Director, Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies
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 University Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2018); Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (edited with Jane Caplan; Princeton University Press, 2001); Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices (editor, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (co-edited with Daniel Levy and Max Pensky; Verso, 2005), Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006; paperback ed. Rutgers University Press, 2017); The Post-Secular in Question (co-edited with Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, and Jonathan van Antwerpen; NYU Press, 2012); Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison (with Christian Joppke; Harvard University Press, 2013); Transformations of Warfare in the Contemporary World (edited with David Jacobson; Temple University Press, 2017); The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental (Rutgers University Press, 2017); The Decline of Antiracism and the Future of Progressive Politics (Routledge, 2026); Revitalizing the United Nations: Making and Keeping the Peace (Routledge, 2026).  During 2015-2016, he was President of the Eastern Sociological Society.

PhD in Political Science (CUNY Graduate Center)

Deputy Director, Ralph Bunche Institute
Director, Project on UAP Studies and International Security
ekaretny@gc.cuny.edu
@ekaretny

Eli Karetny, JD, PhD, is the RBI’s deputy director. He is the Principal Investigator on several core research projects, directs the Project on UAP Studies and International Security, manages the Diplomat in Residence Program, supervises graduate student research and oversees the Visiting Scholars Program, and serves as the Institute’s grants director, financial officer, and legal advisor to the 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 advisory boards of both organizations.

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 Nietzsche’s influence on Strauss’s view of the role of teachers and advisors as regime-changers. He got his JD/MBA from Temple University, served in the Peace Corps in Ukraine, and received his Master’s Degree in International Relations from NYU. Eli is also researcher at the Hotam School of Anthroposophy and Kabbalah, which informs his interest in how esoteric wisdom influences human affairs.

As the director of the Project on UAP Studies and International Security, Eli hosts the UAP Working Group on UN Engagement. He is an advisory board member of the Society for UAP Studies and teaches a Masters course in UAP Studies and National Security at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Assistant Director of Programs

PhD Candidate – Political Science (International Relations)
jacevedo@gc.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.

PhD Candidate – Political Science
omenaaguilar@gc.cuny.edu

Oswaldo Mena (he/his) is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He specializes in comparative public policy and Latin American political economy, with a focus on inequality, poverty, and the redistributive and predistributive policies (labor-market regulation, taxation, and social transfers) used to address them.

His doctoral dissertation, Predistribution, Income Inequality and the Politics of Minimum Wage and the Left in Latin America, combines cross-national econometric analysis of minimum wages and inequality in Latin America with an intensive qualitative study of the recent trajectory of minimum-wage policy in Mexico. Methodologically, He combines econometric analysis, household survey microdata, Bayesian process tracing, semi-structured elite interviews, documentary analysis, and archival research.

His work has been published in The Economic and Labour Relations Review and Policy Studies Journal. My research has been supported by the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS), the American Political Science Association (APSA), and Georgetown University. I am also a Graduate Center Dissertation Fellow (2026), a Latino Data Scholar at CLACLS (2025), a CONAHCYT Scholar (2024–2027), a Junior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality (2024), and a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar (2021–2024).

PhD Candidate – Political Science laltinsoy@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Laura Altinsoy (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, specializing in International Relations with a minor in Political Theory. Her research focuses on international organizations, global political economy, U.S. hegemony, Third World contestation, and financialization. Her dissertation examines how U.S. hegemony was contested and reconstituted through international institutions and global finance from 1955 to 1986, with particular attention to the IMF, UNCTAD, G77, NAM, NIEO, and the role of financial networks.
She also teaches undergraduate political science courses at CUNY, including American Government, U.S. in an Age of Globalization and Modern Political Theory. She previously served as a Political Affairs Intern with the Peacebuilding Commission Support Branch of the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs at UN Headquarters in New York. Her academic background includes an MLitt in History from the University of Dundee, where she graduated with distinction and received the Charles McKean History Prize, and an MA Honours degree in Philosophy and Politics from the University of Edinburgh, where she graduated with First Class Honours and received prizes in Philosophy of Science and Logic. She has also lived, studied, and worked in several countries, including Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, and the United States, and has traveled extensively and participated in volunteer work in Central America, Africa, and Asia. She speaks German, English, French, and Spanish.