Project Leaders
Thomas Cleary
Principal Investigator/Library
Thomas Cleary is an Assistant Professor Archivist/Librarian at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. He received his MLS at Queens College, CUNY, and MA in Liberal Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY, specializing in Digital Humanities. His research interests are in computational text analysis and data visualization, particularly with the goal of making archival collections more accessible and understandable. His current work is available on CUNY Academic Works.
Molly Rosner
Project Leader/LaGuardia and Wagner Archives
Dr. Molly Rosner is Director of Education Programs at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at the College. She works with faculty to incorporate the archival collections into curricula and runs grant-based extracurricular student projects. Her programming helped secure a one million dollar grant from the Robert D. L. Gardiner Foundation for the archives to continue their work with students. She regularly leads Oral History workshops and archives orientation sessions with students and faculty. As an adjunct at NYU, she is well-versed in the theory and practice of public history work. She received her PhD in American Studies from Rutgers University- Newark, her MA in Oral History from Columbia University.
Tomonori Nagano
Project Leader/ELA
Dr. Tomonori Nagano is a Professor of Japanese and Linguistics at LaGuardia Community College. He received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center and his MA in TESOL from New York University. His research interests are second language acquisition and Japanese as a heritage language. He has published in various linguistics/applied linguistics journals such as Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Modern Language Journal, and Foreign Language Annals (See https://www.t-nagano.com/publications/ for the publication list). Dr. Nagano is a certified tester and rater for ACTFL's OPI and AAPPL (Japanese) and is currently serving as an executive board member for the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL) at MLA.
CTL
To be announced.
Seminar Participants
Habiba Boumlik
Education & Language Acquisition
Habiba Boumlik is a professor in the Education and Language Acquisition department at CUNY LaGuardia Community College. (https://bit.ly/hboumlik) She teaches French and Arabic language and literatures, and Middle Eastern and North African Cinema. Her research interests encompass francophone literatures, North African immigration to France, Moroccan Judaism, and Amazigh identity. She has authored various publications in the fields of literature, education, and social sciences. Her work reflects a deep commitment to exploring various facets of North African culture and history. Her academic journey has taken her to several international conferences, where she has shared her insights and research on the intersection of cinema and the Amazigh diaspora. Professor Boumlik is the founder of the New York Forum of Amazigh Film (www.nyfaf.com), which showcases features, documentaries, and shorts by and about Amazigh/Berber people and cultures in North Africa and the diaspora.
Lucie Mingla
MEC (Mathematics)
Lucie Mingla is a Lecturer of Mathematics at LaGuardia CC, CUNY. Her research interests are math education and digital technology, applied mathematics, and proof methods and logic. Her work experience includes high school mathematics teacher, school leader and countywide PD Designer and Leader. For more than a decade, Lucie has been teaching mathematics in various universities and colleges in New York City. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Tirana in Albania, an M.S. in Mathematics Education from Mercy College, in addition to several educational fellowships. She is actively involved in PD and presentations at CUNY, national, and international conferences.
Suzanne Uzzilia
English
Suzanne Uzzilia is a lecturer in English at LaGuardia. She received her Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2020, and her research examines contemporary Caribbean and multiethnic American women’s literature, especially in the memoir genre. She lives in Brooklyn.
Invited Speakers
Bridget Bartolini
Bridget Bartolini is an oral historian, educator, socially engaged artist, and writer who specializes in New York City history, place-based storytelling, and narrator profiles. Bridget has conducted oral history interviews for the Columbia Center for Oral History Research's NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive, Queens Memory's COVID-19 Project, Educational Alliance's Nonagenarians in the NORC, and family clients. She served as an audit editor for Columbia's Obama Presidency Oral History. Her thesis project, 34th Avenue Oral History, was awarded the 2021-2022 Public Humanities Fellowship from the SoF/Heyman Center and the Public Humanities Grant from Humanities New York. Inspired by her love for New York City and belief in the power of storytelling as a tool for social justice, Bridget created the Five Boro Story Project in 2013 to produce community programs that bring New Yorkers together through sharing personal stories and art inspired by our neighborhoods. She has produced more than eighty community events with the Five Boro Story Project and has led numerous workshops on oral history, storytelling, advocacy, and social change. Before studying in Columbia's Oral History MA program, Bridget earned a Masters in Community Education and a Bachelors in East Asian Studies with a concentration in Japanese language.
Natalie Milbrodt
Queens Public Library
Natalie Milbrodt is an information professional and content developer with over a decade of experience working in small business, academic, cultural heritage and library settings. She currently manages a Metadata Services division within a large public library's Technical Services department. She oversees archival digitization and the creation and management of metadata for the library's physical and digital collections. This includes the preservation of intangible cultural heritage and local history on behalf of the library's community-driven digital archives initiative, the Queens Memory Project. She holds a bachelor's degree in Humanities and a master's degree in Library and Information Studies with a concentration in Archives and Cultural Heritage.
Ross Perlin
Endangered Language Alliance
Dr. Ross Perlin is a linguist, writer, and translator from New York City - Lenapehoking.
As a linguist, he serves as co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance (https://www.elalliance.org), where since 2013 he has overseen research projects focused on language documentation, mapping, policy, and public programming. Himalayan languages are a focus – for his PhD, he created a trilingual dictionary, a corpus of recordings, and a descriptive grammar of Trung, an endangered language of southwest China, based on several years of fieldwork. He also teaches linguistics at Columbia.
As a writer, he has written on language, labor, and China for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Harper's, among other places, and he published a book on unpaid work and youth economics (Intern Nation). He has given talks to students, scholars, employers, career counselors, union members, activists, and politicians at venues as different as the Googleplex, the UK Parliament, and the Economic Policy Institute, as well as universities and colleges across America. TV and radio appearances have been on MSNBC, CBS, Fox, BBC, and NPR, among others. His new book "Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York" is coming out in February 2024.
As a translator, he works primarily from Chinese into English. He translated Liao Yiwu's Bullets and Opium (2019) and Chen Guangcheng's The Barefoot Lawyer (2015). He has recorded two Yiddish-language video series for The Forward and translated essays, stories, and poems as a National Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow.
Dr. Perlin has a BA from Stanford, an M.Phil. from Cambridge, and an MA from the University of London (SOAS), the last two thanks to the British people as a Marshall Scholar. His PhD in Linguistics is from the University of Bern in Switzerland. He was a 2023 New Arizona Fellow at New America.
Johnathan Thayer
Queens College
Prof. Johnathan Thayer teaches classes based on his experiences in the field of professional archival and public history work, with a focus on fundamentals of archival practice, including archival appraisal and documentation, access systems, digitization, local public history, and the preservation of cultural heritage materials. His approach to teaching archival theory focuses on answering the question “Why do archives matter?” and translating the discussions that follow into opportunities for archival advocacy. Potential topics include the relationship between archival access and political power, archival records as potential tools for accountability and justice, archival ethics, and intersections between community archives, public history, and social memory.
His research interests include intersections between maritime, labor, and urban history; archival advocacy; rethinking “archival literacy”; and critical approaches to archival education. In addition to work on publications and conference presentations, he has coordinated student-led collaborations with Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground and Documentation Services at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. He is also the lead researcher on Mapping New York City's Sailortown, which uses digitized archival material and data visualization to represent the cultural palimpsests of New York's historical waterfront. Other projects include the Seamen’s Church Institute’s American Merchant Marine Veterans Oral History Project, a publicly accessible digital archive consisting of over 800 audio clips from interviews with more than 70 veteran merchant mariners. Beginning in 2010, he has been the lead archivist for the Seamen’s Church Institute’s Digital Archives, which hosts more than 12,000 digital archival items.
