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
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.
Ted Knudsen
Ted Knudsen is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY, where he has taught since 2018, and a PhD candidate in History at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses on colonial New York, the American Revolution, and the development of political economy in British North America. His dissertation, Before Hamilton: Marketcrafting in Colonial New York and the Birth of the American System, examines how New York’s political leaders experimented with monetary policy, trade, immigration, and public institutions to foster economic development in the decades before the Revolution. His recent article, “Gone for Soldiers: Manhattan’s Last Natural Forests and the Revolutionary War,” appeared in Revolutionary New York City: America at 250, a special joint publication of New York City historical societies commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary. Knudsen is also co-founder of the NYC Revolutionary Trail and co-creator of Echoes of Revolution: New York City, an immersive augmented-reality history experience developed with Ubisoft and Sugar Creative. He is co-curator of The Occupied City, an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York exploring New York under British occupation during the Revolutionary War.
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.
Thomas Tilitz
Powdermaker Hall, Room 352-M
Phone: 718-997-5364
Fax: 718-997-5359
thomas.tilitz@qc.cuny.edu
Emma Waney
Powdermaker Hall, Room 352-M
emma.waney@qc.cuny.edu
Emma Waney is a second-year history PhD student studying at CUNY Graduate Center. She studies gender and religious history in the eighteenth-century American colonies. Her current research investigates the intersections of gender and power during the Quaker reform in the mid-1700s.