This dissertation template should work well for social scientists and humanists trying to stick to the CUNY formatting specifications.
I kept looking for something like this when I started dissertation writing but came up short, so I thought I'd be nice and share what I ended up using. This way you don't have the excuse to procrastinate trying to figure all this out.
Run one of the following to typeset the example dissertation:
$ make
$ latexmk -xelatex main
$ xelatex main; biber main; xelatex main; xelatex main
You can also view the result.
This should work with any reasonably current TeX distribution (tested using TeX Live 2014). If you run into difficulties, hit me up on Twitter and I'll do my best to help out. You can also file an issue here on Github, but I might not see it right away.
Edit config.tex to customize the dissertation title, names of EO, chair, and
committee members, etc.
Happy dissertating!