Today is Commencement Day at the Graduate Center, and we are again marking the occasion by celebrating the culminating works of our graduates, most of which are deposited in the Mina Rees Library to be preserved and made available to researchers and, ultimately, the public. We now hold just over 18,000 dissertations, theses, and capstone projects in our collection across print and digital formats, with more than 5,000 works submitted digitally after we ceased archiving bound copies in 2015. 

Before we get to this year’s round-up of new works, let’s linger a moment on what it means to steward digital collections in the library. I don’t need to remind anyone (but I will) that generative AI hit the scene four years ago, and whether we think of these consumer-facing products as “plagiarism machines” or “reasoning engines,” we’ve all come to understand the industry’s need for textual data to train the models used by these tools. It turns out that open access library collections have become prime targets for bots behaving badly. As one resource puts it, “the nature of traffic on the Web has changed,” and digital libraries now have to deal with “aggressive, adaptive, and evasive web crawlers” that threaten our infrastructure and our ability to make materials broadly accessible. 

Sadly, one solution seems to be adding “friction” to the online experience; those interstitial pages asking us to verify our humanity are like speed bumps to deter the machines straining our systems with their incessant requests. CUNY’s institutional repository platform is managed by a vendor (the biggest vendor!) so our technical infrastructure is perhaps safe, but our graduate authors now come to us with another worry about making their research available: will it be used to train AI models? We are seeing more students embargo their works: 67% of this year’s dissertations had some form of access restriction (that number drops to 55% when we include master’s theses and capstones). While the library can’t control bad actors on the open web, we can work, at least, to ensure that the vendors we contract with can’t use our student works as training data for their own products without our consent (and, good news: all new NYS contracts have such provisions). I hope that we can thread the needle of protecting intellectual property rights while re-committing to broad, if not entirely friction-less, access to publicly-funded research.

In another sign that the digital publishing landscape is changing, the Dissertation Office began to see more formal AI disclosures in the manuscripts this year. We often think of the dissertation deposit process as a proto-publication experience—a dry run for what will occur when graduates move into their fields and begin formally publishing their work (though, of course, many dissertation authors have already published portions of it). Understanding the restrictions of copyright and navigating permission structures, avoiding plagiarism (and self-plagiarism), and fine-tuning the presentation of their data in tables and figures are some of the mechanics of manuscript preparation that depositing a dissertation or thesis has always developed. Now, as scholarly publishers begin to find their way with requirements around AI disclosure, we’re seeing more of that come into the dissertations and theses that are deposited in the library. 

What do these disclosures look like? Here’s one example: 

The author used Claude (Anthropic) for assistance with LaTeX formatting, copy-editing, code syntax, and generating alt text for figures. No AI tools were used in the design, execution, or interpretation of the research presented in this dissertation. The author takes full responsibility for all content.

Should the Graduate Center develop its own requirements for disclosing the use of AI in a dissertation or thesis? As with most issues in scholarly publishing, there are disciplinary considerations that make it difficult to dictate a single approach for all fields. Resnick and Hosseini (2025) suggest a framework of mandatory, optional, or unnecessary disclosure of AI use for scientific publications, although some of their emphasis on reproducibility might not translate to the arts and humanities. So, for now, the Library is taking the approach—as we do with many of our manuscript preparation guidelines—that graduates should follow the conventions of their discipline and align with publishing practices common in their field. We naturally expect that authors will take full responsibility for the work; do we really need them to state it outright? Perhaps.

But enough about AI and scholarly publishing, that’s not why you’re here! Let’s dig into the research that our graduates have produced and celebrate their accomplishments. This year, the library accepted 433 deposits: 291 doctoral dissertations, 7 doctoral capstone projects, 96 master’s theses, and 39 master’s capstone projects. You can browse them all in CUNY Academic Works.

The Ph.D. Program in Psychology again led with the largest number of doctoral dissertations deposited (38), followed by Biology (28), and we had a four-way tie for third place with Business, Chemistry, Music, and Urban Education each with 14. For the master’s students, the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies had the most deposits (28 theses and capstones), followed by Cognitive Neuroscience (17), Data Analysis & Visualization (16), and Astrophysics and Political Science both came in fifth place with 15 theses deposited by students in their programs.

In a year indelibly marked by anti-migrant terror within our occupied cities and across militarized borders, we should celebrate our Graduate Center students writing about migrant justice and collective liberation, exploring immigration policy  in Colombia and South Korea), theorizing migrant displacement as a literary genre, and revealing the precarity of migrant labor (in sex work and small food businesses, to name two). I can’t possibly cover them all, so please—search, browse, and explore them on your own in our online collection.

You’ll see that our graduates are experimenting with mixed methods and creating new methodological frameworks themselves. Amyleth Vargas (M.A., Liberal Studies, September ‘25) combines autoethnography and archival research to explore the construction of public memory in “Brownsville Taught Me: Reframing the Public Memory of Brownsville’s History,” while David Milley (Ph.D., Anthropology, February ‘26) offers a methodological alternative to the “false dichotomy between humanistic and scientific traditions in archaeology” by joining phenomenology and GIS as complementary lenses in “Sensing Prehistory: A Framework Reconciling Scientific Modeling and Human Experience Through Affordance Theory.” 

We have explorations of queer ecologies on Riis beach and visual culture in Stalinist Poland; anti-ableist spectatorship in East Asian regional theater and sonic performances of Afro-Cubans in Florida; a photographic and gendered history of the Algerian War and oral histories of tech worker organizing. 

You’ll find critical examinations of sport and public spaces in master’s capstones like “The New York City Fields of Calcio Libero: Where Protagonists Activate Counter-Hegemony” (Olivia Soderini, M.A., International Migration Studies, June ‘26) and “Courts of New York: A Visual Atlas of the City’s Public Basketball Spaces” (Nathaniel Rattner, M.S., Data Analysis & Visualization, February ‘26), alongside doctoral dissertations on the privatized public space of Hudson Yards and the effects of gentrification on public health across New York City. 

Graduates in the sciences are contributing novel approaches to material problems like adapting lithium-ion batteries for use in extreme conditions and scaling grid energy storage. They are investigating cognitive difficulties in breast cancer survivors, studying the role of molecular imaging in gynecological pathologies, and working towards  therapeutic applications for age-related blindness. We have works on dragonflies, butterflies, and even sleep regulation in fruit flies; from working memory in bottlenose dolphins and cat-human play to tarantula toxin and Andean bird fauna, you will not be disappointed! 

And now, the milestones:

Longest dissertation: “Cecil Taylor, 1950–1976: Theory & Practice in His Own Words” by Michelle Yom (Ph.D., Music, February  ‘26) at 450 pages.

Note: This year, I looked at the length of the text, including bibliography, but tried to exclude appendices and illustrations. That said, there are two notable mentions to be made for students who included significant amounts of supplementary materials that pushed them each towards 900 pages!

“Sensing Prehistory: A Framework Reconciling Scientific Modeling and Human Experience Through Affordance Theory” by David Milley (Ph.D., Anthropology, February ‘26) at 877 pages

“Form and Structure in African Music: Four Case Studies in San, Por Por, Ewe, and Aka Music” by Bai Xue (Ph.D., Music, September ‘25) at 954 pages

Shortest dissertation: “Quiver of Affine Monoid of a Vector Space Over Finite Field” by James Junie Chen Cleary (Ph.D., Mathematics, June ‘26) at 45 pages.

Longest title: “Fostering Ecological Consciousness in An Era of Collapse: Reimagining the Purpose of Environmental Education through Collaborative Curriculum Development with Radical Environmental Educators and Activists in the Hudson Valley of New York” by Matthew Devine (Ph.D., Psychology, February  ‘26)

Shortest title: “Systems Epistemology” by Boris Ayala (Ph.D., Philosophy, February  ‘26)

The Graduate Center has always been a special place where disciplines intersect and faculty and students do meaningful, imaginative, and exceptional work that centers the public good over private gain. Let’s keep showing up, keep working together, and keep ourselves grounded in the fight for a more just world, con los pies en la tierra.

Congratulations, Class of 2026!

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