Department of History Faculty
Email: Thomas.Heinrich@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-4320
Location: NVC 5-253
Thomas Heinrich is chair of the Department of History and specializes in business and naval history. His book publications include Warship Builders: An Industrial History of U.S. Naval Shipbuilding, 1922-1945 (Annapolis, MD, 2020) and A Concise American History (Oxford, UK, 2020), co-written with David Brown, Simon Middleton, and Vivien Miller. Born and raised in Germany, Heinrich received his BA equivalent in European social history from the University of Bielefeld, his MA in US social history from SUNY Buffalo, and his PhD in US business and labor history from the University of Pennsylvania. His teaching and research interests are industrial and technology history, World War II, naval history, and the cold war.
Courses:
HIS 1005: Modern American History
HIS 3390: Naval Battles and Society: A Global History
HIS 3410: History of American Business Enterprise
HIS 3430: World War II: A Global History
HIS 3445: History of the Cold War
Books:
Thomas Heinrich, Warship Builders: An Industrial History of U.S. Naval Shipbuilding, 1922-1945 (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, forthcoming Nov. 2020)
David Brown, Thomas Heinrich, Simon Middleton, and Vivien Miller, A Concise American History (Oxford, UK, 2020)
Thomas Heinrich and Bob Batchelor, Kotex, Kleenex, Huggies: Kimberly-Clark and the Consumer Revolution in American Business (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2005)
Thomas Heinrich, Ships for the Seven Seas: Philadelphia Shipbuilding in the Age of Industrial Capitalism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
Select Articles:
Heinrich “’Fighting Ships, Knowledge, and Experience:’ Industrial Mobilization in American Naval Shipbuilding, 1940–1945,” Business History Review 88 (2014): 273-301.
Heinrich “Cold War Armory: Military Contracting and Industrial Development in Silicon Valley,” Enterprise and Society 3 (2002): 247-84.
Heinrich, “Product Diversification in the U.S. Pulp and Paper Industry: The Case of International Paper,” Business History Review 75 (2001): 467-505.
Email: anna.boozer@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 5-257
Phone: 646-312-4326
Anna Lucille Boozer is a professor in the Department of History at Baruch College and in the Anthropology Program at the Graduate Center. She specializes in the archaeology and ancient history of the Roman Mediterranean world, with a particular interest in empires, houses, social life, and connectivity in Roman Egypt and Meroitic Sudan. She welcomes applicants for graduate study in these areas as well as other topics relating to social archaeology and history.
Anna’s book publications include At Home in Roman Egypt: A Social Archaeology (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021), A Late Romano-Egyptian House in the Dakhla Oasis: Amheida House B2 (ISAW & NYU Press, 2015), and Archaeologies of Empire: Local Participants and Imperial Trajectories (SAR Press, 2020), which was co-edited with Bleda Düring and Bradley Parker. Anna is an Area Editor for the Encyclopedia of Ancient History for the volumes on Social History and Northeast Africa and serves on the editorial board for Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies. She directs two research projects: The CUNY Excavations at Amheida in Egypt and MAP: The Meroë Archival Project in Sudan.
Anna received her BA from St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD) and her MA and PhD from Columbia University. Before coming to Baruch College, Anna held a post-doc at the TOPOI Excellence Cluster in Berlin, Germany followed by a faculty position in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Reading, United Kingdom.
Podcasts and Videos:
Watch WSAS Dean Aldemaro Romero interview Anna about her work.
Directed Projects:
CUNY Excavations at Amheida (Egypt) (www.Amheida.org)
MAP: The Meroe Archival Project (Sudan) (www.Meroecity.org)
Undergraduate Courses:
HIS 1001: History Before 1500 CE
HIS 3012: Ancient World – Rome
HIS 3860: The History and Archaeology of Ancient Egypt
HIS 3890: Encounters in Global Ancient Empires
Books:
Boozer, A. L. (forthcoming 2021) At Home in Roman Egypt: A Social Archaeology. Cambridge University Press: New York and Cambridge.
Boozer, A. L., Düring, B. S., & Parker, B. J. (Eds.). (2020) Archaeologies of Empire: Local Participants and Imperial Trajectories. SAR & UNM Press: Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Boozer, A. L. (2015) A Late Romano-Egyptian House in the Dakhla Oasis: Amheida House B2. ISAW & New York University Press: New York.
Select Recent Articles:
2020 – “The Urbanization of Egypt’s Western Desert under Roman Rule” in Trans-Saharans: Urbanization and State Formation. D. J. Mattingly and M. Sterry (ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and the Society for Libyan Studies.
2019 – “Cultural Identity. Housing and Burial Practices” in Blackwell Companion to
Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt. K. Vandorpe (ed). Malden: Blackwell:
361-380.
2019 – “Looking for Singles in the Archaeological Record of Roman Egypt”
in Singles and the Single Life in the Roman and Later Roman World. S. R.
Huebner and C. Laes (ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 57-84.
2018 – “The Archaeology of Imperial Borderlands: A View from Roman Egypt and Sudan” in The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes: A Comparative Study of the Archaeology of Empires in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean World. B.S. Düring and T.D. Stek (ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 206-239.
2017 – “A Historiography of Archaeological Research at Meroë, Sudan” in Ancient West
& East: 16: 209-248.
2015 – “The Social Impact of Trade and Migration: The Western Desert in
Pharaonic and Post-Pharaonic Egypt.” Oxford Handbooks Online in Archaeology. C. Riggs (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2015 – “The Tyranny of Typologies: Evidentiary Reasoning in Romano-Egyptian Archaeology” in Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice. R. Chapman and A. Wylie (ed). Malden: Routledge: 92-109.
Email: Charlotte.Brooks@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 5-251
Phone: 646-312-4340
Originally from California, Charlotte Brooks earned her B.A. in Chinese history from Yale University and worked in China and Hong Kong after college. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in U.S. history from Northwestern University and taught at the University at Albany-SUNY, before coming to Baruch College. A scholar of race, immigration, and urban history, she has published widely on Asian American history, especially Chinese American history.
Her newest book is American Exodus: Second Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949 (University of California Press, 2019). Between twenty-five and fifty percent of all native-born Chinese American citizens in the early twentieth century left the United States for China under the assumption that they would never permanently return to the land of their birth. American Exodus explores this little-known aspect of modern Chinese and American history through the lives of the thousands of Chinese Americans who settled in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and the Pearl River Delta. The project received a 2017 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers.
Prof. Brooks is also the author of two other books. Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is a comparative study of Chinese American political activism in New York and San Francisco between World War Two and the late 1960s. Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (University of Chicago Press, 2009), uses Asian Americans’ experiences with housing discrimination to explore the startlingly rapid racial transformation of mid-century urban California. It received an honorable mention for the Organization of American Historians’ 2010 Frederick Jackson Turner Award. In addition, Prof. Brooks’ articles have appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of American History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and the Journal of Urban History, and her work has also been reprinted in The Best American History Essays.
Prof. Brooks is currently working on two new projects. The first is An American Family: The Moys of New York and Shanghai, a literary nonfiction account of six Chinese American siblings and their spouses during the exclusion era. The second, Selling America in China, is a scholarly monograph that focuses on the lives and activities of the thousands of American entrepreneurs, diplomats, and adventurers who traveled to China in the late Qing and republican years; although few succeeded in accumulating great wealth, many stayed on for decades, founding small businesses, peddling their “American expertise,” and occasionally reinventing themselves on the China coast as they promoted not just US products, styles, and services, but what they saw as American values.
Email: profobi@gmail.com
Phone: 646-312-4333
Location: NVC 5-247
Professor Desch-Obi received his doctorate in African history from UCLA.
He specializes in the cultural history of pre-colonial Africa and the African Diaspora. His research interests include martial arts and physical culture, religion, sport, ethnography, oral history, and military history.
He is the author of Fighting For Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World (University of South Carolina Press, 2008). His current research focuses on the social history of the machete and machete fighting in Africa and the African Diaspora, and on a trans-national history of black boxing styles.
Email: vincent.digirolamo@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-4334
Website: vincentdigirolamo.com
Location: NVC 5-252
Vincent DiGirolamo is an associate professor of history at Baruch College, where he specializes in 19th and 20th century U.S. history, with a focus on workers, children, immigrants, city life, and print culture.
He is the author of Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the Turner, Taft, Mott, Palmegiano, and DeSantis prizes in history. He is also the recipient of the 2020 Baruch College Presidential Excellence Award for Scholarship.
He has published in the scholarly journals Labor History, Radical History Review, and the Journal of Social History, as well as in popular periodicals, including American Heritage, Time magazine, and several anthologies. DiGirolamo has received research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Woodrow Wilson Society, American Antiquarian Society, and Eugene M. Lang Foundation, among others.
A practitioner of public history, DiGirolamo has produced library exhibits, online teaching modules, and the award-winning PBS documentary Monterey’s Boat People (1984). He currently serves as an adviser to the American Masters series documentary Becoming Helen Keller, the CUNY-based American Social History Project, and as Baruch chapter chair of the Professional Staff Congress, the union representing CUNY faculty and staff.
Originally from Monterey, California, DiGirolamo received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism, MA in Comparative Social History from UC Santa Cruz, and PhD in history from Princeton University. Before coming to Baruch in 2003 he taught writing, history, and Ethnic Studies at Santa Cruz, George Mason, Colgate, Stony Brook, and Princeton universities, and the Graduate Institute of Journalism of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.
Courses:
HIS 1000: Themes in American History
HIS 3044: The Civil War and Reconstruction
HIS 3050: The Emergency of Modern America
HIS 3550: The Immigrant in History
HIS 3551: The People of New York
HIS 3552: The Great Depression
Books:
Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Winner of the
• 2020 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians;
• 2020 Philip Taft Book Prize from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Labor and Working-Class History Association;
• 2020 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism from the American Historical Association;
• 2019 Frank Luther Mott Research Award from the Kappa Tau Alpha national honor society for best book on Journalism and Mass Communication; and
• 2021 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize from the Society for the History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Select Articles:
DiGirolamo, “The Voice of Young America,” American Heritage, Winter 2021, 4.
DiGirolamo, “21 Lessons from America’s Worst Moments—Nov. 29, 1864: The Sand Creek Massacre,” Time magazine, June 25, 2020.
DiGirolamo, “’Tramps in the Making’: The Troubling Itinerancy of America’s News Peddlers,” in A. L. Beier & P. Ocobock, eds., Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), pp. 209–49.
DiGirolamo, “In Franklin’s Footsteps: News Carriers and Post Boys in the Revolution and Early Republic” and “’Though the Means Were Scanty’: Excerpts from Joseph T. Buckingham’s Personal Memoirs and Recollections of Editorial Life (1852).” in J. Marten, ed., Children and Youth in a New Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008), pp. 48–66; 229–41.
DiGirolamo, “New York in an Age of Amusement,” in J. Tottis (Ed.), Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure, 1895–1925 (Detroit Institute of the Arts and Merrell Publishers, 2007), pp. 53–73.
DiGirolamo, “Such, Such were the B’ hoys…” Radical History Review (90), 2004, pp. 123–141.
DiGirolamo, “Newsboy Funerals: Tales of Sorrow and Solidarity in Urban America,” Journal of Social History, 36(1) 2002, pp. 5–30.
DiGirolamo, “The Negro Newsboy: Black Child in a White Myth,” Columbia Journal of American Studies (4), 2000, pp. 63–92.
Email: Johanna.Fernandez@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-4328
Location: NVC 5-249
Johanna Fernández is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History (UNC Press, February 2020), a history of the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party. She teaches 20th Century US history and the history of social movements.
Dr. Fernández’s recent research and litigation has unearthed an arsenal of primary documents now available to scholars and members of the public. Her Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) lawsuit against the NYPD, led to the recovery of the “lost” Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country, namely over one million surveillance files of New Yorkers compiled by the NYPD between 1954-1972, including those of Malcolm X. She is the editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (City Lights, 2015). With Mumia Abu-Jamal she co-edited a special issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy, titled The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor (Routledge, 2014).
Among others, her awards include the Fulbright Scholars grant to the Middle East and North Africa, which took her to Jordan, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship of the Scholars-in-Residence program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.
Professor Fernández is the writer and producer of the film, Justice on Trial: the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (BigNoise Films, 2010). She directed and co-curated ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York an exhibition in three NYC museums cited by the New York Times as one of the year’s Top 10, Best In Art. Her mainstream writings have been published internationally, from Al Jazeera to the Huffington Post. She has appeared in a diverse range of print, radio, online and televised media including NPR, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Democracy Now!.
Fernández is the recipient of a B.A. in Literature and American Civilization from Brown University and a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Columbia University.
Email: zoe.griffith@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 5-257
Phone: 646-312-4329
Zoe Griffith is an Assistant Professor of History specializing in the Middle East and Islamic world. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and received her BA in History and Middle Eastern and North African Studies from UCLA. Professor Griffith’s current research revisits the arrival of capitalism in the Middle East through the history of Egypt’s pre-colonial port cities at the turn of the 19th century. Her work has been inspired and informed by the years she was lucky to spend living in the Middle East, especially Egypt and Turkey, since 2004. In particular, she in interested in how ordinary men and women experienced grand-scale economic and political change, and how their responses have shaped local, regional, and global history. Her broader research and teaching interests include the history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East, political economy, commodity history, material culture and urban history, and gender and family history.
Professor Griffith completed her Ph.D. at Brown University in 2017. In addition to her written work, she hosts interviews on the popular Ottoman History Podcast.
Email: elizabeth.heath@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 5-266
Phone: 646-312-4316
Website: http://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/elizabethheath/
Elizabeth Heath is an Associate Professor of History. She earned her B.A. from New College of Florida and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows. An historian of Modern France and the French Empire, her research focuses on colonialism, capitalism, and everyday life in France and the French empire.
Her first book, Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France: Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870-1910, was published by Cambridge University Press in October 2014 and received the Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize for the best book on the French colonial experience from 1815 to the present by the French Colonial Historical Society in May 2015. This work examines how two different and unequal forms of racialized citizenship emerged from the Third Republic’s efforts to manage the local effects of global economic crisis at the turn of the twentieth century. The book traces the transformation of French republican citizenship through a comparative social history of two sets of citizens living in different regions of the French Empire: the rural, wine-growing inhabitants of the southern metropolitan department of the Aude and the colonial, sugar-producing population of the Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe. Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France ultimately argues that these two divergent forms of citizenship were fundamentally connected, both reflecting the ways that the Third Republic used empire to balance the competing logics of republicanism and capitalism, and in turn came to be reconstituted as a racial state.
Her current project, “Everyday Colonialism, Everyday Capitalism: Commodities of Empire and the Making of Modern French Self, 1750-1950” examines the broad history of the French Empire through the “life stories” of key colonial commodities like sugar, vanilla, chocolate, wine, and rubber which flowed into France from the seventeenth century onwards. The project will show how colonial commodities and colonial commerce shaped the way metropolitan men and women understood what it meant to be French and modern. Use of colonial goods restructured French daily life, redefined family and class relations, reshaped conceptions of gender and race, and generated new economic activities and cultural expressions. Seeing these consumption habits as essential to the formation of modern French identity and economic life, this project will offer novel answers to two recurring questions in the historiography of the French Empire: What was the economic importance of empire in the emergence of modern France? To what extent did the French embrace the empire as part of their conception of French identity and culture?
She is additionally working on two digital humanities projects. The first, “Visualizing Colonial France in the Eighteenth Century” draws upon detailed research in the commercial and notarial records, business correspondence, and family papers housed in archives of the economic centers of eighteenth-century France in order to map points of colonial contact. In mapping the many points at which French men and women, rich and poor, encountered colonial commodities and connections, this project will illuminate the way that empire and imperial networks permeated everyday French lives. In helping to visualize these connections, the project shifts the focus away from the quantitative to the qualitative, thereby opening up new ways for historians to think about the importance of empire to the political and economic transformations leading to the French Revolution.
The second, which is being done in collaboration with Julia Landweber (Montclair State University) and a team of digital humanities experts at Baruch College, is entitled “Visualizing the Data of the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean.” When complete, the project will offer scholars open access to eighteenth century census records of the French Caribbean in digital formats that can be used alone or with georeferenced historical maps and GIS software. Equally important, the project will provide scholarly tools that will help investigators better understand the ways these sources blurred the imaginary and the objective quantitatively and visually, but with real-life implications for those who lived and toiled in the colonies. Together these digital formats and analytical resources will allow scholars at all levels to assess, visualize, and critically analyze the demographic and economic changes that occurred in the eighteenth century French Caribbean and generate new understandings of this revolutionary era and region. More information about this project can be found at:
Visualizing the Data of the Eighteenth Century French Caribbean
Professor Heath teaches a variety of classes on modern Europe, modern France and the French Empire, and historical methods, including classes on the Haitian Revolution, Nineteenth Century Europe, Hands on History, and the history of everyday life. She also regularly teaches classes on food history and is developing a digital history class.
Recent Publications
Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France: Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870-1910. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
“Toys” in Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France, edited by Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, Lydie Moudileno (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 394-402.
“‘The Black Race’s Dreyfus Affair’: Hégésippe Jean Légitimus and the Dissimilation of Colonial Guadeloupe.” French Historical Studies 42,3 (April 2019): 261-294.
“Sugarcoated Slavery: Colonial Commodities and the Education of the Senses in Early Modern France.” Critical Historical Studies. 5,2 (Fall 2018): 169-207.
“Shoot Out in the O.K. Corral: Revisiting the Méline Tariff in an Age of Global Trade War,” Europe Now, Special Feature on Food, Food Systems, and Agriculture (September 2018).
“The French Empire and the History of Economic Life. Introduction: Dossier on Wine and Empire,” co-authored with Owen White. French Politics, Culture, and Society. 35,2 (Jun. 2017): 76-88.Translated and reprinted as “L’empire français: Histoire de la vie économique,” Revue Juridique Politique et Économique de Nouvelle-Calédonie, 30 (2018/1): 210-216.
“The Color of French Wine: Southern Wine Producers Respond to Competition from the Algerian Wine Industry in the Early Third Republic.” French Politics, Culture, and Society 35,2 (Jun. 2017): 89-110.
“Citizens of the Empire? Indentured Labor, Global Capitalism, and the Limits of French Republicanism in Colonial Guadeloupe.” Building the Atlantic Empires: Slavery, the State, and the Rise of Global Capitalism, 1500-1945, eds., John Donoghue and Evelyn Jennings (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2015).
“Albums of Empires Past: Photography, Collective Memory, and the British Raj.” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 27/2015: 74-103.
“Apprendre l’Empire par le jeu. Enfants et familles françaises, début vingtième siècle,” (trans. Sylvie Kandé). CLIO. Femmes, Genre, Histoire. Objets et fabrication du genre. 40/2014: 69-87. Released in English as “Child’s Play? Colonial Commodities, Ephemera, and the Construction of the Greater French Family.” CLIO. Femmes, Genre, Histoire. Making Gender with Objects. 40/2014: 69-87.
“Creating Rural Citizens in Guadeloupe in the Early Third Republic,” Slavery & Abolition, 32, 2 (June 2011): 289-307.
Email: alexander.manevitz@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 5-256
Phone: 646-312-4318
Alexander Manevitz is an historian, educator, and public scholar on race, freedom, and urbanism in the nineteenth-century United States and New York City. He specializes in African American history, the history of early American capitalism, and how a diverse array of Americans shaped the growth of the cities we live in today.
His current research project and book manuscript, The Rise and Fall of Seneca Village: Remaking Race and Space in Nineteenth-Century New York City, is under contract with Cornell University Press. At the intersection of African American history, the history of urban development, and questions of historical memory, Professor Manevitz investigates Seneca Village, the largest African American landowning community in New York City until it was destroyed to build Central Park in the late antebellum period. Piecing together forgotten traces of the neighborhood and highlighting the voices of marginalized New Yorkers, he analyzes the creation, destruction, and dispersal of a free Black community that grappled with racial discrimination, internal class tensions, and the inequalities of a transforming urban property regime to establish an experimental model of Black freedom and citizenship.
Professor Manevitz teaches courses in American history, African American history, as well as the histories of capitalism and New York City. With experience in both higher education and secondary schools, he seeks to expand students’ views of the world and enable them to analyze the past from multiple perspectives, using interdisciplinary methods to highlight diverse voices and experiences. By thinking critically about the past’s implications for the world around them today, students learn that history is an ongoing process in which they have the power to intervene.
Professor Manevitz received his Ph.D. in U.S. History from New York University in 2016. Prior to joining the faculty and students of Baruch, he has been a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Trinity College (Hartford), a Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and the New School University, and a history teacher at an independent secondary school. He has collaborated with New York City cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New-York Historical Society, and you can find his work in publications from the Journal of Urban History to the Washington Post.
Email: martina.nguyen@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 4-245
Phone: 646-312-4335
Martina T. Nguyen is an historian of modern Southeast Asia. Her research focuses on colonialism, intellectual life and social and political reform in twentieth century Vietnam. Her book On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) examines the historical landscape of 1930s French-occupied Vietnam, arguably the country’s most dynamic intellectual and cultural period, as a lens for examining the relationship between cultures of the metropole and colonized societies. She teaches a variety of classes on modern Asia, world history and colonialism, including classes on the Vietnam War, empire and decolonization, women and gender, and fashion.
Professor Nguyen received her Ph.D. in 2012 from the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a graduate of Northwestern University, where she earned a B.A. in history and political science.
Email: Katherine.Pence@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 5-246
Phone: 646-312-4332
Katherine Pence began teaching in the History Department at Baruch College in the Fall of 2002.
Originally from Oakland, California, she got a B.A. in history from Pomona College in Claremont, California. She then received her Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of Michigan where she studied German gender history with advisors Geoff Eley and Kathleen Canning. Her courses reflect her areas of specialty in German and European history, history of the Cold War, gender history, the history of consumption, and other themes in cultural history.
Professor Pence has written widely on the history of consumer culture in both East and West Germany. Her current research and writing focuses on cultural aspects of East and West German trade relations with decolonizing countries in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.
Pence became Chair of the History Department in January 2011. She is also the director and co-founder of a Women’s Studies program and minor at the college. Pence also collaborated with students in establishing a History Club and was the faculty mentor for the Club for many years.
Before arriving at Baruch College, Pence taught for three years at Adrian College, a small liberal arts school in Michigan. She spent one year as a James Bryant Conant post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies. Her research has been funded by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Friedrich Ebert Research Foundation, PSC-CUNY grants, a Eugene Lang Fellowship, and a Whiting Fellowship awarded for outstanding teaching. She lives in Brooklyn.
Watch WSAS Dean Aldemaro Romero’s recent interview of Prof. Pence.
Email: Mark.Rice@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-4344
Location: NVC 5-246
Mark Rice is an Associate Professor of history, specializing in Latin America. His research focuses on the history of the Andean region and modern Peru in particular. He researches and writes about the history of tourism, travel, and infrastructure in the Andes. Professor Rice also studies and teaches the history of material culture, economic history, and social history.
Professor Rice’s first book, Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru, examines the transformation of Machu Picchu into a global tourist attraction. His research, by emphasizing the important role travel and tourism has played in elevating Machu Picchu into a global symbol of Peru, has cast new light on the role that tourist-centered development plays in affecting regional and national politics in the developing world.
Mark Rice has written extensively about the history of tourism in academic journals, collaborative projects, and the media. He has been invited to present his research at academic events and conferences in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe.
Professor Rice’s next book project, funded by a Fulbright Fellowship, investigates the social and political consequences of road construction and infrastructure development in twentieth-century Peru.
At Baruch, Mark Rice’s teaching interests include a broad range of courses that includes introductory courses on global history and the history of Latin America as well as classes focused on US-Latin American relations, economic history, and the history of tourism.
Mark Rice completed his Ph.D. at Stony Brook University and earned his BA in history from Cornell University. He lives in Queens, New York and his hobbies include running (slowly), trainspotting, watching baseball, and eating big plates of Peruvian ají de gallina and spicy Hunan rice noodles.
For more information on Mark Rice’s ongoing research and teaching, please visit his webpage.
SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTISE
Modern Latin America; the Andean Region; Peru; Tourism and Travel; U.S.-Latin American Relations; History of Development; Business History; History of Infrastructure
DEGREES
Ph.D., History, Stony Brook University (2014)
B.A., History, Cornell University (2007)
AFFILIATIONS
American Historical Association
Conference on Latin American History
Latin American Studies Association
NOTABLE PUBLICATIONS
Books
Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
Articles
“Desastres y destinos: la política del turismo y preservación en el Cusco después del terremoto de 1950.” Riqch’ariy 1, no. 1 (2020), pp. 97-116.
“Viajes anteriores y destinos futuros en el estudio del turismo.” Apuntes: Revista de Ciencias Sociales 46, no. 85 (July 2019), pp. 5-22.
“Good Neighbors and Lost Cities: Tourism, the Good Neighbor Policy, and the Transformation of Machu Picchu.” Radical History Review, no. 129 (October 2017): 51-73.
“Transnational Business and U.S. Diplomacy in Late Nineteenth-Century South America: W. R. Grace & Co. and the Chilean Crises of 1891,” Journal of Latin American Studies 44, number 4, (November 2012), pp. 765-792.
Book Chapters
“‘To Know Peru is to Admire It’: National Tourism Promotion and Populism in Peru, 1930-1948,” The Business of Leisure: Tourism History in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Andrew Grant Wood, pp.147-69. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021.
“Generals, Hotels, and Hippies: Velasco Era Tourism Development and Conflict in Cusco.” In The Peculiar Revolution: Rethinking the Peruvian Experiment under Military Rule, edited by Paulo Drinot and Carlos Aguirre, 295-318. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.
Email: andrew.sloin@baruch.cuny.edu
Location: NVC 5-247
Phone: 646-312-4317
Andrew Sloin is an associate professor of History, specializing in Russian, East European, Soviet, and Jewish history. His research focuses on the relationship between economy, politics, and culture in the Soviet Union during the interwar period. Professor Sloin is broadly interested in questions of nations and empire, the history of socialism and the Left, the history of capitalism, social theory, and Yiddish culture. His first book, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indiana University Press, 2017), focuses on the economic and political transformation of Belorussian Jewry in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He is currently working on two new research projects. The first, a book-length project tentatively entitled Troubled Time: Socialism and the Yiddish Historical Imagination, 1871-1948, examines the relationship between the writing of popular history in the transnational Yiddish public sphere and the development of Jewish socialism. The second project examines the relationship between economy, antifascist campaigns, and Stalinist politics during the period of the Great Terror. He is also a member of the board of editors for the journal Critical Historical Studies. Professor Sloin received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a joint-Ph.D. in History and Jewish Studies from the University of Chicago.
Watch WSAS Dean Aldemaro Romero’s recent interview of Prof. Sloin.
Email: randolph.trumbach@baruch.cuny.edu
Phone: 646-312-4314
Office: NVC 5-266
Randolph Trumbach (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins), was born in Belize, and raised in New Orleans. He studies the origins in the 18th century of the modern western culture of the last three hundred years, concentrating on the family, sexuality, and religion. He has published The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (1978) and Sex and the Gender Revolution Vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (1998). Volume 2, The Origins of Modern Homosexuality, will summarize and revise his 25 papers on the subject. He teaches courses on western civilization (the Greeks, the Jews, and Jesus) on the history of homosexuality, on 18th-century Europe, and on the life of Jesus. He is interested in the ways “private life” changes society as opposed to economic or political factors.
Recent Publications
“A first-rate, thorough study of the impact of the ‘gender revolution’ on the sexual lives and practices of eighteenth-century Londoners. This, the first volume of Trumbach’s long-awaited study is a highly original, important, and provocative work. It is sure to be both essential and controversial reading for anyone interested in the history of gender.” — Kathleen Wilson, author of The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785.
Former Faculty and Faculty Emeriti
Email: Ervand.Abrahamian@baruch.cuny.edu
Ervand Abahamian (B.A, Oxford University. Ph.D., Columbia University) is a historian of the Middle East specializing in modern Iran. He taught at the universities of Oxford, Columbia, New York, and Princeton, in addition to the Graduate Center in the City University of New York and for over forty years at Baruch College.
His book publications include: Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton University Press); The Iranian Mujahedin (Yale University Press); Khomeinism (University of California Press); Tortured Confessions (University of California Press); A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press); and The Coup: 1953, The CIA, and the Roots of Modern US-Iran Relations (New Press). His books have also been published in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Polish, and Italian. He is now working on a book on the 1979 revolution in Iran.
In 2011 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Carol Berkin
Presidential Professor Emeritus, American Colonial and Revolutionary History; Women's History
Email: Carol.Berkin@baruch.cuny.edu
Carol Berkin received her B.A. from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University where she won the Bancroft Dissertation Award. She was Presidential Professor of History at Baruch College and a member of the history faculty of the Graduate Center of CUNY. Before her retirement, she taught early American and women’s history.
Her publications include: Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist (1974); First Generations: Women of Colonial America (1996); A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution (2001), Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence (2004), and Civil War Wives: The Life and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant (2009).
Professor Berkin has worked as a consultant on several PBS and History Channel documentaries, including, The “Scottsboro Boys,” which was nominated for an Academy Award as the best documentary of 2000. She has also appeared as a commentator on screen in the PBS series by Ric Burns, “New York,” the Middlemarch series “Benjamin Franklin” and “Alexander Hamilton” on PBS, and the MPH series, “The Founding Fathers.” She serves on the Board of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Board of the National Council for History Education.
Jane Clement Bond (Ph.D., University College, London University) is a historian of modern France, with special expertise in the 19th and 20th centuries and also with an interest in modern European social and intellectual history. Her area of research is the French working class during World War I.
Before her retirement, she taught courses in world history, 19th and 20th-century European history, modern European women’s history, World War I, the Third French Republic, and 17th-century French history.
Stanley Buder
Professor Emeritus, American urban history; history of housing and planning; American business
Email: Sbuder13@aol.com
Phone: (646) 312-4310
Stanley Buder is a native New Yorker with a B.A. from City College/CUNY, and an M.A. and Ph.D. (1966), from the University of Chicago. The former chair of the History Department at Baruch, he taught at Tufts, Cambridge University, the University of Illinois in Chicago, and the Illinois Institute of Technology as well as at Baruch and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Dr. Buder’s scholarly interests are the history of city planning, modern American history, and business history. He was a Senior Fulbright Professor at the American Study Center, National University of Singapore in 1999. Among his publications are Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City and the Modern Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Capitalizing on Change: A Social History of American Business (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Pullman and Visionaries and Planners both remain in print. Visionaries and Planners was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice in 1991. Capitalizing on Change appeared in a Chinese translation in 2013.
Professor Buder is presently revising for publication a book manuscript with the working title of A Diplomatic Trio: Franklin ROOSEVELT, William C. BULLITT, and Joseph P. KENNEDY.
Email: Bert.Hansen@baruch.cuny.edu
Website: www.BertHansen.com
Bert Hansen’s research in the history of science and medicine ranges from the 14th to the 20th century in both Europe and the United States. He taught at SUNY-Binghamton (1974-79, later renamed Binghamton University), University of Toronto (1979-84), New York University (1985-88), and Baruch College of the City University of New York (1991-2015). In retirement, he continues to publish and give public lectures.
Hansen has held three research fellowships as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard University, 1978-79; as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, 1984-85; and as a Visitor of the Institute, 1997.
A comprehensive account of his publication and career, including links to multi-media presentations, is available at www.BertHansen.com.
BOOKS
Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature: A Study of His De causis mirabilium with Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985.
Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Winner of awards from the Popular Culture Association and the American Library Association.
ON-LINE ARTICLES
Hansen has published a number of online articles in Distillations, a magazine of the Science History Institute (formerly the Chemical Heritage Foundation). Recent pieces have discussed the invention of serum therapy in the 1890s and its use in diphtheria, polio, and other infections prior to its pursuit as a remedy for patients with Covid-19; an unnoticed innovation that permitted expanded use of vaccination for smallpox after 1870; the discovery of phosphorus by an alchemist; chemists’ efforts to eliminate adulteration of foodstuffs; and how the Chamberland filter led to the discovery of viruses. For these links and more, see https://www.sciencehistory.org/profile/bert-hansen.
SELECTED PRINT PUBLICATIONS SINCE 2014
“Rabies,” Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Science, Medicine, and Technology, ed. Hugh Slotten, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), II: 321-322.
Co-authored with the late Richard E. Weisberg, “Collaboration of Art and Science in Albert Edelfelt’s Portrait of Louis Pasteur: The Making of an Enduring Medical Icon,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89:1 (Spring 2015), 59-91.
__________, “Louis Pasteur’s three artist compatriots—Henner, Pointelin, and Perraud: A story of friendship, science, and art in the 1870s and 1880s,” J. of Medical Biography 25: 1 (February 2017), 18-27, published online before print, May 29, 2015.
__________, “Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), his friendships with the artists Max Claudet (1840–1893) and Paul Dubois (1829–1905), and his public image in the 1870s and 1880s,” J. of Medical Biography 25: 1 (February 2017), 9-18, published online before print, May 29, 2015.
“Medical History’s Moment in Art Photography (1920 to 1950): How Lejaren à Hiller and Valentino Sarra Created a Fashion for Scenes of Early Surgery,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 72:4 (October 2017), 381–421.
“Medical History as Fine Art in American Mural Painting of the 1930s,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 36:1 (Spring 2019), 80-111.
“The Personal, the Scholarly, and the Political: How Liz Fee’s Early Career Integrated Activism around Sex, Homosexuality, and AIDS,” American Journal of Public Health 109:6 (June 1, 2019), pp. 870-871.
“Medical History’s Graphic Power in American True-Adventure Comic Books of the 1940s,” in Handbook of Popular Culture and Biomedicine: Knowledge in the Life Sciences as Cultural Artefact, ed. Arno Görgen, German Alfonso Nunez Canabal, and Heiner Fangerau (Springer International, 2019), pp. 179-194.
MAKING COLLECTED MATERIALS AVAILABLE FOR FUTURE RESEARCHERS
Alongside research, writing, and speaking during retirement, Hansen has been donating historically significant personal materials to libraries and archives. These include diverse prints and artifacts collected over decades of research in medical history plus a personal archive consisting of correspondence, records of organizations in which he participated, and documents from his time as a gay activist in 1970s and later in the AIDS movement of the 1980s. These voluminous materials are being added in installments to the collection of gay and lesbian lives being curated at Manuscripts and Archives of Yale University. The Bert Hansen Papers are Ms. 2042, with this collection description and a pdf finding aid for materials already transferred. Other donations have included scientific instruments and printed materials to the Science History Institute, books and historical manuscripts to the New York Academy of Medicine, audio-visual materials to the National Library of Medicine, and early comic books to Columbia University, Fordham University, Michigan State University, and Yale School of Medicine. Yale’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is receiving the largest group of materials, antique prints illustrating medical history, Ms. Coll. 67, with this collection description and a pdf finding aid.
Veena Oldenburg
Professor Emeritus, India; women in the developing world
Alfonso W. Quiroz, Professor of History at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, passed away at age 56 from bone cancer on January 2, 2013.
Quiroz was devoted to producing cutting-edge scholarship on the economic history of Latin America. He published several books and numerous articles, most recently the book, Corrupt Circles: Costs of Unbound Graft in Peru (Woodrow Wilson Center and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Quiroz received the Abraham Briloff Prize in Ethics for this book, as well as the President’s Excellence Award for Scholarship at Baruch College’s 2009 Commencement. In addition to these Baruch honors, he gained international recognition for his scholarship with awards such as a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright, a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Relations, the Robert S. McNamara Fellowship, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He was member of the editorial board of the Colonial Latin America Review.
Peru is the country where Professor Quiroz was born and raised, where he first became interested in issues of Latin American economic development as an undergraduate at Universidad Católica, in Lima. In his recent work, he has used Peru as a case history to illustrate how corruption feeds on itself, undermining both democratic institutions and economic progress. The looting of Peru’s resources and interested mismanagement of its economy has, he argued in Corrupt Circles, cost the country dearly, inflicting much social harm and obstructing many promising possibilities for development.
Quiroz began teaching at Baruch in 1986 upon completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University. His courses covered Latin American and Caribbean colonial and modern history, economic history and policies, Cuban and Peruvian history, and modern world history. He had many devoted students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He continued to teach his Baruch classes in fall 2012 despite his heroic struggle with radiation and chemotherapy.
Earlier publications include Domestic and Foreign Finance in Modern Peru, 1850-1950 (1993), Deudas olvidadas: instrumentos de crédito en la economía colonial peruana 1750-1820 (1993), and La deuda defrauda: consolidación de 1850 y dominio económico en el Perú (1987), as well as articles and chapters on Peruvian colonial and modern credit, and Cuban nineteenth-century corruption, education, and socioeconomic repression. He is also co-editor and co-author of Cuban Counterpoints: The Legacy of Fernando Ortiz (2005) and The Cuban Republic and José Martí: Reception and Uses of a National Symbol (2006).
He was the curator of the centennial exhibition on propaganda and popular participation during the Spanish-American War of 1898 at the New York Public Library (“A War in Perspective, 1898-1998: Public Appeals, Spanish-American Conflict”) and at the New York Historical Society (“Militant Metropolis: New York City and the Spanish-American War, 1898”).
He was working on a book project that drew on a long-standing interest in Cuba, tentatively entitled “A History of War and Peace in Cuba from the 1770s to the 20th Century.” As he explained in a proposal, “among countries in the Atlantic world, Cuba has this unique and particularly tense experience with war,” one that began with its prolonged fight to throw off the yoke of Spain. “Even today, Cuba has a kind of siege mentality,” he said, indicating the theme of the book he had been thinking about and working on since 1992.
Murray Rubinstein (PhD, New York University) is a specialist in modern East Asia. He writes on Christianity in China, Chinese popular religion, and on the socio-political development of Taiwan/the Republic of China and Fujian/ The Peoples Republic of China. His monographs include The Protestant Community on Modern Taiwan, and The Origins of the Anglo-American Missionary Enterprise in China, 1807-1840. He has edited The Other Taiwan and Taiwan, 1600-1996. He has also written over thirty articles in books and scholarly journals published in the United States, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Taiwan, and Hong-Kong.
Email: psheingorn@gc.cuny.edu
Pamela Sheingorn (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) specializes in the European Middle Ages, especially in visual, cultural, and women’s history. Her research areas include hagiography, drama, and visual culture. Her books include: Myth, Montage, and the Visible in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (2003, co-authored with Marilynn Desmond); Writing Faith: Text, Sign, and History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy (1999, co-authored with Kathleen Ashley); The Book of Sainte Foy (1995); Interpreting Cultural Symbols: St. Anne in Late Medieval Society (1990); and The Easter Sepulchre in England (1987). Her current research projects focus on representations of the late medieval family, medieval masculinities, a cultural history of Joseph the Carpenter, and illuminations in medieval drama manuscripts. She is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and Vice-President of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society. At Baruch she teaches Medieval, Renaissance, and early modern European history as well as women’s history. At the Graduate Center she has been the Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre since 1999; she is also on the faculties of the Ph.D. Program in History and of the Certificate Program in Medieval Studies.
Email: Clarence.Taylor@baruch.cuny.edu
Clarence Taylor was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the public schools of East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn and received his undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College and his MA from New York University. Shortly after graduation from NYU, Taylor began teaching in the New York City public school system as a special education teacher. For seven years, he worked at Junior High School 278 in Marine Park, Brooklyn, with students who were classified as emotionally disturbed, one of the most challenging student populations in the system. In 1984 Taylor left JHS 278 and became a social studies teacher at James Madison High School in Brooklyn. While teaching at James Madison, Clarence pursued his doctorate in history at Graduate School of the City University of New York.
In 1991, Clarence received his PhD in American history and began teaching at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. He reworked his dissertation into a book, The Black Churches of Brooklyn from the 19th Century to the Civil Rights Era, and it was published by Columbia University Press in 1994. In 1996, Clarence became a member of the history department and the African-New World Studies Program at Florida International University. In 1997, Clarence’s second book, Knocking At Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools was published by Columbia University Press, and, in 2002, his book, Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight for Equality from Jim Crow to the 21st Century, was published by Routledge.
Prof. Taylor’s research interests are the modern civil rights and black power movements, African-American religion, and the modern history of New York City. He is also co-editor of Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader in the Black Struggle (New York University Press, 200) which won the Gustavus Myers Prize in 2001 and editor of Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era (Fordham University Press, 2011). Taylor’s book, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights and the New York City Teachers Union was also published by Columbia University Press (2011).
Cynthia Hyla Whittaker received her B.A. from Marymount College in Tarrytown, NY, in 1962. By 1971, she had received master’s degrees in Russian history and Russian literature and a doctorate in Russian and Soviet history from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
Before her retirement, she was chair of the Department of History. She taught Russian and European history at Baruch for nearly three decades; she also taught at CUNY’s Graduate Center starting in 1984. Professor Whittaker’s research concentrates on Russian political culture. Her book, The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and came out in 1999 in Russian translation. She has also written Alexander Pushkin: Epigrams and Satirical Verse. Her other books include Russian Monarchy: Eighteenth-Century Rulers and Writers in Political Dialogue, and Russia Engages the World, 1453-1825.
Her articles on Russian history cover a range of topics that include the oriental renaissance, the women’s movement, abolitionism, and university education. She has lectured on her research at American and Russian universities and also at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and in St. Petersburg.
Professor Whittaker was also co-curator of a major exhibition, “Russia Engages the World, 1453-1825,” New York Public Library (October 2003-May 2004). It featured over 230 maps, drawings, rare books, and engravings drawn from the rich collections of the library.
Professor Whittaker has been a Fulbright Scholar as well as the recipient of numerous research awards, including grants from the NEH, the Rockefeller Foundation, IREX, the Kennan Institute, and the Harriman Institute, and PSC/CUNY awards. In the academic year 1999-2000, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University in Japan.
Professor Whittaker has appeared on Russian and American television. She was also a commentator on the History Channel’s four-hour program, Russia, Land of the Tsars. In the past, she has served as the History Channel’s commentator on movies with a Russian theme, such as Reds, War and Peace and Alexander Nevskii.
Professor Whittaker is currently working on an intellectual biography of Catherine the Great; it will include chapters on the Empress as a reader, writer, political theorist, art collector, and patron of urban architecture. Its tentative title is The Passions of an Empress: Reading, Writing, Building, Art Collecting and Other Pastimes.