RBI Fellows
Professor Manu Bhagavan
Professor of History, Hunter College
Senior Fellow, RBI
manu.bhagavan@hunter.cuny.edu
Manu Bhagavan is Professor of History and Human Rights at Hunter College and the Graduate Center-The City University of New York, and Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute. He is the author of The Peacemakers (2012, 2013) and Sovereign Spheres (2003), the (co-) editor of 4 books, and the biography of Madam Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the world’s first celebrity diplomat from the Global South. His edited volume on India and the Cold War is in production with the University of North Carolina Press and is expected in 2019. Manu’s Quartz essay on global authoritarianism went viral internationally and was translated into German as the lead, cover article of the May 2016 Berliner Republik magazine. He is the recipient of a 2006 Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and is an elected member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. He regularly appears in the media to comment on global affairs. Follow @ManuBhagavan.
Associate Professor Luca Storti
Associate Professor of Economic Sociology, University of Torino Senior Fellow, RBI
luca.storti@unito.it
Luca Storti is an Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Torino (since November 2018). His main research interests involve Mafia’s processes of territorial expansion at both national and international level, and the topic of international organized crime groups at the boundaries between legal and illegal markets. Among his recent publications: “The territorial expansion of mafia-type organized crime. The case of the Italian mafia in Germany”, in Crime, Law and Social Change (2014, with R. Sciarrone); “Social class and wealth inequality in Italy over 20 years, 1993-2014”, in Journal of Modern Italian Studies” (2018, with J. Dagnes and M. Filandri), and “Undisciplined, selfish big Babies? The cultural framing of the Italian financial crisis”, in Modern Italy (2018, with J. Dagnes and J. González-Díez).
Tapio Kanninen
Senior Fellow, RBI
tapio.kanninen@gmail.com
Tapio Kanningen is Senior Fellow and Director of the Major Wars Project at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he earned his PhD in Political Science in 1990. He is also President of the Global Crisis Information Network Inc. He was Chief of the Policy Planning in the UN Department of Political Affairs (1998-2005) and Head of the Secretariat of Kofi Annan’s five Summits with Regional Organizations. He has worked on several UN reforms: as Secretary and Research Focal Point of the High-level Drafting Group of Boutros-Boutros Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace and Convener of the Interdepartmental Task Force to Implement its Recommendations; Secretary of General Assembly Working Groups on An Agenda for Peace; of Strengthening of the UN System; and of Security Council reform. Earlier he also worked as a team member of the UNEP-funded project in the UN Statistical Office to develop a global framework for environmental statistics and he is also a co-founder of Climate Leadership Coalition, Europe’s largest non-profit business network on climate change. He is a member of Club of Rome, and the history of the Club is described in his book “Crisis of Global Sustainability” (Routledge, 2013). His earlier book “Leadership and Reform” (Kluwer 1994) described the inside story of Javier Perez de Cuellar’s leadership in the UN’s major reform process of the late 1980s.
Danielle Zach
Senior Fellow, RBI. Director of the Human Rights Hub
dzach@ccny.cuny.edu
Danielle A. Zach is Assistant Professor of Political Science & Human Rights at the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the Center for Worker Education (CWE). She is actively involved in CCNY’s Human Rights Forum; chair of CCNY’s Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Conference; host and producer of the Rights Talk at CCNY Downtown podcast; and steering committee member of the inter-CUNY Human Rights Hub. She is also an affiliated scholar of The CUNY Graduate Center’s Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies (RBIIS), Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity. She was previously Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Adelphi University, and Visiting Scholar of Irish Studies at New York University (NYU).
Amy Adamczyk
Senior Fellow, RBI.
AAdamczyk@jjay.cuny.edu
Dr. Amy Adamczyk is Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Programs of Doctoral Study in Sociology and Criminal Justice at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Trained as a sociologist of religion, her research focuses on how different contexts (e.g. nations, counties, friendship groups), and personal religious beliefs shape people’s deviant, moral, and health-related attitudes and behaviors. In 2025, she will publish her third book, Fetal Positions: Understanding Cross-national Public Opinion about Abortion, with Oxford University Press. Her coauthored book, Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass their Religion on to the Next Generation, was a finalist for Christianity Today’s 2022 Book of the Year Award, Marriage & Family Category. She is also the recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Book Award from the International Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences for Public Opinion about Homosexuality: Examining Attitudes Across the Globe. She has also published 58 peer-reviewed journal articles. Her research has been supported with grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust of Nassau, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Jack Shand Research Award. To learn more, check out AmyAdamczyk.com/