Staff from the CUNY TV show, Asian American Life.
The City University of New York proudly recognizes its enduring and multidimensional relationships with the Asian American and Pacific Islander community this month and honors its AAPI administrators, faculty and alumni for their outstanding accomplishments in many areas.
“CUNY’s diverse and growing AAPI community is a vital and integral component of our University. During AAPI Heritage Month, we acknowledge and celebrate the legacies of AAPI community members who have served on our faculty and staff, as well as those of our alumni and current students,” said CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. “High-caliber scholarship, political advocacy and excellence in the humanities and arts are all important manifestations of the ways the AAPI community and its members have enriched the greater CUNY community, and its leadership in the development of collaborative peer networks and innovative student support programs will have a lasting impact.”
CUNY’s AAPI Heritage Highlights
At CUNY, 22% of all enrolled students and 14% of faculty are of Asian, Asian American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Island descent. CUNY’s focused efforts to acknowledge and serve the AAPI community can be traced to these formative moments:
- In 1970, the late immigration activist, scholar and author Betty Lee Sung began teaching City College’s first full-time course in Asian studies, later founding its Asian American studies program – a first in the East Coast.
- In 1993, the Asian American Studies Program (AASP) at Hunter College was founded; it has a history of activism, supporting Asian American cultural and political movements in New York City and beyond. The Hunter College Asian American Studies Oral History Project explores the lives of its founders as well as recent alumni and students who are continuing their legacy.
- The Asian American/Asian Research Institute (AAARI), which currently serves as a resource center for policies and issues affecting Asians and Asian Americans, was formed in 2001 to facilitate a community of scholarship and research surrounding Asia and the Asian American experience.
- In 2013, the television show Asian American Life premiered on CUNY TV. The New York Emmy-winning news magazine show addresses topical news issues and celebrities, highlighting Asian American communities and leaders nationwide.
A Sampling of CUNY’s AAPI Notables
The list of distinguished AAPI administrators, alumni and faculty is constantly expanding. Although the list below is by no means exhaustive, these are people who have not only been shaped by their experiences at CUNY, but have continued to make an impact by giving back to the University and the greater New York City AAPI community in a variety of ways.
Innovative Administrators
Baruch College President S. David Wu, right, and Queens College President Frank H. Wu
CUNY Board of Trustees member Kevin Kim is the commissioner for the NYC Department of Small Business Services (SBS). He was also the first Asian American commissioner of the New York State Liquor Authority. As a member of the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, Kim helps advise President Biden on ways the public, private and nonprofit sectors can work together to advance equity and opportunity for all Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) communities. At CUNY, he serves as chair of the Board’s Audit Committee, and as a member of the Subcommittee on Investment and Executive Committee.
Baruch College President S. David Wu was appointed in February 2020, becoming the first Asian American to lead a CUNY college. Wu, who came to the United States as an international student from his native Taiwan about 40 years ago, is known for his bold and visionary approach to higher education. An accomplished scholar in systems engineering and operations research, he served as provost and executive vice president of George Mason University before coming to CUNY.
The accomplished legal scholar Frank H. Wu was named president of Queens College in March 2020, becoming the second Asian American to lead one of CUNY’s schools. Wu previously served as chancellor and dean at University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, as a faculty member at Howard University and as dean of Wayne State University Law School. In each of these leadership roles, he was the first Asian American to serve in such a capacity.
CUNY School of Law Dean Sudha Setty is the first person of South Asian descent to lead a CUNY school. Setty had previously been the dean of the Western New England University School of Law, where she was the first woman of South Asian descent in the U.S. to serve as dean of an American Bar Association-accredited law school. She specializes in comparative law and is known for her work as an antitrust litigator, pro bono civil rights counsel, constitutional law scholar and legal education leader.
Qing Hu is the dean of the Koppelman School of Business at Brooklyn College. Previously he served as senior associate dean for academic affairs and innovation and held the rank of professor of information systems at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College. Earlier in his career, he held multiple positions at Iowa State University’s Ivy College of Business, including associate dean for graduate programs and research. Hu is a leading scholar on sociotechnical cybersecurity research, and his findings on insider threats to organizational digital assets have been frequently cited by academics and reported in the media.
Shiang-Kwei Wang is the Vice President of Academic Affairs and Provost at Hostos Community College. Dr. Wang is the principal investigator of multiple private, federal, and state grants, including the National Science Foundation and the Illinois Community College Board. Previously, Dr. Wang was the PI of the Bank of America’s TechQuity grant to address the equity issue of Chicago workforce training. Before joining Hostos, Dr. Wang was the Vice President of Academic and Student Affairs at the Harold Washington College, City Colleges of Chicago, the Dean for Research at Queensborough Community College (QCC), City University of New York (CUNY), and an Associate Dean at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies and Education at New York Institute of Technology (NYIT). Dr. Wang was also a tenured full professor at NYIT, taught both graduate and undergraduate level courses. Her research concentrates on STEM Education, technology integration, and pedagogical practices. She recently received United Federation of Fil-Am Educators’ Outstanding Leadership in Education Award.
CUNY Interim Executive Director of Human Resources Sujata Malhotra attended Brooklyn College and the CUNY School of Professional Studies. She also worked in human resources at Queens College, where she was interim executive director, and at Lutheran Hospital and Coney Island Hospital. She received the Emerging Leader for the Eastern Region award from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA HR).
Star-Studded Faculty
Queens College Distinguished Professor Kimiko Hahn
Distinguished professor Kimiko Hahn teaches creative writing and literary translation in the M.F.A. program at Queens College. The author of ten books of poetry, she was recently elected to the 15-member board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, the nation’s leading champion of poets and poetry. She has also won numerous other honors, including the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the American Book Award and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Author, playwright and punk musician Alvin Eng is a professor in the Department of Speech, Communications and Theatre Arts at BMCC. His memoir, “Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond” chronicles his experience growing up in Flushing, Queens as the child of immigrant parents. Eng is a two-time Fulbright Specialist Scholar in Theatre/U.S. Studies, and his plays and performances have been seen off-Broadway, throughout the United States, and in Paris, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China.
One of the world’s most widely recognized science experts, City College professor Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist and bestselling author known as the co-founder of string field theory. He is also attempting to complete Einstein’s work of seeking to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into one unified theory. He is the author of several acclaimed science books, including “Hyperspace” and “Beyond Einstein,” and his latest book, “Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything,” was published earlier this month. He appears frequently on international television and radio, and his own show, Science Fantastic, is the largest nationally syndicated science radio show commercially broadcast in the United States.
A distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, Zohra Saed is a published poet, editor and expert in Asian American studies who earned her B.A. and MFA from Brooklyn College, and her Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center. Saed was an infant when her family, ethnic Uzbeks, fled Afghanistan because of the Soviet-Afghan war, and her family’s experiences have informed her writing. Saed was interviewed by The New York Times about her experience helping a friend’s extended family flee the Taliban and come to the United States with emergency visas, rallying members of the CUNY community around the cause. Saed is the co-editor of “One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature.”
Ava Chin is an associate professor in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island. A Queens College graduate, she is the author of “Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming” and the award-winning “Eating Wildly: Foraging for Life, Love, and the Perfect Meal,” which won first prize in the 2015 M.F.K. Fisher Book Awards.
Parvaneh Pourshariati is an associate professor at City Tech who specializes in the late antique, early medieval and modern histories of Iran and the Middle East. Her first book, “Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire,” has been translated into Persian and Arabic, and the Persian translation was shortlisted for Book of the Year in Iran. Her acclaimed work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the American Association of University Women, the Iran Heritage Foundation and the Center for Iranian Studies at Columbia University.
A refugee from Vietnam, Van Tran attended Hostos Community College, then Hunter College, getting a B.A. in Sociology, and finally Harvard University, where he earned a Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy. Tran is currently associate professor of sociology and deputy director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on immigrant integration, ethnic and racial categories, diversity and intergroup relations, neighborhood gentrification, urban poverty and social inequality.
Francisco Delgado is an assistant professor of English at BMCC, where his research focuses on Native American/Indigenous literature. He is of Chamorro heritage and, through his maternal grandmother, a member of the Tonawanda Band of Seneca. He is a board member of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) and is currently working on a project funded by CUNY’s Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI) to develop indigenous studies programs at CUNY.
Prolific, Influential Alumni
Brooklyn College graduate Ocean Vuong
A City College graduate, Wellington Z. Chen is the executive director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation in New York City, which was founded to mitigate the impacts of September 11 on local residents and business owners. He is also a former member of CUNY’s Board of Trustees. He was the first Asian American to serve on a community board and a local development corporation in Queens, and was also the first Chinese American to serve as a commissioner on the New York City Board of Standards and Appeals.
Lisa Ko, who received her M.F.A. from City College, is the author of “The Leavers,” which was a National Book Award finalist and winner of a PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. “The Leavers” was a national bestseller and named a best book of the year by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, The Los Angeles Times, and others, and has been translated into five languages.
A trailblazer in the legal field, Doris Ling-Cohan earned her B.A. from Brooklyn College. In 2014, she was the first woman of Asian descent to preside as a judge in a New York State Appellate court, and in 2002 became the first woman of Asian descent to be elected to the New York State Supreme Court. In 2005, ten years before the U.S. Supreme Court, she became the first trial judge in the state to decide in favor of marriage equality. During her 25 years on the bench, she hired hundreds of diverse interns, many of whom now work for the court system. Prior to becoming a judge, she taught at Queens College, City College and CUNY School of Law.
Rajiv Mohabir was born in London to Guyanese parents. He earned his MFA. at Queens College and his hybrid memoir, “Antiman,” was the inaugural selection for AAARI Reads, a communal reading experience for CUNY students, staff and faculty that focuses on texts by Asian American and Pacific Islander writers that reflect the complex experiences of AAPI New Yorkers. He has won many literary accolades, including the Kundiman Prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grand and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Queens College graduate DJ Rekha (born Rekha Malhotra) is a DJ, producer, curator and educator who founded Basement Bhangra, one of New York City’s longest running club nights, and is credited with helping bring Bhangra music to North America. They have appeared with artists like Yoko Ono, the Roots and M.I.A, and performed at major events like the inaugural Women’s March, SXSW and the Sundance Film Festival, as well as at the White House. Rekha has won a Drama Desk award for their work on the play “Rafta Rafta” and was also inducted into City Lore’s New York City People’s Hall of Fame for “contributing creatively to the folk culture of New York.” Earlier this month, Rekha interviewed Rajiv Mohabir as part of AAARI’s day-long symposium, “Asian American Studies across CUNY: Reflections, Connections, Futures,” and the two discussed a range of topics including family relationships, identity, inclusion and belonging.
Brooklyn College graduate Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling poetry collection “Time is a Mother” and The New York Times bestselling novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” which has been translated into 37 languages and won or been nominated for two dozen literary awards. He is also a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Born in Saigon, he was raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working-class family of nail salon and factory laborers.
Political Pioneers
New York State Senator Iwen Chu, who is the first Asian American woman to serve in the State Senate, was born and raised in Taiwan, where she worked as a television journalist. Chu came to New York when she was 27 to study sociology at Brooklyn College, where she earned her M.A. After working for local newspapers to amplify issues affecting the AAPI community, she became involved in local government, serving as a New York State assembly member for 10 years before running for State Senate.
Shahana Hanif, a graduate of Brooklyn College, is the first Muslim woman elected to the New York City Council, where she currently represents Brooklyn’s 39th District. She previously served as the director of organizing and community engagement for former Council Member Brad Lander’s office. Hanif is the child of Bangladeshi immigrants and also has the chronic illness lupus – these two factors helped galvanize her commitment to seeking equity for working-class families through organizing and public service.
New York City Council Member Sandra Ung represents the 20th District in Queens, which includes Flushing, Mitchell-Linden, Murray Hill, Queensboro Hill and Fresh Meadows. After escaping the Cambodian genocide as a child, Ung and her family immigrated to New York City when she was just seven years old. Sandra attended Hunter College as an undergraduate, and got her JD from Columbia Law School.
New York State Senator and former New York City Comptroller John Liu currently teaches municipal finance and policy at Baruch College and Queens College. He was the first Asian American New York City Council member and comptroller, and one of the first two Asian American New York State senators, as well as the first elected to legislative or citywide office in New York. Liu immigrated from Taiwan at the age of five and attended Hunter College High School.
Assembly Member Steven Raga, who received an MPA from Baruch, represents District 30 in Queens. When he was elected in 2022, he became the first Filipino-American elected to public office in New York State. He previously served as executive director of the non-profit organization Woodside on the Move, as the Northeast regional manager for policy and advocacy for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and as chief of staff for Assembly Member Brian Barnwell.
The City University of New York is the nation’s largest urban public university, a transformative engine of social mobility that is a critical component of the lifeblood of New York City. Founded in 1847 as the nation’s first free public institution of higher education, CUNY today has seven community colleges, 11 senior colleges and seven graduate or professional institutions spread across New York City’s five boroughs, serving over 243,000 undergraduate and graduate students and awarding 55,000 degrees each year. CUNY’s mix of quality and affordability propels almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all the Ivy League colleges combined. More than 80 percent of the University’s graduates stay in New York, contributing to all aspects of the city’s economic, civic and cultural life and diversifying the city’s workforce in every sector. CUNY’s graduates and faculty have received many prestigious honors, including 13 Nobel Prizes and 26 MacArthur “Genius” Grants. The University’s historic mission continues to this day: provide a first-rate public education to all students, regardless of means or background.
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