It is my great pleasure to share this long list of the Spring 2024 Alumni and Student Accomplishments!

 

Ugur Akpinar was awarded a $4,000 Pre-Dissertation Summer Research Award.

Arinn Amer was featured in Bunk History’s Best History Writing of 2023 roundup.

Oscar Aponte was awarded a $25,000 CGSC/Dissertation Year Fellowship Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year for From Dispossession to Reservation: Indigenous Nations and the Colonization of Colombian Amazonia in the Twentieth Century. Additionally, he has an article “Escaping from Casa Arana: The Murui-Muina Nation after the Amazon Rubber Boom,” that is forthcoming in Ethnohistory 71 no. 4 (Winter 2024).

Esther Adaire (PhD 2022) published her first book with Bloomsbury, titled Neo-Nazi Postmodern: Right-Wing Terror Tactics, the Intellectual New Right, and the Destabilization of Memory in Germany since 1989, in April 2024. In September 2023 she accepted a position as an Intelligence Analyst with NYPD’s Intel & Counterterrorism Bureau.

Danielle Bennett was awarded a $4,000 Early Research Initiative (ERI) American Studies Archival Research Award . She presented two papers: “Pushing the Boundaries of Gender at the Sarah Orne Jewett House” at the Deerfield/Wellesley Symposium on Queer New England in Deerfield, MA, and “Homebody: Interpreting Henry Davis Sleeper through his Creation” at NCPH’s Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, UT.

Tyler Brady began managing the President Joe Biden Hometown Oral History Project in coordination with the Lackawanna Historical Society and the Democratic National Committee in March.

Evelyn Burg (PhD 2003) published “Chaos and Form: George Santayana and William James in Darwin’s World, in a special  edition of Limbo: boletín internacional de estudios sobre Santayana (suplemento de la revista Teorema).

Geoff G. Burrows (PhD 2014) published The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration: New Deal Public Works, Modernization, and Colonial Reform (University of Florida Press, 2024).

Maricarmen Canales Moreno was awarded a $3,000 Kathy Chamberlain Research Award by the Women Writing Women’s Lives organization

Gloria Caminha was awarded a $4,000 Pre-Dissertation Summer Research Award, a CLACLS Summer Research Fellowship, a GSRG grant, and a Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library grant.

Laura M. Chmielewski (PhD 2006) was promoted to Full Professor of History and Museum Studies at SUNY Purchase.  She is also joining Viking Cruise Lines as a Resident Historian

Madeline DeDe-Panken was awarded the Julia and Warder Cadbury Research Fellowship at Adirondack Experience Library. She has also been awarded Massachusetts Historical Society’s Mary B. Wright Environmental History Fellowship. She is continuing her rounds on the Mycology Club lecture circuit, with upcoming invited talks at the Boston Mycological Club annual dinner and the Illinois Mycological Society.

Benjamin Diehl was awarded a $25,000 Capelloni Dissertation Fellowship Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year for Fascinating the Masses – Sergei Chakhotin and the Psychotechnics of Political Propaganda. He also received a Doctoral Student Research Grant (DSRG) to help fund a 5-week research trip to France and Germany this summer. His article “Sergei Chakhotin Against the Swastika” was published online in March by Central European History of Cambridge University Press and will appear in print this September 2024.

Glenn Dyer (PhD 2018) is happy to announce his forthcoming book, The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York’s Rank-and-File Rebels, which will be published in October 2024 with University of North Carolina Press.

Deena Ecker has received the Rose and Isidore Drench Memorial Fellowship and the Dora and Mayer Tendler Endowed Fellowship in American Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for the 2024-2025 academic year and the Provost’s Office ERI Connect New York Summer Research Award for 2024. She was also selected as one of the Victorian Society New York’s Emerging Scholars for 2024.

Megan Elias (PhD 2003) was co-host for the Queer Food Conference, which was covered in the New York Times –  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/dining/queer-food-conference.html. Megan was recently promoted from Director of Gastronomy to Director of Food Studies Programs at Boston University

Evan Friss (PhD 2011) has a book, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, coming out this summer from Viking.

Marcia Gallo (PhD 2004) is now Emerita at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. In addition to two new writing projects, one of which relies on oral histories of feminist/anti-racist/LGBTQ+ activists, she chaired the Organization of American Historians’ 2024 Mary Nickliss Prize committee for the best book in women’s/gender history.

Rebecca Irvine was awarded a $25,000 Dissertation Year Fellowship Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year for Treating the Nation: Public Health, Disease and the Body in Iraq 1940s-1970s.

Micki Kaufman will be co-keynoting the KeystoneDH 2024, conference at Penn State Behrend School of Humanities and Social Science, Erie, Pennsylvania on May 20-22. The conference focuses on the role of play and imagination in digital humanities research. Micki will be presenting her dissertation, “Quantifying Kissinger,” an interactive 3-D and XR data visualization and analysis.

Kate Kelley was awarded a $25,000 Randolph L. Braham Dissertation Award for the 2024-25 academic year. Additionally, she presented a paper titled “Present and Absent: National Identity and Blackness in East German Ballet” at the Northeastern Modern Languages Association annual conference in Boston, MA this past March. Furthermore, her paper “Shaping Socialist Bodies: Training Young Ballet Dancers in the GDR” was accepted to the 2024 Conference of the International Society for Cultural History to be held in Potsdam, Germany this fall.

Anastasia Kirtiklis was awarded a $25,000 Dissertation Year Fellowship Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year for Of Fever High and Parts that Swell:  “Wellness” in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine: 1830-1890.

Adam Kocurek was a panelist for the University of Connecticut’s Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies conference “The Uses of Anger,” on March 22nd.

Madeline Lafuse successfully defended her dissertation and is finishing her first year as an upper school history teacher the Berkeley Carroll School.

Carl Lindskoog (PhD 2013) published “Sanctuary is Justice: Resilience and Ingenuity in the Sanctuary Movement since 1986”, a chapter in Whose America? U.S. Immigration Policy Since 1980, edited by Maria Cristina Garcia and Maddalena Marinari (University of Illinois Press, 2023). Carl also appeared on “A History of Sanctuary,” an episode of Against the Grain, KPFA Pacifica Radio.

Sarah Litvin (PhD 2019) presented her work as founding Director of the Reher Center for Immigrant Culture and History at a symposium on Storytelling in Museums in Kennesaw, GA in April, 2024 and will present at “What’s Cooking? New Directions in Historic House Kitchens Conference,” sponsored by the Association for State and Local History, at Old Westbury Gardens on June 27th, 2024.

Stephanie Makowski has been offered a 2 Year Visiting Professorship at the Air Force Academy.

Gwynneth Malin (PhD 2013) was invited by the Tenement Museum to give a virtual talk to K-12 educators called From Cholera to Clean Water: Daily Life in 19th Century New York on April 10, 2024.

Blake McGready received the John W. Shy Memorial Fellowship from the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, the New York State Society of the Cincinnati Fellowship, the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada Scholarship, and the Brigade of the American Revolution Founders Fellowship.

Kevin McGruder (PhD 2010) is a contributor to The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom (Beacon Press, April, 20244). His chapter, “Knowledge and Good Community Organizing Can Counter the ‘Divisive Concepts’ Campaign,” provides suggestions for creating a counter narrative to challenge the notion that the teaching of accurate historical information is divisive and harmful to students and the nation.  He is also a recipient of the $5,000 Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship from Biographers International Organization, which he will use to support his research on a biography of Harlem Renaissance writer and physician Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934). He is an Associate Professor of History at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Marta Millar’s first article, “Facing a ‘Difficult Heritage’: Decolonizing Baden-Württemberg’s Relationship with Namibia through Research, Restitution, and Repatriation,” will be published in German Politics and Society [Spring 2024, vol. 42, no.1]. She would like to thank the History Department for supporting her first-year research through the Paul Naish travel and research fund.

Blake McGready was awarded a $4,000 Connect NY Summer Award.

Victoria Mondelli (PhD 2009) recently published the book, The Educator’s Guide to Designing Games and Creative Active-Learning Exercises: The Allure of Play, with her co-author Joe Bisz, CUNY professor of English at BMCC.

Laureencia Morice was awarded a $4,000 Pre-Dissertation Summer Research Award.

Brad Pelletier was awarded the 25th Anniversary Fund Dissertation Fellowship, for the 2024-2025 Academic Year. Also, his article, “’Fugitive’ Medicine: Modjeska Simkins’ Medical Activism, 1931-1942” was accepted for publication in the Journal of African American History.

Walter Penrose, Jr. (PhD 2006) has edited and written the lead article for an issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies vol. 28 no. 2 (2024), on the theme of “Queer/Feminist Representations and Receptions of the Amazons.”  His article is entitled “Introduction: the Appeal of the Amazons,” and can be viewed here.

Rashmi was awarded a $4,000 Pre-Dissertation Summer Research Award.

Keith Rosenthal was awarded a $4,000 African American/African Diaspora Archival Award.

Evan Rothman was awarded a $4,000 African American/African Diaspora Archival Award.

Chelsea Schields (PhD 2017) won the 2024 Bryce Wood Book Award and the 2024 Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award awarded by the Latin American Studies Association for her book, , Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (UC Press, 2023).

Maggie Schreiner was awarded a GC Summer Research Fellowship from the Public Scholarship Practice Space.

Andrew Shield (PhD 2015) is now co-chair of the Sexuality Track of the European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC), which will be held in 2025 at Leiden University, where he is Assistant Professor of Migration History.

Litian Swen (PhD 2020) (孙立天) just published Kangxi de hongpiao. Quanqiuhua zhong de Qingchao. 康熙的红票. 全球化中的清朝  . Emperor Kangxi’s Red Manifesto. The Qing Dynasty in Globalization. Beijing: Commercial Press商务印书馆, 2024.  This book is based on Swen’s English book ( Jesuit Mission and Submission: Qing Rulership and the Fate of Christianity in China, Brill 2021). 

Marybeth Tamborra was awarded a $25,000 IRADAC Dissertation Fellowship Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year for Black Internationalism and the Invasion of Ethiopia.

Bret Windhauser was awarded a $850 Digital Initiatives Summer Award.

Martin Woessner’s (PhD 2006) book, Terrence Malick and the Examined Life, was published in March with the University of Pennsylvania Press, in their Intellectual History of the Modern Age series.  He is an Associate Professor of History & Society at CCNY’s Center for Worker Education.

Helena Yoo Roth will be the inaugural Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Fellow at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon for 2024-2025.