groundless arrest and has initiated civil trials for clients to win compensations for wrongful violation of individual liberties. Professor Yong is a graduate of Boston College (B.A.) and earned his law degree from the University of California.