Alumni
Below is current information on American Studies Certificate Program alumni. Program graduates, please contact us at americanstudies@gc.cuny.edu to update your information.
Ashna Ali (Ph.D., Comp Lit, 2019)
Dissertation: Migritude: Migrant Structures of Feeling in a Minor Literature of Globalization
Lauren Albert (Ph.D., English, 2000)
Dissertation: The Friction of Experience: Community and Understanding in the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown
Publications: “Environmental Scanning – A Different Kind of Competency” (Information Outlook, September 2008)
Current Position: Received Master of Science in Library & Information Science (October 2008), Pratt Institute
Sari Altschuler (Ph.D., English, 2012)
Dissertation: National Physiology: Literature, Medicine, and the Invention of the American Body 1789-1860 Current Position: Emory University (tenure-track)
Andrew April (Ph.D., Urban Education, 2017)
Dissertation: Musicalization: Early Childhood Music Access, Discourse, and Praxis in NYC Charter Schools, 2014-2015
Talia Argondezzi (Ph.D., English, 2012)
Dissertation: The Transnational Body in American Literature
Current Position: Five-Year Postdoctoral Appointment, Duke University
Todd M. Barosky (Ph.D., English, 2010)
Dissertation: Counterfeiting in American Literature
Lynne Beckenstein (Ph.D., English, 2022)
Dissertation: Committed to the Fragment: Feminist Literature and the Promise of Wellness
Jill Belli (Ph.D., English 2012)
Dissertation: Pedagogies of Happiness: What and How Self-Help, Positive Psychology, and Positive Education Teach about Well-Being
Nicole Berkin (Ph.D., Theatre, 2015)
Dissertation: Economies of Touring in American Theatre Culture, 1835-1861
Current Position: Academic Program Consultant, Office of Collegiate Programs, Stanford University
Anton Borst (Ph.D., English, 2014)
Dissertation: A Chant of Dilation: Walt Whitman, Phrenology, and the Language of the Mind
Current Position: Instructional Consultant, Center for the Advancement of Teaching, New York University
Christopher Bruhn (Ph.D., Music, 2006)
Dissertation: Ives's Multiverse: The Concord Sonata as American Cosmology
Publications: "Taking the Private Public: Amateur Music-making and the Musical Audience in 1860s New York" (American Music, Fall 2003)
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Music History, Denison University
Jacob A. Cohen (Ph.D., Music, 2017)
Dissertation: Constructions of New England Identity and Place in American Music, 1885-1935
Johannes Hendrikus Burgers (Ph.D., English, 2012)
Dissertation: Conspiratorial Modernism: Modernism and Conspiracy Theory in Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, and Musil
Louis E. Bury (Ph.D., English, 2011)
Dissertation: Exercises in Criticism: The Theory and Practice of Literary Constraint
Jessica Wells Cantiello (Ph.D., English, 2012)
Dissertation: The American Teacher Memoir: From Confessions to the Inspirational True Story
Frank D. Casale (Ph.D., English, 2004)
Dissertation:“Dr. Franklin’s School of Politics”: Community and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English, Morgan State University
Kristen Case (Ph.D., English, 2009)
Dissertation:“A Bird’s Life”: Pragmatism in the Field of Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Publications: "Photographs from Rt. 80," "Critique of Pure Reason," "Housework," "Directive (What Is Poetry?)"
Iowa Review, Winter, 2004/05 Winner of Iowa Review Poetry Prize
Current Position: Visiting Assistant Professor of English, 2009-2010, Lebanon Valley College
Rachel Chatalbash (Ph.D., Art History, 2015)
Dissertation: Contemporary Art and Internationalism at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1952-1988 Current Position: Senior Archivist, Yale Center for British Art
Marci Muhlestein Clark (Ph.D., Art History, 2017)
Dissertation: I.M. Pei, William Zeckendorf, and the Architecture of Urban Renewal
Stuart Cochran (Ph.D., English, 2000)
Dissertation: Styles of the Wild Current Position: Director of Research & Evaluation for Collaborative Programs, CUNY Office of Academic Affairs
Melissa Dennihy (Ph.D., English 2014)
Dissertation: Battles with Words: Literate and Linguistic Resistance in Multi-Ethnic U.S. Literature and Everyday Life
Anne C. Donlon (Ph.D., English, 2014)
Dissertation: Archives of Translational Modernism: Lost Networks of Art and Activism Current Position: CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS), Emory University
Ryan Donovan (Ph.D., Theater, 2019)
Dissertation: Broadway Bodies: Casting, Stigma, and Difference in Broadway Musicals Since "A Chorus Line" (1975)
Anahi Douglas (Ph.D., English, 2018)
Dissertation: Nomads of the Body, Exiles of the Mind, Twentieth Century Transnational African American Mexican Art and Literature
LeiLani Dowell (Ph.D., English, 2019)
Dissertation: Wolf Packs: U.S. Carceral Logics and the Case of the New Jersey Four
Robert M. Dowling (Ph.D., English, 2001)
Dissertation: Slumming: Morality and Space in New York City from ‘City Mysteries’ to the Harlem Renaissance
Publications: Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem (University of Illinois Press, 2007)
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English, Central Connecticut University
Ira Dworkin (Ph.D., English, 2003)
Dissertation: American Hearts: African-American Writing on the Congo, 1890-1915
Publications: Ed., Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins (Rutgers University Press, 2007)
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, American University in Cairo.
Glenn D. Dyer (Ph.D., History, 2018)
Dissertation: Final Call: Rank-and-File Rebellion in New York City, 1965-1975
Garrett Eisler (Ph.D., Theatre, 2012)
Dissertation: “This Theatre is a Battlefield”: Political Performance and Jewish-American Identity, 1933-1948
Publications: Ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists (Gale, 2008)
Current Position: Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre Arts, Ithaca College
Cathy E. Fagan (Ph.D., English, 2002)
Dissertation: The Excitement of an Afternoon Call: Re-Framing the Regional and the Modern through the Poetry of Jeanne Robert Foster
Publications: Essay based on dissertation in Prodigal Father Revisited: Artists and Writers in the World of John Butler Yeats, Ed. Janis Londraville (Locust Hill Press, 2003
Current Position: English faculty, Nassau Community College
Duncan Faherty (Ph.D., English, 2003)
Dissertation: "A Game of Architectural Consequences”: The American House and the Formation of National Identity, 1776-1858
Publications: Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858 (New Hampshire, 2007)
Current Position: Associate Professor of English, Queens College & Graduate Center/CUNY, Coordinator, American Studies Certificate Program, Graduate Center/CUNY
Donatella Galella (Ph.D., Theatre, 2015)
Dissertation: Performing (Non) Profit, Race, and American Identity in the Nation's Capital: Arena Stage, 1050-2010. Publications: “Playing in the Dark/Musicalizing A Raisin in the Sun” (Continuum, 2015) [Her article was named among the winners of the 2014 S. Randolph Edmonds Young Scholars Competition Winning Articles] Current Position: Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Digital Production, University of California/Riverside
Sean Patrick Gerrity (Ph.D., English, 2017)
Dissertation: A Canada in the South: Marronage in Antebellum American Literature
Matthew K. Gold (Ph.D., English, 2006)
Dissertation: The Culture of Proof: Science, Religion, and Photography in America, 1780-1875
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English, New York City College of Technology/CUNY
Josh Gosciak (Ph.D., English, 2002)
Dissertation: Between Diaspora and Internationalism: Claude McKay and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual
Publications: The Shadowed Country: Claude McKay and the Romance of the Victorians (Rutgers University Press, 2006)
Current Position: Assistant Adjunct Professor, St. John's University
Jonathan W. Gray (Ph.D., English, 2005)
Dissertation: Innocence by Association: Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination
Publications: Innocence by Association: Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination (in progress)
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English, John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY
Timothy M. Griffiths (Ph.D., English, 2017)
Dissertation: Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905
Allison Guess (Ph.D., Earth & Environmental Sciences, 2021)
Dissertation: Plotting on the Plot in Hispaniola: A 16th Century (Dis)continuous Black Land Story and the Insistent Unsettling Crisis of the New World
Brian E. Hack (Ph.D., Art History, 2007)
Dissertation: American Acropolis: George Gray Barnard's Monument to Democracy, 1918-1938
Jon Hartmann (Ph.D., English, 2004)
Dissertation: “Neither In Nor Out of Blackwood’s”: The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe’s Prose Address”
Publications: The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe(Routledge)
Current Position: Lecturer in English, University of New Haven
Brooks E. Hefner (Ph.D., English, 2009)
Dissertation: “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic”: American Vernacular Modernism, 1910-1937
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English, James Madison University
Stefania Heim (Ph.D., English, 2015)
Dissertation: Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, and the Scholar's Art Publications: A Table that Goes on for Miles (Switchback Books, 2014) Current Position: Lecturing Fellow in the Thompson Writing Program, Duke University; In Spring 2016, she will be Richard Hugo Visiting Poet at the University of Montana
Caroline Hellman (Ph.D., English, 2007)
Dissertation: Sanctum Sanctorum: The Alternative Designs and Domesticities of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English, New York College of Technology/CUNY
Elsie Y. Heung (Ph.D., Art History, 2018)
Dissertation: Women’s Suffrage in American Art: Recovering Forgotten Contexts, 1900-1920
Dale Holstrom (Ph.D., Theatre, 2013)
Dissertation: Producing Memories: Staging the Civil War in US Culture, 1867-1908
Christopher Iannini (Ph.D., English, 2003)
Dissertation: Fatal Revolutions: U.S. Natural Histories of the Greater Caribbean, 1707-1856
Publications: Fatal Revolutions: Caribbean Nature and the Routes of American Literature (in progress)
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English, Rutgers University
Rachel Ihara (Ph.D., English, 2007)
Dissertation:Novels on the Installment Plan: American Authorship in the Age of Serial Publication, from Stowe to Hemingway
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English, Kingsborough Community College/CUNY
Marc Johnson (Ph.D., Music, 2003)
Dissertation: "The Masses Are Singing”: Insurgency and Song in New York City, 1929-1941
Current Position: Attorney
Stefanie A. Jones (Ph.D., Theatre, 2017)
Dissertation: Acts of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms on/through the Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage
Cara Michelle Jordan (Ph.D., Art History, 2017)
Dissertation: Joseph Beuys and Social Sculpture in the United States
Robert Kaplan (Ph.D., English, 2008)
Dissertation: Manning America: Francis Hutcheson, HomoaffectiveRelations and National Identity in the Early Republic
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts, Temple University
Cristina Katapodis (Ph.D., English, 2021)
Dissertation: Sound Ecologies: Music and Vibration in 19th-Century American Literature
Jonathan Keller (Ph.D., Political Science, 2014)
Dissertation: Right Without Might: Prophecy and Enervation in the American Political Tradition Current Position:
Lauren Klein (Ph.D., English, 2011)
Dissertation: Matters of Taste: Eating, Aesthetics, and American Identity, 1720-1865
Current Position: Assistant Professor, Georgia Tech
Kevin Wayne Lambert (Ph.D., English, 2011)
Dissertation: Witness to the Mad City Asyulums: Composing the Self in Early Cold War Madhouse Literature
Karen Lemmey (Ph.D., Art History, 2005)
Dissertation: Henry Kirke Brown and the Development of Public Sculpture in NYC, 1846-1876
Current Position: Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts, National Gallery of Art (2005-2007)
Jenny LeRoy (Ph.D., English, 2017)
Dissertation: Custodian of the Specie: White Women, Capital, and Slavery in the Hemispheric South
Christopher Leslie (Ph.D., English, 2007)
Dissertation: Social Science Fiction
Current Position: Instructor of Humanities & New Media, Polytechnic University
David J. Letzler (Ph.D., English, 2014)
Dissertation: Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach to the Mega-Novel
Robert R. Machado (Ph.D., English, 2013)
Dissertation: Metachromatics: Applied Color Across Media in the Age of Composite Pictures (1839-1935)
Manissa M. Maharawal (Ph.D., Anthropology, 2017)
Dissertation: Affective Afterlives: An Ethnography of Activism Between Movements
Ian S. Maloney (Ph.D., English, 2004)
Dissertation: Melville’s Monumental Imagination
Publications: Melville’s Monumental Imagination (Routldege, 2005)
Current Position: Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs, Associate Professor, St. Francis College: Managing Editor, Arthur Miller Journal
Mark A. McCullough (Ph.D., English, 2009)
Dissertation: “The Naked Gospel”: Varieties of American Religious Poetry, From Richard Henry Dana to Herman Melville
Current Position: Assistant Professor of Literature, Ave Maria University
William McNally (D.M.A, Music, 2015)
Dissertation: Ragtime Then and Now: Composers and Audiences from the Ragtime Era to the Ragtime Revival. Current Position: Pianist, composer.
Krystyna Michael (Ph.D., Comp. Lit, 2019)
Dissertation: The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity, Literature, And Culture in 19th and 20th Century New York City
Erin Lee Mock (Ph.D., English, 2014)
Dissertation: “It Was Easy”: How American Culture Turned the Veteran into the Man, 1944-1959
Publications: “Paladin Plays the Field: 1950s Television, Masculinity and the New Episodic Sexualization of the Private Sphere”in Love in Western Film and Television: Lonely Hearts and Happy Trails, Ed. Susan Matheson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English & Director of the Film Studies Program, University of West Georgia
Kristin Moriah (Ph.D., English, 2017)
Dissertation: Dark Stars of the Evening: Performing African American Citizenship and Identity in Germany, 1890-1920
Jean Murley (Ph.D., English, 2004)
Dissertation: American Murder and Its Literary Consequences: The Rise of True Crime
Publications: The Rise of True Crime: 20th Century Murder and American Popular Culture (Praeger, 2008) (Nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America) Current Position: Assistant Professor of English, Queensborough Community College/CUNY; Vice President of the New York Metro American Studies Association
Rafael A. Mutis (Ph.D., Earth & Environmental Sciences, 2021)
Dissertation: Hybrid EthnoBotanical Practices: Afro and Indigenous Place-Making in the Contemporary Colombia Andean Pacific
Mark Noonan (Ph.D., English, 2003)
Dissertation: Reading The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870-1893
Publications: Ed. with Juanita But; Foreword by Brian Keener, The Place Where We Dwell: Reading and Writing about New York City(Kendall/Hunt, 2005)
Current Position: Assistant Professor of English, New York City College of Technology
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs (Ph.D., Earth & Environmental Sciences, 2019)
Dissertation: The Contested Terrain of the Louisiana Carceral State: Dialectics of Southern Penal Expansion, 1971–2016
Trace Peterson (Ph.D., English, 2020)
Dissertation: A Literary History of Early Trans Poetry: Readings, Poetics, Transitions, Obstacles, Movements
Michael Phillips (Ph.D., Comp. Lit, 2018)
Dissertation: Manifest Density: Decentering the Global Western Film
Audrey Claire Raden (Pd.D., English, 2012)
Dissertation: “As Long as She Cracks She Holds”: Thoreau’s Anticipation of Dying
Elizabeth Rosen (Ph.D., English, 2000)
Dissertation: Natural Causes: American Gothic Literature and the Doctrine of Natural Law
Current Position: Associate Professor, New York Law School and Director, Horace W. Goldsmith Scholars Program at Macaulay Honors College/CUNY
Justin Rogers-Cooper (Ph.D., English 2011)
Dissertation: Embodied Politics: Crowds in Late Nineteenth Century American Fiction
Publications: “Fraternal Orders,” and “Gay Men,” with Robert Reid Pharr in Encyclopedia of African-American Culture, 2nd ed. (Macmillan Reference USA, 2006)
Danica Savonick (Ph.D., English, 2018)
Dissertation: Insurgent Knowledge, the Poetics and Pedogogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions
Galina N. Savukova (Ph.D., English, 2010)
Dissertation: Reading Films: Words on the Silent Screens of American Cinema
Current Position: Senior Lecturer, Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna (Austria)
Mark A. Schiebe (Ph.D., English, 2012)
Dissertation: The Spector of Art in the American Business Novel: 1885-1917
Current Position: Assistant Professor, English Department, Queensborough CC (CUNY)
Jesse W. Schwartz (Ph.D., English 2012)
Dissertation: Genetic Revolutionaries: American Socialism, the Russian Revolution, and the Invention of the Radical Immigrant, 1886-1920
Douglas Singsen (Ph.D., Art History, 2013)
Dissertation: An Alternative by Any Other Name: Alternative Comics between the “Mainstream” and the Avant-Garde Current Position: Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Yair Solan (Ph.D., English, 2017)
Dissertation: Writing the Projected Image: American Fiction and Early Screen Culture
Karinne Keithley Syers (Ph.D., English, 2014)
Dissertation: Committing to the Waves: Emerson’s Moving Assignments
Publications: Montgomery Park, or Opulence: An Essay in the Form of a Building (53rd State Press, 2013). Another Tree Dance and Other Writings (53rd State Press, 2015)
Peter S. Taback (Ph.D., English, 2000)
Dissertation: Nuclear Families: The Bomb and the Future in the American Middle Class
Current Position: Director of Communications for amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research
Whitney Thompson (Ph.D., Art History, 2017)
Dissertation: Foreign-Born Artists Making “American” Pictures: The Immigrant Experience and the Art of the United States, 1819-1893
Karen A. Weiser (Ph.D., English, 2013)
Dissertation: “Self-Begot, Self-Rais’d”: Elective Orphanhood in American Novels, 1790-1852 Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellowship, Fordham University
Joylette E. Williams (Ph.D., English, 2012)
Dissertation: “Rememory”: Memoir and Testimony on Women’s Human Rights in the Global South
Katherine Wilson (Ph.D., Theatre, 2012)
Dissertation: The Social Lives of Playscripts: Nick of the Woods from Inkwell to Internet
Valeri Whitmer (Ph.D., English, 2011)
Dissertation: The Sounds of War: Radio, the Aural Experience and National Consensus in World War II
Heather Homonoff Woodley (Ph.D., Urban Education, 2013)
Dissertation: “But What About the Other Kids?”” Linguistic and Religious Minority Youth in a Newcomer High School
Current Position: Clinical Assistant Professor of TESOL, Bilingual and Foreign Language Education, NYU Steinhardt
Krystyna Zamorska (Ph.D., English, 2006)
Dissertation: Ethnic Fictions: Cultural Mediations in Contemporary American Writin
Current Position: Faculty, University of Connecticut Center for Continuing Education
Peter Zazzali (Ph.D., Theatre, 2012)
Dissertation: The Commodification of US Acting as Seen Through the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs, 1965-1987
Current Position: Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre, University of Kansas
Anna Zeemont (Ph.D., English, 2022)
Dissertation: “The Act of the Paper”: Literacy, Racial Capitalism, and Student Protest in the 1990s
Nicole Zeftel (Ph.D., Comparative Literature, 2018)
Dissertation: Sickly Sentimentalism: Sympathy and Pathology in American Women’s Literature, 1866-1900
Dominique Zino (Ph.D., English, 2014)
Dissertation: Mind, Media, and Techniques of Remediation in America, 1850-1910
Current Position: Assistant Professor, English, LaGuardia Community College/CUNY
Devin P. Zuber (Ph.D., English, 2010)
Dissertation: Hieroglyphics of Nature: Swedenborg, Ecology and Romantic Aesthetics Current Position: Assistant Professor, Institute for English and American Studies, Universität Osnabrück, Bielefeld Area, Germany
