Retired/Emeritus Faculty
Charles Green
Charles Green received his BA in Sociology from Hunter College, MSW from Howard University, and the Ph.D. from Rutgers University. He also teaches in the Ph.D. program in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate School and University Center. He served as Department Head from 1998 -2003. His published works have been in the areas of race and ethnic relations, urban politics, Caribbean migration, and comparative urban development issues. He was the (1989-1990) Fulbright Scholar in Sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He is the coauthor of The Struggle for Black Empowerment in New York City: Beyond the Politics of Pigmentation (Praeger/McGraw-Hill paperback), and editor of Globalization and Survival in the Black Diaspora: The New Urban Challenge (SUNY Press). In 2001 he authored Manufacturing Powerlessness in the Black Diaspora (Altamira Press a division of Rowman & Littlefield). His current work (co-editor Roberta Coles) is "The Myth of The Missing Black Father" (Columbia University Press, 2009).
Selected Publications
Manfred Kuechler
Manfred Kuechler received his Ph.D. from the University of Bielefeld in (West) Germany in 1971. He was a professor at the University of Frankfurt and also served as Program Director (later Executive Director) of the Center for Survey Research and Methodology (ZUMA) at Mannheim, which later became part of GESIS (Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences). He came to the United States in 1985 when he accepted a joint appointment as professor in the departments of Sociology and of Political Science at Florida State University, Tallahassee.
He joined the Hunter faculty in 1988 and was appointed to the doctoral faculty in the sociology program at the CUNY Graduate Center (GC) shortly thereafter. For a number of years, he was very active in professional organizations including two four year terms first as Secretary, then as President of the Research Committee for Logic and Methodology of the International Sociological Association. His main research interests are in the areas of political sociology, public opinion, voting behavior, and social movements. He has numerous publications in scholarly journals and edited volumes both in Germany and in the United States. He is co-editor (with Russell Dalton) and contributor to Challenging the Political Order: New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies (Oxford, 1990) which was also published in Spanish. Work published since 1990 is focused on xenophobia, immigration, and naturalization (in Germany and within the European Union). In late spring of 1997, he joined an interdisciplinary (law, economics, social sciences) research team of scholars from Korea, Germany, and the United States which developed a handbook on Korean Unification drawing in part on the lessons learned from the German experience (preprint of chapter on "Political Culture and Mass Sentiment").
At Hunter, he taught Social Statistics, Introduction to Research Methods, Population Dynamics, and Social Movements -- as well as innovative courses focused on the changes brought about by the ever expanding Internet but also providing training in Internet related skills on both the undergraduate and graduate level. Starting in 1995, he used course web sites (for the most part open to "guests") to supplement regular classroom sessions and he increasingly used technology to support teaching and learning. In an attempt to involve students (including undergraduates) in primary empirical, but not necessarily quantitative research he developed the concept of the "Internet Research Paper", which became the core of a required course in the graduate program (GSR 716) for some time. In spring 2013, he taught a course in the Thomas Hunter Honors Program: "Demography: Fertility, Mortality, Migration in a Changing World" -- the last course he taught at Hunter before going on retirement leave in fall 2013.
From July 2008 to May 2010, he served as the (first) "Acting Associate Provost for Instructional Technology" at Hunter College while maintaining his status as active faculty member teaching one course per semester. In his administrative role, he led the "Technology Teaching and Learning Group (TTLG)", directed the Presidential "Faculty Innovations in Teaching with Technology (FITT) " initiative, and coordinated support for academic technologies including Blackboard. In November 2012, he returned to the Provost Office to help with the implementation of the "Campus Solution" module of CUNYfirst (otherwise known as Oracle/PeopleSoft) at Hunter, a comprehensive integrated administrative system to support all student and course related functions as well as similar projects like to the online collections of teaching evaluations. As to the latter, results had been online since 2008, but Hunter also started data collection in fall 2012.
He retired in early 2014 and has been given the title of "Professor Emeritus" effective February 1, 2014. Former students seeking a letter of recommendation and/or general advice about graduate studies shall contact him via e-mail.
Selected Publications
Naomi Kroeger
Naomi Kroeger received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Her scholarly and research interests include the sociology of organizations, work and retirement, and life transitions and identity change. She teaches courses in introductory sociology, organizations, identity change and research methods in both the undergraduate and master's programs. She has been a past director of the Graduate Social Research Program.
Claus Mueller
Claus Mueller pursued undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Cologne, Germany, and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, and the New School for Social Research where he received his Ph.D. in Sociology. His research interests focus on political communication, the relation between electronic media and contemporary stratification, and development issues. He has authored many articles, books and presentations, including The Politics of Communication, also in a German and Japanese edition, Third World Television Access to U.S., and, most recently, essays on "Integrating the Turkish Community: A German Dilemma", and "International Film Festival Tourism" published in the US, Germany, and Korea respectively. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on electronic media, television, and film, and has served twice as the Director of the Department's Graduate Social Research Program of which he is the current media adviser, and has been working as the New York correspondent for domestic and foreign print and electronic publications. He is the recipient of numerous grants from public and private agencies and has been awarded a French government fellowship and two Fulbrights grants.
Apart from his academic activities Claus Mueller has been arranging screening seminars and conferences for policy and opinion makers which have included since 2001 annual Congressional Briefings and seminars at the Rayburn House Office Building and the German UN Mission on the Global Challenge of HIV/AIDS and other policy issues. He has been elected to the American Council on Germany and to the International Council of the National Television Academy and is a member of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Relations, the Foreign Press Association, and other groups. He serves on the Board of Directors of the non-profit New York Film and Video Council and the International Film and Television Exchange.
Selected Publications
Robert Perinbanayagam
Robert Sidharthan Perinbanayagam received his B.A. in Sociology from the University of Ceylon and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology and Anthropology from the University of Minnesota. His latest book (published in 2006) is Games and Sport in Everyday Life: Dialogues and Narratives of the Self. In addition, he has published The Karmic Theater: Self, Society and Astrology in Jaffna, Sri Lanka; Signifying Acts, and Discursive Acts, The Presence of Self and a number of articles in professional journals. His main research interests are in social linguistics and in contemporary sociological theory. He teaches courses in interpersonal behavior, sociological theory (undergraduate and graduate), and the sociology of knowledge. He has won the following awards: G. H. Mead Award and the C. H. Cooley Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and the Theory Award from the American Sociological Association (Theory Section) for The Presence of Self.
Selected Publications
Janet Poppendieck
Professor Janet Poppendieck has taught Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York, since 1976. She received her undergraduate degree in History from Duke University (‘67) and her Masters (‘72) and PhD (‘79) degrees from the Florence Heller Graduate School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare at Brandeis University. From 1988 until 2001, she served as director of the Hunter College Center for the Study of Family Policy, where she helped to start the Welfare Rights Initiative, the Community Interpreter Project, and the Language Diversity Initiative. Her primary concerns, both as a scholar and as an activist, have been poverty, hunger, and food assistance in the United States. A 1984-1987 W.K. Kellogg Foundation National Fellow, she has traveled widely in both the U.S. and the developing world. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Advisory Committees of City-as-School and the Welfare Rights Initiative.She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Woody Goldberg; they are the parents of Amanda Goldberg. Professor Poppendieck is currently a member of the Department's Personnel and Budget Committee.
A 1984-1987 W.K. Kellogg Foundation National Fellow, she has traveled widely in both the U.S. and the developing world. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Advisory Committees of City-as-School and the Welfare Rights Initiative. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Woody Goldberg; they are the parents of Amanda Goldberg. Professor Poppendieck is currently a member of the Department's Personnel and Budget Committee.
Selected Publications
Yaffa Schlesinger
Yaffa Schlesinger did her Ph.D. in the sociology of law at New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She has written on sex roles and social change in the Kibbutz, Hadassah (the National Zionist Women's Organization in America), the gay synagogue, and the Jewish response to AIDS. She teaches courses on deviance, the sociology of the family, and the sociology of art and is a co-editor of "Course Syllabi in the Sociology of Culture" published by the American Sociological Association. She has published an article ("Race, Sex, Class: Social Theory, Politics, and Arts") which discusses the controversial 1993 biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art and also wrote on the Astor Court (the Chinese Ming Garden) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has given seminars, directed independent studies and lectured on the sociology of the Jewish family.
Selected Publications
Marvin Scott
Marvin Scott
Marvin B. Scott received his Ph.D. in 1966 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a founding member of the ethnomethodology movement. Trained as an actor, psychoanalyst, and family therapist, he uses these perspectives to teach courses in interpersonal behavior, mental health, and family.
Selected Publications
Ruth Sidel
Ruth Sidel
Ruth Sidel received her B A. from Wellesley College, her M.S.W. from the Boston University School of Social Work, and her Ph.D. from Union Graduate School. Her research interests center around poverty, particularly its impact on women and children, and the need to develop a comprehensive, universal family policy in the United States. She has made several study visits to China and has written extensively on health care and human services in China as well as in Great Britain and Sweden. She teaches Introduction to Sociology, Child Welfare and special seminars such as Childhood in New York and Women and Leadership.
She is the author of several books including On Her Own: Growing Up in the Shadow of the American Dream and Keeping Women and Children Last: America's War on the Poor. Her most recent book, Unsung Heroines: Single Mothers and the American Dream, was published by the University of California Press in 2006.
Selected Publications
Michael Wood
My teaching interests include courses in: Consumer behavior, research methodology and applied statistics, history and development of consumer society, and social psychology.
My research interests include: history of consumer society and business institutions, consumer behavior decision-making, socio-cultural change and the self, sociology student learning and assessment, and informed consent in medicine and research.
My current research projects include a replication of a 1970s national sample survey that asked Americans about self-concept and core values using open-ended questions, and a book-length study of U.S. peddlers and itinerant service providers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Peter Tuckel
Peter Tuckel received his B.A. from Clark University and his Ph.D. from New York University. He teaches statistics and research methods both at the undergraduate level and in Hunter College's Master's Program in Social Research.
As part of the course requirements in his Introduction to Research Methods course, his students conduct a research project observing behavior in public places. Examples of the types of projects his students have undertaken in the past are: (1) observing the number of times riders on the New York City subway system need to swipe their Metrocards in order to get through the turnstiles, (2) the incidence of hand-washing in public restrooms in New York City, (3) the frequency of purchasing more than the "allowable number" of items in supermarket express lanes, (4) the number of motorists in New York City who run red lights, and (5) the behavior patterns of cyclists in New York City.
Respecting his research, one of his primary interests is an examination of the factors influencing participation in different data gathering modes such as public opinion surveys, focus groups, and the U.S. Census. He has written extensively on the usage patterns of evolving telephone-related technologies (e.g., answering machines, Caller ID, cell phones) and their impact on telephone surveys.
Another major research interest centers on the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a historical research tool. He has applied GIS to study the diffusion of the influenza pandemic of 1918. Currently he is using this research technique to study the residential patterns of African-Americans of differing geographic origins in one American city. His most recent publications focus on injuries due to falls from playground equipment and falls from skateboarding in the United States.
