CACI Fall 2024 Fellows

Teaching fellows

Christos Angelopoulos


Angelopoulos is a 5th-year PhD Candidate in Economics at the Graduate Center, specializing in financial markets, particularly financial derivatives markets, and their effect on the real economy. His current research investigates the dynamic relationship between financial derivatives markets and wealth inequality. He has extensive teaching experience in Finance, Statistics, Econometrics, and Macroeconomics. He holds a BSc in Economics from the University of Piraeus, Greece, an MSc in Finance from Stony Brook University, and an MPhil in Economics from the Graduate Center. As a CACI fellow, Angelopoulos aims to enhance his curriculum by incorporating recent developments in the Chinese economy, helping his students engage with real-world case studies. Furthermore, he seeks to deepen his understanding of China’s financial system and explore the role of derivatives markets in shaping China’s economic landscape.

Juan Corredor-Garcia


Juan Corredor-Garcia is a PhD student at the Political Science Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. He also works as a research fellow at the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies. He has taught undergraduate courses at Fordham University, including Environmental Politics and International Studies. He will be teaching Comparative Politics at Lehman College in Fall 2024. Juan will include two sessions on China’s political institutions and state building as a Non-Western comparative study for his course. The CACI program will assist Juan in integrating the study of China on his syllabus as well as by bringing a CUNY Faculty guest speaker with expertise in Chinese politics.

Helena Najm


Helena Najm is a PhD Student in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY with a major in Political Theory, and an instructor at Brooklyn College. She has worked as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Center for Humanities, CUNY, and with the Gittell Urban Studies Collective. Her research interests include questions of gender politics, cultural production, political economy, media, and city life. She holds an Honours B.Sc in Human Geography and Health and Disease from the University of Toronto, St. George, and an M.A. in Global Thought from Columbia University. She anticipates using her time with China at CUNY to further develop her pedagogical approach to the contrast between the language of globalization’s connectivity and the localized effects of political and economic decisions.

David Monda


David Monda teaches American Government and Political Science classes Hunter College(CUNY).  He expects to teach Sino-American political and economic relations in Fall 2024. China@CUNY will support his instruction and research by providing him with peer reviewed reading materials for his classes and expert faculty mentorship in designing his class syllabus. David’s doctoral training is situated at the intersection of Comparative Politics and International Relations with an emphasis on African international relations, foreign policy and international migration in the Global South. He recently completed a book chapter on “Rwanda: An Emerging Power in the Great Lakes Region?” for inclusion in Palgrave Publishers “The Foreign Policies of the Global South” published in Summer 2024. He has also been a research fellow at the Vera Institute’s Ending Detention Initiative, in Brooklyn New York, the Ralph Bunch Center at the Graduate Center – City University of New York (CUNY) and the Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society also at the Graduate Center. His research has included fieldwork in Belize, France, Botswana, South Africa, Brazil, Kenya and Argentina.

Seminar Fellows

Silvina (Bibi) Calderaro


Bibi (Silvina) Calderaro is a Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Studies and the Environmental Justice and Sustainability Programs at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She specializes in urban education’s role in magnifying climate action and environmental justice through situated pedagogies. She has designed and implemented a week-long pedagogical experience for educators in the lower Hudson River estuary, gaining access to remote areas by kayak, facilitated workshops, and designed and conducted semi-formal interviews with communities across NYC about environmental issues. Her expertise, networks, and collaborative experiences as artist and educator are key for mentoring community leadership, integrating academic and non-academic knowledge generation, and building relationships across constituencies and sectors. Her recent scholarship includes “Playing with Conscientizaçao: A Collectividual Project for a World We Wish to See” in Cultural Praxis and “Walking the Land where Fountain Avenue Begins” in CSPA Quarterly. Calderaro is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center where she has earned an MPhil and an MA; she holds an MFA from Queens College and a BA from Wesleyan University.

Karen Hui


Karen Hui is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center. Her research examines the politics and ethics of middle-class child-rearing in contemporary Shenzhen, China (where she was raised), and its relationship to national imaginaries of the future. She has taught courses on cultural anthropology at Baruch College. She is excited to be a part of a cohort of scholars invested in researching and teaching China at the Graduate Center and CUNY at large.

Haoju Lu


Haoju Lu will graduate from the MPS in Labor & Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State in August. She focuses on labor, social movement, and China study. She is interested in exploring workers’ responses and resistance under changing economic and political conditions. Since 2023 fall, she worked as a graduate assistant researching Chinese overseas investment. She worked as a workers’ rights advocator and labor organizer in China since 2018. I hope to receive guidance and trainning on course design and research methodology.

Brendan O’Connor


Brendan O’Connor is a PhD student in Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation research focuses on how changes in the political economy of the world football (soccer) industry make themselves manifest on the field and how football supporters make sense of those changes. He teaches the introductory “World Regional Geography” course at Hunter College, surveying capitalism’s uneven development, colonialism and imperialism, and the geography of class struggle. As a CACI Fellow, he hopes to learn more about the place of sport in Chinese state-building as well as to develop teaching materials on labor struggles in China. Before coming to CUNY, he was a full-time journalist; he is the author of Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right, published in 2021.

Jun Yoo


Jun Yoo is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Economics at CUNY’s Graduate Center and a graduate teaching fellow at Queens College. He teaches courses that provide general perspectives on both micro and macroeconomic concepts. China serves as an excellent example of modern economic growth and potential future opportunities, which he often incorporates into his teaching. His research focuses on small business lending, with a particular interest in competition and policy effects. Additionally, he explores recent technological developments in the banking industry, including Fintech, where China plays a significant role. Through the CACI fellowship, he aims to deepen his understanding of China and bring that knowledge into the classroom. This fellowship will allow him to further refine his skills as a teacher and scholar by exploring new methodologies and engaging in cross-disciplinary collaboration.