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American and New England Studies Program at Boston University
American Studies PhD Preservation Studies MA Undergraduate Concentration Faculty Resources

Alumni

Below is a sampling of the current activities of American & New England Studies alumni:

Deborah Binder, M.A., 1986, is living in Washington where she is an independent art consultant in the Puget Sound Region.

Martin Blatt, 1983, is the Chief of Cultural Resources/Historian at Boston National Historical Park where his activities include being the principal organizer (along with Louis Hutchins) of the National Park Service Northeast Museum Services Center and its traveling exhibit with the Gulag Museum of Perm, Russia entitled “Gulag: Soviet Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom.”  The exhibit opened at Ellis Island in spring 2006, then travels to Boston National Historical Park and other National Park Service sites throughout the country.   Martin has also been on the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians since 2003; he was the Program Committee Co-chair for the 2006 joint annual meeting of Organization of American Historians and National Council on Public History; and he’s authored the Afterword for the National Park Service Handbook on the American Revolution.

Claudia Bushman, 1978, teaches American Studies at Columbia University.  Her tenth book Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America (Praeger Publishers) was released in January of 2006, and last year she and her husband (historian Richard Bushman, formerly on the faculty at BU and one of the founders of AMNESP) celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary!

Brian Carso, 2004, lives in New York.  In 1998, while working on his dissertation and practicing law part-time in his hometown of Cooperstown, NY, he was elected County Clerk of Otsego County.  Shortly after being re-elected in 2002, he was appointed by NY Governor George Pataki to be Assistant Commissioner of the Department of Motor Vehicles, a senior policymaking position in NY’s largest state agency.  A revision of his dissertation was published in March, 2006 entitled “Whom Can We Trust Now?”  The Meaning of Treason in the Untied States, from the Revolution to the Civil War (Lexington Books).  He continues to work in NY state government, though is looking to move into the world of academics in the near enough future.

Kerry Dean Carso, 2001, is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the State University of New York at New Paltz where she teaches courses on art and architecture of the Hudson Valley, New York City, and the United States generally.  Her most recent publication was “The Theatrical Spectacle of Medieval Revival: Edwin Forrest’s Fonthill Castle” in Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture, vol. 39, no. 1 (Spring 2004).  In the past two years, she has been working on a new book project tentatively entitled “Landscapes of Nationalism: Towers, Follies, and Summerhouses in America, 1776-1876.”

Edward (Ned) Cooke, 1983, is the Chair of the History of Art Department at Yale University and recent publications include “The Long Shadow of William Morris: Paradigmatic Problems of Twentieth-Century American Furniture,” in Luke Beckerdite, Ed. American Furniture 2003, (Chipstone Foundation, 2004); The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940-1990 (Boston MFA Publications, 2003); and “The Embedded Nature of Artisanal Activity in Connecticut, ca. 1800” in Christopher Bickford et al, Eds. Voices of the New Republic: Connecticut Towns 1800-1832, Connecticut Academy of Arts, 2003).

Margaret Creighton, 1985, is Professor of History at Bates College. She recently published a book on the social history of the Battle of Gettysburg entitled The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History: Immigrants, Women, And African Americans in the Civil War's Defining Battle (Perseus, 2006). The volume was a finalist for the 2006 Lincoln Prize.

Claire Dempsey, M.A., 1980, is Director of the Preservation Studies Program at Boston University, where she is also Associate Professor of American Studies.  She continues to research, lecture, and write on early American architecture and landscape.

Beth DeWolfe, 1996, is Associate Professor of American Studies, Chair of the Department of History; and Co-Director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of New England.  She teaches courses at UNE in women’s history, print culture, communal societies and American culture.  Her current research project with the working title of "The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories" involves the 1849 slaying of a Maine factory girl.

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.

Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, 2003, has a tenure track faculty position in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Salem State College.  She has been named the Coordinator of American Studies there, and is working to develop some additional American Studies courses and help expand the American Studies major that was recently created.

Elysa Engelman, 2003, is an Exhibits Researcher and Developer at Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea in Mystic, Connecticut and teaches as an adjunct at the University of Connecticut.

Jean Follett, 1986, is doing preservation-consulting work dealing with National Register nominations and a large amount of work with suburban communities in Chicago, Illinois.  She is one of the leading experts on the subject of teardowns and does much work helping communities put preservation ordinances in place, inserting preservation into their strategic/comprehensive plans and strategizing with them on planning and public education efforts.  She is a charter member on the Board of the Illinois Barn Alliance and also sits on the Board of the National Barn Alliance.

James L. Garvin, 1983, is the State Architectural Historian for the New Hampshire SHPO, where one of his greatest challenges is the preservation of engineering works - especially dams, manufacturing complexes and highway bridges.  To try to instill greater concern for the latter he is writing a history of New Hampshire’s bridges, while at the same time working with the DOT and others to preserve several endangered spans.

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).

Jeffrey Halprin, 1987, is a Professor of English and Associate Dean for Liberal Arts at Nichols College in Dudley, Mass.  He enjoys teaching 20th Century American Lit and African American Lit, as well as contemporary World Literature and a number of other things it never occurred to him to study while he was at BU.  He has particularly enjoyed thinking about teaching and learning, which has led him to become a member of the Board of Directors of the New England Faculty Development Consortium, where he is a Past-President.

Marilyn Halter, 1986, is a Professor of History and a Research Associate at BU’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. Her current research project is a study of West African immigrants and refugees to the United States.

Benjamin Hanley, M.A., 2001, is beginning his second year in the MBA program. at Rensselaer in Troy, NY.  Before that, he worked as a management analyst for the City of Boston.

Roger House, 1999, is an Assistant Professor of American Studies in the Department of Journalism at Emerson College.

Ella Howard, 2007, is Assistant Professor of History at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia. She teaches undergraduate and master's level courses in public history, material culture, women's history, and modern American political and social history. She is currently revising for publication with the University of Pennsylvania Press her dissertation, "Skid Row: Homelessness on the Bowery in the Twentieth 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.

Eugenia Kaledin, 1977, is enjoying retirement and spending time with her grandchildren.

Lori Kenschaft, 1999, is currently working full time on a book on the history of Americans’ attitudes towards taxes.  She recently published Reinventing Marriage: The Love and Work of Alice Freeman Palmer and George Herbert Palmer (University of Illinois Press, 2005).

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, M.A. 2005, is the Ellyn McColgan Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  Recent projects include the 2007 exhibition, “Jewelry by Artists: The Daphne Farago Collection,” and preparing galleries for the Museum’s new American Wing.  She co-authored MFA Highlights: American Decorative Arts and Sculpture (Boston: MFA Publications, 2006) and The Maker’s Hand: American Studio Furniture, 1940-1990 (Boston: MFA Publications, 2003), and published “Uplifting the Southern Highlander: Handcrafts at Biltmore Estate Industries” in Winterthur Portfolio in 2002. 

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, 1996, teaches American literature, intellectual history and religion at Sophia University in Tokyo.

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, is teaching 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. His latest book on educational alternatives will be published in 2008. Ron is currently editor of the magazine Education Revolution, and also serves on the board of trustees of Woodbury College in Montpelier.

Susan Montgomery, 1990, works freelance on museum projects and as a consultant to private collectors.

William Moore, 1999, is an Assistant Professor of History and the Director of the Public History Program at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington.  He teaches American history and public history to both undergraduates and M.A. candidates.  He is active in the local preservation community and is working on a book concerning 20th century conceptions of the Shakers.

Rebecca Noel, 1999, is an Assistant Professor of History at Plymouth State University.  She is working on converting her dissertation to a book, tentatively entitled “Schooling the Body: The Intersection of Educational and Medical Reform in the United States, 1780-1870.”

Mary Panzer, 1990, writes and teaches free-lance.  She has a new book out entitled Things as They Are: Photojournalism in Context since 1955 (Aperture, 2006).  She also recently 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, teaches popular culture and law courses at Middlesex Community College. He has a series of eight books on media literacy that are being used in middle schools and high schools.  His article on lawyers’ advertising was published in the “Journal of Popular Culture,” and republished in Profiles of Popular Culture (University of Wisconsin, 2005).

Ann Marie Plane, M.A., 1990, is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has been on the faculty since 1994.  She is working on a book called “When I Awaked” which is a cultural history of dreams, dream narratives and cosmologies in seventeenth century New England in both Algonquian and English colonial cultures.

Naomi Remes, MA 1981, later received an MBA from George Washington University in 1985. For the past 14 years she has been an Exhibition Officer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC organizing special exhibitions.

Susan Reverby, 1982, teaches in the Women’s Studies Department at Wellesley College.   She is continuing her research on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and has an edited book on the subject entitled Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (North Carolina Press, 2000).  In addition, she recently published an article with a colleague comparing the 1970s women’s health movement to the Vagina Monologues.

Jan Seidler Ramirez, 1985, is the Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in Lower Manhattan. Previously, she served as museum director & vice president of the New-York Historical Society (1999-2004) and as Deputy Director & Chief Curator of the Museum of the City of New York (1986-1999). She serves on the boards of the Mid Atlantic Center for the Humanities - anchored at Rutgers University/Camden; and the Hood Art Museum at Dartmouth, and has written broadly on the subjects of material culture, cityscape painting, American Sculpture and aspects of New York City history, including Greenwich Village bohemianism. She was also a contributing editor to the New York City Encyclopedia.

Nora Pat Small, 1994, is Professor of History at Eastern Illinois University. She is active in local historic preservation projects, and her graduate students are conducting a multi-year comprehensive architectural survey for the local historic preservation commission. Her dissertation was published in 2003 by University of Tennessee Press as Beauty and Convenience: Architecture and Order in the Early Republic.

Mike Sokolow, 1997, is an Associate Professor of History at Kingsborough Community College, a campus in the City University system of New York.  His dissertation has been published in book form, entitled Charles Benson: Mariner of Color in the Age of Sail (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).

Kimberly Lyman St. Charles, M.A., 1990, has been teaching ESL since 2000 - first in the intensive English Program at the University of West Florida and now at the USC Language Academy.  

Myron Stachiw, M.A., 1982, has just completed two years as a Fulbright Fellow in Ukraine, and in September 2006 will be assuming the post of Director of the Fulbright Representative Office in Ukraine.  He has taught historic preservation courses at the Taras Shevchenko National University and at the National University at Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, and is very engaged in the activities of the historic preservation, archaeology, and museum communities in Ukraine.  His work as director of the Fulbright Program in Ukraine will involve an expansion of the academic exchange program for graduate students and for senior scholars from Ukraine to the United States and from the US to Ukraine.

Louise Stevenson, 1981, has been teaching at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania since 1982; where she is currently a professor of history and American Studies specializing in Civil War era and Women’s History. In the past, she has served as chair of both the History Department and the Women’s Studies program. Louise has written many scholarly reviews, articles and essays on American higher education and nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual life, and has published two books on these subjects: Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830-1890 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), and The Victorian Homefront: American Cultural and Intellectual Life, 1860-1880 (1991, new ed., Cornell University Press, 2001). Her recent work includes articles on books and reading in everyday life, from the best sellers of the eighteenth century through Harry Potter. Two of her articles out this year are, “The Transatlantic Travels of James Thomson’s The Seasons and Its Baggage of Material Culture, 1730-1870"  in The Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society and another on the book, domesticity, and commercial culture in Vol. 3 of the History of the Book in the United States.  Next June, she will be presenting at a conference on Uncle Tom's Cabin and its many manifestations in nineteenth-century American culture. 

Robert C. (Bob) Stewart, M.A., 1979, received an MBA from Emory University in 1985.   An Alabama native, Bob has been Executive Director of the Alabama Humanities Foundation (AHF) since 1987.  AHF is the state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  He oversees a statewide organization that awards grants of federal funds to colleges and universities, museums, libraries, and other non-profit organizations for public programs in all humanities disciplines, especially history and literature.  AHF also conducts its own statewide programs, including scholar-led institutes and workshops for secondary teachers, Smithsonian exhibitions for small museums, humanities speakers bureau and media collection, Motheread family literacy program, and development of an online Encyclopedia of Alabama in partnership with Auburn University.  Prior to joining the AHF, Bob held curatorial, fundraising, and administrative positions at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Historic St. Augustine (FL) Preservation Board, and Huntsville (AL) Museum of Art.

Erik Trump, 1996, is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan.  With Jesse Donahue, he has co-authored The Politics of Zoos: Exotic Animals and their Protectors (Northern Illinois University Press, 2006) and is currently completing a second book manuscript called Public Art in Zoos.

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 last year 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.”

Chris Walsh, 2000, is the Associate Director of the CAS Writing Program here at Boston University.

Barbara Ward, 1983, is the Director/Curator of the Moffatt-Ladd House and Garden, and on the faculty in Museum Studies at Tufts University where she teaches Historical Interpretation of Material Culture.  She is also on the NH State Democratic Committee and the secretary of the Portsmouth Public Library Trustees.

Gerry Ward, 1984, is the Katherine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He is active in the Portsmouth (NH) Athenaeum, Colonial Society, Pilgrim Society and the December Arts Society.

Bryan Waterman, 2000, is a tenured 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 is currently working on two book projects: one on seduction stories in the Revolutionary Atlantic world, and another, with his colleague Cyrus R. K. 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).

Ed Zimmer, 1984, has been the historic preservation planner for Lincoln, Nebraska since 1985, and teaches as an adjunct in the Community and Regional Planning Program of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He writes, lectures, and provides tours and TV programs on local history for children and adults. A forthcoming publication, /Lincoln in Black and White, 1910-1925 /(Arcadia Publishing, August 2008) presents the work of John Johnson, an African American photographer. Ed has also been an elected member of the Lincoln Board of Education since 1996.

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.

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