Alumni News

Laura D’Amore, 2009, is currently a visiting assistant professor at Roger Williams University, Rhode Island. In 2011 she published her book  Bound by Love: Familial Bonding in Film and Television Since 1950 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Her next book We Are What We Remember: The American Past Through Commemoration, with Jeffrey L. Meriwether is due to be published in 2012.

Paul d’Ambrosio, 2001, is President and CEO of the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY.

Elizabeth DeWolfe, 1996, is Professor of History; Chair of the Department of History; and Affiliated Faculty in the Women’s & Gender Studies Program at the University of New England (Biddeford, Maine). She teaches courses in women’s history, print culture, communal societies and American culture. She has published four books including The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories (Kent State Univ. Press, 2007) which received awards from the New England Historical Association, the Northeast Popular Culture Association, the Independent Publishers Association, and ForeWord magazine. Shaking the Faith: Women, Family, and Mary M. Dyer’s Anti-Shaker Campaign, 1815-1867(Palgrave 2002), based on her AMNESP dissertation, received the Communal Studies Association Outstanding Book award in 2003. Her current project focuses on a Gilded Age scandal.

Marianne Doezema, 1990, is the Florence Finch Abbot Director at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum where she is currently working on an essay about the representation of women by Achcan School artists for an exhibition catalogue to be published by the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Liz Duclos-Orsello, 1999, currently lives in Beverly, MA, with her husband and son.  She was tenured at Salem State University in 2010.  She is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and has served as the Coordinator of American Studies since 2007.  Dr. Duclos-Orcello is also an affiliated faculty member with the SSU Center for Economic Development and Sustainability, where she works with nonprofits and towns to link cultural activities with and to their economic development goals. In spring of 2010, she was a Fulbright Fellow at L’Université du Luxembourg in the Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, where she taught courses on The History and Literature of US Immigration and American Identities. While there she developed and coordinated an immigration history interview project in conjunction with the Luxembourg-American Cultural Society & Center in Belgium, Wisconsin. Dr. Duclos-Orsello writes for the “The Public Humanist”(a humanities and public policy blog project of Mass Humanities), sits on the Board of Trustees at the House of the Seven Gables, and serves as Academic Director for a Teaching American history grant.

Jean Follett, 1985, does preservation consulting work and is a part of a six-person team writing an NR nomination for the Chicago boulevard system and three parks. Along with an 1839 underground railroad site it makes for an interesting research schedule. She is a National Trust Advisor for Illinois, sits on board of Illinois’ statewide preservation organization, and chairs the Illinois Barn Alliance.

Desiree Garcia, 2007, is Associate Professor at Dartmouth. Dr. Garcia is Chair of the Department of Latin American, Latino, & Caribbean Studies and is an Affiliate of Film and Media Studies. Her most recent book, The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film, is to be published by Rutgers University Press in January 2025.

Janet Golden, 1983, is a Professor of History at Rutgers University and a Research Associate at Rutgers Center for Children and Childhood Studies. Her most recent book is Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome(Harvard University Press, 2005).

Julia Grant, 1992, is the Co-Director at the Center for Gender in Global Context at Michigan State University and Professor at James Madison College.   She has published Raising Baby By the Book: The Education of American Mothers (1998), When Science Encounters the Child: Perspectives On Education, Child Welfare, and Parenting(2008) and is currently engaged in a new book to be published by Johns Hopkins: The ‘Boy Problem’ In Urban America, 1890-1940.

Jennifer R. Green, 2001, is Professor of History at Central Michigan University and Book Review Editor of the Michigan Historical Review.  Professor Green’s book, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South (Cambridge, 2008) won the American Education Research Association New Scholar Book Prize for 2007-2008.  A co-edited volume, The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century, will appear from LSU Press this spring.

Jeffrey Halprin, 1987, is Associate Dean for Liberal Arts and the Professor and Chair of English at Nichols College in Natick, Massachusetts.

Marilyn Halter, 1986, is Professor Emerita of History and served Research Associate at BU’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs.

Hina Hirayama, 1998, previous served as Associate Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Boston Athenaeum. Currently, she is working on a book on the collaboration between the Boston Athenaeum and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (est. 1870) in the late nineteenth century.

Sheila Hones, 1984, is a professor in the Area Studies department (North American Division) of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Tokyo, Japan. http://sheilahones.wordpress.com/

Roger House, 1999, is associate professor in American Studies at Emerson College in Boston. He is author of Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy by Lousiana State University Press, 2010. Blue Smoke was a finalist for the 2011 award for Excellence in Historical Writing by the Association of Recorded Sound Collections. House also has published in journals such as Labor: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas, and The Journal of American and Canadian Studies. He can be reached at roger_house@emerson.edu.

Ella Howard, 2007, is Associate Professor of History and Graduate Program Coordinator at Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia, where she teaches urban history, digital history, material culture, and popular culture. Her dissertation book Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2013. She is currently studying the roles of tourism and historic preservation in the development of Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, and other Southern cities during the 20th century.

Laura Johnson, 2002, is the Assistant Dean for Sophomore Advising at Harvard College.

Sara (Toni) Caldwell Junkin, 1986, is researching, writing, and lecturing about American art and decorative arts. Recently she finished an article entitled “Francis Boardman Crowninshield (1869-1950): Rough Rider, Sailor, Sport Fisherman, Hunter, and Watercolorist” and did an exhibition of his watercolors for the Boca Grande Florida Historical Society. For about five years, she has been doing collections management and creating a database at the Somerset Club. Continuing her studies in decorative arts, she went to the Attingham Program for study of the English Country House in 1992 and will go this September to their Royal Collections program at Windsor Castle to study the Queen’s Collections there.

Lori Kenschanft, 1998, is a part-time writing coach for a neuroscience researcher and also spends her time writing, organizing events, giving talks, and leading discussion groups.  One of her goals is increasing Americans’ understanding of Islam. She also hosts occasional concerts and poetry readings, tends several gardens, and teaches gardening classes.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Mankin Kornhauser, 1988, is the Chief Curator and Krieble Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. She has written several books, including Hudson River School: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Yale University Press, 2003) and Samuel Colt: Arms, Artistry, and Invention (Yale University Press, 2006).

Kelly L’Ecuyer (BU MA 2005) is the Ellyn McColgan Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Art of the Americas, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In the Museum’s new Art of the Americas Wing, she co-curated several galleries of nineteenth and twentieth century art. Her book Jewelry By Artists: In the Studio, 1940-2000 (Boston: MFA Publications, 2010) recently won an award from the Association of Art Museum Curators. At the MFA, she organized the 2007 exhibition, “Jewelry by Artists: The Daphne Farago Collection,” and has contributed essays and entries to publications including A New World Imagined: Art of the Americas (2010); MFA Highlights: American Decorative Arts and Sculpture (2006); and The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940-1990 (2003).

Aaron Lecklider, 2007, is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at University of Masschusetts Boston. He teaches undergraduates and graduate students in topics ranging from the U.S. in the 1960s to a graduate Gender and Sexuality seminar. He is currently revising his dissertation “Brain Power: Intelligence in American Culture from Einstein to the Egghead” into a book manuscript.

Brad Martin, 2000, is an Assistant Professor and History Coordinator at Bryant University. His book The Theater Is In the Streets: Politics and Public Performance in Sixties America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004),which started out as his dissertation, won the New England American Studies Association’s 2004 Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize for the best book by a member.

Shitsuyo Masui, 1995, is Professor, Department of English Literature at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan.  She teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses on Early American literature and intellectual history.  Professor Masui also served as the editor-in-chief of the Japanese Journal of American Studies, the English journal of the Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS) from 2008 to 2010.  Her co-edited book “Christianity in America: Continuities and Transformations,” which includes articles by two of the AMNESP past directors (David D. Hall and Richard W, Fox), was published in February 2011 from the Sophia University Press.  From April 2011 to March 2012, Professor Masui will be a visiting scholar in the History of American Civilization department at Harvard.

Veronica Savory McComb, 2010, is Academic Dean at Bryant University.

Joan McElroy, 1989, is self-employed as a freelance writer producing materials for major educational publishers – primarily in social studies. She writes pupils’ textbooks, teachers’ editions, and a wide range of ancillary materials, including lesson plan books, test practice materials, study guides, and enrichment materials.

Ron Miller, 2000, taught courses in Modern American Social History at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. His AMNESP dissertation was published by SUNY Press in 2002 under the title Free Schools, Free People: Education and Democracy After the 1960s. Ron served as editor of the magazine Education Revolution and was on the board of trustees of Woodbury College in Montpelier.  He has since retired from teaching and education activism, and now owns and operates the Shiretown Bookstore in Woodstock, Vermont.

Charlotte Emans Moore works as an independent art historian with expertise in eighteenth and nineteenth century American painting.  She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, but is currently in the process of moving back to Boston with her husband Will and son Gideon.

Rebecca R. Noel, 1999, lives in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where she is Associate Professor of History at Plymouth State University.

Timothy Orwig, 2010, is a lecturer in Art History at the Rhode Island School of Design. He has recently published articles in Historic New England Magazine. The first is titled “Joseph Everett Chandler, Architect and Preservationist,” Historic New England Winter/Spring 2011, 24-29 and the second,”Concrete Solutions: Tad Stahl’s Urbanism,”  is due to be published in the Winter/Spring 2012 edition.

Mary Panzer, 1990, writes and teaches free-lance. Her book out entitled Things as They Are: Photojournalism in Context since 1955 was published in 2006. She also published an article on Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s that was published in Vanity Fair in March 2005.

Peyton Paxson, 1993, lives in Westford, MA, and teaches at Middlesex Community College (full-time) and Lesley University (part-time). Professor Paxson recently published Mass Communication and Media Studies: An Introduction, a book aimed particularly for community colleges.

Brad Queen, 2004, is an Assistant Professor of English, tenure-track, at the University of California, Irvine.

Kavita Ramdya, 2007, lives in London, where she writes for a variety of newspapers and magazines and works in a sales role at an American bank.  Ms.Ramdya’s Bollywood Weddings: Dating, Engagement and Marriage in Hindu America” was published in 2009 by Lexington Books.

Jan Seidler Ramirez, 1985, lives in the NYC metropolitan area and works downtown as the Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the National September 11 Memorial Museum located at the World Trade Center site.  Despite predictions to the contrary, the memorial is on track to be dedicated on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, with the museum (occupying the archeological void of the former Tower footprints) on schedule to open in September, 2012.

Susan M. Reverby, 1982, teaches at Wellesley College in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department where she began her career in 1982.  Her book, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) won the Arthur Viseltear Award from the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from Phi Beta Kappa.  Most recently, her article “‘Normal Exposure’ and Inoculation Syphilis: A PHS ‘Tuskegee’ Doctor in Guatemala, 1946-48,” Journal of Policy History 23 (Winter 2011: 6-23) touched off a U.S. government apology to Guatemala and garnered world-wide media attention.

Michelle Robinson, 2011, is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in American Studies at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Nora Pat Small, 1993, lives in an 1880s farmhouse in rural central Illinois and teaches at Eastern Illinois University, where she also coordinates the Historical Administration Program.  Dr. Small spends her time teaching, gardening, and keeping up with multiple fields (architectural history, historic preservation, museum studies, early national history).

Myron O. Stachiw is Director of the Kyiv, Ukraine, Office of the Institute of International Education and the Director of the Fulbright Program in Ukraine (since 2006). In 2004-2006, Professor Stachiw was a Fulbright Scholar studying the process of cultural rescue of the traditional cultures of the territories in Ukraine that were irradiated (and partially evacuated) as a result of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in 1986.  One result of my project was a multi-media exhibition (photographs, video, text) titled “Chernobyl + 20: this is our Land – We still live here.”  The exhibition opened on the 20th anniversary of the disaster in April 2006 in Kyiv in the Ivan Honchar National Museum and Center for Ukrainian Folk Culture and in the Ukrainian Museum in New York City.  He also teaches courses on museum studies and historic preservation.  Currently, he is editing two volumes of conference proceedings from “The State of Historic Preservation Education in Ukraine” and “World War II and the (Re)Creation of Historical Memory in Contemporary Ukraine.”

Maren Stange, 1981, is Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, The Cooper Union, NYC. Her book Photography and the End of Segregation is forthcoming in 2012 from University of Pennsylvania Press.  In the fall of 2008 she enjoyed a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University in England.

Since 1982, Louise Stevenson has taught at Franklin and Marshall College, where she is professor of history and American studies. She has chaired the history department and the women studies program. She has been the campus representative for the James Madison Fellowship Foundation scholarship competition for the past eleven years. Her term as a board member for that organization recently expired. In Lancaster, she is involved in the community and serves on the board of directors of the Lancaster County League of Women Voters.  Dr. Stevenson’s article, “The New Woman, Networking, and the Harlem Renaissance: Ophelia Settle Egypt as Black Professional,” will appear in the Journal of Southern History this year.

Len Travers, 1992, is Associate Professor of History at UMass, Dartmouth. Along with fellow alum Sheila McIntyre, she co-edited The Correspondence of John Cotton, Jr. (Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2009) and is now working on a new book concerning the fates of Massachusetts soldiers captured in the French and Indian War.

Erik Trump, 1996, is Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Midland, Michigan. He also serves as the chair of the Political Science department.  With his wife and colleague, Jesse Donahue, he is working on his fourth book. The first three were about zoos and American politics and culture. The next will be about venomous snakes and public health policy in the United States.

Jonathan Vogels, 2000, is head of the Upper School at Colorado Academy. He also teaches English electives and works with a playwriting group. His book based on his dissertation about the Maysles brothers, The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles was published by Southern Illinois University Press.

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, 1994, is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Liberal Arts and Women’s Studies at Emory University. She has written Skin Deep, Spirit Strong (University of Michigan Press, 2002), and will soon publish a second book “Mammy! A Century of Race, Gender and Southern Memory.”

Bryan Waterman, 2000, is Associate Professor of English at New York University. His book Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature, based on his dissertation, was published in 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. He co-edited, with his colleague Cyrus R. K. Patell, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York (2010). The author of the volume on Television’s Marquee Moon(Continuum’s 33 1/3 series), he is currently at work on two book projects: one on seduction stories in the Revolutionary Atlantic world, and another, with Patell, on the cultural history of New York City.

Lynn Weiner, 1981, is currently Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of History at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Her most recent publications are encyclopedia entries in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink (“Baby Food”) and the Encyclopedia of Chicago (“Work Culture”). Her long-term project is a history of the PTA and school desegregation.

Kate Wittenstein, 1988, is teaching U.S. Women’s and African American History, History of Gender and Sexuality and a course on the Jim Crow South to undergraduates at Gustavus Adophus College in Minnesota where she is a Professor of History. She is also researching the life of Civil Rights and Feminist Activist, Anna-Arnold Hedgeman (1899-1990).

Paul Wright retired in 2006 from the University of Massachusetts Press, where he was an acquisitions editor for eighteen years.  While at the Press, he developed and managed the Press’s series in book history: “Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book.”  He is currently working on several research projects.  During 2009-2010 he had a fellowship at the Houghton Library at Harvard to work on a study of the editing and publication history of the Harvard Classics, known as “Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf of Books” (1909-1910).

Since 1985, Edward Zimmer has served as the historic preservation planner in the Lincoln/Lancaster County Planning Department.  He teaches as an adjunct at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and since 1996 has been an elected member of the Lincoln Public School board of education, helping govern a urban district serving 36,000 students.

Philip Zimmerman, 1985, is a museum and American decorative arts consultant.  Current projects include a catalogue on the early 19th century furniture of the Harmonist Society for Old Economy Village in Ambridge, PA., and a catalogue and exhibition on Delaware clocks for the Sewell C. Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, DE.  Recent publications include “New York Card Tables, 1800 to 1825,” Luke Beckerdite, Ed. American Furniture 2005(Chipstone Foundation, 2005); American Federal Furniture and Decorative Arts from the Watson Collection(Columbus Museum, 2004); a co-authoring of The Sewell C. Biggs Collection of American Art: A Catalogue, 2 vols. (Biggs Museum, 2002); and numerous articles for The Magazine Antiques.