Eli Karetny

PhD in Political Science (CUNY Graduate Center)

Interim Director, Ralph Bunche Institute
Lecturer, Baruch College-CUNY
ekaretny@gc.cuny.edu
@ekaretny

Eli Karetny, JD, PhD, is the RBI’s interim managing director. Prior to taking on this role, he served as deputy director and head of programs and operations. Eli is the Principal Investigator on the Institute’s core research projects, he oversees relations with sponsors,  liaises with university administration, and serves as the Institute’s grants director and financial officer. Eli also serves as the legal and financial advisor to the RBI’s Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P) and the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity (CSHGCAH), and is a member of the boards of both organizations.

After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, Eli completed his PhD in International Relations at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation explored monarchic themes in the work of Leo Strauss, focusing especially on how Nietzsche influenced Strauss’s view of the role of teachers and advisors who influence regimes in profound ways. Eli teaches political theory and international relations at Baruch College-CUNY and had been advising RBI Project Directors for many years before himself becoming a director.

Eli is also researcher at the Hotam School of Anthroposophy and Kabbalah, which informs his interest in how esoteric wisdom influences human affairs. He is also an advisory board member of the Society for UAP Studies.

Juan Acevedo-Ossa

Research Associate

PhD Candidate – Political Science (International Relations)
jacevedo@gradcenter.cuny.edu
@huanacevedo

Juan Acevedo-Ossa is a PhD Candidate in Political Science specializing in international relations and international political economy with a special focus on multilateralism and leadership in the Global South. He came to the RBI after a spending some years working on international trade in China, Brazil and Colombia, where he also was a professor. He is a seasoned contributor of Foreign Affairs Latin America and Africa is a Country and co-author of the volume Diplomatic Strategies of Nations in the Global South Palgrave (2024). He is also a co-founder and coordinator of the China at CUNY Initiative, the Human Rights Hub, and the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity. Currently, Juan is studying the determinants of leadership of Global South countries in multilateral fora and the effects of structural power in international organizations.

European Union Studies Center

Dr. Lukasz Chelminski

Assistant Director lchelminski@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Lukasz Chelminski is the Assistant Director of the European Union Studies Center, organizing EUSC events, collaborating with scholars as well as other institutions. He has taught at Brooklyn College, The Cooper Union and Queens College. He is currently a digital pedagogy specialist at the Baruch College Center for Teaching and Learning and was previously an instructional technology fellow at the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY. His dissertation is provisionally titled Émigrés as Aneks. It follows a group of Warsaw University students whose protests in 1968 are met with an anti-Semitic government campaign that forces many of them into exile, where they create a publication that will be sent back into Poland as a way to stay in touch with the milieu they left behind. He is currently translating the dispatches from Ukraine of Paweł Pieniążek, a Polish journalist and war correspondent, which are being published on The New School’s Democracy Seminar website.

Human Rights Hub

Malak Harb

Research Assistant PhD Candidate – Political Science mharb@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Malak Harb (she/her) is a PhD student in the Political Science department at the CUNY Graduate Center. Holding an LL.M. in European and International Law, her research focuses on refugee and asylum regimes, particularly the politics of reception and asylum decisions. In addition to her PhD research, she supports the Human Rights Hub initiative at the Ralph Bunche Institute and teaches at Baruch College and Roosevelt House at Hunter College.