Degrees
Puya Gerami serves as Distinguished Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and in the affiliated Leadership Institute for Democracy and Social Justice. Puya joined CUNY SLU and LDSJ after working for more than a decade trying to help build the labor movement and the broader movement for social justice in his home state of Connecticut. He began by serving as an organizer and then the education director at SEIU 1199 New England, a union of nearly 30,000 health care workers. He later served as founding director of Recovery For All (now called Connecticut For All), a new statewide progressive coalition of nearly 75 labor, community, and faith organizations. In addition to this movement work, Puya also studied past movement-building in the Department of History at Yale. His dissertation tells the story of the clash between public sector unionism and privatization in the United States over the last century by focusing specifically on the state level in the Northeast region, investigating how forces on the Left and on the Right fought to advance contradictory visions of transforming the capitalist state in an era of chronic fiscal crisis. Puya is proud to be a part of the unique community of students, staff, and faculty at CUNY SLU and LDSJ.
Recent News
- M.A., M.Phil. in History, Yale University, 2019
- B.A. in English, Columbia University, 2012
Selected Publications
- “Beyond Austerity America: Labor Animates New Coalitions in the Age of COVID-19,” in The Pandemic and the Working Class, edited by Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2025.
- “Independent Political Organizations: A Strategy in the Making,” Convergence, November 27, 2023.
