Graduate Student Biographies
*Listed Alpha-Order, Last name first.
Brown, Kevin C
Status: 2nd year, Ph.D. Student
Education: M.A. in History, Carnegie Mellon University, 2007; B.A. in History and Economics, Bucknell University, 2006.
Interest Area: American economic, labor, and environmental history
Publications: "The Great Strike of 1877" in "Disasters, Accidents, and Crises in American History: A Reference Guide to the Nation’s Most Catastrophic Events." Edited by Ballard C. Campbell. Facts on File Press, forthcoming, 2008.
Awards: Harold W. Miller Prize, Bucknell University Honors Program, 2006; Barbara Wertheimer Prize, New York Labor History Association, 2006.
Advisor: Joe W. Trotter, Jr.
Contact: kcbrown@andrew.cmu.edu
Burke, Laurence
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (1997) The George Washington University, Museum Studies; BS (1991) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Science and Technology Studies.
Interest Area: History of Technology; Social and Technological History of the US Military
Dissertation Title: “What To Do With the Airplane? Determining the Role of the Airplane in the US Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, 1908-1930.” My dissertation looks at the creation of roles for new technology by examining how the different branches of the U.S. Military determined the “best way” to use the newly invented airplane.
Advisor: David A. Hounshell
Publications, Conference Papers: "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency," "The Enola Gay Controversy," and "National Space Program," Encyclopedia of War and American Society, Peter Karsten, ed., SAGE Publications (2005).
"Growing Their Own: The US Navy's Naval Apprentice System 1875-1905," presented at the 2005 conference (Charleston, SC) of the Society for Military History.
Contact: lburke@andrew.cmu.edu
Campet, Fidel Makoto
Status: Ph.D. student
Education: MA (2005) University of New Orleans, History; BA (2000) Southeastern Louisiana University, History & French.
Interest Area: US History, 19 & 20th century
Research Interests: African-American; Labor; Urban
Contact: fcampet@andrew.cmu.edu
Chilton, Katherine
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (2001) University of Sussex, American History; BA (2000) University College London, History
Dissertation Title: Gender, Labor, and Family during Slavery and the Transition to Freedom in the District of Columbia, 1820-1875
Interest Area: United States African American, Women's and Labor History
Research Interests: My dissertation examines the role of urban conditions in shaping the gender, labor, and family relationships of African Americans during the last forty years of slavery and the transition to freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction. By spanning the period between 1820 and 1875, my research presents a new chronological perspective on the transition to freedom that grounds the actions and ambitions of the former slaves in their experiences during slavery and the culture of the urban black community.
Grants: Frances Lewis Fellowship in Gender and Women's Studies, Virginia Historical Society, 2006
Advisor: Tera Hunter
Contact: kchilton@andrew.cmu.edu
Clemente, Deirdre
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (2004) Fashion Institute of Technology, Museum Studies; BA (1996) The Johns Hopkins University, Writing Seminars
Interest Area: My research deals with the interface between clothing trends and social change.
Dissertation Title: “From Snobs to Slobs: Collegiate Culture and the Transformation of the American Wardrobe, 1900-1960. My dissertation studies the dissemination of casual clothing styles and argues that the college campus was the locus for fundamental changes in the country's sartorial standards.”
Publications: Peer-Reviewed Articles:
"Caps, Canes, and Coonskins: Princeton and the Evolution of Collegiate Clothing," Journal of American Culture, Winter 2008;
"Made in Miami: The Development of the Sportswear Industry in South Florida, 1900-1960," Journal of Social History, September 2007;
"Striking Ensembles: The Importance of Clothing on the Picket Line," Labor Studies Journal, Winter 2005.
Book Chapters: "Making the Princeton Man: Collegiate Clothing and Campus Culture, 1900-1920," Display: The Spaces and Places of Fashion, forthcoming Routledge, Fall 2008;
"Dressed for Defiance: Clothing and Public Demonstrations," The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, forthcoming ME Sharpe Spring 2008.
Grants/Awards:
Best Graduate Student Paper, Journal of American Culture, 2007;
Dissertation Grant, Schlesinger Library at Harvard University (Summer 2007);
Research Grant, Friends of Princeton Library (Summer 2006);
Research Grant, Miami Design Preservation League (Winter 2005);
Costume Society in America, Adele Filene Travel Grant (2004)
Advisor: Scott Sandage
Contact: www.deirdreclemente.com
Dasgupta, Rajeshwari
Status: Ph.D. Student
Gao, Yan
Status: Ph.D. Student
Education: MA (2003) Wuhan University, History; BA (2000) Wuhan University, History
Interest Area: Chinese environmental history, Qing history (17th century-early 20th century)
Research Interests: Water control in China, especially water resources management and conflicts; origins and development of environmental consciousness in China; state-society relationship.
Advisor: Donald Sutton
Contact: ygao1@andrew.cmu.edu
Gilmore, Peter
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: BA (1972) University of Bridgeport (Conn.), History
Interest Area: Irish immigration and ethnic identity formation in the United States, late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
Dissertation Title: "Rebels and Revivals: Ulster Immigrants, Western Pennsylvania Presbyterianism and the Formation of Scotch-Irish Identity, 1770-1850."
This project is an attempt to explain how Presbyterian immigrants from the north of Ireland, who initially created specifically "Irish" institutions in western Pennsylvania, eventually adopted a "Scotch-Irish" persona. Crucial to this process-and to changes within Presbyterianism in the region-were high levels of immigration from the north of Ireland and the presence of competing varieties of Presbyterianism.
Advisor: David W. Miller.
Publications: "'Minister of the Devil': Thomas Ledlie Birch, Presbyterian Rebel in Exile" in David A. Wilson and Mark Spencer, ed., Ulster Presbyterianism in the Atlantic World (Dublin, November 2005);
"'If they would come to America': Inheritance as a form of chain migration" in Familia, Ulster Genealogical Review No. 21 (2005);
"Scotch-Irish Identity and Traditional Ulster Music on the Pennsylvania Frontier," The Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 2001).
Contact: p.e.gilmore@att.net
Hagan, Carrie
Status: Ph.D. Student
Education: BA (2002) University of California, Santa Cruz, History of the Americas and Women's Studies
Interest Area: 20th century U.S. cultural history, specifically, sexuality
youth, and wartime
Research Interests: My research looks at the broad changes in sexuality and youth cultures during wartime. Past projects have included examining the domestic venereal disease control project in the U.S. from 1942-1945 through the use of quarantine centers that involuntarily detained young women for treatment, as well as the popular representation of the threat of promiscuity during the war. Other research interests include the development of youth cultures in the mid-twentieth century, with an emphasis on musical subcultural movements, delinquency and the performances of gender, class and racial identities.
Advisor: Steven Schlossman
Contact: csh@andrew.cmu.edu
Kittner, Ruth
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: M.A. History, Carnegie Mellon University, 2002; M.A. History, Duquesne University, 1995; M.A. Mass Communications, University of Denver, 1978; B.A. History, Allegheny College, 1975.
Interest Area: German History, 18th and 19th century; History, identity and memory.
Dissertation Title: Becoming Buff and Blue: Urban Identity Transformation at the End of the Holy Roman Empire, the Case of Überlingen, 1789-1820.
In this project I am studying the ways in which a small urban culture preserved or jettisoned elements of popular practice when the city lost its status as an imperial city and was annexed by the Duchy of Baden in 1802. During this time the city was occupied by nearly every army that participated in the wars against France (1792-1802), and in 1802 occupied by the army of the Duke of Baden.
Advisor: Donna Harsch
Grants: GuSH, April 2005, GuSH, August 2002, History Department, 2002 and 2005.
Contact: kittner@andrew.cmu.edu
Klanderud, Jessica
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (2005) Carnegie Mellon, American History; BA (2001) Western Michigan University, History Education, Social Science
Dissertation Title: "Street Wisdom: African American Cultural and Community Transformations on the Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1918-1970." In this dissertation I will study how African Americans used the street, how those uses changed over time, and what role street space played in community formation within African American neighborhoods.
Advisor: Joe W. Trotter
Conference Papers: 2005 American Historical Association Conference Paper "Challenges presented Teaching Students to Understand Change over Time"
Contact: jklanderud@cmu.edu
McMahon, Cian
Status: Ph.D. candidate (A.B.D.)
Education: MA (2002) University College Dublin, C20th Irish History; BA (2000) University of Manitoba, History
Fields of Interest: Modern Ireland; antebellum United States; migration, race, religion, nationalism, Irish foreign affairs
Dissertation Title: "Did the Irish ‘Become White’? Race and Migration in Ireland, Australia, and the United States, 1845-1877"
Cian McMahon is a PhD candidate (A.B.D.) in Irish and U.S. Social and Cultural History. His dissertation examines how racial identity was experienced and expressed by Irish people at home and abroad in the mid-nineteenth century. By analyzing change over space and time, the study challenges the current scholarly consensus that Irish self-perceptions were dominated by “whiteness”.
Advisor: David W. Miller
Reading Committee: Scott A. Sandage, Richard Maddox
Selected Publications:
“Irish newspapers and the Abyssinian crisis, 1934-5”, Irish Historical Studies (forthcoming).
“Struggling against oppression’s detestable forms: R.R. Madden and Irish anti-slavery, 1833 – 1846”, History Ireland, vol. 15, no. 3 (2007).
“The Irish Catholic press and the Abyssinian Crisis”, History Review, vol. xiii (2002).
“Eoin O’Duffy’s Blueshirts and the Abyssinian Crisis”, History Ireland, vol. 10, no. 2 (2002).
“Loose cannons: the Irish domestic opposition and the Abyssinian crisis”, Pages: UCD Faculty of Arts postgraduate journal, vol. 8 (2001).
Awards/Fellowships/Grants:
“Hibernian Research Grant” (CUSHWA Center for the Study of American Catholicism, 2007).
“GuSH grant” (Carnegie Mellon University, Graduate Student Association, 2007).
“Susan Householder Van Horn Scholarship” (Carnegie Mellon University, Division of University Advancement, 2007).
Paul & Anna Kokor Award (St. Andrew’s College, University of Manitoba, 1998).
Peter Taraskis Memorial Award (St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, 1998).
Conferences:
(Respondent) “National Identities, Transnational Debates”, Boundaries and Alliances Graduate Student Conference, University of Pittsburgh/C.M.U. (April 2007).
(Presenter) “The Fusion of So Many Races’: Young Ireland, Migration, and Race in the Atlantic
World, 1842-1855”, Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World, “The Irish in the Atlantic World Conference”, Charleston, South Carolina (27 February – 2 March 2007).
(Presenter) “‘An Apprenticeship to the Cause of General Freedom’: Richard Robert Madden, Irish nationalism, and Atlantic anti-slavery, 1833-1842” (C.M.U. Department of History Annual Graduate Student Forum, April 2005).
Book Reviews:
Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery, and Anti-Slavery, 1612-1865 (2006) in Foilsiú: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 6 (2007).
Teaching Experience:
Teaching Assistant, Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University, 2003-present.
Tutor, Department of Modern History, University College Dublin, Ireland, 2001/2002.
Professional Experience:
Research Assistant, Public History Inc., Winnipeg, Canada, 2001.
Contact: cianm@andrew.cmu.edu
Mock, Michelle
Status: Ph.D. Student
Education: MA (2005) Carnegie Mellon University; BA (2003) Bloomsburg University
Interest Area: My current research interests lie in the fields of the American history of consumer culture, technology, and gender. My dissertation research analyzes the market process from product design to home use of cooking technologies, such as the refrigerator, stove and toaster, but also cabinetry and canning methods. It is a historical analysis of the sum of the efforts of and interaction between manufacturers and industrial designers, product testers, advertisers, home economists and consumers to create new devices for American kitchens in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Grants/Awards/Fellowships: GuSH grant: Carnegie Mellon University, Graduate Student Association
Advisor: Scott A. Sandage
Contact: mking1@andrew.cmu.edu
Morgan, Jason
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (2003) Carnegie Mellon University, History; BA (2002) University of North Carolina, Greensboro, History
Interest Area: European history; radical politics; political violence
Research Interests: I am interested in political violence, state responses to political violence, the construction of “terrorism,” and the complex relationships between practitioners of political violence and the communities they claim to represent. My dissertation research will be on Northern Ireland.
Contact: jtmorgan@andrew.cmu.edu
Moxley, Shera
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Nash, Mary Louise
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (2002) Carnegie Mellon University, History; BS (2001) Illinois State University, African American Studies and English
Interest Area: African American Urban History, History of Music and Popular Culture
Research Interests: My dissertation examines African American urban and labor history through the lens of music. It is a community study of Chicago, using culture, specifically blues and rap music, to understand the black urban experience from the Great Migration through de-industrialization. Imbedded in my study, is the examination of music as labor and its importance to understanding broader working class culture. I also explore issues of identity, class and ethnicity.
Dissertation Title: “Living for the City: Music, Race and Labor in Chicago, 1930-1980.”
Publications: "Birmingham Church Bombing," "Congress for Racial Equality" and "Kent State Killings," in Postwar America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History, forth coming M.E. Sharpe, 2005; "Marian Anderson," "Billie Holiday," "Woody Guthrie," and "Pretty Boy Floyd," in The Encyclopedia of the Great Depression, Macmillian Reference USA, 2004.
Associations: Board Member, 2006-present, LAWCHA (Labor and Working Class History Association).
Advisor: Joe W. Trotter
Contact: mnash@andrew.cmu.edu
Pryor, Russell
Status: 1st year, Ph.D. Student
Education: Columbus State University 2007, B.A. in History
Interest Area: Labor, Race, Social Movements, and the American South
Contact: jrpryor@andrew.cmu.edu
Ramey, Jessie
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (2002) Sarah Lawrence College, Women's History; BA (1991) Carnegie Mellon University, History
Dissertation Title: Contested Childhood: Black and White Orphans, Poor Families, and Institutional Childcare in Pittsburgh, 1877-1929
Interest Area: U.S. Women's History, 19th and early 20th century, gender, race, children, families, child care
Research Interests: My dissertation explores institutional childcare in Pittsburgh from 1877-1939 through a comparison of the United Presbyterian Orphan’s Home and the Home for Colored Children. The vast majority of “orphans” in these two institutions actually had one or even two living parents, often struggling under severe financial crisis to care for their children. This project conceptualizes orphanages first and foremost as institutional childcare, emphasizing poor families’ use of the organizations to care for their children, and their agency in shaping those institutions through their use.
Advisor: Tera Hunter
Publications:
"The Bloody Blonde and the Marble Woman: Gender and Power in the Case of Ruth Snyder," Journal of Social History, 37, no. 3 (2004): 625-650.
"Involving Faculty at Research Universities in Undergraduate Research," with Janet Stocks and Barbara Lazarus. (Council on Undergraduate Research, 2004)
"The Rat-Faced Woman and the Boo-hooing Apron Throwers: The Case of Martha Place," The Westchester Historian, 78, no. 1 (2002): 15-30.
"Public Life: Citizenship and Women's Rights," Encyclopedia of Women in American History vol.2, Joyce O. Appleby, Eileen K. Cheng, Joanne L. Goodwin, eds. (New York: Sharpe Reference, 2001).
Carnegie Mellon’s “Ethics in Research” Program (CUR Quarterly, 1998)
Planning an Undergraduate Research Symposium (CUR Quarterly, 1996)
Building From the Ground Up: Administrator Roles in Developing a Campus-Wide Undergraduate Research Program (CUR Quarterly, 1995)
Conference Papers:
“A Historical Overview of Women and Capital Punishment in the United States” (Dead Man Walking: Law, Culture, and Capital Punishment conference, Pittsburgh, 2004)
“The Rat-Faced Woman and the Boo-hooing Apron Throwers: The Case of Martha Place” (Researching New York Conference, 2001)
“Undergraduate Research at a Research Institution: New Models for Networking” (Council on Undergraduate Research National Conference, 1998)
“Support Programs for Undergraduate, Graduate, and Faculty Women on a Shoe String” (Women in Higher Education International Conference, 1995)
“Designing, Implementing and Sustaining Undergraduate Management Research Experiences” (The Institute of Management Sciences/Operations Research Society of America National Conference, 1994)
“Undergraduate Research: Learning through Doing” (National Honor Society/Phi Beta Kappa National Meeting, 1994)
Awards: Gerda Lerner Award in Women’s History, Sarah Lawrence College
Contact: ramey@cmu.edu
Robertson, John
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (1999) Carnegie Mellon University, History; AB (1986) University of Chicago, History.
Interest Area: Ph.D. Oral Fields: Modern Chinese History, Family History and Historical Demography, 19th Century American Social History, World History
Dissertation Title: Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Opportunity?: Civil War reenlistment and the Right to Rise
Advisor: Scott Sandage
Publications, Grants and Awards: "Re-enlistment Pattern of civil War Soldiers," Journal of Interdisciplinary History - Volume 32, Number 1, Summer 2001, pp. 15-35
Contact: jgr@andrew.cmu.edu
Robick, Brian
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (1998) Columbia University, History; BA (1997) Carnegie Mellon University, Social History; BFA (1997) Carnegie Mellon University, Music Theory and Composition
Dissertation Title: Blight: An Examination of the Development of a Contested Concept in Pittsburgh and Hamilton, 1945 – 1990
Interest Area: US & Canadian Urban, Social, and Planning History, twentieth century
Research Interests: My research examines the rhetoric deployed in public debates about urban redevelopment, renewal, and anti-vice campaigns in industrial cities in the Americas. I also explore the interactions between planning bodies and urban communities that form with or without propinquity, including African-American, Latino/a, Asian-American, and GLBT communities.
Conference Papers: Society for American City and Regional Planning History. “Urban Blight and Community Reaction to the Gateway Center Redevelopment Project, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1946-1950,” Portland, Maine, October, 27, 2007.
Grants: Travel Grant, Society for American City and Regional Planning History, 2007
Awards:
Ludwig Schaefer Award in Social History, Carnegie Mellon University, 1997
Richard Hofstadter Fellowship, Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 1997-1998
Best Paper, Graduate Session, Phi Alpha Theta Western Pennsylvania Regional Conference, 2004
Student Research Prize, Society for American City and Regional Planning History, 2007
Advisor: Joel Tarr
Contact: br24@andrew.cmu.edu
Seibert, Lisa
Status: 1st year, Ph.D. student
Education: M.Edu in Adult Education, Lutheran University of Applied Sciences (Nuremberg, Germany), 2005; BA in History and Asian Studies Certificate, University of Pittsburgh, 1999
Interest area: Modern German gender and social history
Advisor: Donna Harsch
Contact: llseiber@andrew.cmu.edu
Simpson, Andrew
Status: 1st year, Ph.D. student
Education: MA (History) American University, Washington, DC 2006; BA (History and Conflict Studies) DePauw University 2002
Interest area: 20th Century U.S. History with a focus in urban history and public health.
Contact: atsimpso@andrew.cmu.edu
Spellman, Susan V.
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (2001) Miami University, History; BA (1999) Kent State University, History
Interest Area: General U.S. 19th and 20th centuries; business and consumer culture; commercial spaces
Dissertation Title: “Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business Culture, 1860-1930.”
This project draws on social and cultural perspectives to analyze the foundations of modern American business and society. I argue that independent grocers, archetypal small businessmen, have been overlooked as a source of innovation in the formation, methods, and operation of the grocery trade. “Corner” grocers built establishments and organizations that were progressive in structure, yet local in character, a reflection of both their community settings and national influences. As my work demonstrates, grocers used business and personal networks to help them acculturate to the increasingly bureaucratic world of “big business,” while responding to local-level challenges posed by competition and customers.
Advisor: Scott A. Sandage
Publications:
• Book Review. The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America, by Richard M. Fried. In Business History Review, vol. 80, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 564-66.
• Book Review. Boosters, Hustlers, and Speculators: Entrepreneurial Culture and the Rise of Minneapolis and St. Paul, 1849-1883, by Jocelyn Wills. In Journal of Social History 39.2 (2005): 570-72.
• "All the Comforts of Home: The Domestication of the Service Station Industry, 1920-1940," Journal of Popular Culture 37, no. 3 (2004): 463-477.
Conference Papers:
• Organization of American Historians. “Schooling the Shopper: ‘Corner’ Grocery Stores and the Making of Modern Consumers, 1880-1920,” and organized panel, “Designed to Sell: Grocery Stores, Customers, and the Rise of Self-Service, 1880- 1960,” Minneapolis, Minnesota, 29 March 2007
Grants:
• Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship, National Museum of American History, Behring Center, 2006-2007.
• Alfred D. Chandler Jr. Traveling Fellowship in Business History. Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. 2006.
• Littleton-Griswold Grant for Research in Legal History. American Historical Association. 2005.
• New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Grant. Massachusetts Historical Society, 2005-2006.
Awards:
• Graduate Student Teaching Award. Carnegie Mellon University, 2008.
• Goldman Award for Teaching Excellence (co-winner). Department of History. Carnegie Mellon University, 2008.
• 2005 Russel B. Nye Award for Best Article published in Journal of Popular Culture
Website: www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/sspellma/
Contact: sspellma@andrew.cmu.edu
Struthers, David
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (2003) Carnegie Mellon University, History; BA (2001) University of California, Riverside, History major, Marxist studies minor.
Dissertation Title: The World in a City: Transnational and Inter-Racial Organizing in Los Angeles, 1900-1930
Interest Areas: Labor, Immigration, Race, Urban History, Transnational Social Movements, Social Theory
Research Interests: The process of constructing and maintaining alliances in the expanding multi-ethnic and multi-racial metropolis of early twentieth century Los Angeles is the subject of my research. Considerable evidence exists of international and inter-racial solidarities within Los Angeles’s working class. My dissertation argues that these two lines of solidarity fused and comprised a crucial component of working class identity in Los Angeles.
Advisor: Joe W. Trotter, Jr.
Website: www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/dstruthe/
Contact: dstruthe@andrew.cmu.edu
Suditu, Oana
Status: Ph.D. Student
Dissertation Title: “Collective Farm and Peasant Household Economy in the Stalinist 1930s.”
Advisor: Wendy Goldman
Vinsel, Lee Jared
Status: Ph.D. Student
Education: BA (2003) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Interest Area: History of Technology
Research Interests: While at CMU, I will be working with the Climate Decision Making Center on a study of how environmental uncertainties shape and limit our ability to make policy decisions. Particularly, I will be examining the history of energy technologies and why specific technologies come to dominate in their given era.
Advisor: David A. Hounshell
Contact: lvinsel@andrew.cmu.edu
Weigel, John
Status: 1st year Ph.D. Student
Education: Albion College 1986, B.A. in History and German; University of Michigan 1989 J.D.; Penn State 1994, M.A. in European history since 1500
Interest Area(s): Germany since 1945; development policy
Publications: “‘Americans Shall Rule America!’ The Know Nothing Party in Cumberland County,” Cumberland County History, Vol. 15, No. 1, Summer 1998, pp. 3-18.
“Free Soil: The Birth of the Republican Party in Cumberland County,” Cumberland County History, Vol. 17, No. 1, Summer 2000, pp. 36-57.
“The Democratic Alternative to Free Soil, 1847-1860,” Cumberland County History, Vol. 17, No. 2, Winter 2000, pp. 103-18.
Contact: jweigel@andrew.cmu.edu
Williams, Germaine
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: MA (2002) Carnegie Mellon University, Social and Cultural History; MAM (2001) Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University, Arts Management; BA (1995) Morehouse College, History
Interest Areas: African American Urban History; Arts and Cultural Policy; Civil Society; History and Memory
Dissertation Title: “(Re)Culturing the City: Race, Urban Development, and Arts Policy in Chicago, 1943-2009.”
The dissertation investigates the development of Chicago's nonprofit cultural sector since World War II. Concerned with the complexities of race, class, and the politics of urban renewal, it takes the activism of African Americans in the nonprofit cultural sector as an opportunity to raise critical questions about arts policymaking, the use of arts initiatives to define "community," and the social impact of nonprofit arts programs on urban communities.
Advisors: Joe Trotter and Judith Schachter
Contact: germaine@andrew.cmu.edu
Zimmerman, Patrick
Status: Ph.D. Candidate
Education: B.A. Biology (2003 University of Pennsylvania), B.A. European History (2003 University of Pennsylvania), M.A. Social and Cultural History (2006 Carnegie Mellon University)
Dissertation Title: “Domesticated Nationalism: Asturian Regionalism and Cultural Politics since the Spanish Transition, 1974-2008.”
Research Interests: 20th-Century Spain, Asturias, regional nationalist and separatist movements; the Spanish Transition from dictatorship to democracy; cultural politics and the politics of language; tourism; the mass media and politics; the role of sport in local or national identity formation (particularly soccer); the construction of Europe and the European Union.
Publications: “Review de Conceyu Bable nes Fueyes Informatives y Conceyu Bable n'Asturias Semanal.” Erada: Revista d'Historia Contemporánea d'Austries, no 2. Forthcoming.
Conference Papers: Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, Fort Worth, TX. April 3-6, 2008. “The Conceyu Bable, Asturian Regionalism, and Language Politics during the Spanish Transition, 1974-1985”
Boundaries and Alliances in the Americas and Beyond, Pittsburgh, PA. April 14, 2007. “'The Cradle of Spain?' The Conceyu Bable, Asturian Nationalism, and Language Politics during the Spanish Transition, 1974-1985.”
Carnegie Mellon University Graduate Forum, Pittsburgh, PA. January 17, 2008. “Nationalism and Language Politics during the Spanish Transition: Asturias, 1974-1985.”
Grants: Dissertation grant, Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, 2008.
GuSH grant, 2008
Research grant, CMU History Dept., 2006.
Awards: B.A. cum laude (2003 Pennsylvania)
Advisor: Richard Maddox
Contact: pkzimmer@cmu.edu