2019-2020 Co-Chair
Ted Knudsen is a PhD student at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a 2020-2021 EARS Co-Chair. Ted studies the political economy of the middle colonies in the early to mid-18th century, with a particular concentration on New York.
Blake is a PhD Student at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a 2021-2022 EARS Co-Chair. He is interested in environmental history and the American Revolution.
Current Members
Arinn Amer
Arinn Amer is a PhD Candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Hunter College. She is interested in material and print culture, performance, violence, and sexuality in early America, and co-chairs the CUNY Public History Collective. Her research concerns tarring and feathering.
Scott Ackerman
Scott Ackerman is a PhD Candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
John Blanton
John Blanton earned his PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center in February 2016 and is currently Assistant Professor of History at The City College of New York, CUNY. John is a founding member of EARS and served as Co-Chair for the 2014/15 academic year. He earned his BA from SUNY Albany (2003) and MPhil from the Graduate Center (2013). John is currently revising a book manuscript, tentatively entitled English Air: The Origins of Anglophone Antislavery, for publication. English Air argues that there was a long and vibrant antislavery tradition in the Anglophone world that challenged the definition of enslaved persons as legitimate articles of property and sought to guarantee the basic rights of English subjecthood to the enslaved. Other interests include early national and antebellum antislavery, the history of capitalism, land and labor reform movements, and imperial history. In addition to his historical work, John is also an accomplished musician and composer whose compositions have been featured nationally on public radio. John currently lives in western Connecticut with his wife and son. He can be reached at jblanton@ccny.cuny.edu and you can follow him on Twitter at @jnblanton.
Brian Bouton
Brian Bouton is a PhD Candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Michael Crowder
Michael Crowder is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. He can be reached here. He served as CUNY EARS Co-Chair for the 2015-2016 academic year. Here’s Mike’s academia.edu page. He’s also from Texas.
Alexander Gambaccini
Alexander is a Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center. He studies intellectual and political history with a focus on political thought and constitutionalism. His work focuses on the mutual influence of Swiss and American constitutional discourse. He served as an EARS Co-Chair for the 2017-2018 academic year.
Sean Griffin
Sean Griffin holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research interests lie in 19th Century U.S. political and cultural history, and include slavery and antislavery, labor, African-American, and urban history. His current project looks at the relationship between wage labor and antislavery politics in the decades before the Civil War. He can be contacted here.
Maddy Lafuse
Maddy Lafuse is a PhD Student at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Andrew J. Lang
Andrew J. Lang is a Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center. A native Wisconsinite, Andrew studies the voting of northern members of the US House of Representatives before the Civil War. His other research interests include the relationship of Congress to antislavery political activism, early national and antebellum political parties and partisanship, 18th and 19th century election practices, Texas annexation and the Mexican-American War, and the American Civil War. He can be contacted here.
Miriam Liebman
Miriam Liebman is a History PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation looks at the ways American women acted in diplomatic capacities abroad, specifically in London and Paris, during the Age of Revolutions. She served as co-chair of EARS for the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 academic years. She can be reached here.
Joseph Murphy
Joseph Murphy holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a founding member of EARS. Joe received his BA from Temple University (2004) and MPhil from the Graduate Center (2012). His dissertation, “Neither a Slave nor a King: The Antislavery Project in the United States, 1820-1848,” recovers the premises and assumptions of the antislavery movement in its progression from moral crusade in the 1830s to a well-defined political project in the 1840s. Other interests include legal and constitutional history, the history of capitalism, and the intertwined histories of race and slavery.
Cody Nager is a PhD Candidate in History at the Graduate Center, CUNY and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at The City College of New York, CUNY. He is a 2019-2020 EARS Co-Chair, and also held that role in 2018-2019. His dissertation, tentatively titled “From Different Quarters: Regulating Migration and Naturalization in the Early American Republic, 1783-1815” examines how the nascent American state considered American engagement with the broader imperial world as it crafted migration policy.
Glen Olson
Glen Olson is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation is entitled “Slavery’s Leviathan: Southern Visions of Federal Governance, 1815-1860.” It examines how slaveholders sought to strengthen certain federal institutions to protect their property regime. Glen received his BA from St. John’s College and an MA from University of Chicago. He served as a 2013-2014 co-chair for CUNY EARS. Glen is a regular contributor at the blog Teaching United States History. He currently works as a history curriculum designer for IXL Learning. He can be reached here, or through his academic page. Glen also claims to be a proud Minnesotan, although he hasn’t lived there in twelve years.
Laura Ping
Laura Ping holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Roy Rogers
Roy is a PhD candidate in American history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is currently a Social Studies Teacher at YESPhilly in Philadelphia, PA. Previously he has served as a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Lehman College and as a Writing Fellow at the New York City College of Technology. He is also a co-founder of The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History and The JuntoCast: A Podcast on Early American History. Roy also co-founded the CUNY Early American Republic Seminar, one of the leading organizations advancing the study of the early United States in the greater New York area.
Nora Slonimsky
Nora Slonimsky is Gardiner Assistant Professor of History, Iona College and the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies. Her dissertation, “The Engine of Free Expression [?]: The Political Development of Copyright in the Colonial British Atlantic and Early National United States” examines the relationship between partisan coalitions and copyright in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century Atlantic world, with a specific focus on the relationship between evolving conceptions of labor, nationalism and press regulation. She served as a 2013-2014 co-chair for CUNY EARS. She can be reached at nslonimsky@gmail.com or through her academic page and followed on twitter @Nora.Slonimsky.
Jaja Tantirunkij
Jaja Tantirunkij is a PhD Student at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Evan Turiano
Evan Turiano is a PhD Student at The Graduate Center, CUNY and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Queens College, CUNY. He was an EARS Co-Chair for the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 academic years. His research examines slave flight and the coming of the Civil War.
John Winters
John is a PhD Candidate in history at the CUNY Graduate Center and studies the Haudenosaunee confederacy in the 17th-18th centuries and public history. He has received fellowships from the N-Y Historical Society and the Colonial Dames of America, and before coming to the GC was a tour guide supervisor at Mount Vernon and currently leads tours at the Roosevelt House at Hunter College. John also teaches at Baruch and Hunter College, and is a co-chair of the CUNY Public History Collective.
Helena Yoo
Helena Yoo is a PhD Student at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a 2020-2021 EARS Co-Chair. She is interested in communication networks in colonial America.
EARS Alumni
Zachary Bennett, Visiting Assistant Professor, Connecticut College
John Blanton, Assistant Professor, The City College of New York, CUNY
Mark Boonshoft, Assistant Professor, Norwich University
David Gary, Curator of Printed Materials, American Philosophical Society
David Houpt, Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Kathryn Lasdow, Assistant Professor, Suffolk University
Cambridge Ridley Lynch, St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School
Alexander Manevitz, Visiting Assistant Professor, Trinity College
Paul Polgar, Assistant Professor, The University of Mississippi
Nora Slonimsky, Gardiner Assistant Professor, Iona College and the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies
Alisa Wade, Assistant Professor, California State University, Chico
