Ellen Chesler, Distinguished Lecturer and Director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative on Women and Public Policy.   From 1997-2006, Chesler was senior fellow at The Open Society Institute, the international foundation started by George Soros, where she directed the foundation's $35 million program in reproductive health and rights and advised on a range of other grant making and policy development concerns.  Chesler is the author of Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, which was a finalist for PEN's 1993 Martha Albrand award for the year’s best first work of nonfiction, and she is co-editor of Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality and Women in the New Millennium, Rutgers University Press, 2005. She has also written essays and articles in many anthologies and in newspapers and periodicals including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Nation, the American Prospect and the Women's Review of Books. 

From 1997 to 2003, Chesler chaired the board of the International Women's Health Coalition. She currently chairs the Advisory Committee of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch and also serves on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Early in her career she served as chief of staff to New York City Council President Carol Bellamy, who was the first woman elected to citywide office in New York. An honors graduate of Vassar College, Chesler earned her master's and doctoral degrees in history at Columbia University.

Judith Friedlander, Professor of Anthropology, is a long-standing member of the Hunter College community. She served as Dean of Social Sciences in the early 1990s and Acting Dean of Arts and Sciences from 2002-2006.  In the intervening years, she was Dean of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science and Eberstadt Professor at the New School for Social Research.  During her 7-year tenure as dean at the New School, the Graduate Faculty strengthened its historical commitment to human rights and policy research by establishing two new policy centers - the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship and the Center for Economic Policy Analysis -and transforming the East and Central Europe Program into the Transregional Center for the Study of Democracy.

Professor Friedlander has written extensively on questions of ethnicity and cultural identity.  She is best known for her books on indigenous Mexico, Being Indian in Hueyapan, and on Jewish intellectuals in France, Vilna on the Seine.  Over the years, she has also contributed to debates about women and ethnicity in higher education.  Currently she is writing a book on the history of the New School, where a remarkable group of European intellectuals, found refuge during the 1930s and 1940s; the vast majority of them Jews from Germany and France.  Social scientists for the most part, with the expertise in politics, social theory and economic policy, a significant number of these scholars subsequently served in the Roosevelt Administration, advising on issues ranging from the New Deal to National Socialism.

As Acting Academic Director of Roosevelt House, Professor Friedlander looks forward to developing opportunities for faculty and students to explore the policy implications of a wide range of disciplines in the Arts and Sciences and in the Schools of Education, Public Health, Nursing and Social Work.  Her responsibilities include: overseeing the creation and implementation of individual policy centers and faculty seminars, the recruitment of research fellows and visiting faculty, and the planning of special academic conferences.

Jonathan Rosenberg, Assistant Professor of History, chairs the Hunter College Senate Special Advisory Committee on Academic Functions at Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. Professor Rosenberg has been teaching U.S. history at Hunter since 2001, and he is also a member of the history faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has offered a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes that examine the domestic and international aspects of twentieth-century American history. Professor Rosenberg's research interests include the U.S. civil rights movement, U.S. foreign relations history, and more broadly, the ways in which international affairs have informed American political, social, and cultural life in the twentieth century. He is the author of "How Far the Promised Land?: World Affairs and the  American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam" (Princeton University Press, 2006). He is also the co-editor of "Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes" (W.W. Norton, 2003), and "Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb" (Oxford University Press, 1999). In addition to writing reviews and essays that have appeared in "The Christian Science Monitor," "The Washington Post," and "The Wilson Quarterly," Professor Rosenberg has discussed race relations, foreign policy, and other issues on CNN International, the BBC, National Public Radio, and WCBS-Radio. His current research explores the relationship between world politics and the culture of classical music in twentieth-century America, spanning the years from World War I to the Cold War. Professor Rosenberg is a graduate of Juilliard and received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University.

Fay Rosenfeld, Director of Programs, Operations and Development (Acting)  Fay Rosenfeld served as Senior Assistant Dean for Student Affairs and Executive Director of International and Comparative Law Programs at Hofstra Law School from 2001 to 2007.  Prior to joining Hofstra, she spent three years on the faculty of the Lawyering Program at New York University School of Law, and also taught at Brooklyn Law School.  Ms. Rosenfeld previously practiced law at the New York City law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where she specialized primarily in commercial and corporate litigation, representing foreign and domestic clients in a range of litigation-related matters.  While at Paul, Weiss, Ms. Rosenfeld served as co-counsel to Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon in Kadic v. Karadzic, a landmark international human rights case brought by female survivors of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, which resulted in a $745 million verdict against Radovan Karadzic, as well as several key legal precedents regarding the scope of liability for violations of international law.  The case was recognized in 2001 by the Public Justice Foundation as a finalist for its “Trial Lawyer of the Year” award, given annually to the attorneys or legal team who made the greatest contribution to the public interest by trying or settling a precedent-setting or socially significant case.  Ms. Rosenfeld also litigated two successful class actions on behalf of homeless men in New York City that exposed fire and other safety hazards inside dangerously overcrowded armory shelters. She received her J.D. cum laude from New York University School of Law, where she was a Junior Fellow at the Center for International Studies, and her B.A. in International Relations, cum laude, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. 

Joseph Viteritti, is the Blanche D. Blank Professor of Public Policy and Director of the undergraduate Public Policy Program at Roosevelt House. Professor Viteritti served as Chair of the inaugural Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Faculty Seminar at Roosevelt House in 2006 and is currently Chair of the Department Urban Affairs & Planning at Hunter. Prior to coming to Hunter in 2004, he had taught at Princeton, NYU, Harvard, and SUNY, Albany.

Professor Viteritti specializes in education policy, state & local governance, and public law. His most recent of ten books are When Mayors Take Charge: School Governance in the City (ed.) (Brookings Institution Press) and The Last Freedom: Religion from the Public School to the Public Square (Princeton University Press). Other books include Choosing Equality: School Choice, the Constitution, and Civil Society (Brookings Institution Press); Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society (Yale University Press) (edited with Diane Ravitch); and Across the River: Politics and Education in the City (Holmes & Meier). His more than 100 essays have appeared in social science journals, law reviews, and popular media such as the New York Times and Washington Post. His legal research has been published in the Yale Law & Policy Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy, Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law, NYU Annual Survey of American Law, Southern California Law Review, Fordham Urban Law Journal, and Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender, and Class. 

Professor Viteritti has an extensive record of public service. He is presently on the Steering Committee of the National Campaign for Civic Education in Schools (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor & Governor Roy Romer, Honorary Co-chairs). He was recently Executive Director of the Commission on School Governance appointed by NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. He has been a special assistant to the Chancellor of Schools (Frank Macchiarola) in New York City and a senior advisor to the superintendents of schools in Boston (Robert Spillane) and San Francisco (Bill Rojas). He was a member of the State Attorney General’s Advisory Panel on Nonpublic Schools (appointed by Eliot Spitzer), Executive Director of the State Charter Commission for Staten Island (appointed by Governor Mario Cuomo), Executive Director of the State Temporary Commission on Executive, Legislative and Judicial Compensation (appointed by Governor Mario Cuomo), and Executive Director of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Police Management and Personnel Policy (appointed by Edward Koch). He was also an advisor to the Charter Commission that wrote the present New York City Charter and to the Districting Commission that drew the current district boundaries for the City Council.

He received his Ph.D. in political science from the City University of New York and is a proud graduate of Hunter College.

The Hunter College Senate Special Advisory Committee serves as an advisory committee to the Provost on a range of academic programs at Roosevelt House, including the interdisciplinary public policy curriculum. The other members of the RHAC are: Ellen Trief (Education), Mimi Abramowitz (Social Work), Ahahi Viladrich (Schools of Health Professions), Jill Gross (Urban Affairs and Planning), Lina Newton (Political Science), Purvi Sevak (Economics), Omar Dahbour (Philosophy), Nancy Foner (Sociology), Joseph Viteritti (at large member, Urban Affairs), William Solecki (at large member, Geography), Vita Rabinowitz (Provost).