CACI Spring 2024 Fellows
Teaching fellows

Guillermo Sardi
Guillermo is a second-year Ph.D. student in Political Science at CUNY’s Graduate Center and a graduate teaching fellow at Lehman College, where he teaches a course on politics and culture. The course aims to develop students’ ability to understand political science with a critical cultural lens by discussing key topics in Comparative Politics, integrating concepts from Anthropology and Cultural Psychology, and comparing countries from different regions of the world. The syllabus structure reflects his interdisciplinary experience as a psychologist and political scientist and my research interests. His research interests include criminal governance, state violence, regimes, and development in Latin America. As a fellow, he intends to strengthen his syllabus by integrating two classes, one on China’s State Formation process as an alternative model to the Western European one and a second one on China’s growing influence in Latin America to exemplify part of his research interests to his students.

Salman Hayat
Salman is a fourth-year cultural anthropology student at the Graduate Center and an adjunct instructor at Hunter College. His research interests revolve around labour, agrarian political economy, the environment and political ecology, and visual anthropology. He will be conducting fieldwork in Pakistan starting September 2024. Before coming to the Graduate Center, he taught Writing and Communication at my alma-mater, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), for a couple of years as a Teaching Fellow, did a Masters in the Humanities (MAPH) from the University of Chicago, and worked as a Research Assistant at LUMS. He loves photography and chess and walking the streets of New York.

Jacky (Man Hei) Chan
Jacky is a Ph.D. student in political science at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and an adjunct lecturer at Queens College. In his teaching, he emphasizes how almost all the fundamentals in political science can be enriched by research on China. He holds a master’s degree in political theory from the University of Essex. His current research explores the intersection of political theory and psychoanalysis. Coming from Hong Kong, he has a keen interest in delving into China’s comprehensive strategy concerning domestic dissident movements. Furthermore, he is eager to explore the consequences of China’s strategy in the development of high-end semiconductor technology, and it implications on global geopolitics.

Ken Silverman
Ken Silverman is a PhD Candidate in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Political Science program, specializing in comparative politics and public policy. He has been an adjunct lecturer at Queens College since 2021. In his current Comparative Politics course, students examine differing images of China vis-à-vis political economy, territoriality, and securitization in the contexts of the West, the East, and the Global South. Prior to receiving his Master of International Affairs from CUNY Baruch College, Ken was an award-winning Senior News Producer and Reporter in the New York Bureau of Fuji TV Network News (Japan’s largest private broadcaster). He also previously contributed to a Center for Strategic and International Studies policy report on China’s political influence in Japan.

Thuy Anh Tran
Thuy Anh (T.A.) Tran is an editor of Science for the People magazine; a scholar of social movements and political repression; and an instructor of political science at Baruch College. They have organized with the Fight for 15 movement, Kshama Sawant’s historic grassroots Seattle City Council campaign, San Francisco Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, Unite HERE Local 8, and served as grievance counselor and vice chair of the CUNY Graduate School chapter of PSC/AFT Local 2334. Their published works explore the strategic use of violence in rebel governance, the analogs between secret policing in the U.S. and the Star Trek universe, and feminist resistance among Orthodox Jewish women artists (which received the 2021 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Award).
Seminar Fellows

Juan Corredor-García
Juan is a PhD student in political science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His work spans comparative politics, security, and environmental politics, with a substantive focus on natural resources, green wars, and violent conflict. He completed my B.A. at Universidad del Rosario (2017) and a MPhil at Sciences Po Bordeaux (2020). Juan will teach Comparative Politics at Lehman College’s Department of Political Science in the Fall 2024, in which he expects to include a session on China’s political institutions as well as the developmental stages of the communist regime from 1949 to the present.

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 state-capital-labor relationship, and class struggle among the Chinese working class.

William Shelton
William Shelton (He/Him/His) is a Black Queer educator, writer, and community activist from West Philadelphia. He is pursuing a Ph.D. in Urban Education at The CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Will’s research examines how the intersections of race, place, and education impact the educational and emotional outcomes of Black and Brown boys, including those who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum. By addressing literacy and School-To-Prison-Pipeline policies and practices, he hopes to dismantle Eurocentric narratives in education to uplift, affirm, and protect queer and youth of color. His ethnographic and narrative writing research is grounded in Critical Race Theory, Black Geographies, Humanizing, and Abolitionist pedagogies. Will previously taught elementary and secondary ELA classes and served as Dean of Culture before beginning his doctoral journey. He is currently teaching a course called Critical Issues in U.S. Education. The course provides the opportunity for students to learn about other country’s education systems and compare them the U.S in a manner to understand the perplexing issues in U.S. Education

Weichao Guo
Weichao Guo is a PhD Candidate in Economics at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research focuses on Game Theory, Information Economics, Economic Development and Regional Growth Inequalities. Besides developing theoretical models to interpret and unveil the interactions of decision-making and information flows, he also applies combined econometric and machine learning methods in the empirical part of his research. Weichao Guo explores the contrasting spread of truth and misinformation on social media using a Bayesian social learning framework, analyzing the influence of news traits and beliefs on (mis-)information dissemination. He also examines China’s regional economic growth, identifying divergent dynamics among spatially converging neighboring regions (clubs), with significant implications for development policies. Weichao holds a B.S. in International Business and a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, and an M.S. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses at Hunter College and Queens College.

Scott Ratner
Scott’s current studies center on how participation in global value chains and production networks shapes patterns of conflict among states in the 21st century. For this project, he is using several different methodological approaches to better understand how novel forms of economic interdependence create incentives for competition and cooperation among emerging states, with a particular focus on the Middle East and Central Asia.

Hart (Minglei) Zhang
Hart M. Zhang is a PhD student in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include the sociology of development, political economy, race and ethnic studies, and social theory. Through the CACI Seminar Fellowship, he aims to create comprehensive course materials on China studies, focusing on both regional and thematic aspects. Additionally, he seeks to network with seminar scholars through interdisciplinary collaborations. In his upcoming teaching in an introductory sociology course, he would like to incorporate perspectives informed by current China scholarship into his teaching and encourage students to bring their own diverse experiences into the conversations.

Sandra Davidovic
Sandra Davidovic is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She holds positions as an adjunct lecturer of International Relations at Hunter College CUNY and Fordham University. As a Fulbright visiting scholar, she dedicated the 2021 academic year to research at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Prior to her enrollment at the Graduate Center, Sandra worked for three years as a Research Associate at the Institute of International Politics and Economics in Belgrade, focusing on post-conflict reconstruction in the Balkans.

Andre Hoolihan
Andre is a fourth-year student in the Sociology Department and a graduate of National Taiwan University who works as an adjunct lecturer at Hunter and Baruch colleges. Their research interests include East Asian organized crime, Cross-Strait politics, and 20th Century Chinese and Taiwanese history. Andre hopes to include more China-related content in both their sociology and criminology classes.

Lixiang Jin
Lixiang Jin is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Sociology program at CUNY Graduate Center, specializing in immigration, ethnicity, urban, and political Sociology. Her master’s thesis examines China’s ethnic education policies and their implications for ethnic societies, specifically Koreans, Mongols, and Uyghurs. As she looks ahead, she envisions amplifying this exploration into one of her major research projects, thereby shaping the trajectory of her doctoral program.