Let’s take a moment to celebrate the recent achievements of our amazing students and alumni!!

 

Soheil Asefi was a participant for the following conferences and workshops: 1) The German Studies Association (GSA)’s 48th Annual Conference, “Selective Amnesia: The Exquisite Art of Forgetting in Germany’s Queer Memorial Landscape,” September 2024, Atlanta, Georgia 2) Young Scholars Forum: Histories of Migration – Transatlantic and Global Perspectives: “Narratives of QPoC Activism Against Gentrification and Imperialism: Beyond Bars to Battlefronts”, The German Historical Institute (GHI), University of California, Berkeley, October 2024 3)Philanthropy and Civil Society’s William Randolph Hearst Endowment Fund Award, Hearst Graduate Fellow, Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, The Graduate Center, CUNY, November 2024 4)Selected Dissertation Proposal in Intersectional Feminist/Queer Studies Workshop, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University(NYU), December 2024.

Israel Benporat (PhD 2024) began serving as a lecturer at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center. His article, “Anxious Adulterers: Prosecuting Infidelity in Early New England,” was recently accepted by Journal of Early American History. He also published pieces in RealClear History and Lehrhaus.

Michael Brenes (PhD 2014) will publish his new book, The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy with Yale University Press in January. He has also signed a contract with Grove Atlantic to publish his next book, a history of the War on Terror. He recently published essays in The New Republic and Boston Review. As of October, he is also a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C.

Amanda Westbrook Brennan (PhD 2024) graduated in September and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Vassar College.

Laura M. Chmielewski (PhD 2006) was promoted to Full Professor of History at State University of New York at Purchase.  She is also the recipient of the 2024 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Activities. A member of the History faculty for 20 years, Chmielewski is also the founder of Purchase’s Museum Studies minor.

Jeffrey Marc Culang’s (PhD 2017) co-edited volume (with Beth Baron), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History, was published with Oxford University Press in February.

Glenn Dyer (PhD 2018) published his book The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York City’s  Rank-and-File Rebels in October with the University of North Carolina Press.

Carla J DuBose-Simons (PhD 2013) was awarded the SUNY Chancellors Award for Excellence in Faculty Service for 2023-24. She was recognized by SUNY Westchester Community College with the Dr. Julius Ford Outstanding Service Award, by the Black History Month Committee on February 23, 2024. She was also recognized by the New York Chapter of the Association of Black Women in Higher Education for Outstanding Scholarship, Commitment, and Service on June 11, 2024.

Gene Fein (PhD 2006) was promoted to Associate Vice President for Academic Records and Services at Fordham University.

Sean Griffin (PhD 2017) has a book entitled The Root and the Branch: Working-Class Reform and Antislavery, 1790–1860 that was published by Penn Press in May.

Ernest Ialongo (PhD 2009) was invited to give a keynote address, entitled “Futurism and Fascism: Approaches, Challenges, and Opportunities” at the conference “Les futuristes et le fascisme” held in Nice, France at the Université Côte d’Azur, November 28 and 29, 2024.

Timothy Scott Johnson (PhD 2016) has a book entitled Repeating Revolutions: The French Revolution and the Algerian War that will be published February 6, 2025 with Routledge in their series Studies in the Modern History of France.

Philip Keisman (PhD 2023) was awarded the Association for Jewish Studies Contingent Faculty Research Grant

Marta Millar received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) four-month research grant. She is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut’s Department of Global History at the Freie Universität Berlin. She also was selected for a 2025 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad award and will spend six months in Namibia and South Africa with the Museums Association of Namibia and the University of Cape Town. She presented a paper entitled “Old Wounds and “Deadly Medicine”: Presenting Histories of Scientific Racism in Namibian Museums” at the annual German Studies Association conference in October this year.

Logan McBride (PhD 2018) co-produced a documentary short film, Degrees of Freedom, which premiered at the Dances with Films Festival in Union Square and won the Audience Award for best documentary short. The film grew out of the Women Transcending Oral History Research Project at the Center for Justice at Columbia University, where McBride held a post-doctoral and continues to work with as a co-researcher. It tells the history of the successful organizing of women incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility to bring college programming back to the prison after tough-on-crime legislation in the mid-1990s essentially eliminated higher educational opportunities in prisons nation-wide. McBride is a Distinguished Lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY and was able to bring all of the students in her Medical Ethics Behind Bars course to the premiere! www.degreesoffreedomfilm.com

Kevin McGruder (PhD 2010) was recently elected to the Board of Directors of The Black Fives Foundation (https://www.blackfives.org/), a non-profit organization that works to research, preserve, showcase, teach, and honor the pre-NBA history of African Americans in basketball. He became aware of these athletes, who from 1904 through the 1950s were the basketball equivalent of baseball’s Negro Leagues, through his research on Harlem during the early twentieth century when Harlem’s very competitive teams from the Alpha Physical Athletic Club, and St. Christopher Athletic Club provided young Black men with athletic and social bases. Some of them later became leaders in New York City business and politics.

Phoenix Paz wrote an article for the CLACLS Reportage Fellowship at the GC, which was published on CUNY Academic Works.

Bradford Pelletier’s article, “’Fugitive’ Medicine: Modjeska Simkins’s Medical Activism, 1931-1942,” will appear in the Winter 2025 issue of The Journal of African American History.

Andrew DJ Shield (PhD 2015) welcomes all attendees of ESSHC 2025 (26-29 March, Leiden University, Netherlands) to pop by my office, drop off your bags, sip tea & attend all sessions with the Sexuality Track (of which I am co-Chair). CUNY Pride!

Chelsea Schields (PhD 2017) was awarded the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History and/or Feminist Theory and the AHA Prize in European International History from the American Historical Association; the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award from the Caribbean Studies Association; and the World History Association’s World History Connected Book Prize for her book, Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (UC Press, 2023) 

Maggie Schreiner published “‘Stop AIDS Evictions!’: Discrimination, Rent Regulation, and New York City’s Housing Crisis (1985–1988)” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (October 2024). She was accepted into the GC Digital Initiatives’ Digital Fellows program.

Johnathan Thayer (PhD 2018) has been awarded tenure and promotion to Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, CUNY.

Rachel B. Tiven’s article, “We were put out of good jobs”: Women Night Workers in New York & the Origins of the Women’s Equal Opportunity League appears in International Labor and Working-Class History. It is accessible to undergrads and would be great for anyone teaching labor or 20^th century U.S. history. Please assign! Separately, she is presenting a paper at the AHA conference on January 6, “‘Manhood Suffrage Means Manhood Service’: Debating US Citizenship in the World War I Era.”

Daniela Moraes Traldi (PhD 2024) joined Columbia University’s Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities as a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in History (Department of History). In October, Traldi delivered a lecture at the SOF/Heyman Center based on her dissertation project: “God, Fatherland, Family: Integralismo and the Making of the Far Right in Twentieth-Century Brazil.” She also presented at New York University’s History of Women and Gender Series with her talk, “Fashioning Fascism in Brazil: The Case of Carmela Salgado and Integralista Women (1930s-60s),” and at the Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon) with “Rebranding Fascism in Brazil: Integralista Women and the Rise of Far-Right Christian Nationalism in the 1940s-50s.”

Evan Turiano (PhD 2022) started a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Wesleyan University, where he is also appointed as Visiting Assistant Professor of History. He is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Guns and Society, where he is contributing to the grant-funded project “Firearms use and regulation in the 18^th and 19^th centuries: Modeling the Application of Historical Methods for Law and Policy in the Bruen Era.” Additionally, he recently published “The ‘Reintegration’ Trap: Fugitives from Slavery and Synthesis in American History” in the September 2024 issue of Reviews in American History. He was also awarded a 2024 Gilder Lehrman Institute Scholarly Research Fellowship.

Branko van Oppen (PhD 2007) has curated the exhibition Ancient Athens: Birthplace of Democracy at the Tampa Museum of Art with an accompanying catalog, and published “Multianalytical Investigation Reveals Psychotropic Substances in a Ptolemaic Egyptian Vase” together with 15 co-authors in Nature’s Scientific Reports 14 (2024): no. 27891.

David Viola (PhD 2017) will have his first book, You Have Unleashed a Storm, published by Hanover Square / HarperCollins in April of 2025. A related article will appear in the winter 2024 edition of the journal New York History, published by Cornell University Press. David, a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy Reserve currently mobilized to Active Duty, is deployed alongside Special Operations Forces in Europe.

Erik Wallenberg (PhD 2023) published a “Classics Review” in the current issue of Women Studies Quarterly, Fall/Winter 2024, titled “The Unbearable City: Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear.” 

Carey Thompson Wells received the 2024 Lane Cooper Fellowship.

Seçil Yılmaz (PhD 2016) has an article entitled “Intimate Technologies of Family Making: Birth Control Politics in Cold War Turkey” that came out in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine; and the cover of this issue also features one of the images Seçil used in the article.