A Word from the E.O.
Joshua Freeman

Being on the Market: Some Experiences and Perspectives of a Recent CUNY Ph.D.
Joe Sramek

Investigating U.S. History: New Teaching Tools at CUNY
David Jaffee

Faculty News

Student News

Recent Alumni News

A Word from the E.O.
Joshua Freeman

Welcome back, and welcome to our new students! I hope everyone had a productive and enjoyable summer. Belatedly, I would like to report on some of last year’s achievements and mention some upcoming developments.

Last year was a good one for the Ph.D. Program in History. Our students, faculty, and alumni continued to excel as scholars, teachers, and writers. Our resources for financial aid, while still inadequate, continued to grow. Among other things, our Chancellor’s Fellowships now will have stipends in all five years and the program of tuition remission for students teaching as adjuncts at the CUNY colleges is continuing. The glaring gap in support for our students is the lack of health insurance. Both the Graduate School administration and the PSC-CUNY are trying to find a way to address this egregious failing.

Our strengths seem to be getting more widely known. Last year we had 130 applications to the program – over ten percent more than the previous year – which has yielded an incoming class of 32, the largest in quite some time and what looks like an exceptionally strong group. Our sense that we are thriving intellectually was confirmed by a recent evaluation and ranking of 150 history doctoral programs undertaken by Academic Analytics, based primarily on faculty productivity, as measured by publications, citations, and grants. Our program ranked fifteenth in the country.

In many ways we remain a traditional program, primarily organized around fields defined geographically and chronologically. But within that structure we have been trying to encourage more work that cuts across subdisciplinary boundaries. We are offering more transnational and comparative courses, which have proved popular and intellectually rewarding. We have developed a more structured procedure for students who want to develop minor fields of their own design. Their proposals now have to be approved by the curriculum committee, which is working with students and their advisors to make sure that ad hoc minors are of similar or greater breadth than the designated minor fields. We also are seeking to create more situations in which students from various fields are exposed to one another’s work, including the first-year and dissertation seminars. Last year we had the privilege of having Carol Smith-Rosenberg with us as a Visiting Professor. Her work has been pioneering in drawing on many fields and methodologies to understand the American – and wider Atlantic world – past. I am delighted that she will be with us again this year. Also joining our faculty last year was Joel Allen from Queens College who teaches Ancient History.

The Graduate Center requires every program to undergo periodic external reviews. This year it is our turn. I expect that sometime in the late fall we will be visited by a pair of external reviewers, who will meet with faculty and students to discuss the program. As part of the review process, the program will have to write a report and self-evaluation. The review will require a fair amount of work, for which I will be asking assistance from faculty and students. It does give us an opportunity to reflect on the program and how we might improve it and to make a case for any additional resources we might feel we need.

Communication has not always been a strong point of the program, but we are slowly trying to make improvements. In an effort to keep our website up-to-date and enhance its content, we have awarded a fellowship to an incoming student, Benjamin Persky, who will be acting as the program’s webmaster. I hope that the newsletter will come out more frequently, with more in it. To that end, I asked one of our graduating students and a faculty member to contribute the short articles that follow. I want to thank Chad Turner for his help in assembling this newsletter.

Finally, I am happy to say that Mary Gibson again will be serving as Deputy Executive Officer and that Jonathan Sassi will be joining us as a second Deputy Executive Officer. Helena Rosenblatt will again chair the admissions committee and coordinate the admissions process. Without their assistance, I could not imagine getting through the coming year.

My best wishes for a good year to come,

Josh Freeman

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Being on the Market: Some Experiences and Perspectives of a Recent CUNY Ph.D.
By Joe Sramek

Two years. One hundred and forty-four job applications. Thirteen AHA interviews. Four final round interviews. And one job in the end: a tenure-track assistant professorship at Southern Illinois University - Carbondale. I mention all these statistics to give fellow C.U.N.Y. Ph.D. students a sense of the possibilities of the job market right now as well as what one needs to do to capitalize on them. First, the good news. Right now - and probably for the next five or so years - the academy is going through a once in a generation hiring boom as professors hired during the 1960s are beginning to retire. Of course, this varies field to field. Some fields like Middle Eastern history or my field, nineteenth-century British imperialism in South Asia, have been booming while others have not yet picked up. Nevertheless, at my new institution, close to half of my colleagues have been hired in the past five years and are still on the tenure clock. As SIU is a large public university with a national reputation, I don't think this is uncommon.

This first fact about the current job market did not surprise me, based on the large number of jobs that I could reasonably apply for during the two full years I was out on the market. But the second piece of good news I'm going to tell you did surprise me a little: not only have people heard of our graduate program before, they think rather highly of it. Not only do we study under scholars well regarded in their fields, but the amount of real teaching experience all CUNY students get before going on the market gives us an advantage on the market which, at the very least, evens out the playing field against students from elite Ivy institutions. Case in point: I was a co-finalist for a tenure-track job at the University of Miami with a recent Columbia Ph.D. While she got the job offer in the end rather than me, one of the reasons, it appears, was because they wanted someone who did Italian and Balkan history rather than British imperialism in South Asia. So, it had nothing really to do with me at the end; indeed, I heard second-hand shortly after the job search was over that I did quite well and that it was a tough decision.

Now some of the "bad” news or, perhaps more correctly, some of the things that you are going to have to be aware of if you are going to succeed on the job market. First, the academic job market has been so bad for so long that even despite the recent good news, there will still be many people ahead of you on the job queue who haven't gotten full-time jobs yet, but who are better qualified. You should, therefore, give yourself realistically two to five years to get a tenure-track job. Definitely go out on the market the year before you think you will defend, but treat that year as "practice." Do not expect to get a job that first year. Not only are more and more institutions leerier about hiring ABDs rather than candidates with a doctorate already in hand, but because they get anywhere from 50-200 applications per job, they can usually get away with doing so. In my case, I applied to 64 jobs the first year when I was ABD, got only two interviews - one at the AHA, one in-town at a CUNY community college - and no job offer in the end. This past year, after I had defended my dissertation, I applied to 80 jobs, got 17 offers of interviews at either the AHA, in town, or on the telephone (of which I turned three down), which resulted in three on-campus interviews and one job offer. Even though I had an article under contract before I went on the market the first year and I worked in a field with a lot of job openings, I was only really taken seriously as a job candidate after I defended my dissertation and had a doctorate.

These numbers lead me to my second piece of advice: the odds are against you for any particular job, but you also only need one job. Even the past year when I had a doctorate, I never heard again from close to 80% of the jobs to which I applied. You will want, therefore, to maximize as much as possible the number of jobs you apply for. I did this by being willing to go national in my job search, applying to all positions in British or British imperial history, European history, Indian history, or world history except for overly religious schools and military academies. I realize that this may not be a realistic strategy for some people who need to stay in New York or live in a big city for personal or family reasons. In that case, you should be even more expansive in the types of jobs you apply for, including community colleges. Whatever your situation, you should expand your odds as much as possible, either by applying to a staggering number of positions as in my case, or by giving yourself a longer time frame in which to get a job if you can't apply nationally.

Finally, the job market is a profoundly dehumanizing experience and one for which you will need to grow a very thick skin to protect yourself emotionally. You will have to adopt the paradoxical stance that nothing is about you at the same time that you are personally applying to jobs. The moment I applied for a job, I tried as best I could to forget about it, a task made easier by the fact that I applied to so many positions. The AHA can be a very dehumanizing experience, especially if your first one is the year you go out on the market, as was my case. Most interviews take place in the "pit,” a hotel ballroom they partition into thin dividers where interviewers sit around a tiny table trying to hear what you have to say to them over the loud din and vice-versa. If you're lucky, you will get offered an interview in a suite, but even these are not always ideal: one of my interviews this year took place in a hotel room with an unmade bed! I sat there mortified as two of my interviewers made the bed; needless to say, I didn't get offered an on-campus interview. Even if you make it to the finalist round, you will be asked questions which might make you feel uncomfortable, even "illegal” ones as happened to me at a Catholic university where a professor asked me about my religious affiliation. Then comes the seemingly interminable wait. You often have to infer from prolonged silence that you are no longer under active consideration as most job search committees will wait until they have actually hired someone before they notify everyone else that the job search is over. For all these reasons, you have to grow a very thick skin: almost always decisions on jobs have much less to do with you than with them.

In sum, though, you should go on the job market knowing that your doctoral training at C.U.N.Y. has well prepared you for this. Not everyone has our real-world experience of teaching real classes or has the opportunity to work with some of the leading scholars in our fields. Although I will no longer be sitting in my usual spot in the fifth floor lounge at the Graduate Center, feel free to send me any questions you might have about the job market. I can be reached at: jsramek@yahoo.com. Good luck and I look forward to seeing everyone at future AHAs!

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Investigating U.S. History: New Teaching Tools at CUNY
By David Jaffee

Teachers of United States history at CUNY (and beyond) have a wonderful new resource now available-twelve interactive multimedia modules that encourage undergraduates to "do history" with the growing amount of terrific online archival materials. While we all know that there are wonderful materials out there on the web, the problem is how do we locate first-rate materials and how do we structure engaging ways for our students to use those sources in a sophisticated historical fashion.

Investigating U.S. History - go to http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/investigatinghistory - was funded by a materials development grant from the National Endowment of Humanities and the support of the CUNY Central Office. The project followed upon the U.S. History Initiative (USHI) initiated by Professor David Nasaw; in its two previous stages faculty shared primary sources for the teaching of the U.S. survey and also started to make use of online resources such as Blackboard for their teaching. The NEH project modules used enhanced versions of six USHI activities designed for the U.S. survey courses and also added six new topics.

The entire project has been a collaborative endeavor: the developers met as a team along with Pennee Bender of the American Social History Project/GC, Professor Bill Friedheim, BMCC, and Professor David Jaffee, CCNY/GC. The modules utilize a rich array of resources including Presidential audio tapes from JFK and LBJ, photographs and folk music of the 1930s, and religious tracts from the nineteenth century.

What was equally exciting about the project was the opportunity to gather at annual summer workshops to have the developers demonstrate their modules and also engage in vigorous discussions among the wider circle of faculty who were "field testing” those modules in their classroom throughout CUNY. Almost three dozen classrooms were surveyed and the developers provided with insightful feedback for their module revisions. The result is an extensive resource for students and faculty to explore the new potential of digital history for the variety of topics often covered in the U.S. survey or other undergraduate history courses. Visual materials and exciting ways of using them are a prominent feature of the project.

The Investigating U.S. History project did a public launch last November when Professor Sam Wineburg of Stanford University delighted us with a keynote address about how students learn history; he is the author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. We were also treated to demonstrations of the modules by their developers at the event. Various participants have also made presentations of their work as module developers or field testers at the 2007 Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting and the 2006 International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

The site is now public and ready for use-please look yourself and help us spread the word.

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Faculty News

Professor Harriet Alonso's book Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War will be published this fall by the University of Massachusetts Press. She also wrote the foreword to Jan Maher's Most Dangerous Women: Bringing History to Life Through Readers' Theater (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006).

Professor Beth Baron received a Carnegie Corporation Scholars Program fellowship to work on her project "In their Own Image: Americans and Middle Eastern Muslim Women”

Professor Josh Brown published "The Graphic Fight: New York Political Cartoonists and the Spanish Civil War,” in Fighting Fascism: New York City and the Spanish Civil War, eds. Peter Carroll and James Fernandez (New York: Museum of the City of NewYork/NYU Press, 2007), a catalog accompanying an MCNY exhibition. He is a co-editor (with Georgia Barnhill and Ian Gordon) of "Revolution in Print: Graphics in Nineteenth Century America," special issue of Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 7:3 (April 2007): http://www.common-place.org. He wrote a cartoon commentary entitled "Great Moments in Labor History VII: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 27, 1877," LABOR: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 4:2 (2007). He has also been elected as a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Professor Margaret Crahan published "Rethinking Religion and Civil Society in Cuba,” in Debating Cuban Exceptionalism, eds. Bert Hoffman and Laurence Whitehead (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007). She presented two papers; one entitled "Lest We Forget: the Role of Women in the Formation of the Latin American Studies Association" and another entitled "Creating Freedom Behind Bars: Argentine Female Political Prisoners and the Arts, 1976-1983" at the Latin American Studies 2006 International Congress in San Juan, Puerto Rico on March 15, 2006. She was elected as Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights from 2006-2008, to the Academic Advisory Council of the Washington Office on Latin America in 2006, and to the Advisory Council of The Latin American Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2006, and is currently serving as the President of the Board of Directors of ForCHILDREN through 2007. She was also awarded a PSC/CUNY Collaborative Grant with Professor Alfonso Quiroz for research on civil society for the period 2005-2007.

Professor Jack Diggins has recently published two books which have received widespread attention, Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy and Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History.

Professor Joshua Freeman gave the Herbert Gutman Memorial Lecture on "Gutman's Legacy: Writing the History of Postwar America.” His article on "The Persistence and Demise of Ethnic Union Locals in New York City after World War II” appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of the Journal of American Ethnic History.

Professor David Harvey was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Dagmar Herzog has edited two anthologies; the first is Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006) and the second, co-edited with Guenter Bischof and Anton Pelinka, is entitled Sexuality in Austria (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006). Her book, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), is being published in paperback. The ten-year anniversary edition of her first book, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers), will be published with a new introduction in the Fall 2007. She is also currently writing a book on the rise of the Religious Right in the United States.

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Student News

Sebastian Bartos presented a paper entitled "The Making of a Duke in 13th Century Krakow: Secular and Ecclesiastical Perspectives” at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, England in July 2006. He also wrote the entries for "Cracow bishopric” and "Wloclawek bishopric” in the International Encyclopedia for the Middle Ages - Online. A Supplement to LexMa-Online, ed. Patrick Geary (Turnhout: Brepolis, 2006).

Kristopher Burrell published book reviews of Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America and Unfinished Business: Closing the Racial Achievement Gap in Our Schools in Radical Teacher 77 (Winter 2006). He also wrote the entry "Harlem" for the Encyclopedia of American Urban History, ed. David R. Goldfield (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006). He was the commencement speaker for Central Park East High School in June 2006 and was a participant in "John Hope Franklin Speaks with CUNY Youth”, a panel discussion with Dr. John Hope Franklin at the CUNY Black Male Initiative Conference at John Jay College in April 2006.

Susannah Crowder received the Birgit Baldwin Fellowship in French Medieval History from the Medieval Academy of America. She has an article entitled "Children, Costume, and Identity in the Chester Midsummer Show” published in the Spring 2007 issue of Early Theatre. She will also be presenting two papers in July 2007; one at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, England entitled "Looking Back: Performance and/of the Past in Medieval Metz” and another entitled "Recontextualizing the Performances of the Drogo Sacramentary within Ninth-Century Metz” at the Société Internationale pour l'étude du théâtre médiéval, XIIe Congrès de la SITM in Lille, France.

Rachel Goldman presented a paper entitled "Cultural Constructions of Colored Clothing in Classical through Hellenistic Greek” at the Athens International and Education Research Organization on History in December 2006 in Athens, Greece. The paper will be published in the proceedings of the conference. She was also awarded a grant from the Part-Time Lecturers Fund at Rutgers University.

David Hamilton Golland is now writing his dissertation on the Philadelphia Plan and the origins of affirmative action in the building construction trades and has been awarded a 2007 research grant from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

Carl Lindskoog presented a paper entitled "The Origins and Development of the Movement to Defend the Haitian Boat People” at the International Conference on Caribbean Studies in South Padre, Texas in November 2006. The paper is being published as part of a volume of selected proceedings from the conference with the title "Defending the Haitian Boat People: Origins and Development of a Movement.”

Aleksandra Majstorac-Kobiljski received a grant from the Japanese American Association and the Honjo Foundation to go the Japan for dissertation research.

Paul Naish presented a paper entitled "Indians from the Train Window” at the Warren Susman Conference at Rutgers on March 31, 2007.

Alejandro Quintana organized a panel for the AHA/CLAH 2007 annual meeting in Atlanta, GA entitled "Interest Groups and the Consolidation of Authoritarian States: The Construction of Mexico's Revolutionary Regime.” There he presented a paper entitled "With a Gun in His Hand, Maximino Avila Camacho and the 1941 Challenge to Presidentialism.” On May 10, 2007, he defended his dissertation entitled "The President that Never Was: Maximino Ávila Camacho and the Taming of Caudillismo in Early Post Revolutionary Mexico.”

Ellen Zitani presented a paper entitled "'Her Own Vision of Life': Sibilla Aleramo's Una Donna and Mothering in Late- 19th-Century Italy” at the 10th Annual Association for Research on Mothering Conference at York University in Toronto, Canada in October 2006.

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Recent Alumni News

Laura Chmielewski completed her first year in a tenure track position in early America/Atlantic World at SUNY Purchase. She recently completed several entries for the forthcoming African American National Biography and is working on a chapter for the forthcoming book Hudson 400 as well as revising her dissertation with an eye toward publication.

Scott Gac's book, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform, has been published by Yale University Press.

Marcia Gallo is an Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College. She published Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York: Carrol & Graf, 2006). It was named one of the best books of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle and is a finalist for a 2007 Lambda Literary Foundation Award.

Anne Hayes has recently accepted a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at Fordham University.

Robert Johnson has been promoted to Associate Professor at the Culinary Institute of America, where he teaches History and Cultures of the Americas and Ethics.

Jacob Kramer has accepted a teaching position at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Walter Penrose has accepted a tenure-track job at San Diego State University. He has received a preliminary contract to publish his dissertation from Oxford University Press.

Joe Sramek published an article entitled "'Face Him Like a Briton': Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India, ca. 1800-1875,” Victorian Studies 48 (2006). He has also recently accepted a tenure-track position at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

Martin Woesnner is the Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Frances S. Patai Program on the Nazi Holocaust at the Center for Worker Education at the City College of New York.

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