Archives and Public History Faculty
Mary Kidd
Mary Kidd (mlk9157@nyu.edu) is the Systems and Operations Manager for the New York Public Library, where she works across various preservation functions to develop and streamline collection management processes and workflows. She has also worked as Project Lead for Preserve This Podcast, and the New York Public Radio Archives as a National Digital Stewardship Resident. She holds an MLIS from Long Island University in New York, and a BA from the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. TEACHES: Digital Archives
Michael Lorenzini
Michael Lorenzini (lorenzini.me@gmail.com) is an archivist, writer, and photographer. He has worked at the New York City Department of Records since 1997, currently as Operations Manager, and prior to that as Curator of Photography and Deputy Director of the Municipal Archives. He initiated the first digitization program for the agency and led the recovery and processing of many important photographic collections including the NYPD photo archive. He has taught the preservation of cultural heritage materials at Queens College since 2015. He began teaching in NYU’s Archives and Public History Program in 2020. Before working in archives, he was a photo book editor at Aperture. He is the author of New York Rises (Aperture, 2007), about the photographs of Eugene de Salignac whose work he discovered and whose life story he uncovered. It was the winner of the New York Society Library’s New York Book Award. TEACHES: Introduction to Preservation for Archives
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez
Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez (cf1994@nyu.edu) is the Archival Collections Manager at the Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora at CENTRO in El Barrio, NYC. Cristina’s work is focused on participatory and non-hierarchical, non-linear ways of knowledge-seeking and making through archival practices that are rooted in collectivity and Latin American popular education. Previously, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor and Institute Archivist at Pratt Institute and is also a former fellow for the National Digital Stewardship Residency for Art Information. She is a founding member of Archivistas en Espanglish, a collective dedicated to amplifying spaces of memory-building between Latin America and Latinx communities in the US and co-runs Barchives, an independent outreach initiative that brings archivists to bars to talk about New York City’s archival collections and local history. Cristina holds a BA in Geography from Universidad de Puerto Rico Recinto de Río Piedras and a Master’s in Library Science with a certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Materials from CUNY Queens College. TEACHES: Introduction to Archives
Ellen Noonan
Ellen Noonan (ellen.noonan@nyu.edu) is the Director of the Archives and Public History Program. She has spent nearly two decades working as a historian, media producer, and instructional designer and began teaching in NYU’s Archives and Public History Program in 2011. In her work at the American Social History Project, she created and led numerous professional development and curriculum development programs serving social studies teachers in the New York City public schools. She has also helped to conceptualize and build several public history and history education digital projects, including the award-winning online interactive game series Mission US; HERB: Social History for Every Classroom; The Lost Museum; The September 11 Digital Archive; and History Matters: The U.S. Survey on the Web. Ellen is the author of The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera (University of North Carolina, 2012), which examines the opera’s long history of invention and reinvention as a barometer of twentieth-century American expectations about race, culture, and the struggle for equality. TEACHES: Introduction to Public History, Approaches to Public History, Internship Seminar, Research in Public History and Archives
Leah Potter
Leah Potter (leahyale@gmail.com) is a writer and instructional designer at Electric Funstuff, an educational game studio located in New York City. She is one of the original developers of Mission US, a series of free, online video games about pivotal moments in U.S. history, produced in partnership with WNET and the American Social History Project (ASHP). From 2006 to 2014, Leah worked at ASHP, collaborating on several digital and professional development projects that support the teaching and learning of American history. She is also the co-creator of “Hats & Ladders,” a mobile app recently awarded the grand prize in the White House’s Reach Higher Career App Challenge. TEACHES: Creating Digital History
Molly Rosner
Molly Rosner is Assistant Director of Education Programs at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark, her MA in Oral History from Columbia University, and her BA in American Studies from Wesleyan University. She has worked in the education departments of cultural institutions around New York City, including the Museum of the City of New York, the Apollo Theater, and the Brooklyn Museum. Her writing has appeared in outlets including the L.A. Review of Books, Salon, Huffington Post, the Gotham Center Blog, Jeunesse, and The Public Historian. Her book Playing with History: American Identities and Children’s Consumer Culture examines political and ideological messages embedded in children’s amusements throughout the twentieth century. Molly is passionate about serving New York, the city in which she was born and raised. TEACHES: Local and Community History
Maggie Schreiner
Maggie Schreiner (maggie.schreiner@nyu.edu) is the Archivist at the Brooklyn Historical Society. She has previously held positions at New York University and the Queens Memory program at Queens Library, and is also a long time volunteer at Interference Archive. Maggie’s work focuses on supporting movements for racial and economic justice through liberatory memory work, and documenting community history through collaborative and post-custodial approaches. She holds an MA in Archives and Public History from New York University and a BA in Central European Studies from McGill University. TEACHES: Community Archives
Martha Tenney
Martha Tenney (martha.tenney@nyu.edu) is the Director of the Barnard Archives and Special Collections, where she manages collection development, reference, instruction, processing, digitization, digital and A/V archiving, and outreach. She previously worked at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative at the University of Texas Libraries. She received her BA in Sociology from Wesleyan University and a MSIS from the University of Texas in Austin. TEACHES: Advanced Archival Description