Digital Commons Network^™

His 242.C301 – Contemporary European History From The Global South / Third World Perspective, Soheil Asefi

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus for HIS 242: Contemporary European History builds on a course taught in Lehman College’s History Department in 2025 and has been revised for Fall 2027. It approaches European history from the French Revolution to the present through Global South perspectives, emphasizing empire, class struggle, migration, anti-colonial movements, gender, and sexuality. Combining primary sources, scholarship, digital archives, and multimedia, the course encourages historical analysis through discussion and student presentations. Developed through the Open Knowledge Fellowship, this Zero Textbook Cost syllabus brings together open educational resources, open-access materials, and CUNY library resources.

Community College Librarian Needs Assessment: Academic Status And Research Interest, Christine (Mi-Seon) Kim, Stephanie Delano Davis

Publications and Research

This pilot study explores the results of the Spring 2023, “Needs Survey for Community College Librarians” conducted by the Community and Junior College Libraries Section (CJCLS).  CJCLS is a section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). One hundred and seventeen individuals participated in the survey. The survey asked community college librarians about their academic employment status and publication requirements, their interest in research, and the support for research available to them at their institutions. The key findings of this research show a broad range of academic status classification among …

Artificial Intelligence Ratings Of Facial Feature Similarity As Predictors Of Eyewitness Performance, Agata K. Bugajczyk

Student Theses

Eyewitness identification plays an important role in the criminal justice system, yet it is often prone to error. Diagnostic Feature Theory (DFD) suggests that lineup fillers should match the eyewitness’s description of the suspect but be different in other ways (Wixted & Mickes, 2014). According to this theory, people remember faces using multiple features (e.g., age, race, face shape), some of which are useful for recognition and some that are not. This approach has been shown to improve the ability to tell the difference between guilty and innocent suspects (e.g., Colloff et al., 2021), but it also increases identification rates …

Supporting Bibliodiversity And Access Through Library Resource Sharing, J. Silvia Cho

Publications and Research

Librarians, with their core values of access, intellectual freedom, stewardship and democracy, share bibliodiversity advocates’ vision of an eco-social system of diverse cultures and reading as a democratic and emancipatory practice. Librarians bolster bibliodiversity by collecting inclusively, critically reviewing and decolonizing library collections, and centering access. Building on previous discussions on the role of open access in strengthening bibliodiversity, this paper acknowledges and articulates how interlibrary loan and library resource sharing also support bibliodiversity. Doing so is important to augment advocacy and support for these services. Advancing solutions to challenges in resource sharing means also advancing towards bibliodiversity goals, supporting …

The Economics Of Modern Basketball Fandom, Holden Velasco

Capstones

In an increasingly money-sucking economy, many Americans are feeling the aching of their wallets. Basketball, once serving as an escape from the outside world, has now turned into a money-making machine where fans are paying to keep it running. It’s inescapable, whether it’s the rising costs to watch the professionals, forking thousands of dollars for children to play or sports gambling being plastered everywhere. Basketball no longer feels like basketball.

Wage Inequalities In Informal Work: Race, Sex, And Citizenship Among Latino Workers In New York State, Amalia Torrecillas Fernandez

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

This report examines wage variation within informal work in New York State from 2016 to 2022, with particular attention to Latino workers. Using American Community Survey data from three five-year periods (2016, 2019, and 2022). The analysis explores how median hourly wages differ by ethnicity, sex, citizenship status, race, age, and nativity.

Informal workers represented 4.6%-4.7% of New York's workforce, approximately 569,000 to 589,000 workers between the years of study. A substantial wage gap persisted throughout the study period. Formal workers earned $18/hour in 2016 versus $12 for informal workers; by 2022, this widened to $24 versus $14, underscoring the …

An Eco-Inspired Emulsion Membrane Harnessed With Waste Vegetable Oil For Effective Separation Of Ibuprofen: Insights Into Stability, Performance, And Kinetics, Huma Warsi Khan, A. Vijaya Bhaskar Reddy, Parvez Alam Khan, Samsur Akm Rahman, Muhammad Moniruzzaman

Publications and Research

Emulsion liquid membranes (ELMs) have emerged as excellent alternatives for the separation and recovery of biologically active drugs (BADs) from industrial waste at trace concentrations. Conventional ELMs generally utilize toxic petroleum-based solvents (PBS) that pose environmental and health risks. Although virgin vegetable oils have been appeared as sustainable alternatives to PBS, their widespread application is limited by economic constraints, resource sustainability, and competition with the food supply. In contrast, waste vegetable oil (WVO) represents an abundant, low-cost, and eco-friendly alternative, yet its potential as a green diluent for ELMs remains largely unexplored. To address this challenge, present study investigated the …

Info 7009 / Lbsci 709: Research In Library And Information Studies, Ping Li

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus of INFO 7009 / LBSCI 709: Research in Library and Information Studies. Funded in part by the CUNY OER Initiative, this class uses open educational resources or zero-textbook-cost materials.

Swk 200: Introduction To Social Work Syllabus, Samantha Norris

Open Educational Resources

This Open Educational Resources (OER) syllabus was created for Introduction to Social Work (SWK 200) at the College of Staten Island, thanks to support from the CUNY Graduate Center’s Open Knowledge Fellowship.

The focus of SWK 200 is on introducing students to the profession of social work. This course examines the profession of social work, its value base, areas of practice, and societal role. Major social problems; philosophies of social welfare, provision, program and policy initiatives; and the response of social work as a profession are addressed. The obligation of professional social workers to promote social and economic justice on …

Intl 30800: Research Methods For International And Global Studies, Eliza Marks

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus was developed for INTL 30800: Research Methods in International and Global Studies at City College of New York (CCNY). This project-based course introduces International and Global Studies students to research methods, with a focus on how social scientists formulate questions, design and carry out research, and interpret evidence. The course is designated Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC).

Generalized Apostol-Bernoulli Functions And The Evaluation Of Character Sums, Brad Isaacson

Publications and Research

We introduce two types of generalized Apostol–Bernoulli functions attached to Dirichlet characters and express them by generalized Apostol–Bernoulli numbers. As a corollary, we obtain formulas expressing two families of character sums by generalized Apostol–Bernoulli numbers. These sums are twisted generalizations of sums introduced and studied by Arakawa, Berndt, Ibukiyama, Kaneko, Kim, Ramanujan, and Zaharescu in the context of modular forms and theta function identities.

Introduction To Theater Syllabus, Claudia Terry

Open Educational Resources

This is the main components of an Introduction to theater course syllabus that is OER.  Using these sources also allows the course to be more open and diverse in what theater is and how it done.

Archives As Activism: Using Cuny Archives To Examine And Analyze Social Change, Marci Littlefield

Open Educational Resources

Archives as Activism uses CUNY archival materials to help students examine the relationship between activism, social issues and social change. Students will analyze primary sources such as flyers, newsletters, photographs, student newspapers, and institutional documents and connect them to contemporary social issues. CUNY’s history of activism around, race, gender, educational access, women’s organizing and institutional power provides students with an opportunity to investigate questions about power, collective action, intersectionality and social change.

Lesson Plan: What Is Mei?, Jennifer Jolley

Open Educational Resources

This lesson plan provides background on the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) and the process for converting digital .wav files from the Deborah Pacini Hernandez Bachata Music Collection housed at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute to .mei using the application Sonic Visualizer.

Growing, Connecting, And Reflecting: Interpersonal Communication In Relationships, Gordon Alley-Young

Open Educational Resources

"Growing, Connecting, and Reflecting: Interpersonal Communication in Relationships" by Gordon Alley-Young is an Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook exploring communication in interpersonal relationships. The text emphasizing that communication is a collaborative, co-creation of meaning across many contexts and channels. The text recognizes the pervasive influence of culture on communication to recognize how our diverse backgrounds shape relational dynamics and dialogue. Topics and themes explored in the text include: self-concept, perception, cultural awareness, effective listening, emotion, verbal and nonverbal communication, relational climates and conflict, and the formation and evolution of foundational interpersonal relationships. The text encourages individual reflection on the reader's …

Wikipedia In The Classroom: From Orientation To Application, Kristen L. Hodnett

Open Educational Resources

"Wikipedia in the Classroom: From Orientation to Application" is a flexible mini-unit designed to help early-career teachers rethink how open web tools can be used in the classroom. Built for graduate teacher preparation programs, the unit breaks learning into 15- to 45-minute micro-lessons spread across a semester. This structure gives future educators low-stakes, repeated opportunities to build digital literacy without taking time away from core course content.

The curriculum walks students through a clear, three-phase framework:

• Orientation & Exploration: Students unpack how Wikipedia actually works—from talk pages to sourcing standards—while examining missing voices, bias, and who gets to create knowledge …

  ---

  Go to article

The State Of The Unions 2026: A Profile Of Organized Labor In New York City, New York State, And The United States, Ruth Milkman, Joseph Van Der Naald

Publications and Research

The 2026 State of the Unions report finds that while union density remains strong in New York, membership rates remain largely unchanged, despite renewed organizing, successful strikes and strong public support for labor. Union density stands at 20.5 percent in New York City and 20.9 percent statewide, more than double the national rate of 10 percent, yet well below levels recorded two decades ago. The report also examines the persistent divide between public- and private-sector unionization, the industries and workers sustaining organized labor, and the forces limiting growth. A special section considers Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s labor-friendly record and the opportunities …

Fast Discovery Of Motivic Patterns In Symbolic Music Via Lossy Compression, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

Generative systems that react to live musicians require rapid analysis of musical data, which rules out deep learning models: they cannot be trained within the time constraints of live performance. But because analysis results are often transformed before use, we are free to reduce the parameters that undergo transformation to a small set of primitive states. We address this coincidence of constraint and opportunity with an algorithm for online discovery of maximal musical motives that achieves speed through lossy compression: the pitch and inter-onset-interval deltas for all pairs of events in a potential motive are reduced to two-bit values, conceptualized …

Chemistry In The City Module, Ji Kim

Open Educational Resources

This project integrates a historical environmental health report from the CUNY Digital History Archive into an online Introductory Chemistry course to connect core chemical concepts with real urban pollution issues. Students analyze perchloroethylene contamination in apartments above dry cleaners, apply concepts such as volatility, vapor pressure, and concentration units, and reflect on chemical principles underlying indoor air pollution.

Chemistry In The City Module, Ji Kim

Open Educational Resources

This project integrates a historical environmental health report from the CUNY Digital History Archive into an online Introductory Chemistry course to connect core chemical concepts with real urban pollution issues. Students analyze perchloroethylene contamination in apartments above dry cleaners, apply concepts such as volatility, vapor pressure, and concentration units, and reflect on chemical principles underlying indoor air pollution.

Hydration-Tunable Ionic Liquid-In-Oil Microemulsions For Increased Transdermal Delivery Of High-Molecular-Weight Proteins, Roy Jabidash, Kiyohiro Toyofuku, Rie Wakabayashi, Yoshirou Kawaguchi, Noriho Jeffrey Kamiya, Muhammad Moniruzzaman, Masahiro Goto

Publications and Research

Transdermal delivery of high-molecular-weight proteins is challenging because of their large molecular size and hydrophilicity, and the barrier properties of the stratum corneum. We report a hydrated ionic liquid-in-oil (HIL/O) microemulsion for transdermal delivery of high-molecular-weight proteins. A biocompatible ionic liquid (IL) composed of cholinium cation and propionate anion, optimized at 45 wt% hydration, was developed as a protein-compatible solubilization medium that dissolved ovalbumin (molecular mass ∼ 45 kDa) and bovine serum albumin (molecular mass ∼ 66 kDa), whereas lower hydration levels were insufficient for effective protein dissolution. Following solubilization, circular dichroism spectroscopy showed recovery of the native-like secondary structures …

Analysis Of Diterpenoid Alkaloids From American Aconitum Using Lc-Ms Metabolomic Methods, Yi Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Analysis of Diterpenoid Alkaloids from American Aconitum Using LC-MS Metabolomic Methods

by

Yi Zhao

Advisor: Edward J. Kennelly

Aconitum plants have been used as a traditional medicine in Asian countries for millennia to treat pain, rheumatism, syncope, fever, and other conditions. These therapeutic effects are mainly due to the bioactive diterpenoid alkaloids accumulated in the roots. Comparing with the large records and studies of Asian Aconitum and their medicinal use and the broad bioactive compounds, American Aconitum has been rarely investigated, not to mention how American Aconitum has been used medicinally. Based on previous phylogenetic and chemotaxonomic studies of Aconitum …

Bridging Data Gaps In Retinal Imaging: From Structural Domain Adaptation To Topology-Aware Synthesis, Gözde Merve Demirci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Comprehensive visualization of the retina is essential for diagnosing and monitoring blinding diseases such as Diabetic Retinopathy and Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP), where pathological changes often extend beyond a single field of view. Despite significant advances in automated retinal image analysis, clinical deployment remains limited by two fundamental data gaps: a structural learning gap, arising from scarce expert annotations and poor generalization across imaging domains, and a spatial coverage gap, caused by the difficulty of acquiring multi-view retinal images in fragile populations. Although these challenges are often addressed independently, this dissertation argues that they are tightly coupled: accurate, …

Allyship And Affect: Qualitative Investigations Into Social Transformation, Michael Lucinda Jane Greer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Allies have faced several critiques in feminist philosophy. Some have argued that they lack the requisite political interests to be motivated to dismantle the social structures from which they stand to benefit. Others have argued that the epistemic limitations resulting from their social privilege are insurmountable. Yet others have argued that allyship is too individualistic a concept, preferring a more collectivist concept like solidarity. However, there remain privileged individuals who understand themselves as complicit in perpetuating oppressive forms of life, and who wish to transform themselves and work in coalition across difference to dismantle structural oppression. How ought these individuals …

Distinguishing Between Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder And Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Role Of Childhood Maltreatment, Catherine Harris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current study examined whether court-substantiated childhood maltreatment may be associated with increased risk for Complex PTSD (CPTSD) and whether individuals with CPTSD and individuals with PTSD could be distinguished in terms of complex trauma exposure. Children with documented cases of abuse and neglect prior to age 11 were matched on age, race, sex, and approximate family socioeconomic status with children without documented histories of maltreatment (controls) and both groups were followed prospectively into adulthood. Participants (N = 1,196) were assessed using a DSM-III-R based structured interview of PTSD symptoms and other self-report measures of psychiatric symptoms at mean age …

Intimate Partner Violence And Emotion Regulation Among Emerging Adults: Investigating The Roles Of Dispositional Mindfulness And Executive Function In The Context Of A Laboratory-Induced Stress Paradigm, Mikell Bursky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a major public health concern that impacts an estimated 10 million men and women in the United States annually. IPV refers to a range of physical, sexual or psychological forms of aggression committed against a current or former romantic partner in the context of a relationship. The highest rates of IPV are observed in emerging adulthood, a developmental period between the ages of 18 to 25 that is significant for the transition from adolescence into adulthood, and the establishment of first meaningful intimate relationships. Although distal risk factors for IPV such as violence in the …

Teaching Third Graders To Read Multisyllable Words: Segmentation Versus Whole Word Reading, Jolie D. Heath

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the early years of elementary school when children are still learning to read, they are presented with words of increased syllable length, and orthographic and morphological complexity in the texts they read.  Although multisyllabic words comprise 90% of words in the English lexicon and carry important linguistic information for expanding vocabularies and comprehension of content, few studies have focused on teaching middle elementary children to read multisyllabic words.  Many children lack strategies to identify these longer more complex words accurately and easily, leading to reading difficulties that place weaker readers at higher risk for school related problems and limit …

Social And Structural Factors In The Development Of Baltimore's Low Back Vowels, Aidan J. Malanoski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is concerned with the low back vowels of Baltimore English: what low back systems occur, and how these systems have changed among Black and white Baltimoreans. I draw on two sources of data: 48 interviews that I conducted with natives of Baltimore and its inner suburbs, and 18 oral history interviews that were conducted from 1978 to 1981. In Chapter 3, I argue for the inclusion of the pre-rhotic sets START and NORTH in typologies of English low back vowels. With these sets included, several previously unattested low back systems are found in Baltimore. These are united by …

Social Media-Based Social Comparisons Among Socially Anxious Young Adults: The Role Of Cognitive Reappraisal, Jennifer L. De Rutte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Social media is a central context for social interaction and self-evaluation among young adults. For those with elevated social anxiety, these environments may be especially salient because they provide frequent opportunities for social comparison. Although upward social comparison on social media has been linked to poorer emotional outcomes, less is known about its experimental effects among socially anxious young adults or whether upward and downward comparison have distinct effects that extend to later socially evaluative situations. The present study examined these questions in 84 socially anxious young adults randomly assigned to view simulated Instagram feeds eliciting upward comparison, downward comparison, …

Potential Energy Landscape Formalism For Quantum Liquids, Yang Zhou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Atomic delocalization due to nuclear quantum effects (NQE) remains poorly understood in low-temperature liquids near the glass state and during vitrification. Many liquids can be described accurately by treating their nuclei as classical particles, but this approximation fails for light elements such as He and H₂, small hydrogen-containing molecules such as water, and systems in which zero-point motion or isotope-substitution effects are important. Developing a general thermodynamic and statistical-mechanical description of such liquids has been challenging. This dissertation extends the potential energy landscape (PEL) formalism, originally developed for classical liquids and glasses, to liquids that obey quantum mechanics and exhibit …