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

 

Oscar Aponte’s (PhD 2025) article “Escaping from Casa Arana: The Murui-Muina Nation after the Amazon Rubber Boom” was selected as the 2025 American Society for Ethnohistory’s Robert F. Heizer Article Award Honorable Mention.

Israel Benporat (PhD 2024) published “Anxious Adulterers: Prosecuting Infidelity in Early New England,” Journal of Early American History, 15, nos. 1-2 (June 2025): 5-29. He also wrote articles for RealClear History, Lehrhaus, eJewishPhilanthropy, Algemeiner, and Providence. He presented papers at the annual Omohundro Institute conference and the Society of Early Americanists biennial conference. He was also awarded a Tikvah Academic Fellowship, and he was cited in the latest issue of Modern Judaism as an “up-and-coming Jewish historian…[with] illuminating, recent popular articles.”

Mila Burns (PhD 2017) published the book Dictatorship Across Borders: Brazil, Chile, and the South American Cold War 

Miranda Brethour’s (PhD 2025) chapter “Oral Histories of Sexual Violence in Hiding during the Holocaust in Poland: Memory, Agency, and Reconceptualizing the ‘Rescuer,’” was published in the edited volume Shattered Liberation: Sexualized Violence against Holocaust Survivors, 1943-1946 with Purdue University Press (available open access here). 

Nicholas Cross’s (PhD 2017) first book The Roots of Cooperation: Constructing Interstate Alliances in Ancient Greece will be published by the University of Michigan Press in fall 2026. 

Megan J. Elias (PhD 2003) is co-editor with Alex D. Ketchum of Queers at the Table, a collection of essays, comics and recipes on the theme of queer food. The book came out on October 7 from Arsenal Pulp Press. 

Scott Gac (PhD 2003) published the article “The Lost Soul of Higher Education,” Inside Higher Education, June 24, 2025. He was also selected to teach the American Studies Seminar at the American Antiquarian Society in fall 2026. 

Marcia M. Gallo (PhD 2005) was honored by the Coordinating Committee of Women Historians (CCWH) with their 2025 Rachel Ginnis Fuchs Award for scholarship and mentorship.

Timothy Scott Johnson (PhD 2016) published the review essay “Field Work” in Modern Intellectual History.

Marc Kagan’s (PhD 2023) Take Back the Power: The Fall and Rise and Fall of NYC’s Transport Workers Union Local 100, 1975-2009 will be published by Brill in December as a hardcover and an Open Access electronic download version. He’ll be speaking about it at the Graduate Center on February 5. He also has a forthcoming article about the 2005 NYC transit strike in the Spring 2026 edition of New Labor Forum. More humorously, he was also outed this fall as Zohran Mamdani’s favorite high school teacher. 

Mounira Keghida was awarded the Odyssey Travel grant from The Graduate Center. It allowed her to do research at the French National Archives and to access materials not otherwise available. Also it allowed her to visit the town of Senlis where the French garrisoned the Spahis, beginning 1830, a cavalry unit made up entirely of indigenous Algerians.  In October, she traveled to Elkader, Iowa where she was invited to speak at an event titled, “Abdelkader’s Legacy: Bridging Elkader and Algeria.”

Adam Kocurek is going to be part of an accepted panel for the LGBTQ+ History Association’s fourth conference, the 2026 Queer/Trans History Conference (#QTHC26), to be held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from June 2 to 5, 2026. He was also the recipient of the Open Knowledge Fellowship run through the Mina Rees Library. 

James Lepree (PhD 2008)  and Matthew Ponesse of Ohio Dominican University published the first English translation of  The 9th century Benedictine abbot’s The Royal Way, a book about spiritual advice for Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious. It was published by the University of Dallas Press and Toronto Medieval Institute.  

Stephanie Makowski (PhD 2024) has a book under contract with Manchester University Press. It’ll be called Sex, Love and the Colour Line: Interracial Intimacy and British Identity, 1919-1958. 

Marta Millar’s article, “A Protectorate Divided: The Otjimbingue Petition and Settler Contestations of Railway Construction in German Southwest Africa, 1897-1902”, will be published in the Oxford University Press journal, German History, later this month as part of a special about “Colonial Transactions: Railways and Colonial Societies.” 

Sato Moughalian received a 2025 Provost’s Pre-Dissertation Summer Research Travel Grant, a Graduate Student Research Grant, and presented a paper at the Gulbenkian Foundation’s  October 2025 conference, “Artistic Networks of Trust: Collecting and Dealing in Times of War and Diplomacy,” in Lisbon, Portugal, and “Ivan Aivazovsky and the Chicago 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition: A Russian Armenian Painter’s American Encounter” at the Southern Historical Association’s 2025 Annual Conference in St. Petersburg, FL in November. Recent publications include “The Union of Armenian Artists, 1916-1921: Recovering the First National Fine Arts Institution,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, Vol. 31 (2026); “Les céramiques de Kütahya: un art arménien entre innovation et emprunts culturels,” in Trésors arméniens d’une culture en mouvement, 1512-1828 (Sources d’Arménie, 2025) [exhibition catalog essay]; “Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem,” Le patrimoine arménien de Jérusalem (Paris: Editions El Viso, 2026) [chapter in edited volume]; “Matthew Teller, The Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City ” Wasafiri, Vol. 120, 2024 [book review].

Walter Penrose, Jr. (PhD 2006) published an essay “The Amazons: From History to Myth,” in Brill’s Companion to Ancient Women and Warfare in the Mediterranean World, edited by Elizabeth Carney and Sabine Müller, E.J. Brill, 2025.

Keith Rosenthal wrote an article published in Tempest titled, “The Mamdani Campaign, Left Horizons, and the ‘Defund The Police’ Question”; wrote an article published in Spectre titled, “‘The Greatest New York City Mayor of All Time’: A Historical Reappraisal of Fiorello La Guardia”; presented a paper at the New Directions in Black Disability Studies conference at the University of Virginia in April 2025 on “The Struggle Against Racial Segregation at the New York Association for the Blind in the 1930s”; participated in a roundtable at the Disability & Life Writing Conference at the CUNY Graduate Center in April 2025 on “Disability, Accommodations, and the COVID Pandemic”;  and presented a paper at the Labor and Working-Class History Association conference in June 2025 on “The 1937 Blind Workers’ Strike Ripple.”

Rina Rossi published an article for Ojalá in both Spanish and English about a local Dominican and Haitian cafe in Flatbush building community across ethnic divides. Additionally, she earned the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies Reportage Fellowship for 2025, where she will write an article about Latinas’ current barriers to accessing reproductive healthcare in New York City. Furthermore, she was accepted to participate in the UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center’s 36th Annual Thinking Gender Conference, Thinking Gender 2026: “Feminist & Queer Ecologies,” in April.

Melanie Rush’s article “As though their father were dead”: Gender and Indenture in New York’s Legal Regime of Gradual Emancipation“ was recently published in the Winter 2025 issue of the Journal of the Early Republic.  

Maggie Schreiner was awarded an LGBTQ History Research Grant from the American Historical Association and an ERI Challenges of Migration and Belonging in NYC Summer Research Fellowship.

Andrew DJ Shield (PhD 2015) concurs: it’s clever students like YOU who push academic debates forward. He’s happy to share his first article co-authored with his graduate students: “Sexuality and Asylum: Progress and Ambivalence in the Netherlands, 1979–1986” tackles the history of LGBTIQ+ Asylum.