Alumni of the Graduate Program in HistoryKathleen M. Barry
U.S. social and cultural history, 20th Century U.S., history of women and gender, labor and class. Currently finishing dissertation, "Femininity in Flight: Flight Attendants, Glamour, and Pink-Collar Activism in the Twentieth-Century United States." This study examines how U.S. airline flight attendants negotiated the rewards and exploitation of their popular glamorization as exemplars of femininity and pursued respectability as service and safety "professionals" through labor organizing and feminist activism from the late 1940s through the 1970s.
Elizabeth A. Campbell
Ph.D. candidate in Modern European History and French Studies. Currently writing dissertation: "Cultural Heritage and the French State during the Second World War, 1939-1945." This study analyzes French cultural policy within the framework of the Vichy regime’s National Revolution, focusing on policy toward "patrimoine artistique" -- public museums, historic monuments and archeological objects. It challenges the current historiography in two ways: first, by illustrating a continuity in policy from the authoritarian Vichy regime to the postwar Republics; second, by shedding light on the role of French authorities in the destruction and confiscation of selected artworks, including objects from Jewish collections.
Michael G. Carew
Working on dissertation "The Reciprocal Influences of the Major Magazine News Media, and the Formulation of Foreign and Defense Policy in the Roosevelt Administration 1939-1941." The research involves the analysis and codification of the presentation in the major news-magazines (592 issues of Life, Look, Newsweek and Time) of the then wartime events, and the response of the electorate as perceived by government policy makers. The hypothesis is that the audience of these magazines constituted a dominant portion of the electorate, and were therefore essential for the formulation of an assertive foreign policy to respond to the aggressive depredations in Europe and the Far East.
Jessica Cooperman
Joint Program in Modern European history and Hebrew and Judaic studies. Interests include: nationalism and Jewish nationalist movements, diaspora and the construction of diasporic identities and communities, masculinity, citizenship, and military service. Currently working on a dissertation proposal dealing with American and German Jewish participation in the First World War.
BJ van Damme
Medieval social history, gender theory. Researching dissertation, "Degrees of Difficulty: Performing Widowhood in Thirteenth-Century Siena." This study compares and contrasts the lives of men and women following the loss of a spouse in thirteenth-century Siena.
Noah L. Gelfand
Seventeenth Century Dutch Atlantic history, Colonial American history, New York history, United States history to 1865, The Social and Cultural implications of the Cold War in North American Ice Hockey. Dissertation: "Every one to have his own belief": Religious Diversity in Seventeenth Century Dutch Atlantic Colonization". This study explores the issue of religious diversity in the Dutch Atlantic World, examining the development of religious toleration in the Dutch colonies, while also emphasizing trade patterns and commercial expansions which occurred through religious and kin networks in the Dutch Atlantic.
Joshua M. Humphreys
Modern European social and intellectual history and European politics, contemporary France, relations between eastern and western Europe, political ideologies and democratic political culture, industrial society and social reform, communism and the European left, history and memory, the cold war, the European Union, international conflict and Transatlantic relations. Working on a doctoral thesis entitled "Industry, Democracy and the Reformist Moment in France, 1914-1939", a social and intellectual history of the rise and fall of industrial and governmental reform in France after the unprecedented experience of total, industrial warfare during World War One.
Daniel H. Inouye
Japanese American Community history; Jazz and the Cold War; Documentary film; public history; 20th century American social and political activism, American legal history.
Peter Kulsrud
Early Modern European, Cultural and Intellectual History, Enlightenment and French Revolution with a minor in nineteenth century France, I am currently in the process of preparing to defend my proposal: "Theatricality and Sentiment : An Investigation into the Transformations of the Theater and Public Life in Revolutionary France (1760-1820)" which investigates the relationship of changes in the theater to changes in public life, the division between public and private spheres, the constitution of gender roles and the decline of the cult of sensibility in late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century France. This study aims to examine the Parisian stage with regard to changes in aesthetic values, the uses of spectacle, the content of plays, acting styles costumes and scenery and the relationship between theater managers, critics, censors and the state.
Andrew H. Lee
European History. Currently working on issues of gender and the family and syndicalist culture in the Spanish labor movement during the 1920s and 1930s.
Natasha Lightfoot
Area of Focus: Investigating the history of gender relations in the late colonial and post-colonial British Caribbean, specifically concentrating on how the nation-building process, which involved watershed labor and independence struggles of the late 1950s-mid 1970s, omitted women from its imagined notions of citizenship. I am interested in historicizing the ways that women in this region made space for themselves to be represented in the polity/economy despite the fact that citizenship and masculinity were conflated at the time (and still are today in some ways). I am also interested in tracing the redefinition of citizenship during the massive migration of Caribbean nationals to the UK and US at the midcentury, and how this also opened up space for women to assert themselves as nationals through their contact with the wider world.
Micki McElya
Late-nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. cultural and political history; postbellum American South; history of sexuality; African-American history; history of women and gender; feminist theory; queer theory. Dissertation in progress: "Monumental Citizenship: Reading the Mammy Commemoration Controversy of the Early Twentieth Century."
Neil M. Maher
U.S. environmental and social history. Recently finished dissertation, "Planting More Than Trees: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement, 1929-1942." This study uses an examination of landscape and landscape change during the New Deal period to argue that the Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps helped transform the Progressive Era conservation movement into Post-World War II environmentalism.
Stephen Mihm
American Cultural and Economic History. Currently finishing dissertation, "Making Money: Counterfeiters and Counterfeiting in Antebellum America." This study documents the forces behind the epidemic of counterfeiting that plagued the antebellum economy and the ways it was an outgrowth of other, legal economic practices.
Thomas Ort
Modern European history, Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia), intellectual and cultural history, social history, social theory, modernism. Currently writing dissertation "Men Without Qualities: The Capek Generation, 1908-1938," a study of a generation of modernist artists and writers that came together in the pre-WWI period around the Czech writer Karel Capek. In spite of their philosophical relativism and attraction to irrationalism, in the postwar period they committed themselves to reason and experience as the only criteria of responsible action in the world. They defended the new Czechoslovak state and looked to create a reform socialist center opposed to both fascism and communism.
Kiril Petkov
Late medieval and early modern Western European, social and cultural history, historical anthropology, and ritual studies. Currently completing dissertation on "The Kiss of Peace: Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West." The study explores ritual peacemaking as a legal, emotional, and identity-building phenomenon.
Orlando Plaza
African Diaspora and Latin America, with a focus on Puerto Rican Diaspora not just within the U.S. context, but within the Latin American and Caribbean context as well. Research interests include issues of race and class in the Puerto Rican community, Puerto Rican nationalism and the Puerto Rican social movements in the U.S. Outside of Graduate School I was and am working with the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center in the Lower East Side, a Puerto Rican- Latino multi-ethnic and multi-arts performance and visual arts center.
Dan Prosterman
U.S. History. Research and teaching interests in the Cold War, Japan since the Meiji Restoration, U.S.-East Asian Relations, and U.S. Social and Foreign Policy. In my forthcoming dissertation, "Under the Cloak of Patriotism: The Proportional Representation Campaigns in New York City, 1936-1947," I argue that local activists manipulated community perceptions of national security during the Great Depression and Second World War to gain power in city government. As part of my concentration in Public History, I presented the following website concerning PR at the Museum of the City of New York: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/history/public_history/PR.
Brian J. Purnell
20th Century American and African American History, mixed race identity in America and the American Black Freedom Movement in the urban North. I am interested in writing a dissertation on the transformations of local organizations engaged in the Black Freedom Movement during the 1960s and 1970s.
Marci Reaven
Currently completing Ph.D. coursework in American History, with a focus on 20th-century urban history. I am the Associate Director of City Lore, a non-profit cultural organization that produces programs and publications on New York City history and culture. A current project is a citywide partnership with the Municipal Art Society called Place Matters, a public history and policy initiative that focuses on the interplay between place, history, and community life. Over many years of professional practice in documentary film and public history, my previous projects have included film and public television production, creation of exhibitions and educational curricula, and development of community-wide discussion programs.
Jane Rothstein
Joint program in U.S. history and Hebrew and Judaic Studies. American Jewish history; history of women and gender; history of sexuality; late 19th-20th century American social and cultural history; history of religion. Currently at work on my dissertation, "Pure Women and Sacred Baths: Family Purity, Sexuality, and American Jews in the Early Twentieth Century."
Wendy Schor-Haim
Medieval European history, early-to-mid medieval period; medieval church; Christian-Jewish relations in medieval Europe, with a special interest in the blood libel legend (an anti-Jewish myth where Jews supposedly kidnapped and crucified a Christian boy each year around Easter) and its symbolism.
Katherine Allen Smith
Medieval European History; Church History; Monasticism. I am currently beginning work on my dissertation, which which focus on the Christian cult of the Archangel Michael in France, Italy, and England in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries.
Larry Weimer
Colonial and Early National U.S. history (MA), Archival Management. Full-time career in management at a global financial institution. Studying in preparation for a second career as an archivist.
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