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American Social History Project • Center for Media and Learning

Bridging Historias Conference Presenters

  • Aránzazu Borrachero, Queensborough Community College, CUNY
    Aránzazu Borrachero is Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures of Queensborough Community College, CUNY. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her areas of specialization include Spanish for Heritage Speakers, Critical Pedagogy, and Spanish Cultural and Gender Studies. She has published numerous articles and two books: a critical and annotated edition of Clara Catalina Ramírez de Guzmán, Spanish poet of the 17th century, in collaboration with Karl McLaughlin (Obra poética, Editora Regional de Extremadura, 2010); and a study in literary criticism, Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Women’s Fiction (Pliegos, 2011). She is currently working on a web-based oral history project about women’s lives during the Spanish dictatorship. She is also developing a telecollaboration project for heritage speakers as part of a Department of Education grant.

  • Danelle Bower, Reading Area Community College
    Danelle Bower is an Associate Professor in the Social Sciences Division at Reading Area Community College. Danelle earned her Bachelor of Social Work from Kutztown University and her Master of Social Work from Washington University with an emphasis on Social and Economic Development. She is currently a third year doctoral student at Widener University. Her proposed area for dissertation research is Latinos in Higher Education. As a social worker Danelle has worked with various client populations and served as an agency administrator.

  • Linda McDonald Carter, Essex County College
    Linda McDonald Carter is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Paralegal Studies Program at Essex County College. She received her Bachelor of Arts in political science and Juris Doctor degrees from Rutger’s University. Linda became an active citizen early, protesting the Vietnam War at the age of twelve. As a resident of Scudder Housing Projects in Newark, NJ, she vowed to become an attorney to help her community navigate the justice system and to make a difference. During law school she worked for United States Senator Bill Bradley. In California she led various grassroots and political initiatives. In 1996, she opened one of the first African American women law firms in New Jersey, Richardson, Powell and Carter, LLC. Linda is a member of the NJ State Bar Association, the American Association for Paralegal Education, the New Jersey Association of Criminal Justice Educators, and VOCAL (Voices of Change and Liberation).

  • John S. Christie, Capital Community College
    John S. Christie is a professor of English at Capital Community College in Hartford, CT. He is the co-editor of the textbook anthology of Latino/Hispanic literature called Latino Boom, which came out in 2005. He earned his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Connecticut and his dissertation was published as Latino Fiction and the Modernist Imagination in 1995. His first M.A. degree in ESL from Columbia University: Teacher’s College led to two years teaching in Bogotá, Colombia and Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. He’s been interested in interdisciplinary Latino Studies ever since and has been teaching Latino Literature at Capital for over twenty years, both on campus and on line.

  • Craig R. Coenen, Mercer County Community College
    Craig R. Coenen is a professor of history who also serves as Chairperson of the Social Science Department and Director of the Holocaust and Genocide Resource Center at Mercer County Community College. Dr. Coenen obtained a Ph.D. in history from Lehigh University and has authored From Sandlots to the Super Bowl: The National Football League, 1920-1967, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), and co-edited American Presidential Campaigns and Elections, (M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2003). He has written articles and book reviews and delivered papers on topics ranging from “James Bond” to “Global Forces and the Future of the Latin American City.”

  • Jodi Corbett, Reading Area Community College
    Jodi Corbett is Director of Academic Partnerships since January 2014 and has been a member of the Communication, Arts, and Humanities faculty since 2008 at Reading Area Community College. She hast taught developmental writing, composition, literature, and speech. She holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Kutztown University. She is also a poet, sharing her work through her participation in the regional group, Berks Bards. Her poems have been published in Lehigh Literary Review, Avalon Literary Review, Eunoia Review, Mused:BellaOnline Literary Review, Red River Review. Her first chapbook Fried Eggs and Un-edged Lawns (2006) is available through Foothills Publishing. She is seeking a publisher for her first full-length poetry collection, Home of Stone.

  • Daniel D’Arpa, Temple University
    Daniel D’Arpa is a doctoral candidate, in the Department of Spanish Literature and Linguistics at Temple University in Philadelphia; his dissertation is a sociolinguistic study of Dominican Spanish in the diaspora. Daniel currently teaches Spanish and beginner French at Mercer County Community College In New Jersey, where he also serves students as the Coordinator of the World Languages Department.

  • Gianna Durso-Finley, Mercer County Community College
    Dr. Gianna Durso-Finley holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University and an A.B. (Cum Laude) in Anthropology from Princeton University. For four years, she served as the Director of Institutional Research, Assessment and Planning. She is currently Professor of Sociology and Assistant Dean for American Honors at Mercer County Community College. She has led several study abroad trips to Costa Rica and will be leading a trip to Cuba in May, 2015. She hopes to use her work with Bridging Historias to inform her teaching and assist other faculty with incorporating Latin@ history and culture into their courses.

  • Megan Elias, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
    Megan Elias is the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. She is a U.S. cultural historian who writes about food and gender and is the author of Stir it Up: Home Economics in American Culture (Penn Press, 2008) and Lunch: the History of a Meal (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

  • Samantha Gross, Bucks County Community College
    Samantha Gross is a part-time faculty member at Bucks County Community College in Newtown, PA. She received her BA in History from Brandeis University. She has Masters Degrees from Clemson University and Carnegie Mellon University. Samantha is an award-winning professor who teaches American and African-American history, as well as an interdisciplinary course called the Integration of Knowledge. Samantha has presented at several local, regional and national conferences on technology and media in the classroom.

  • María Castro Gruber, Reading Area Community College
    María Castro Gruber is an Adjunct Spanish instructor at Reading Area Community College. For over a decade, María has provided services to the Latino Community of Berks County. She completed her Psychology degree at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and earned her master’s equivalency in Clinical Psychology at Centro de Salud Mental del Este, Caracas, Venezuela. Her academic interests in the Spanish language and cultures led her to complete master’s level studies in “Máster en Lingüistica aplicada a la enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera” (Linguistic Applied to Spanish as a Foreign Language Teaching) through the Universidad de Jaén, Spain.

  • Carlos Hernández, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
    Carlos Hernandez is Associate Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. His recent academic work has centered around game-based learning; besides his national presentations and participation in grant-funded studies on the topic, he is a co-founder of the CUNY Games Network and the CUNY Games Festival. He is also the lead writer and a game designer on Meriwether, a computer roleplaying game about the Lewis and Clark expedition. His Ph.D. focused on Creative Writing; primarily focused on science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism, he has published over thirty works of fiction poetry and drama. Abecedarium, a novel he co-wrote with Davis Schneiderman, was published in 2008. His book of short stories, The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria, is forthcoming in January 2016.

  • Sarah Jakub, Bucks County Community College
    Sarah Jakub graduated from Brandeis University and then worked at the University of Pennsylvania as part of their clinical research team assisting patients suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease. She received her Master¹s Degree in sociology from Temple University where she worked as a teaching assistant in classes such as American Ethnicity, Statistics and Sociology of Race and Racism. Sarah then moved to New York City where she attended CUNY Law School and received her Juris Doctor degree. For the past four years, she has been teaching sociology and criminal justice full-time at Bucks County Community College. She teaches Introduction to Sociology, Criminology, Criminal Evidence, Criminal Law and Introduction to Juvenile Justice. Sarah is also the Coordinator for the Criminal Justice Department where she participates in many facets of the College life, helping students succeed in their hopes and dreams.

  • Peter Kolozi, Bronx Community College, CUNY
    Peter Kolozi is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Department of Social Science at Bronx Community College, CUNY. His research areas of interest include political theory and political economy, with particular focus on issues of economic inequality and power. He is a member of the editorial collective for Dollars & Sense. His forthcoming book, Conservatives Against Capitalism will be published by Columbia University Press in Fall 2015.

  • Juleyka Lantigua-Williams, Naugatuck Valley Community College
    Juleyka Lantigua-Williams is an assistant professor of English at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, CT. She earned an M.S. in Print Journalism from Boston University, graduated from the Radcliffe Publishing Course at Harvard University, and is a Fulbright Scholar (Spain). She was a nationally-syndicated columnist with The Progressive magazine’s Media Project for fifteen years. Her work has appeared in The Simon and Schuster Short Prose Reader, Once Upon a Cuento, and Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. In 2013, she co-edited Confluencia in the Valley, a prose and poetry anthology. Most recently, she volunteers as Communications Director for TEDxFulbright.

  • Marci Littlefield, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
    Marci Littlefield is an Assistant Professor in Sociology and Ethnic Studies at the Borough of Manhattan Community College CUNY. She received a Masters degree in Public Affairs from the Lyndon B. Johnson Graduate School of Public Affairs and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of specialization include race and ethnicity, gender and family. She has publications on Black women in the media, their roles as mothers and gender and racial groups as a source of support for domestic violence. She also has authored several publications on the role of the African American church in community and economic development. She is currently using visual culture in her teaching and her most recent research looks at the visual culture of the Civil War and Black women’s activities in the South.

  • Marguerite Lukes, International Network for Public Schools and LaGuardia Community College, CUNY
    Marguerite Lukes, Project R.I.S.E., International Network for Public Schools and Department of Education and Language Acquisition, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. Marguerite Lukes studies issues of educational equity, access and success for immigrant and language minority students in the United States. She holds a doctorate from New York University, where she conducted research on educational experiences of immigrant high school non-completers and designed professional development for schools serving immigrant students across New York State. Marguerite currently oversees Project R.I.S.E., a five-year federally-funded school reform initiative that support higher levels of achievement for English language learners (ELLs) in two public high schools in New York City and San Francisco.

  • Maria V. Luna, Essex County College
    Maria V. Luna received her MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University. Shortly after, she embarked on a yearlong teaching experience, volunteering in the north coast of the Dominican Republic with The DREAM Project. Ms. Luna is now a humanities instructor at various colleges in New Jersey, including Essex County College, Kean University and NJIT. She is the editor of LatinTRENDS Magazine and founder of DelenArts.com—A global Workshop for Culture, Arts and Letters. Ms. Luna is often invited to host cultural events, and was a featured panelist at the 2014 National Dominican Student Conference at Harvard University.

  • Arianna Martinez, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY
    Arianna Martinez is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at LaGuardia Community College. She received her PhD from Rutgers University in urban planning and geography. She has analyzed the criminalization of Latino immigrant communities in municipalities where both space and citizenship are hotly contested. Martinez’s current scholarship focuses on national immigration policy, the urban transformation and empowerment of Latino communities, and LGBTQ immigrant enclaves. She is happy to call Queens her home.

  • Patricia Mathews-Salazar, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
    Patricia Mathews-Salazars is a professor of Anthropology in the Social Sciences Department at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She is currently the Director at the Center for Ethnic Studies at BMCC and a member of the doctoral faculty in the Anthropology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. Professor Mathews has been teaching a range of courses from Introduction to Anthropology, Introduction to Human Geography, to courses in Women Studies and on the Anthropology of Latin America, as well as doctoral courses on Ethnicity and Nationalism and the Anthropology of Human Rights. Her research examines the impact of tourism and cultural heritage policies on indigenous groups focusing on the development of women and indigenous rights in the Andes of Cusco, Peru and in rural northwest Argentina. Professor Mathews has extensive experience in coordinating faculty development programs at CUNY.

  • Karen Miller, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY
    Karen Miller is Professor of History at LaGuardia Community College. Her book, Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism and Black Activism in Interwar Detroit, came out from NYU press in 2014. She has been a faculty fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and the Center for Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a visiting scholar at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan. Her current project focuses on the transition to independence in the Philippines, between 1934, when the U.S. Congress set a timetable for independence and July 4, 1946, when the Philippines became a legally sovereign nation. Professor Miller teaches Latino history and US-Latin American relations in her US history classes.

  • Jerry Millevoi, Bucks County Community College
    Jerry Millevoi has been an adjunct instructor of history at Bucks County Community College in Newtown, PA since 2008 where he teaches “U.S. History: Young America,” “US History: Modern America” and “The American Indian.” He has also developed course material for “Interpreting History Through Cinema” and “The Photographic Image in American History.” Both of these courses investigate motion pictures and still images as historical texts and examine how cinema and photographs create a window for viewing American culture, politics and society.

  • José Luis Morín, John Jay College, CUNY
    Professor in the Latin American and Latina/o Studies Department. His areas of academic specialization include domestic and international criminal justice, civil rights and international human rights law, race and ethnicity in the United States, Latina/o studies, and Latin American studies. In addition to his career as a CUNY faculty member, Professor Morín has held numerous administrative positions within the City University of New York. Most recently, Professor Morín served as the founding Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost of Stella and Charles Guttman Community College (formerly The New Community College) where he was responsible for establishing and developing both academic and student affairs at this new college dedicated to innovation and high-impact, student-centered practices. Prior to becoming Provost, Professor Morín served as Director of the Puerto Rican Research and Public Policy Initiative, a special project of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY, that focused on the study of stateside Puerto Ricans.

  • Andrea Morrell, Guttman Community College, CUNY
    Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Guttman Community College CUNY, Andrea Morrell teaches interdisciplinary first year courses and courses in the A.A. in the Urban Studies program. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2012 and is working on a book, based on her dissertation research, about the political economy of prison expansion in upstate New York.

  • Lisandro Pérez, John Jay College, CUNY
    Professor and Chair of Latin American Latina/o Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. He served for twenty-five years on the faculty of Florida International University in Miami where he founded and directed its Cuban Research Institute. He also served as the editor of the journal Cuban Studies from 1999 to 2004 and is the co-author of the book The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States, (2002).

  • Yadira Perez Hazel, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
    Yadira Perez Hazel is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the Center of Ethnic Studies, Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY) and an oral historian at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, NYC. She completed her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Virginia with a dissertation entitled “Blanqueamiento (whitening) in Paradise: Nation-building, Japanese Immigration and Race in the Dominican Republic.” From 2010-2011, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Waikato University and Auckland University in New Zealand and, before that, a qualitative researcher on several public health programs and research projects for the Latino Commission on Aids in NYC. She has published on issues of belonging, immigration and racism in the Dominican Republic and is currently working on several oral history projects on the Lower East Side and in the Bronx.

  • Julia Petitfrere, Naugatuck Valley Community College
    Julia Petitfrere is an assistant professor of English at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, CT. Julia earned her BA in English from Fairfield University and her MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She teaches college-level English and developmental writing.

  • John H. Petito, Bucks County Community College
    John H. Petito is Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Bucks County Community College where he has taught US History and Political Science. He has an MA in History from NYU and a JD from Suffolk University Law School in Boston. He entered the world of higher education following careers in government, law and documentary production. The Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences is a leader in experiential education and sponsors a social science club that takes students on about 40 trips/semester to neighborhoods, museums and landmarks between NYC and Washington DC. John.Petito@bucks.edu

  • Charles Pinderhughes, Essex County College
    Charles Pinderhughes, Ph.D. currently teaches Sociology at Essex County College in Newark NJ. With his fields of specialization including Racial and Ethnic Relations, Social Movements, and Historical Sociology, his recent research has focused on the reassessment and application of internal colonialism theory to present day conditions both in the USA and internationally. Before earning his doctorate at Boston College in 2009, he was a longtime community organizer who participated in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.

  • Crystal Rodriguez, Bronx Community College, CUNY
    Crystal Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice in the Department of Social Sciences at Bronx Community College, CUNY. She holds a PhD. in Criminal Justice with a focus on juveniles from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Crystal’s goal is to transform the juvenile justice system to create the most fair and just process regardless of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, etc. She started teaching to influence the next generation of criminal justice professionals with the hope of seeking justice in a system that does not always serve the best interest of all groups.

  • Ivelisse Rodriguez, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
    Ivelisse Rodriguez has published or has work forthcoming in All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, Boston Review, Kweli, the Bilingual Review, and other publications. She has received fellowships to attend Las Dos Brujas Workshop, Summer Literary Seminar in Kenya. Voices of America (VONA) workshop, and the Writers of Americas Conference in Cuba. In December 2010, she was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes for her fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College, and a B.A. in English from Columbia. She has finished a collection of short stories entitled Love War Stories and is working on a novel about salsa music.

  • Vicki L. Ruiz, Conference Keynote Speaker
    Award-winning scholar and Distinguished Professor of History and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Ruiz is the author or editor of several books, including Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950, (1987); From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (1998); with Ellen Carol DuBois, Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in U.S. Women’s History (4th edition, 2008); and, with Virginia Sánchez Korrol, Latinas in the U.S.: A Historical Encyclopedia (2006). A past president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Studies Association, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, she is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians and on the advisory board of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

  • Virginia Sánchez Korrol, Visiting Scholar
    Dr. Virginia Sanchez Korrol, Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, is Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Best known for her monograph, “From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City,” she has also published six books on the history of U.S. Puerto Rican and Latina women. Among these are: “Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography and Community,” and the acclaimed three volume “Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia,” both co-edited with Dr. Vicki Ruiz. Sanchez Korrol’s historical novel,”Feminist and Abolitionist: The Story of Emilia Casanova,”(2012)has led to her current project on Puerto Rican exiles in New York before 1898. In 2012, Dr. Sanchez Korrol became the first Latina scholar to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Inter-University Program on Latino Research.

  • Nichole Marie Shippen, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY
    Nichole Marie Shippen is an Assistant Professor in the Social Science Department at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University in 2011. Prior to her employment at LaGuardia, she served as the Associate Director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy and was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Political Theory during the 2011-2012 academic year at Rutgers. Prior to Rutgers, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Ohio University where she also taught courses in political theory for the Political Science Department. Her first book, Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom (Palgrave 2014) reconsiders discretionary time as a measure of freedom through the concept of temporal autonomy as developed through the Aristotelian-Marxist and critical theory traditions. Her research is further enriched by the respective contributions of feminist, post-colonial, and critical race theory.

  • Amy Traver, Queensborough Community College, CUNY
    Amy E. Traver is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Queensborough Community College. She is interested in intersections of identity, race/ethnicity, gender, and (dis)abilities in contemporary American families and educational institutions. Traver has published articles in such venues as Qualitative Sociology, Sociological Focus, International Journal of Sociology of the Family, and The Journal of Education Policy. Traver is also interested in community college pedagogies. In 2013 she published an article in Internet and Higher Education (with Volchok, Bidjerano, and Shea) on community college students’ success in partially-online courses, and in 2014 she edited (with Perel Katz) Service-Learning at the American Community College: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan). Traver’s two new projects involve the academic pathways of former foster youth and community college efforts to connect coursework to professional work.

  • Alex Trillo
    Alex Trillo, Saint Peter’s University
    Alex Trillo is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Latino Studies at Saint Peter’s University. His research focuses on immigration, poverty and health, especially among Latino populations. As Director of the SPU Latin American and Latino Studies Program, Professor Trillo also has an extensive background in Latino cultural programming on college campuses. He is currently the activities coordinator for a five-year, $4.5 million Hispanic Serving Institutions grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

  • Lori D. Ungemah, Guttman Community College, CUNY
    Lori earned her doctorate in international education development at Columbia University’s Teachers College with a focus on curriculum and teaching. Her dissertation research examined a multiethnic high school in Brooklyn and how both curriculum and instructional practices included and excluded students based on their racial and ethnic backgrounds. Lori’s research interests include urban student populations, immigration and education, secondary and post-secondary literacy teaching and practices, and urban fiction. Prior to CUNY, Lori worked for 11 years for the New York City Department of Education, teaching high school English in Brooklyn.

  • Gerard A. Weber, Bronx Community College, CUNY
    Gerard A. Weber is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Bronx Community College, CUNY where he teaches courses in sociology and anthropology. His doctorate is from the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Since 2004 he has been conducting ethnographic research in the city of Galaţi in eastern Romania, examining the implications of the transformation from socialism to neoliberal capitalism since 1989 on retired, working-class women and men. The major topics he explores in this project include social causes and consequences of chronic stress among older people.

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