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

 

Oscar Aponte (PhD 2025) will start a new job as assistant professor of Latin American history at Villanova University in the Fall. Also, his piece “Dismantling an Indigenous Transport System: Roadbuilding and State Formation in Colombian Amazonia” was published by The Journal of Transport History.

Soheil Asefi published the article “The Revolutionary Writer Who Still Screams: Sa’edi’s Legacy, Monarchist Desecration, and the Israeli Flag,” Lefteast, January 7, 2025. He was also a selected participant for The Gender of Activism seminar at Georgetown University.

Yuliya Barycheuskaya’s article “The Sexy Voice of Perestroika: The Intersection of Rock Music, Politics, and Sexuality in the Songs of Nautilus Pompilius,“ has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Betekintő as part of their thematic issue, Popular Music in the Soviet Bloc.

Danielle Bennett received a PS2 Summer Public Research Award and a Doctoral Student Research Grant to pursue archival work in Summer 2025. She has also been selected as a Teaching and Learning Center Fellow for the 2025/26 academic year. Danielle attended the National Council on Public History Annual Meeting in Montréal this spring as a member of the “Doing LGBTQ+ History in Hostile Times” working group. She would like to thank the History Department for supporting her conference participation through the Paul Naish fund.

Miranda Brethour will be starting a position at Penn State as Visiting Assistant Professor of History.

Megan Brown’s (PhD 2017) book, The Seventh Member State (Harvard, 2022), won the Laura Shannon Prize from the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame.

Kristopher Burrell (PhD 2011) has a chapter included in an edited collection that was published on April 15th, “Towards a Real United States Patriotism: Black Americans’ Centrality to the Pursuit of a Multiracial Democracy” in Black Citizens and American Democracy: Fighting for the Soul of a Nation, eds. Reginald K. Ellis, Jeffrey Littlejohn, and Peter B. Levy (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2025). He is also going to be the recipient of the “Hostos Community College Presidential Medal of Honor for Outstanding Faculty Member” at the Hostos commencement on May 27, 2025.

Maricarmen Canales-Moreno received the following awards and fellowships: Rockefeller Archive Center Fellowship. Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Graduate Center, CUNY; Kathy Chamberlain Research Award. Women Writing Women’s Lives (WWWL), Graduate Center, CUNY; Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, Research Grant, Ann Arbor, Michigan; CLACLS Summer Research Fellowship; Doctoral Student Research Grant; and the Koonja Mitchell Memorial Prize. The Center for the Study of Women and   Society, Graduate Center, CUNY

Hamilton Craig organized an accepted panel to the Pacific Coast AHA conference on 1980s activism; delivered a paper on the 1980s farm movement to the Midwestern Historical Association Conference; submitted an accepted proposal for an article on the far right in the 80s farm movement to the Berkley Journal of Right Wing Studies; and accepted an offer to write a book on the political history of the modern South for Sublation Press.

Laura M. Chmielewski (PhD 2006) recently joined Viking Cruises’ Resident Historian Program, engaged to lecture at sea on Early Modern European, Early American, Atlantic World and North American Pacific Coast History.  She is Professor of History and Museum Studies at State University of New York at Purchase.

Jessica Georges continues to be foine and fly as she advances her dissertation, teaches, and raises a human.

Jessica Hammerman (PhD 2013) was recently promoted to full professor and received a sabbatical to develop a new class. She has also produced two history-themed dance productions.

Timothy Scott Johnson (PhD 2016) has been elected Speaker of the Faculty Senate at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi.

Aleksandra Kobiljski (PhD 2010) has been promoted to full (Research) Professor or “Directrice de recherche” at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Philip Keisman (PhD 2023) will be starting a job teaching in the History Department of the Ethical Culture Fieldston High School this fall!

Adam Kocurek was the recipient of the Open Knowledge Fellowship through the Mina Rees Library and is designing a NYC history summer course using open and accessible sources.

Andrew Kotick (PhD 2022) has accepted the Leon Levy Fellowship at the Center for Jewish History. Additionally, his first monograph, titled The Humoring of Modern Life: Laughter and Politics in the Cartoon Press of Turn-of-the-Century Paris, is under contract for publication at The Ohio State University.

Marta Millar presented a paper entitled “Old Wounds and “Deadly Medicine”: Presenting Histories of Scientific Racism in Namibian Museums” at the annual African Studies Association conference in December 2024, as part of a series of panels on African histories of the Holocaust. 

Bradford Pelletier (PhD 2025) has accepted a two-year position at the University of Virginia as a Mellon Race, Place, and Equity Postdoctoral Research Associate in the History of Nursing and Healthcare at the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry at UVA School of Nursing.

Rachel Pitkin was awarded a 2025-2026 Larry J. Hackman Research Residency Award from the New York State Archives for a project titled “Indigenous Education and the Everett Commission in Early Twentieth-Century New York State.” Rachel was also selected to serve as a Mellon Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at The New York Historical for the 2025-2026 academic year, which she will begin in August of 2025. In early 2025, as part of a digital skills equivalency project for the GC History Department, Rachel demonstrated the skill of audio editing and production, and produced a podcast episode for The American Social History Project (ASHP) to highlight the project’s teaching LGBTQ+ histories initiatives. In January 2026, Rachel will moderate a panel for the American Historical Association’s annual meeting based on the project’s work titled “Aren’t You Afraid to Teach That? Building Solidarity for Teaching LGBTQ+ Topics in Secondary Schools.”

Luke Reynolds (PhD 2019) will deliver the National Army Museum/Royal United Services Institute’s annual Siborne Lecture in London on June 19, 2025; his chapter “’The management wisely refrains from guaranteeing the absolute authenticity of all the exhibits:’ Napoleon, Wellington, and the 1890 London Waterloo Panorama” was published in Napoleonic Objects and their Afterlives: Art, Culture and Heritage, 1821-present, Nicole Cochrane and Matilda Greig, eds. (London, Bloomsbury, 2025); and he was recently elected to the Board of Directors for the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era.

Chris Rominger (PhD 2018) has accepted a position as Director of Undergraduate Studies at Harvard University’s Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, where he will begin this summer.

Yanara Schmacks (PhD 2025) successfully defended her dissertation “Reproductive Nation: Cold War Fantasies and German Unification” in March and started a 4-year position as postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Modern History at the University of Bremen (Germany) in April.

Andrew DJ Shield (PhD 2015) has completed a 4-year, multinational EU project on migration history. He’d like to share this clip about his research on queer migration history, as well as his instructional MOOC with tips about oral histories with migrants and the NGOs that work with them.

Michael Spear’s (PhD 2005) article “James Haughton, Fight Back, the Struggle to End Discrimination in New York City’s Building Trades, and the Fight for Social Justice” appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of The Journal of African American History.

Litian Swen (PhD 2020) has an article entitled “Bypassing the Bureaucracy: Qing Rulership and the First Papal Legation to China” that was published in Later Imperial China, December 2024. His Chinese book, 康熙的红票：全球化中的清朝 （Emperor Kangxi’s Red Manifesto: Qing Dynasty in Globalization) sold more than 100k physical copies in the first year of its publication (since April 2024). It is the best-selling academic history book in the Chinese reading market in 2024.

Rachel B. Tiven was awarded two fellowships for her research on the Nineteenth Amendment: from the Library of Congress, the National Woman’s Party Fellowship, and from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Abigail Bowen Wright Fellowship.

Evan Turiano (PhD 2022) will be starting as Visiting Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Law at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.

Erik Wallenberg (PhD 2023) and Professor Jeanne Theoharis co-wrote an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune on King Day that covers Martin Luther King’s work in Chicago, “We Must Mark the Places that Define Chicago’s Black Freedom Struggle.” They were interviewed on Bill Ayers Podcast, Under the Tree, about the article and Jeanne’s book for which Wallenberg did a lot of research. Finally, Wallenberg has been co-hosting CounterPunch Radio since last June, a podcast on history, politics, and culture, so there are over 20 episodes he’s worked on, including interviews with Ralph Nader, Eman Abdulhadi, Ramzy Baroud, Jerry Markowitz and David Rosner, Jeanne Theoharis, Ashley Dawson, Janene Yazzie, Koheioi Saito and many others.

Helena Yoo-Roth will be the Barra Postdoctoral Fellow (2025-2027) at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bret Windhauser will be speaking at the Iraq Political Science Day Conference at the University of Kurdistan – Hewlêr in Erbil, Iraq.