Staff and Board

Staff

Jeanne Houck, PhD, Executive Director
Jeanne Houck is the Executive Director of ALBA. She is an experienced public historian and holds a PhD in history from New York University. She was founder and president of History Works, a New York City-based public history consulting and production company for film and new media.  Most recently, she served as development associate at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. She is also executive producer of the NEH-sponsored film project No Job for a Woman: The Women Who Fought to Report World War II.  Other film production credits include Executive Producer for Miss America: A Documentary History (PBS, 2002), From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, with John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss (2001). She co-wrote the screenplay for The Ballad of Greenwich Village (PBS, 2005).
She can be reached at jhouck@alba-valb.org.

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Board of Governors

Peter Carroll, Chair

James D. Fernandez, Vice-Chair
James Fernandez is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University.  He has a PhD from Princeton University and a BA from Dartmouth College. His areas of interest are literature, history, and culture of modern Spain; autobiography; cultural relations between Spain and Latin America; visions of Spain in the United States. 

Fraser Ottanelli, Vice-Chair
Fraser Ottanelli is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of South Florida in Tampa.  His areas of specialization are post-1865 US History, US radical movements, ethnic and labor History, US immigration and ethnic history; comparative migration, and US history in a global age. 

Fredda Weiss, Vice-Chair

Ellyn Polshek, Secretary

Joan Levenson Cohen, Treasurer

Elizabeth Bouvier

Christopher Brooks

Joshua Brown
Joshua Brown is executive director of the American Social History Project and professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is author of Beyond the Lines: The Pictorial Press, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America and co-author of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.  He is visual editor of the noted textbook Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History, and co-authored/directed the accompanying CD-ROMs and documentaries. He has served as executive producer on award-winning Web projects, including History Matters, The Lost Museum, The September 11 Digital Archive, and Picturing U.S. History.  His cartoons, including his weekly Life during Wartime, appear regularly in print and online at www.joshbrownnyc.com.

Robert Coale, Université Paris 8

Burton Cohen
Burt Cohen has devoted his life to standing up for what he believes. He served on the office staff of Boston Clamshell and was active in the anti-nuclear movement of the late seventies. In the eighties, he was deeply involved in efforts to halt US aid to the right-wing regime in El Salvador.  In the nineties, Burt was elected to the New Hampshire State Senate where he would go on to win re-election six times and become the first Democratic Majority Leader of that body since 1912.
When he is not on the frontlines of political action, Burt is a well-respected academic and prolific political commentator. He serves on the faculty of Southern NH University and the College for Lifelong Learning, where he teaches 20th Century American History, the War in Vietnam, and most recently, American's Transformation in the 1930s. His articles have appeared in The Nation.

Jesse C. Crawford

Daniel Czitrom
Daniel Czitrom is Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College, where he has taught since 1981 with a focus on recent American cultural and political history. He joined the ALBA Board in 1987 and served as its Chair from 1990-94. His latest book is Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn of the Century New York (with Bonnie Yochelson, 2007). Czitrom is also the author of Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (1982), which received the First Books Award from the American Historical Association, and has been translated into Spanish and Chinese. He is also co-author of Out of Many: A History of the American People (Pearson Prentice Hall, 6th ed., 2008), a best selling U.S. History college textbook. In 2003 Czitrom’s historical drama, Red Bessie, (co-written with playwright Jack Gilhooley), was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It is based on the letters and experiences of two Lincoln Brigade vets, the brothers Joe and Leo Gordon.

Sebastiaan Faber
Sebastiaan Faber was born and raised in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he studied Spanish. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College and he received his doctorate from the University of California, Davis.  Sebastiaan is the author of Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Exiles in Mexico (Vanderbilt, 2002), and Anglo-American Hispanists and the Spanish Civil War (Palgrave, 2008), as well as some forty articles on Spanish and Latin American literature, history, and politics (www.oberlin.edu/faculty/sfaber). In 2000 he won the George Watt Essay Prize in the graduate category, and has been on the ALBA board since 2004. He currently serves on the Executive Committee and chairs the Watt Prize jury.

Henry Foner

Soledad Fox
Soledad Fox is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, and Chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Williams College. She has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Her main fields of research are peninsular literature, the Spanish Civil War women in twentieth century Spain, exile, autobiography and memory, and relations between Spain and the United States; she is also interested in comparative studies of the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War. She is the author of Constancia de la Mora in War and Exile: International Voice of the Spanish Republic (Sussex Academic Press, 2006) and Flaubert and Don Quijote: The Influence of Cervantes on Madame Bovary (Sussex, 2008).

Anthony L. Geist
Anthony Geist is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Geist's research concerns art and literature of the Spanish Civil War. He published a photo-essay on Seattle-area Lincoln Brigade veterans, coauthored with the Spanish photojournalist José Moreno, Passing the Torch: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade and its Legacy of Hope / Otra cara de América: Los brigadistas y su legado de esperanza. He has also curated ALBA’s traveling exhibit They Still Draw Pictures: Children’s Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo. The accompanying book was published in 2002. In 2006 he co-produced and co-directed a documentary film on the American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War, Souls without Borders: The Untold Story of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1936-2006.

Peter Glazer
Peter Glazer is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  He holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.
He is a professional director and playwright whose plays, adaptations, collaborations and directing projects include Woody Guthrie's American Song (Bay Area Drama Critics award winner at Berkeley Rep and San Jose Rep; Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations Off-Broadway at Melting Pot Theater Co.; Joseph Jefferson Award winner at Northlight Theater in Chicago), O'Carolan's Farewell to Music (Delaware Theater Co.), Michael, Margaret, Pat & Kate (Marin Theater Co., Victory Gardens Theater), Heart of Spain and Foe (Northwestern University), My Fair Lady (American Musical Theater of San Jose), Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (Industrial Strength Co. at the Magic Theater).   

Dr. Meyer Gunther

Yolanda Hall

Gina Herrmann
Gina Herrmann is Associate Professor of Spanish Literature and Culture at the University of Oregon, and is on the editorial board of The Volunteer. She is the author of articles on Spanish political culture, particularly communist literature and history, and is an oral historian. Her first book, Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain, will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2009.

Gabriel Jackson

Robin D.G. Kelley
Robin D.G. Kelley is a professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. From 2003-2006, he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University. From 1994-2003, he was a professor of history and Africana Studies at New York University as well the chairman of NYU's history department from 2002-2003. Robin Kelley has also served as a Hess Scholar-in-Residence at Brooklyn College. In the summer of 2000, Dr. Kelley was honored as a Montogomery fellow at Dartmouth College, where he taught and mentored a class of sophomores, as well as wrote the majority of the book, Freedom Dreams.
He has published several books focusing upon African-American history and culture as well as race relations, including Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, and Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Kelley is also a prolific essayist, having published dozens of articles in scholarly journals, anthologies, and in the popular press, including the Village Voice and the New York Times.

Thomas Knight, Esq.

Jo Labanyi
Jo Labanyi is Professor of Spanish at New York University, where she directs the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center. A founding editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, she has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish culture. She is currently writing the volume on Spanish Literature in the Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series; co-authoring a Cultural History of Modern Literatures in Spain (Polity); and co-editing a Companion to Spanish Cinema (Blackwell). She has a particular interest in the memory of the Spanish Civil War, on which she has published several articles, and in the early Franco Dictatorship.

Howard Lurie

Linda Lustig

Shirley Mangini

David H. Manning
David Manning’s eclectic career falls in two separate realms: marketing educational and cultural endeavors, and developing his own creative work.  The former has culminated in his current position as Director of Media Relations and Marketing for the CUNY Graduate Center, promoting the school’s doctoral programs, research centers, faculty scholarship, and public events.  He has also written dozens of published and unpublished short stories, novels, plays, op ed articles and personal essays.
David has a BA in History from Duke University, along with a lifelong vocational and avocational interest in the subject.   While living in Barcelona in the early 80s, he found himself particularly drawn to the Spanish Civil War, both as part of the eternal struggle against right wing tyranny and as a compelling tragedy on its own. 

Antonio Muñoz Molina
Antonio Muñoz Molina is a Spanish writer and, since 1995, a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy. He studied art history at the University of Granada and journalism in Madrid. He began writing in the 1980s and his first published book, El Robinsón urbano, a collection of his journalistic work, was published in 1984. His columns have regularly appeared in El País and Die Welt.

Judy Montell
Judith Montell started her directing career in theater, producing and directing professional summer theaters in Buffalo, New York and Bismarck, North Dakota. From theater she moved into the world of film as a production manager for Amram Nowak Associates, a New York producer of documentary and educational films. After taking a 15-year break to raise two daughters, she began producing her own documentaries. Forever Activists: Stories from the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Achievement in Documentary Feature, was her first feature-length documentary. You are History, You Are Legend is a 25-minute sequel to Forever Activists, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War. Professional Revolutionary: The Life of Saul Wellman is the story of another veteran of the Spanish Civil War and is an in-depth look at one man and the ways he was impelled to make a difference in the world around him throughout his long life.

Michael Nash, Tamiment Library, New York University

Cary Nelson
Cary Nelson received a BA from Antioch College in Ohio and a PhD from the University of Rochester in New York. Since the fall of 1970 he has taught modern poetry and literary theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of English. His campus work has included a decades-long project of building up the holdings in modern poetry and the Spanish Civil War in the library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Department. His twenty-five authored or edited books include Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education (1999), Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (2001), and Office Hours: Activism and Change in the Academy (2004). He is the author of over 100 essays, including a number published in Academe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Education.

Julia Newman
Julia Newman worked in advertising as a producer of television commercials for many years and as a journalist whose writings have appeared in the New York Daily News, Miami Herald, Travel and Leisure, and Metropolitan Home.  Her award winning documentary, Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War, was broadcast on Public Television and Spanish Television and is distributed in the U. S. by First Run Features. She was Executive Director of ALBA for 5 1/2 years.

John Sayles
John Sayles is the writer and director of acclaimed independent films including Return of the Secaucus Seven, Lianna, Baby It’s You, The Brother From Another Planet, Matewan, Eight Men Out, City of Hope, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, Men with Guns, Limbo, Sunshine State, Casa de los Babys, Silver City and most recently, Honeydripper.  Sayles has also written novels and short stories.  Among his awards: John D. MacArthur Award, Eugene V. Debs Award, John Steinbeck Award, John Cassavettes Award, Ian McLellan Hunter Award.  He has been nominated twice for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

James Skillman

Mel Small
Mel Small is Distinguished Professor of History at Wayne State University. A specialist in US foreign relations, he has written, among other books and articles, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves, The Presidency of Richard Nixon, Democracy and Diplomacy, and Antiwarriors and was one of the editors of The Good Fight Continues.  He became interested in the Brigade and ALBA because of his wife's uncle, brigader Larry Cane.

Robert W. Snyder
Robert W. Snyder, a journalist and historian, is an associate professor of journalism and media studies and an affiliate associate professor of history at Rutgers-Newark. Currently working on a book about New York in the years of the crack epidemic, he is the author of The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York, and Transit Talk: New York’s Bus and Subway Workers Tell Their Stories; the co-author of Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, which won the Barr Prize of the College Art Association; and the co-editor of nine volumes in media studies.

Nancy Wallach
Nancy Wallach is the daughter of Lincoln Vet Hy Wallach.  Her interest in bringing the history of the Spanish Civil War and VALB’s participation in it to the New York City public school’s curriculum led her to collaborate on creating the elementary level standards based teaching module for They Still Draw Pictures.  She is currently an arts and cultural liaison for the NYC public schools.  Her awards and honors in the field of arts education include the NYC Schools and Culture Award from the Mayor’s Advisory Panel on the Arts and Art Educator of the Year Award from NYCATA/UFT.  She is the author of a children’s book published by MacMillan-McGraw Hill.

Nancy Yanofsky