Celebrating our students and alumni on their recent successes!!

 

Esther Adaire (PhD 2023) has signed a book contract with Bloomsbury. Her PhD dissertation will be published later this year as a monograph under the title Neo-Nazi Postmodern: Right-Wing Terror Tactics, the Intellectual New Right, and the Destabilization of Memory in Germany since 1989.

Ben Alexander (PhD 2005) is publishing the expanded version of his dissertation on Armenian Americans, titled Ararat in America, with I. B. Tauris later this year.

Oscar Aponte was awarded a $4,000 BRES Doctoral Fellowship.

Soheil Asefi published an article titled “The Life Uprising in Iran, Imperialism, and International Solidarity,” with LeftEast.

Danielle Bennett was this past year’s Stanley Paterson Research Fellow at Washington’s Headquarters – Longfellow House National Parks Site where she also gave a talk called “Not Just Roommates: Queer Historic Preservation” with Historic New England’s Ken Turino. She also gave a presentation at the 2022 New England Museum Association’s annual conference. And over at ASHP, they released the first two episodes of a new podcast on queer public history, funded with a grant from Humanities NY. Danielle also won a DGSC Early Research grant.

Israel Ben-Porat was awarded a $25,000 Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year for “Hebraic Puritans: Old Testament Politics in Early New England”.

Miranda Brethour has been awarded a 2023-2024 fellowship at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Emily Brooks (PhD 2019)  accepted a full-time position as a Curriculum Writer at the New York Public Library’s new Center for Educators and Schools. She also published “The Politics of Policing” in the Journal of Urban History, “Coercive Patrotism: Gender, Militarism, and Auxiliary Police in New York City during World War II” in Labor History, and her book, Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City, will be out October 2023 with University of North Carolina Press.

Nicholas Cross (PhD 2016)  has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean History at the United States Naval Academy starting in the fall.

Rebecca M. Dresser (PhD 2010) published her book The Life of Daniel Waldo Lincoln, 1784-1815 Letters from a Wayward Son with Routledge Press Fall 2022.

Deena Ecker was awarded a $4000 Summer 2023 Early Research Initiative Pre-Dissertation American Studies Archival Award.

Christopher Ewing (PhD 2018) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the History Department at Purdue University. His book, The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970, is currently under contract with Cornell University Press, scheduled to be published in January 2024.

Krystle Farman Sweda (PhD 2019) has started a full-time position in Research Development at Stanford University School of Medicine.

David Hamilton Golland (PhD 2008) accepted his current appointment as Dean of the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey.  David’s next book, Livin’ Just to Find Emotion: Journey and Race in Rock Music, is currently under consideration by several trade and academic presses.

Jiwon Han was awarded a $10,000 Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year for “Buttressing Britain’s Financial Rise: Anglo-Dutch Brokers in Eighteenth-Century London.” Additionally, Jiwon’s presentation was accepted for the Britain and the World (BATW) Conference 2023.

Nour Hodeib was awarded a $10,000 CPCP Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year for “By Songs and Fire: Leftist Musicking and the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990).”

Demetrio Iannone recently published “Francesco Misiano e la Mezhrabpom-Film: la fine di una storia. Alcuni esiti delle ultime ricerche bibliografiche.” in Francesco Misiano tra Cinema e Rivoluzione: Opere letterarie, Avventure di Celluloide ed. Eugenio Attanasio. Cineteca della Calabria (2023). Demetrio is now planning to work on translating the entire book in the summer and will convert the article to a publishable piece for an English journal by the end of the year.

Kate Kelley won a $25,000 AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation, “How Cinderella became a Communist: The Politics of Classical Ballet in East Germany.” She has also  been awarded $5000 from the John M. Cammett Memorial Fund.

Mimi Keghida presented a paper at the annual meeting of the New York State Association of European Historians (NYSAEH), in Niagara Falls. Fellow Europeanists should note the next meeting will take place in Brooklyn, at St. Francis College, so submit a paper or panel suggestions when the call appears. She was also invited to join the Board of the Abdel Kader Educational Project (AEP), a small non-profit organization headquartered in Iowa. The organization is dedicated to teaching Global Citizenship through the life lessons of the Emir Abdel Kader, a nineteenth century Muslim historical figure who built bridges and lead by example gaining the respect of world leaders. The organization also conducts an annual essay contest for High school and College students offering generous prizes.

Hratch Kestenian was awarded the $20,000 Miles Gerstein  Dissertation Year Fellowship.

Anastasia Kirtiklis was awarded the $7,000 National Society of the Colonial Dames in the State of New York Dissertation Year Fellowship.

Madeline Lafuse was awarded a $4,000 BRES Doctoral Fellowship and a $25,000 IRADAC Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year for “”Poison in Marie Laveau’s New Orleans: A Cultural History of Slavery and Violence, 1769-1900.” Madeline has also accepted a full-time teaching position in the History Department of the Berkeley Carroll School for next year.

James Lepree (PhD 2015) published an article in the March edition of the American Benedictine Review on “The Rule of St. Benedict as a Blueprint for the Reformation of Carolingian Spirituality in the Via regia of Abbot Smaragdus of St. Mihiel written by the Benedictine abbot Smaragdus as a guide for ruling for Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious” (Volume 74.1, March 2023). James is also working on a project with Prof. Yitzhak Hen, Director of Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem which will concentrate on theocratic kingship for the Germanic Frankish people which will cover the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties, covering a period from about 500 AD to 840 AD.   In addition, James has recently edited (2023) a reader for his classes called “Readings in World Civilization: Primary sources in Ancient and Early Medieval History”, Cognella Publishing Company.

Idan Liav was awarded a $25,000 Braham Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year for “Historical Times of Tashach: She’erit HaPleta and Holocaust Memory in Nascent Israel”

Sarah Litvin (PhD 2019) published a chapter in the book “Storytelling in Museums,” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) about her work as founding Director, creating a new museum and cultural center at the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History in Kingston, New York. Also in 2022, Litvin led the Reher Center to partner with the Kingston Library, Bard College, the Culinary Institute of America, and Ulster County Literacy Association to create a Hudson Valley Immigrant Oral History project. These audio recordings and transcripts, available on New York Digital Heritage website, feature narratives of thirty-six local immigrants, refugees, and migrants to the region. Opening May 6th at the Reher Center Gallery is “Taking Root: Immigrant Stories of the Hudson Valley,” a multi-sensory exhibition that features the stories and highlights the food cultures of the Hudson Valley Immigrant Oral History Collection. Visit Fridays-Sundays through November. ReherCenter.org.

Tamara Maatouk was awarded a $25,000 Altman Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year and the Doctoral Student Research Grant (DSRG). She was selected as one of this year’s recipients of the Futures Initiative’s Dr. Louise Lennihan Arts and Sciences Grant. Her article “On the Heels of 1967: Chahine, Cinema, and Emotional Response(s) to the Defeat” was published by the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

Stephanie Makowski was awarded the $25,000 CUNY/Schomburg Archival Dissertation Year Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year.

Gwynneth Malin (PhD 2012) was invited by the Center for Brooklyn History to give a talk and workshop titled In Sickness and in Health: A History of Sewers and Sanitation in Brooklyn   for K-12 educators held at the Greenpoint Public Library’s Environmental Education Center on March 25, 2023.

Marta Millar was awarded a $4000 Summer 2023 Early Research Initiative Archival Award in African-American and African Diaspora Studies, and a 2023-2024 Doctoral Student Research Grant to support her research internship with the Museum Association of Namibia (Windhoek) in July 2023.

Bradford Pelletier was awarded a $4000 Summer 2023 Early Research Initiative Pre-Dissertation Archival Award in African American and African Diaspora Studies. He also received an IRADAC/Schomburg Digitization Fellowship. Bradford’s book review “Pelletier on Gonaver, ‘The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880′” was published by H-Net Reviews. Additionally, his article “An Ill-bred Culture of Experimentation: Malaria Therapy & Race in the United States Public Health Service Laboratory at the South Carolina State Hospital (1932-1952)” was accepted by The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.

Laura Ping (PhD 2018) and Cindy Lobel (PhD 2003) published the coauthored book Catharine Beecher: The Complexity of Gender in Nineteenth-Century America with Routledge Press. This book is part of the Lives of American Women series edited by Carol Berkin. Laura Ping will be presenting a paper entitled “Strong-Minded Women and Their Sisters: Public Perceptions of Queer, Black, and Poor Women as Dress Reformers” at the 2023 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in California.

Luke Reynolds (PhD 2019) was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in July 2022 and Secretary of the Napoleonic and Revolutionary War Graves Charity in October 2022. His first book, Who Owned Waterloo? Battle, Memory, and Myth in British History, 1815-1852 (Oxford, 2022) was awarded the 2023 Distinguished Book Award in the First Book Category by the Society for Military History and was a runner up for the Society for Army Historical Research’s Prize for Best First Book. It will be released in paperback in November 2023.

Evan Rothman was awarded a $4000 Summer 2023 Early Research Initiative Pre-Dissertation Research Award.

Chelsea Schields (PhD 2017) has published her book, Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean, with the University of California Press (April 2023).

Yanara Schmacks has been awarded a 10-month residential fellowship at the Leibniz-Institute for European History in Mainz (Germany). Her dissertation chapter draft “Motherhood in the GDR between Socialism and Opposition” has won the Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central European History 2022. She has an article on the “Sexual Revolution” (co-authored with Dagmar Herzog) forthcoming in the Cambridge World History of Sexualities collection.

Maggie Schreiner was awarded a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and a LaGuardia and Wagner Archives Scholarship. Maggie was co-awarded the CLAGS Graduate Paper Award for 2022.

Mary Jane Shimsky (PhD, 2007) was elected to the New York State Assembly from Westchester in November

Carli Snyder was awarded the Manya Friedman Memorial Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and the Dori Laub Fellowship at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. She also delivered a public lecture organized by the University of Southern California Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Shoah Foundation entitled, “Questions of Gender and Sexuality in Interviewer Trainings and Holocaust Survivor Testimonies.” The lecture was the culmination of her 2022-2023 Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies.

Daniela Moraes Traldi received a $30,000 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation, “God, Fatherland, Family: Integralismo and the Making of the Far-Right in Twentieth-Century Brazil.” She also published “Christian Political Hypermasculinity: Brazilian Fascism in the 1930s.” in Gender & History (March 2023).

Evan Turiano (PhD 2022) will spend the Fall 2023 semester as the Walter O. Evans Fellow at Yale University, and the Spring 2024 semester as the Lapidus Center Long-Term Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He was also awarded a four-month fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library. His article, “‘Prophecies of Loss’: Debating Slave Flight during Virginia’s Secession Crisis,” was published in the Journal of the Civil War Era in September 2022.

Branko van Oppen (PhD 2007) has curated two major long-term antiquities exhibitions, “Life & Death in the Ancient World” (on view through 2026), and “Identity in the Ancient World” (on view through March 2025), at the Tampa Museum of Art, Florida.

Thompson Wells, has published “”In a Desolate and Foreign Land:” Byzantine Cross-Cultural Attitudes on the Road to Nemanjić Serbia (Thirteenth-Fourteenth Centuries),” Byzantinoslavica, 78/1, 2020, 93-116. His other article, “Queenship and Agency in Medieval Serbia: The Case of Empress Jelena-Jelisaveta-Eugenia (1310-1376 CE),” should be out this summer/fall 2023 in Byzantion

Helena Yoo Roth was awarded the $20,000 EP Thompson Dissertation Year Fellowship.