Peter-Christian Aigner is Director of The Gotham Center for New York City History.

A native of the city, he has lived, studied, or worked in all five boroughs. He takes no position on his favorite.

Rachel Pitkin is a PhD student in US History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her current research interests include public and social history, the development of social welfare, and women, gender and sexuality in the twentieth century United States. Rachel holds MA degrees in History and in Museum Studies, and has a background in education, teaching History and Social Studies. She is originally from Buffalo, New York, and her spare time is spent road-tripping throughout New York State.

Hongdeng Gao is a PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines how Cold War geopolitics and grassroots activism in New York City improved access to health care for under-served Chinese New Yorkers in the late 20th century. A Dissertation Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies, Hongdeng has worked at Columbia's Rare Book & Manuscript Library and served as a research consultant for New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Before pursuing a PhD, Hongdeng co-founded Health Bridges, a grassroots initiative based in California that trains multilingual college students to serve as health advocates for patients with limited English proficiency.

Emily Holloway is a PhD candidate in Urban Geography at Clark University. Her dissertation, “Domino in the Longue Durée (1791-1883): Racial Capitalism and the Urban Question,” reconstructs the prehistory of the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, through the site’s connections to the Caribbean plantation complex. She has a master’s degree in Urban Policy and Planning from Hunter College and a bachelor’s degree in Government from Smith College. She worked for several years with various community development and urban research institutes in New York City, including the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative and the Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center. Her work has been published in American Quarterly and Metropolitics. She is currently the Associate Managing Editor of Urban Affairs Review.

David Huyssen is part-time faculty at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, specializing in the history of U.S. political economy, class relations, urban life, and New York. He was previously Senior Lecturer at the University of York, and taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and New York University. He is the author of Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890-1920 and and is completing a biography of Alfred Winslow Jones whose working title is The Socialist Who Created the Hedge Fund.

Erin Kramer is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University, teaching courses in early American and Native American history. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018. Her current book project looks at Dutch and Haudenosaunee (“Iroquois”) influences on the seventeenth-century development of Albany, New York, as an important center of trade and diplomacy in the northeast borderlands.

Alyssa Lopez is an Assistant Professor at Providence College. She received her Ph.D. in History from Michigan State University, where her dissertation, “Screens, Seats, Pickets Signs: New York City’s Black Film Culture, 1896-1935,” explored the various means that black New Yorkers utilized theaters and cinema to practice and engage in self-determination, equal access to citizenship in the city, and urban modernity in the face of an overwhelmingly exclusionary society. As a King-Chávez-Parks Future Faculty Fellow, she has taught courses on black film history and race, ethnicity, and pluralism in the US. 

Susie J. Pak is an Associate Professor of History at St. John’s University. A graduate of Dartmouth and Cornell, she is the author of Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J.P. Morgan. Pak has served as a Trustee of the Business History Conference, and she serves as co-chair of the Columbia University Economic History Seminar and as co-editor of the Global Enterprise series of Cambridge University Press. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of Business History Review, Financial History, and Connections, the journal of the International Network of Social Network Analysis. 

Ryan Purcell is a Visiting Lecturer at Fordham University, where he teaches US history. He received his PhD from Cornell University. His writing on popular culture has appeared in various publications including the Journal of Urban History, Rethinking History, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Hyperallergic. Ryan’s current book project explores the political economy of grassroots music scenes that fostered the development of what became known as punk rock and hip hop in New York during the 1970s.

Imani Radney is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at New York University. Her dissertation examines police activism in New York City during the second half of the twentieth century. She is also an Associate Editor at Public Books. She holds an MA in Social and Cultural Analysis from NYU and an AB in African American Studies from Harvard University.

Dillon Streifeneder is a historian of colonial America and the early American republic. His current project focuses on state formation and governance in New York during the era of the American Revolution. Streifeneder received his PhD from the Ohio State University. He has taught at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz, and is currently a History Instructor at the Millbrook School in Dutchess County. A native of the Lower Hudson Valley, he serves on the board of Historic Red Hook.

Evan Turiano is a Walter O. Evans Fellow at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, CUNY. His first book, under advance contract with LSU Press, examines the contested legal rights of African Americans accused of being fugitive slaves from before the Revolution until the early Civil War. His dissertation was awarded the Bradford-Delaney Dissertation Prize by the St. George Tucker Society. His work has been supported by the New York Public Library's Lapidus Center, the John Carter Brown Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, and the University of Virginia's Nau Center for Civil War History.

​​Katie Uva is a historian, teacher, and writer whose research focuses on 20th century New York City history, with particular interest in housing, Queens, and the two New York World's Fairs. She has worked in public history settings for several years and is currently a Research Associate at the New York Public Library's Center for Educators and Schools, an Adjunct Lecturer at CUNY, and a freelance researcher and consultant.

Michael Casper is the Postdoctoral Associate in Modern Jewish History at Yale University. He received a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles and is the co-author with Nathaniel Deutsch of A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg (Yale University Press, 2021), winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in the American Jewish Studies category, sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.