Part-Time Faculty
Tracey Billado
Tracey Billado-Lotson earned her A.B. in history from Smith College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in European history from Emory University. Her teaching interests range widely within the fields of pre-modern European and Mediterranean history, including conflict, law, violence, persecution, noble culture, unfreedoms, crusading, art and material culture, historiography, Saga Iceland, and classical reception and medievalism. Her research focuses on dispute-processing and violence in France during the central Middle Ages and has received support from the Newberry Library, the American Historical Association, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She also has an interest in paleography, codicology, and archival studies which she developed as a graduate exchange student at the École Nationale des Chartes (Sorbonne) in Paris. Her current project examines political, social, and legal relationships among lay lords, ecclesiastical lords, and peasants in eleventh-century western France. Two pieces of this research are forthcoming in 2024: a study of feuds waged by monks and nuns against their enemies, and a study of peasants who fought against claims that they were serfs.
Irit Bloch
Modern European and Jewish History
Irit is an interdisciplinary historian working on German and Jewish social and legal history with a focus on judicial prejudices, antisemitism and racism in the twentieth century. She earned her M.A. and PhD in History from The Graduate Center, CUNY. She also holds an L.L.B (JD equivalent) from Tel-Aviv University, Faculty of Law, Israel. Irit’s dissertation examines the relationship between democracy and the judiciary in the Weimar Republic (Germany 1919-1933) and how biased judicial decisions harmed the rule of law and contributed to the breakdown of democracy. Irit’s teaching specializations are modern European history, the Holocaust, Women and Gender studies, and comparative law. In addition to teaching, Irit is a research fellow at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Margret M. Bostwick
Medieval and Early Modern English History, radical political and religious ideas in the 17th century, women history
Samantha (Sammie) Chomsky
Samantha (Sammie) Chomsky is a PhD student in History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the intersection of labor and civil rights organizing in the U.S. South in the 1960s and 1970s. Broader research interests include twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American labor history, histories of U.S. empire, workers’ education and the civil rights movement.
Daniel Cumming
Postdoctoral Fellow
Daniel is a historian of the twentieth-century U.S. His scholarship explores the intersections of urban history, environmental justice, and racial capitalism. As part of the Melting Metropolis team, he is researching how histories of heat reshape our understanding of postwar inequality in New York City.
Bryony Ella
Visiting Researcher
Bryony Ella (nee Benge-Abbott) is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in public engagement with science. She has also spent 10 years curating social history exhibitions. She is a co-collaborator with Kara Schlichting on the Wellcome-Discovery Award -Funded project Melting Metropolis: Everyday Histories of Heat and Health in London, New York, and Paris Since 1945. She is the team’s Research Artist. Melting Metropolis is an environmental history project exploring how Londoners, New Yorkers and Parisians have thought and felt about heat and its impact on their health. With a focus on sensory, community, and cultural experiences, the project investigates how city dwellers have experienced heat and sought to mitigate its impact on their health and well-being.
Mohamed Gamal-Eldin
I am a historian interested in the built environment, nature, and infrastructure in order to tell narratives of urban residents in Egypt and the Modern Middle East from below. Using a variety of archival material from colonial and state institutions I examine the development of cities over the last two hundred years. At the core, I am a social and environmental historian of the Modern Middle East. I am finishing work on a monograph that looks at the cities along the Suez Canal in the 19th and early 20th century.
I earned my PhD in Urban Systems-History from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers-Newark. I also have a MA from the American University in Cairo in Middle East Studies.
One of my recent articles, “Looking at Suez Canal Infrastructures: Water, Plants, and the Urban Drainage, Sewage and Bathroom Systems,” was published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. I have been published in such venues, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Planning Perspectives, Jadaliyya, The Metropole, and elsewhere. I am currently an adjunct professor, teaching in the history department at Rutgers University, Newark and Queens College-CUNY. I also teach at the Spitzer School of Architecture and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Stephen F. Haller
American history
Dr. Haller earned his M.A. and PhD from St John’s University. His research area focuses on the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment ideas in Early American Education. He wrote his dissertation on Rev. Charles Nisbet of Dickinson College and the role these ideas factored into his lectures and writings.
Christopher Harding
Modern Middle East and contemporary Palestine
Chris is a historian of the modern Middle East and contemporary Palestine. His research focusses on the question of mobility of capital and labour during the British Mandate (1922-1948). He engages with Marxist theories particularly from the Third World/Global South. He is also a researcher/curator at Dar Jacir, Bethlehem. In 2024 his work featured in the Biennale De Venezia, as part of the South West Bank, Landworks, Collective Action, and Sound exhibition.
Idan Liav
Idan Liav is a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Queens College and is a PhD Student at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He earned his second M.A. in History from the Graduate Center, CUNY, and his M.A in Conflict Research, Management and Resolution, and B.A. in International Relations and English Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Idan’s research is focused on the history of memory and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More specifically, he examines the intersection of Holocaust memory and the memory of the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948.
Myles McDonnell
Ancient Greek and Roman History
Powdermaker Hall, Room 352-X
Phone: 718-997-5372
catulussr@gmail.com
Myles McDonnell received a B.A. in History from Queens College, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Ancient History from Columbia. He has published on various aspects of ancient Greek, Roman, and Etruscan cultures and history, and is the author of Roman Manliness: Virtus and the Roman Republic (CUP 2006, pbk 2010). He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (1998), and from 2004-7 was Director of the American Academy’s Classical Summer School in Ancient Roman Topography. He has taught at Columbia University, Dartmouth College, the University of Washington, as well as at Brooklyn and Baruch Colleges. In 2020-21 he was Professor-in-Charge of The Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome.
Sophia McGee
International Affairs, the Middle East, and Conflict Studies
Powdermaker Hall, Room
Phone: 718-997-53
Sophia McGee was one of the founders of the Center for Ethnic, Racial and Religious Understanding (CERRU) at Queens College. She teaches a series of courses about the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict that are part of the “America and the Middle East: Clash of Civilizations or Meeting of Minds” series. Sophia holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University. Her concentration was Conflict and Security, and her regional area of specialization was the Middle East with a focus on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. In addition, Sophia is an SIIS Fellow at Brandeis University. Ms. McGee was a participant in the inaugural CUNY TEDx, where her TED talk was entitled “Learning to Take the Leap of Faith.” She has also spoken about her work on the Brian Lehrer show, as well as at numerous conferences and gatherings at Columbia University, The New School, Queens College, for the International Society of Political Psychology, and most recently at the Urban Clinic at Hebrew University.
Thomas Tilitz
Powdermaker Hall, Room 352-M
Phone: 718-997-5364
Fax: 718-997-5359
thomas.tilitz@qc.cuny.edu
Loucas Tsilas
International Diplomatic History
Powdermaker Hall, Room 352-X
Phone: 718-997-5353
loucas.tsilas@qc.cuny.edu
Ambassador Loucas Tsilas earned bachelor’s degrees in law and economics from the University of Athens, and a master’s degree in international relations at the State University of Louisiana. During his 35 years with the Greek Foreign Ministry, Ambassador Tsilas served as Diplomatic Advisor to the Prime Minister of Greece, Ambassador to South Africa, Ambassador to Washington, D.C., and Permanent Representative to the European Union, Brussels. Subsequently, for 15 years, he was the Executive Director of the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (USA) and a member of its board.
Bret Windhauser
Middle East and African History
bwindhauser@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Bret is a current PhD student in History at the Graduate Center focusing on the Modern Middle East and East African history. His work centers on imperial laws related to death, burial, and disease in the Persian Gulf and wider Indian Ocean arena. Broadly, his work touches on topics of migration, medical history, and new definitions of criminality within the context of imperialism. Bret is also a managing member of the Standing Group on Organized Crime with the European Consortium for Political Research and has participated in digital humanities initiatives such as the Svoboda Diaries Project with the University of Washington and the Princeton Ethiopian Miracles of Mary project through Princeton University.