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Marie Lily Cerat has a Ph.D. in urban education and a certificate in Africana studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Cerat is associate director of the CUNY Haitian Studies Institute at Brooklyn College and teaches in the Africana Studies Department. Prior to her career in higher education, Cerat served as a bilingual Haitian Creole educator with the New York City Department of Education and a resource specialist with the Haitian Bilingual/ESL Technical Assistance Center (HABETAC) of the New York State Education Department Office of Bilingual Education.
A postcolonial scholar and culturally responsive pedagogue, Cerat examines the effects of the exclusion of Haitian language, culture, and history in the education of Haitian learners. Her research articles have appeared in Rethinking Schools, the Journal of Haitian Studies, and the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Her book chapter “Tell All the Others Our Story” is included in Education Across Borders: Immigration, Race and Identity in the Classroom (Beacon Press, 2022).
In addition to her scholarly activities, Cerat has a long history of organizing within the New York Haitian community. She is the co-founder of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, which was established in 1992 to provide ESL and adult literacy instruction to Haitian immigrants and refugees. Today, the organization also offers leadership training to help community members develop the necessary skills to advocate on their own behalf for civil, educational, social, labor/economic, and immigrant justice.
E: Marie.Cerat@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Margarett S. Alexandre is an assistant professor and academic coordinator at the York College Department of Nursing, School of Health Sciences and Professional Programs, of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is a Ph.D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interest involves disability in the post-2010 Haiti earthquake. Her other interests include student mentoring and community initiatives both nationally and internationally. She also shares a great interest in transcultural nursing education, community engagement, service-learning, active learning strategies, and health disparities. In fall 2012, she played a key role in the development of the first nursing elective and global nursing course, NUR 450-Assessment of Global Health Needs, in an underserved community. She is actively engaged in a collaborative project addressing the incidence of hypertension among college students throughout the metropolitan area. Alexandre received a master’s in nursing and a certificate in gerentological nursing from Adelphi University. Additionally, she is the founder and president of Mission Grandbois in L’Artibonite Haiti. She joined York College in fall 2012. Over the past five years, she has mentored nursing students at York College and the School of Professional Studies service learning internationally. Alexandre was a visiting professor at the Université Publique aux Gonaives (UPAG)-Faculté des Science Infimières in Gonaïves, Haiti, in 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015. She was co-PI for a PSC-CUNY grant to examine simulation in older adults and has published in peer-reviewed nursing journals.
York College City University of New York 94-20 Guy R. Brewer Blvd. Jamaica, NY 11451
P: 718.262.2857 F: 718.262.2696 E: malexandre1@york.cuny.edu
Dale Byam‘s work has developed primarily in the field of theater for development in Africa and the diaspora. In recent times, she has been focusing her attention on the African transnation and the demise of Afro indigenous art forms in the Caribbean. She is attempting to document the transformations in Afro indigenous performance in the Americas and to draw some conclusions on the directions these forms have taken since the post emancipation era.
E: daleb@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Lynda Day is a professor in the Africana Studies Department at Brooklyn College. She received her Ph.D. in African history at the University of Wisconsin and her B.A. in comparative history from Howard University. Her interest in political leaders in Africa led to research in Sierra Leone in 1979, 1981–82, 1995, 2005, 2007, 2012, and 2014. She was awarded a Senior Fulbright Scholar Fellowship and taught for a year at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. Her book, Gender and Power, the Women Chiefs of Sierra Leone, the Last Two Hundred Years, analyzed traditional Mende women political leaders, illuminating gendered political authority in the history of the region. For two years she served as the Endowed Chair of Women and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College. In that role she raised awareness of the work of African women in the areas of sustainability, media representation, and post-war reconstruction through seminars, speakers, and films. She has written numerous articles on women leaders in Sierra Leone and Ghana, as well as the Black history of Long Island.
E: LDay@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Roger Dorsinville is professor and chair of the Electrical Engineering Department at the CUNY Graduate Center and the City College of New York (CUNY). He received a Ph.D. in physics from Lomonossov Moscow State University (Russia). He was a postdoctoral research associate at Laval University (Canada), assistant professor at Dakar University (Senegal), and senior optical engineer with Dorsal Networks/Corvis Corporation (United States). He joined the City College of New York (CCNY) as a researcher and later as a faculty member. He has been a full professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at CCNY since 1992 and the chair of the department since 2003. He is also co-chair of the Computer Engineering Program. His research interests include fiber optics communications, nanotechnology, and photonic devices and systems. Dorsinville has successfully mentored 11 Ph.D. students and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
City College of New York (CUNY) 160 Convent Avenue New York, NY 10031
P: 212.650.8253 F: 212.650.7482 E: dorsinville@ccny.cuny.edu
Kenneth A. Gould is a leader in the subfield of environmental sociology. His research focuses on the political economy of environment, technology, and development, and is best known for its contribution to the Treadmill of Production model of social system-ecosystem dynamics. His publications examine the role of inequality in environmental conflicts, and the impacts of globalization on sustainable development efforts. Gould is co-author of Green Gentrification: Urban Sustainability and the Struggle for Environmental Justice (2017), The Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy (2008), Local Environmental Struggles: Citizen Activism in the Treadmill of Production (1996), and Environment and Society: The Enduring Conflict (1994). He is also co-editor of Ten Lessons in Introductory Sociology (2017) and Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology (2015). His recent journal articles examine the structure of scientific research on nanotechnology, and the relationship between ecotourism and oil exploration on the Meso-American Barrier Reef. Gould is past chair of the Environment and Technology section of the American Sociological Association.
A native of Brooklyn, Gould earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University. For 15 years he was a faculty member of St. Lawrence University, where he served as chair of the Department of Sociology and coordinator of the Caribbean and Latin American Studies Program. He returned to Brooklyn in 2007 to serve as chair of Brooklyn College’s Department of Sociology, and later as director of the Urban Sustainability Program. Gould also serves as professor of both sociology and earth and environmental sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center.
E: kgould@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Frantz-Antoine Leconte, French Area coordinator, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in a Franco-Haitian and syncretic atmosphere that shaped his universe forever. He studied at City University of New York, where he received his B.A. (1977), M.A. (1980), M.Phil. (1985), and Ph.D. (1989). His contribution to the world of the intellect seems to have been decided since birth. He is very committed to promote French, Francophone, and Haitian literature and culture through CUNY. What he does in his free time is precisely what he would like to teach and write about: literature, culture, and history on which he has extensively lectured.
Leconte is a member of the American Association of Teachers of French, the Conseil International d’ Études Francophones, the National Association of Scholars, the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and La Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d’Amérique. His extensive publications deal with French philosophy and literature from the Middle Ages to Charles Baudelaire (19th century), the colonization of the New World, the political reality of Haiti, and the intersection between politics and vodun in Haiti.
Kingsborough Community College City University of New York 2001 Oriental Blvd., Room E-214 Brooklyn, NY 11235
P: 718.368.5210 F: 718.368.5943 E: frantzantoineleconte@gmail.com
Evans Lespinasse is the chair of the Department of Radiologic Tech & Medical Imaging at New York City College Technology (CUNY). Lespinasse currently teaches Introduction to Radiologic Technology & Medical Imaging, and Radiation Protection & Applied Radiobiology. She coordinates curriculum planning and scheduling for the department and has directed several funded projects for equipment purchase.
With over 25 years of teaching experience, Lespinasse has taught a variety of courses in the medical imaging discipline, including Radiographic Physics, Advanced Radiographic Studies, Imaging Modalities, Seminar, Radiographic Pathology, Radiographic Procedures and Positioning, Pediatric Radiography, Medical Terminology, Health Care Ethics, Patient Care, and Mammography. She has also taught Legal Issues in Health Care in a baccalaureate degree program at St. Francis College and served for six years as program director of the Long Island College Hospital School of Radiologic Technology.
Lespinasse is a frequently invited speaker at professional conferences both locally and nationally. Her areas of concentration and interest include teaching and learning, classroom management, service learning, mammography, and bone densitometry. She currently serves on various educational advisory boards and has held other board positions in professional organizations, including chair, president, president elect, vice president, and recording secretary.
Lespinasse received her Bachelor of Science degree from St. Francis College and her Master of Science degree from Central Michigan University, holds advanced certification in mammography, and was awarded a doctoral equivalency in radiologic technology and medical imaging in 2006.
Her professional recognitions and awards include:
P: 718.260.5360 E: elespinasse@citytech.cuny.edu
Philippe-Richard Marius is a cultural anthropologist with research interests at the intersection of race, class privilege, postcolonial identity, and bourgeois modernity. He received a bachelor of fine arts in film from New York University and holds his Ph.D. from the Anthropology Program of the CUNY Graduate Center. His anthropological research, generally through an ethnohistorical approach, is informed by his training and practice in film. His fieldwork in the privileged classes of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was supported by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He has also conducted theoretical and empirical research in other Caribbean places, the United States, Canada, and Berlin, at Humboldt University. Marius regularly presents his work at annual meetings and conferences of the American Anthropological Association and the Caribbean Studies Association. He also presented findings from his ethnography of Haiti’s elites at the 54th International Congress of Americanists (ICA) in Vienna (2012), and he has organized and chaired the symposium Identitarian Particularisms and Class Universality in the Reproduction of Privilege and Inequality in the Americas at the 56th ICA, at the University of Salamanca, Spain, July 15–20, 2018. He is currently completing the manuscript of his monograph Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society: The Case of Haiti, which has been accepted for review by the University Press of Mississippi.
Marius is director of financial aid at the College of Staten Island, where he has worked since 1987. He is also an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, where he teaches and serves as thesis adviser in the interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program (MALS). At the graduate level he has taught the MALS courses Roots of Modern Society, Modern Society, Modern Culture, and Interaction of Western and Non-Western Societies. At the undergraduate level, he has taught Understanding Our World, Cultural Anthropology, Urban Anthropology, Anthropology of Religion, and Social Analysis. During his tenure at CSI, he wrote, produced, and co-directed the independent feature film A City Called Heaven, which was presented at the Pan African Film Festival of Los Angeles (1999), the African Diaspora International Film Festival (New York, 1999), and the Festival panafricain du cinema de Ouagadougou (FESPACO, 1999), and broadcast nationally on the cable television network BET-Starz (2001–02).
E: philippe.marius@csi.cuny.edu
Marie Lily Cerat
