Our Staff
The Rikfind Center Arts & Humanities Faculty Seminar was created by Mikhal Dekel, Emily Greble, and Andras Kisery in 2014. The goal of the Interdisciplinary Rifkind Faculty Seminar is to enhance scholarly life on campus; create a greater sense of community among the faculty; expose students to the breadth of their professors’ research and creative activities; raise the public profile of research in the Humanities and Arts at The City College of New York (CCNY); encourage interdisciplinary collaboration; and develop new research opportunities for Humanities and Arts faculty.
MIKHAL DEKEL
Center Director
Mikhal Dekel is Distinguished Professor of English at CCNY and the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, an M.A. in English from CCNY, and a Bachelor of Law from Tel-Aviv University. Mikhal is a public facing writer and speaker as well as an academic, having published or been interviewed and reviewed in the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, New York Daily News, C-Span and elsewhere. She is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including from the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, the Lady Davis Foundation, and the Katz Professorship. Her latest book, Tehran Children (W.W. Norton, 2019/ paperback 2021) has won many awards and accolades and been translated to several languages.
Yana Joseph
Center Administrator
Yana Joseph is the administrative manager in the Division of Humanities and the Arts. She has served City College in various administrative positions since 1995, with titles including Assistant to the Dean of Humanities and the Arts, Assistant to the Dean of Faculty and Staff Relations, director of administration in the English Department, and earned an Administrative Staff Service Award from the CCNY Alumni Association.
Ms. Joseph’s responsibilities include: training and overseeing office staff, assisting department chairs in the Division of Humanities and the Arts, balancing budgets, and working with more than 150 full and part-time faculty members. She holds a Masters in Chemistry from Baku University.
ADVISORY COMMITTEE
ANDRÁS KISÉRY is Associate Professor of English at CCNY. A recipient of Mellon, NEH, and various residential fellowships, he published his monograph Hamlet's Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England in 2016. He is currently writing a book on early modern textual media, while pursuing quantitative research on literary translation, and working on a third project on media studies in the early 20th century.
ANDREAS KILLEN is Professor of History at CCNY and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the UCLA Humanities Center, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and has published widely on German history, the history of psychiatry and the human sciences, and film history. His publications include Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press 2017) and, most recently, Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War (HarperCollins 2023).
ANNA INDYCH-LÓPEZ works to investigate Latin American and U.S. modernisms as well as Latinx and U.S.-Mexico borderlands contemporary art, focusing on trans-American exchanges, the polemics of realisms, and public space. Her book on Judith F. Baca, which will be published in the fall of 2018 by The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and The University of Minnesota Press, probes the public artist’s aesthetic strategies to activate the contested socio-political, spatial, and racial histories of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. Her new project investigates the ways in which urban spatial representations and interventions born out of Mexico City impact the lives of those who inhabit, visit, consume, view, and produce it, expanding on some of the themes in her first books: Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927-40 (2009) and Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2011; co-authored with Leah Dickerman for the exhibition of the same name at The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
JERRY M. CARLSON is a specialist in narrative theory, global independent film, and the cinemas of the Americas, Professor Carlson is Chair of CCNY’s Department of Media & Communication Arts and a member of the doctoral faculties of French, Film Studies and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is also an active producer, director, and writer with eleven Emmy Awards. As a Senior Producer for City University Television (CUNY-TV), he created and produces the series City Cinematheque about film history and Nueva York (in Spanish) about the Latino cultures of New York City. He was educated at Williams College (B.A.) and the University of Chicago (A.M. & Ph.D.).
SITE DESIGN & CONTENT
Kevin Kanarek is a freelance website producer and content editor specializing in media, academic and educational projects.