Julia Alvarez, M.A.
Julia Alvarez is an award-winning novelist, essayist and poet whose novels include How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and In the Name of Salomé (2000). Her poetry was chosen by the New York Public Library for its exhibit, “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez,” 1996. In 2002, she was awarded the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature at Kennedy Center. In its millennial issue, LATINA Magazine selected Ms. Alvarez as one of the fifty “History-Making Latinas of the Century.” Her essay, “I Want To Be Miss America,” included in her collection of essays, Something to Declare (1998), has been reprinted in numerous anthologies and textbooks. In addition, Ms. Alvarez is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
Elaine Abelson, Ph.D.
Elaine Abelson is a senior lecturer in Historical Studies and a faculty member at the Eugene Lang College for the Liberal Arts at the New School, teaching history, gender and feminist studies, and urban studies. She wrote When Ladies Go-A-Thieving: Middle Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store. Her current work is on women and homelessness in the Great Depression. Abelson has written and lectured on numerous subjects including urban and gender history. She has acted as advisor for many film and multimedia projects and has served as the co-chair of the program committee for the Berkshire Conference on the history of women.
Joyce Avrech Berkman, Ph.D.
Joyce Avrech Berkman is professor of U.S. and European history at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst where she teaches women's history. She earned her Ph.D. in history at Yale University. Her current areas of specialization include the history of African American women, U.S. and European women and the two World Wars, the women's movement, 1965 to the present, women's autobiography, historical epistemology, oral history theory, methods, and inquiry into the nature of empathy. Berkman is one of the co-editors of the recently published African American Women and the Vote, 1817-1965 (1997) and author of The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner, Beyond South African Colonialism (1989).
Ann-Marie Bivans, Author and Consultant
Ann-Marie Bivans is considered a national authority on the Miss America pageant and is the author of three books on pageants, including the first authorized social history on the subject, Miss America: In Pursuit of the Crown (1991). Having researched the Pageant for the past twenty years, she has been an invited commentator on over 200 media programs nationwide, including Larry King Live and American Journal. A judge for the 1992 Miss America Pageant as well as for numerous state and local contests, Bivans has consulted on, and been quoted in, numerous feature articles on Miss America for national publications, including USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Washingtonian.
Susan Douglas, Ph.D.
Susan Douglas is professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan and media critic for The Progressive. She is author of Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (1994) and Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (1987). She received her Ph.D. from Brown University. She has lectured at colleges and universities and is a regular commentator and columnist for The Nation, The Village Voice, Ms., In These Times, The Washington Post and TV Guide. She has appeared on various radio and television talk shows.
George Lipsitz, Ph.D.
George Lipsitz is professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research centers on urban culture and social movements. He is the author of numerous books and articles. His publications include Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990), Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (1994), Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (1994), A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (1995), The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (1998), and The Sidewalks of St. Louis (1991).
Jay Parini, Ph.D.
Jay Parini is a poet, author and biographer of Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck; he is currently teaching at Middlebury College in Vermont. He has written numerous books of poetry and novels including the critically acclaimed Benjamin's Crossing (1997), and The Last Station: A Novel of Leo Tolstoy’s Last Year (1990). He has contributed poems, essays, and reviews to many journals including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, and The Nation. His other recent books include a third book of poems, Town Life (1988). In addition, he has edited The Columbia History of American Poetry (1993) and The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry (1995).
Kathy Peiss, Ph.D.
Kathy Peiss is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches history of American women and gender, sexuality, consumption, popular culture, 19th and 20th century U.S. cultural and social history. Her publications include Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986); a co-edited anthology, Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (1989); and Love Across the Color Line: The Letters of Alice Hanley to Channing Lewis (1996). Her recent book, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture, was published by Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt in May 1998. She has consulted on a number of documentary films and museum exhibitions.
Paul Stekler, Ph.D.
Paul Stekler is an internationally recognized documentary producer and director. With Louis Alvarez and Andy Kolker, he was producer–director–writer of the four-part series, Vote for Me: Politics in America , which won the George Foster Peabody Award, an Emmy Award, and the Alfred I. DuPont Columbia University Journalism Award. Stekler's work has appeared on PBS nationally on the PBS–American Experience series, and as specials. His other award-winning documentaries include Last Stand at Little Big Horn, Louisiana Boys, Raised on Politics, and Eyes on the Prize, Part Two: America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965-1980. Stekler is currently Production Area Head in the Radio-Television-Film Department at the University of Texas, Austin.
Geoffrey C. Ward
Geoffrey C. Ward co-wrote the PBS series The Civil War and is widely considered one of the finest writers of documentary film narrative. A prolific writer on a wide range of topics in American history, Ward received the 1990 National Book Critic Circle Award in biography for his study on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Currently writing the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz, his writing credits for documentary film include Lindbergh, Duke Ellington, Empire Of the Air, Baseball, The West, and Frank Lloyd Wright. He has also consulted on numerous PBS documentaries, including Coney Island, The Donner Party, and New York: A Documentary Film.
Susan Ware
Susan Ware is an author and teacher specializing in twentieth century American history and the history of American women. She is the editor of the biographical dictionary Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (2004) at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Her recent books include It's One O'Clock and Here is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography (2005); Letter to the World: Seven Women Who Shaped the American Century (1998); and Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism (1993). From 1986 to 1995 she taught in the history department of New York University; she has also taught at Harvard University, the University of New Hamsphire, and Tufts University. Her other books include Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics (1987), Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (1982); and Beyond Suffrage: Women and the New Deal (1981). She is currently writing a book about Title IX, sports feminism, and Billie Jean King.
