Teaching Fellows

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  Weixiang Chen

  Weixiang Chen is a Chinese labor activist and a doctoral student in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has been active in labor organizing and worker empowerment for a decade in southern China. His research interest lies in the labor relations, labor movement and China. He teaches Research Method at Queens College.

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  Anson Chung

  Anson Cheuk-Hin Chung is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on the judicial behavior of judges and the institutional design of incorporating foreign judges in local courts, specifically focusing on the case of Hong Kong. His research also focuses on the strategic judicial behavior of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science from the CUNY City College of New York (2022) and a Master of Arts in Political Science from the University of Toronto (2024). Anson currently teaches at Brooklyn College and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In Spring 2026, Anson will be teaching a class called United States in World Politics at Brooklyn College, where he plans to have a module focusing on U.S.-China Relations and the rise of China. He will also be teaching a class called Judicial Processes and Politics at John Jay College, where he plans to focus on aspects of legal mobilization in China. By incorporating China into his teaching, he wishes to expand the scope of knowledge for his students, especially on East Asia and China.

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  Amalia Torrecillas

  Amalia is a Ph.D. student in Public Policy at the CUNY Graduate Center, where her research focuses on labor informality, inequality, and the political economy of social policy. Her work examines how informal and precarious labor arrangements shape economic insecurity, access to social protection, and democratic governance, with a particular emphasis on migrant and marginalized workers. Methodologically, she combines comparative political economy, welfare state analysis, and mixed methods, drawing on both macro-level data and on-the-ground research in urban contexts. Alongside her research, she is a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Baruch College, where she teaches Introductory American Government and prioritizes connecting institutional analysis to everyday labor realities.

  In Spring 2025, she plans to incorporate China-related content by examining labor informality, migration, and inequality in China in a comparative perspective, focusing on state regulation, social insurance systems, and urban labor governance. The China at CUNY Initiative will help her strengthen her comparative framework by providing mentorship and resources that enable her to integrate China’s labor and welfare institutions into her teaching and research in a rigorous, grounded way.

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  Gloria Caminha

  Gloria Caminha is a PhD candidate in History at the Graduate Center. Her research focuses on U.S. foreign policy toward Brazil from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, with a specific emphasis on energy issues. She teaches United States history and currently teaches U.S. policy in Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries at John Jay College. I plan to use the contemporary conflict over the Panama Canal, between the US under Donal Trump’s administration, China and Panama to show how China has become a significant influence in Latin America posing a challenge and threat to US hegemony and interests in the region.

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  Rosa Emilia Milagros Arevalo Leon

  Rosa Arevalo Leon (M.P.A., Syracuse University; M.A. studies, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru) is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the City University of New York (CUNY). Her research focuses on human rights, human mobility, democracy, and subnational politics, with a methodological emphasis on qualitative approaches. She was a Sardon-Glass Fellow at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, sponsored by the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. Rosa has served as a consultant for organizations including the International Labour Organization and the Presidency of the Council of Ministers in Peru. At the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), she taught courses on academic research and social responsibility with a focus on human mobility. She brings extensive experience in the research, design, and analysis of public policy.

Seminar Fellows

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  Juan Rua-Serna

  I am a Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center, specializing in International Relations and Comparative Politics. My research focuses on the intersection of immigration, border politics, human rights, and international organizations. I am particularly interested in understanding how integration policies work, how immigrants think about political participation, and the relationship among integration, democracy, and citizenship. I expect that the CACI fellowship will strengthen both my teaching and scholarship by deepening my knowledge of China and providing tools to understand how China manages immigration.

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  Sara Feinstein

  I am a second year student in the Sociology Doctoral program at the Graduate Center. My research focuses on the ways that digital technologies relate to social inequalities. My current project uses panel longitudinal survey data to examine the connection between childhood digital technology use and early adult social mobility outcomes. I am teaching an undergraduate Introduction to Sociology course this semester and aim to incorporate cross-national research and perspectives into the course. My hope in participating in the CACI program is to learn about social scientific research regrading inequalities in China in order to incorporate cross-national comparisons between China and the US into my course. The Introduction to Sociology course content centers on social inequalities, however much of the research often presented in this sort of course centers on the US. I believe presenting a cross-national comparison incorporating current research on social inequalities in China would be a great addition to the course.

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  Fatima Rahman

  Fatima Rahman (she/her) is a second-year doctoral student in the English program at the Graduate Center. Her research interests include interrogating representations of the state, nationalisms, and revolutionary possibilities in postcolonial literature, including the diasporic community whose cohesion (or lack thereof) can complicate or contribute to the longue durée of ongoing decolonization. In Spring 2025, Fatima will be teaching World Humanities I (1500 BCE until the 1700s CE) at the City College of New York. A major text covered in this course is Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West, whose historical and political content echoes into the present. The CACI program will assist in exploring contextual and foundational details through which the novel’s greater significance may be articulated and clarified for undergraduate students. A question debated during class, for example, involves the revolutionary character of Sun Wukong invoked by Mao Zedong. Some students felt otherwise, emphasizing Wukong’s absurdity and condescension. To help promote student understanding during such discussions, it would be useful to learn more about the perhaps hypothetical but nonetheless differing cultural implications or perceptions of Journey to the West in the Ming era compared to the more modern Maoist era.

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  Inna Oliinyk

  Inna Oliinyk’s research focuses on Ukraine, with particular attention to civil society, the ongoing Russian invasion, and the role of global propaganda in shaping political and social responses. She is the author of the research project Open Arms, Conflicting Loyalties: A Comparison of Russian and Ukrainian Immigration to Poland and the United States, 1991–2023. Her current project examines Russia’s authorization of sexual violence in Ukraine at the UN Security Council between 2014 and 2024.
  She plans to incorporate China into her International Relations and Comparative Politics courses by analyzing its role as a major global actor—particularly its influence on Russia in the context of the war in Ukraine and its strategic ambitions regarding Taiwan. From a Comparative Politics perspective, she will examine China’s ideological foundations within political culture, as well as its political economy and the broader implications for democratization processes. The CACI Seminar Fellowship will provide essential support for this curricular expansion, enhancing her ability to deepen the academic analysis of China’s global influence and its intersection with political economy and democratization.

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  Jesus López Pérez

  Jesus Lopez-Perez is a Mexican economist with a diverse academic and professional background. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and a master’s degree in Applied Statistics from the Tecnologico de Monterrey. He also earned a master’s degree in Economic Theory from the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico. His professional journey has focused on the financial sector, empirical research and econometric analysis. His research has resulted in some publications in academic journals. Jesus is a third year PhD Economics student at The Graduate Center, where he also teaches International Trade and is TA for Macro Theory. On Spring 2026, I will continue participating at CACI to deep my understanding of China from an academic point of view, mainly by looking at its economic development policies: export-oriented growth and foreign policy relations.