Dr. Eli Karetny JD, Ph.D

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

Eli Karetny 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 spent a sabbatical year in 2023-2024 researching the Bedouin of the Negev and the impact of TE Lawrence on postwar plans, but after October 7th his focus shifted to exploring how the war in Gaza fundamentally changes regional dynamics. Eli is also researcher at the Hotam School of Anthroposophy and Kabbalah, which informs his interest in how esoteric wisdom influences human affairs.

Professor John Torpey

Faculty Director, Ralph Bunche Institute
Presidential Professor, Sociology
jtorpey@gc.cuny.edu
@JohnCTorpey

John Torpey is Presidential Professor of Sociology and History and Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent: The East German Opposition and its Legacy (University of Minnesota Press, 1995); The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2018); Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (edited with Jane Caplan; Princeton UP, 2001); Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (Verso, 2005), Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Harvard Press, 2006; paperback edition Rutgers Press, 2017); The Post-Secular in Question (NYU Press, 2012); Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison (with Christian Joppke; Harvard Press, 2013); Transformations of Warfare in the Contemporary World (edited with David Jacobson; Temple Press, 2017); and The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental (Rutgers Press, 2017).

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.