We are delighted to introduce you to our incoming Futures Initiative Fellows for 2019-2020, Michael Epstein and Cihan Tekay. Welcome!

Michael Lewis Epstein, Web Developer and Digital Strategist

Michael Epstein is a doctoral candidate in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience at the Graduate Center, CUNY, working in a lab based at Baruch University. His interests are primarily in attention and perception, with a current focus on ensemble perception—the statistical compression of perceptual information—in vision. He has taught at City College and the CUNY School of Professional Studies, and volunteers with BraiNY, BioBus and the NYCLU. You can find more about his research and interests here.

Cihan Tekay, Institutional Leadership and Administration Specialist

Cihan Tekay earned her BA from Hampshire College and she is a PhD Student in Anthropology at the Graduate Center. Cihan is interested in the global emergence of novel forms of citizenship, and how people’s engagement with science, technology, and popular political ideologies shape visions of the future. As an interdisciplinary scholar trained in history, sociology and anthropology, her research reevaluates the relationship of people and politics to technology and natural resources by employing archival and ethnographic methods. She is currently writing her dissertation on the political economy of electrification and its repercussions in daily life in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey from 1890 to 1940. Her project has been supported by Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship as well as the Doctoral Student Research Grant and Provost’s Award programs at the Graduate Center.

Cihan has taught courses in Anthropology, Sociology and Gender Studies in the CUNY system since 2012. She also worked as a Graduate Fellow at Medgar Evers College, where she assisted students and faculty in developing tools for writing, researching, and publishing their projects. Cihan is committed to public scholarship, academic freedom, and imagining fair and equitable futures for the public university. She has been a co-editor of the Turkey section on Jadaliyya.com since 2013.