Lingua Franca Media, Inc.
President and Editorial Director
Cambridge, MA
2017 – present
Embracing the traditional model of the research institute as a “university without students,” Lingua Franca Media identifies develops, and supports public intellectuals, provides them with a habitat, and pushes their ideas into the world through magazines, books, films, fellowships, and other channels.
New America
Research Fellow in History and Disability
Washington, D.C.
2022 — 2023
I wrote and edited articles and served as an advisor on disability in New America’s Education Policy Program. My primary subjects were autism and other neuro-developmental disabilities in special education and children’s behavioral health.
The Baffler
President and Editor-in-Chief
The Baffler Foundation
Cambridge, MA, and New York, NY
2012 — 2016
I served in the dual roles of Editor-in-Chief of The Baffler magazine and President of the Board of Directors of The Baffler Foundation, the independent, nonprofit organization that published it.
Boston College
Visiting Assistant Professor of History
Visiting Scholar, Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life
Chestnut Hill, MA
2008 — 2010
I taught a lecture course on American history, a seminar on dreaming, and a history of liberalism for the history department and honors program. I also served as an advisor in the Boisi Center, a community of scholars, policy makers, and religious leaders in conversation about issues at the intersection of religion and American public life.
Harvard University
Lecturer on Social Studies
Cambridge, MA
2000 — 2007
I taught sophomore seminars and junior tutorials and advised senior theses in the Committee on Degrees on Social Studies, an undergraduate honors concentration. My areas of coverage included American and European social thought from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.
Who Built America? From the Great War of 1914 to the Dawn of the Atomic Age in 1946
Researcher and Contributor
American Social History Project, City University of New York
Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Worth Publishers
New York, 2001
For this multimedia exploration of U.S. social history by Roy Rosenzweig, Joshua Brown, and Stephen Brier, I provided research and wrote short essays about some of the tumultuous events of the time: racist policing in Atlanta, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, and the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937. I also wrote about a pair of reforms: Progressive Education in the schools and Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement in the streets. Published before the expansion of the web, Who Built America? marked the first use of CD-ROM technology to break out of confines of conventional textbooks. Oral interviews, songs, speeches, radio programs, and film clips mixed with illustrations and documents. The CD-ROM was produced with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation.
History Matters:
The U.S. Survey Course on the Web
Assistant Editor
American Social History Project, City University of New York
Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Fairfax, VA
1998 — 1999
History Matters served as a gateway to web resources for high school and college teachers of U.S. history survey courses. It also offered unique teaching materials, first-person primary documents, and guides to analyzing historical evidence. The materials, which I spent parts of two years finding, cataloging, and annotating, focused on the lives of ordinary Americans. History Matters was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Visible Knowledge Project.
Blackout History Project
Assistant Editor
Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Fairfax, VA
1997 — 1998
I conducted oral histories and edited material for the Blackout History Project, which reconstructed the history of two dramatic social responses to large-scale technological failure. In early November of 1965, thirty million Americans experienced a cascading power failure which blacked out almost the entire Northeast in less than fifteen minutes. Rising to the occasion, New Yorkers assisted each other in a spirit of cooperation and community uncharacteristic of ordinary city life. Twelve years later, in the summer of 1977, the New York metropolitan region experienced another massive power outage, but this time the popular response was quite different. Devastating riots and looting engulfed the poorer sections of the city, inflicting enormous economic damage at a time when the site was already on its knees. The Blackout History Project was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.