Curious about how our recent History PhD alumni have had their books published? Join us as the alumni below recount their journeys. There will be a Q and A with all the panelists at the end.

October 7, 2015, 4 – 7 p.m.

William P. Kelly Skylight Room, 9^th Floor

A reception will follow in the History Lounge. Please RSVP to history@gc.cuny.edu.

 

 

4 – 4:10

Teresita Levy is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino and Puerto Rican Studies.  She is also teaching at the Graduate Center this semester in the History program.  Teresita graduated from the History program in 2007, where she majored in Latin American history and minored in African American history.  Her dissertation, En la Vega: The Social and Economic History of Tobacco Cultivation in Puerto Rico, 1898-1940“was supervised by Professor Laird W. Bergad.  Teresita will be speaking about her book based on that dissertation, Puerto Ricans in the Empire: Tobacco Growers and U.S. Colonialism, published by Rutgers University Press in December of 2014.

4:10 – 4:20

Jody Cross–Hansen graduated in 2010 with the dissertation  Transcendent Reform: Quaker Women and Social Reform During the Hicksite Schism.  Her advisor was Barbara Welter.  Her book is The Contribution of Quaker Women to the Political Struggle for Abolition, Women’s Rights and Peace: From the Hicksite Schism to the American Friends Service Committee She is currently seeking employment as a hospital chaplain or a college professor and is working on a collection of primary sources on the struggle to integrate gay people into the United Methodist Church.

 

4:20 – 4:30

Phillip Papas (2003) wrote his dissertation, “That Ever Loyal Island: Loyalism and the Coming of the American Revolution on Staten Island, New York,” with Carol Berkin. He has since gone on to publish That Ever Loyal Island: Staten Island and the American Revolution (NYU Press, 2007), Port Richmond (Arcadia Publishing, 2009) — co-authored with Lori R. Weintrob and, Renegade Revolutionary: The Life of General Charles Lee (NYU Press, 2014). Renegade Revolutionary received an Honorable Mention for the 2015 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award. He is currently Senior Professor of History at Union County College.

 

4:30 – 4:40

Cindy R. Lobel is an Associate Professor of History at Lehman College.  She also teaches in the Macaulay Honors College and the MALS program at the Graduate Center.  She completed her dissertation, Consuming Classes: Changing Food Consumption Patterns in New York City, 1790-1860, in 2003 under the direction of Professor Carol Berkin.  Her first book, Urban Appetites:  Food and Culture in Nineteenth Century New York, was published in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press.  Cindy is currently working on two projects: a biography of nineteenth-century education reform and domestic adviser Catherine Beecher, to be published by Westview Press as part of their “American Women’s Lives” series (edited by Carol Berkin) and a biography of nineteenth-century African American oysterman Thomas Downing.  She is also an area editor for the forthcoming Savoring Gotham: A Food Lovers Companion to New York City (NY:  Oxford University Press, 2015).

 

4:40 – 4:50

Alejandro Quintana is assistant professor of history at St. John’s University since 2008.  He received his Ph.D. in history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2007.  He worked with Prof. Margaret E. Crahan and defended his dissertation titled The President that Never Was:  Maximino Ávila Camacho and the Taming of Caudillismo in Early Post-Revolutionary Mexico.  Based on this work in 2010 he published Maximino Ávila Camacho and the One-Party State: The Taming of Caudillismo and Caciquismo in Post-Revolutionary Mexico. This is the work to be presented at the Alumni Publications Evening.  This book was translated into Spanish and published in Mexico the following year.  In 2012 he published Francisco Villa: a Biography, as part of Greenwood’s biographies series.

4:50 – 5:00

Laura Chmielewski is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Purchase,  where she teaches Atlantic World, Colonial American, Early National, and Public History.  She is the author of The Spice of Popery: Converging Christianities on an Early American Frontier  (Notre Dame University Press, 2012), and The Atlantic Experience: Peoples, Places, Ideas (with Catherine M. Armstrong, Loughborough University, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).  She is completing the manuscript of a new book, “Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet: Exploration, Encounter, and the French New World” for Routledge/Taylor and Francis (anticipated 2016), working on a textbook of early American life and culture (again with Catherine Armstrong) and a monograph on religious culture and maritime enterprise in early America.  She is currently Historian in Residence at Historic Hudson Valley, a consortium of house museums and living history sites in the lower Hudson Valley. Laura studied at the GC from 1998 – 2006.  Her dissertation advisor was Carol Berkin, and she also worked closely with David Jaffee.

 

5:00 – 5:10

Stephen Petrus is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the New-York Historical Society. He recently completed a Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellowship at the Museum of the City of New York, where he curated the exhibition Folk City, an examination of New York’s central role in fueling the mid-20th century folk music revival.  Petrus was the principal author of the show’s accompanying book, Folk City, published by Oxford University Press, which he will talk about today. He has published scholarly essays on twentieth-century urban and cultural history and taught various American history courses at Lehman College. Stephen received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center in 2010. His dissertation,  To Break Down the Walls:  The Politics and Culture of Greenwich Village, 1955 – 1965, was supervised by Thomas Kessner.

5:10 – 5:20

Kathy Feeley ’04 wrote her dissertation “Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: The Rise of the Celebrity Gossip Industry in Twentieth-Century America, 1910–1950” under the direction of David Nasaw.  She is chair and associate professor in the Department of History, University of Redlands.  She is co-editor (with Jennifer Frost) of When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in American History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).  She is also author of Mary Pickford: Hollywood and the New Woman (forthcoming in December 2015 from Westview Press) and is at work on “The Mightiest Publicity Powers on Earth”: The Rise of the Hollywood Press Corps in Mid-Twentieth-Century America.

5:20 – 5:30

Marcia M. Gallo received her Ph.D. with distinction from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2004. Her advisor was Distinguished Professor Emeritus Martin Duberman and her dissertation was entitled Different Daughters: The Daughters of Bilitis and the Roots of Lesbian and Women’s Liberation, 1955-1970. Her first book, based on her dissertation, was published in 2006 (Carroll & Graf; Seal Press, 2007). It won the Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction and was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. She also has contributed essays and book chapters exploring post-World War II feminism, progressive queer politics, and oral history methodology to journals as well as edited collections. Currently Gallo is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she teaches courses on race, gender and sexuality as well as oral history and public history. Tonight she will discuss her second book, “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy (Cornell University Press, 2015) which examines the social and cultural impact of the story of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, whose rape and murder in Queens, New York in 1964 became an international symbol of urban apathy amid the upheavals of the civil rights era.

5:30 – 5:40

Rachael Goldman (Ph.D. 2011) (Advisor: Jennifer T. Roberts) is the author of Color-Terms in Social and Cultural Context in  Ancient Rome (Gorgias Press, 2013). She is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor at The College of New Jersey where she teaches a variety of courses on the ancient history. She has published the article “The Multicolored World of the Romans” with Glotta in 2015. She has worked as a consultant for Bonhams auction house in the field of Judaica. Here next project is a collected essay volume on Essays on Global Color History: Interpreting the Ancient Spectrum with Gorgias Press, as well.

5:40 – 5:50

A native Italian, Marcella Bencivenni is associate professor of history at Hostos Community College/CUNY, where she has been teaching since 2004. Her research focuses on the histories of im/migration, labor, and social movements in the modern United States, with a particular interest in the Italian American experience. She is the author of Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940 (2011, repr. 2014), and co-editor of Radical Perspectives on Immigration (2008). She has also published over a dozen book chapters, articles and historiographical essays on topics related to the Italian diaspora and American radicalism and was recently featured in the Emmy-nominated TV show “Who Do You Think You Are?” helping Italian American actress Valerie Bertinelli trace her past. She is currently working on two new projects: she is editing the autobiography of leftwing activist Carl Marzani, the first political victim of McCarthyism, and has also started a new book tentatively titled Italian Immigration, the Triangle Fire and the Politics of Memory, for which she has received a Distinguished CUNY Fellowship for the Spring 2016 semester.

She received her Ph.D from the Graduate Center in 2003 with a dissertation titled “Italian American Radical Culture in New York City: The Politics and Arts of the Sovversivi, 1890-1940,” under the supervision of the late Philip V. Cannistraro.

5:50 – 6:00

Hillary Hallett is an assistant professor of history at Columbia University who research interests focus on the history of gender and sexuality and popular culture in transatlantic perspective.

Her first book, entitled Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood was published by the University of California Press in 2013.  Her current project is a biography called, The Syren Within: Elinor Glyn and the Invention of Glamour and is under contract with Liveright-Norton.

6:00 – 6:10

Jacob Kramer graduated from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2006. His dissertation was entitled The New Freedom and the  Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance, 1900-1924.  His advisor was Joshua Freeman.  His book, which shares the title of his dissertation, has been published this year by Temple University Press.  He is an associate professor of history at Borough of Manhattan Community College.  He was formerly an associate editor at Foreign Affairs magazine, and he has written for The Nation, History News Network, and The History Teacher.