Meet CREST

CREST Diversity Dissertation Fellows, 2008-2009

Jillian M. Baez (send an email)

Jillian M. Baez is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Her research and teaching interests lie in media studies, feminist theory, and Latina/o Studies. In particular, Baez' dissertation explores discourses on the Latina body in U.S. popular culture and how Latinas make sense of these representations of their bodies. Her research has been supported by the Puerto Rican Studies Research Grant from the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College and the Tinker Field Research Grant for Graduate Student Research in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Baez was a recipient of the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellowship and the UIUC Graduate College Fellowship. She has presented her work at the National Communication Association, Latin American Studies Association, and the International Communication Association among others. Baez has published articles in the Journal of Popular Communication and Centro (Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies). Jillian has a B.A. in Media Studies and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies from Hunter College-City University of New York.

Eric Adalberto Paul

Eric is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History at the University of California, Davis. He received his B.A. in History from the University of California, Irvine. His research and teaching interests focus on New World slavery, race and class in Latin America, and social/political conflicts in the Americas during the Age of Revolutions. Eric's dissertation examines the impact political and antislavery/abolitionist ideas had on free people of color and slaves in Cuba from 1791-1844. Specifically, he analyzes the movement of people and ideas to trace when, how, and under what circumstances free blacks and slaves came into contact with revolutionary ideas.

Eric has conducted archival research at the Cuban National Archive, the José Martí National Library, and the General Archive of the Indies in Seville. He received support for this research from UC Davis's Institute of Governmental Affairs Dissertation Improvement Award, the Lydia Cabrera Award from the Conference on Latin American History, and a Short-Term Research Grant from the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World from Harvard University. He has presented his work at the University of California Multi-Campus Conference on World History and the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. In his free time Eric enjoys running, reading, and relaxing with family & friends.

CREST Residential Fellows, 2008-2009

Martin Alan Greenberg (send an email)
Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice

Martin A. Greenberg, Ph.D. was formerly a member of the Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Justice Educators and the first Director of the Criminal Justice Administration Graduate Program at Point Park University/Pittsburgh. He has served as a professor/department head at several universities throughout the country. Since 2007, Dr. Greenberg has held his current position at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. He is married to Dr. Ellen C. Wertlieb and has one son, Edward, a student at Bard College.

From 1977 to 1981, Professor Greenberg served as an educational consultant in the field of police science for the U.S. Military Command in the Pacific. At the same time, he was an instructor and coordinator of the criminal justice program at Hawaii Community College, a division of the University of Hawaii at Hilo.

Including his New York State service in higher education, Dr. Greenberg has had a twenty-six year public service career in New York State. His practitioner positions involved public safety employment as a senior court officer, probation officer, and high school security aide. He is a lifetime member of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the Criminal Justice Educators Association of New York State, and the Virginia Criminal Justice Educators Association.

Dr. Greenberg was also a volunteer supervisor in the Auxiliary of the New York City Police Department. He was designated Executive Officer of the Queens Area Patrol Unit in the 1970s with the rank of Auxiliary Deputy Inspector. He is an Honorary Lifetime Member of the Auxiliary Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, Inc., having served as its third president.

In 2005, the University of Pittsburgh Press published Dr. Greenberg's third book--Citizens Defending America: From Colonial Times to an Age of Terrorism. Professor Greenberg is also the author of over 60 articles dealing with public safety issues. His research articles have appeared such publications as: The Police Chief, The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, and The Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement. His most recent opinion articles have appeared in the Sunday Albany Times Union, the Sunday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Sunday Richmond Times-Dispatch. Recently, he appeared as a guest commentator on Channel Ten News in Albany.

Dr. Greenberg has served as the chair of the Section on Security and Crime Prevention of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences in 2006-2008 and has been a New York State registered instructor in general security topics for nearly two decades. He has instructed groups of security personnel employed at industrial, cultural, medical, educational, and recreational sites. He is board certified in the field of security management and holds lifetime certification as a protection professional (CPP) from the American Society of Industrial Security.

Dr. Greenberg earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (1966) from Queens College and a Master of Arts degree (1970) in Criminal Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has also earned the J.D. degree (1969) from New York Law School and M. Phil. (1999) and Ph.D. degrees (2001) in Criminal Justice from the City University of New York.

Dr. Greenberg's CREST Residential Fellowship project involves the preparation of an exhibit detailing the history of citizen participation in homeland security.

After 9/11 concerns over homeland security have led thousands of Americans to volunteer for various citizen emergency response groups, such as the Civil Air Patrol, U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, Community Emergency Response Teams, fire units, etc. The exhibit will focus new attention on the subject of citizen volunteerism by chronicling the nature and purpose of volunteer police units authorized organizations of a public or private nature that work at deterring crime and/or preventing terrorism for little or no monetary compensation--in America since 1620. Some historical groups responsible for maintaining the civil order of the day-slave patrols, frontier posses, vice suppression societies, the American Protective League, for example, now seem controversial when viewed through a contemporary lens. Today, there exists a variety of meaningful and worthwhile opportunities for volunteering one's free time in order to achieve a safe and secure future for America.

Kenneth Krauss (send an email)
Department of English

Kenneth Krauss was born in New Jersey and graduated from Sussex University, in Brighton, England, with an A.B. in English with classical Greek. He earned an M.A. in English literature at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, and then worked for fourteen years off-off Broadway as an actor, playwright, and director. Returning to graduate study in 1986, he received his PhD in 1990 from Columbia University, and during this time his articles appeared in TheatreWeek. He co-edited an anthology, Maxwell Anderson and the New York Stage (1991), published a study about reading plays, Private Readings/Public Texts (1993), and saw his play, There's a War Going On, originally produced in New York in 1993, published as well. More recently he has edited two editions for Barnes & Noble Classics, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays by Oscar Wilde (2003) and Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (2005). His study on images of gender and sexuality on the Paris Stage during the German Occupation, The Theatre of Fallen France (2004), has received positive reviews both in American and British journals.

He is currently working on a book that attempts to analyze American images of masculinity as viewed on stage, on screen, and in physique magazines during the fifteen years that followed the Second World War. Thanks to a 2007-2008 College of Saint Rose Scholars and Artists Grant, he was able to complete research on the section dealing with theatre, at the Lincoln Center Theatre Research Collection, and he finished writing these chapters in the spring of 2008. He is currently working on chapters that deal with three male movie icons of this period: Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean. He expects to complete these chapters by the end of 2008.

The chapters, which Dr, Krauss will research and write during the spring of 2009, explore the art of an increasingly active, pre- or proto-gay subculture. Between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the 1960s, when the Supreme Court allowed full nudity to be depicted and sent through the mails, a phenomenon, known at the time as "physique magazines," became the only form of permitted publications for men who wished to look at the bodies of other men. While a number of photographers contributed to their evolution, physique magazines began when Bob Mizer, who founded the Athletic Model Guild in Los Angeles, published a catalogue of male models that went into wide circulation (as Physique Pictorial). The garment of choice in such photography was the "posing strap," which covered the genitals but gave full view of the rest of the body. Indeed, photographs that Mizer (and others) had taken of completely nude models were doctored, retouched with painted-on posing straps and bikinis, much like the fig leaves added to hide the privates of classical statuary.

Unlike the traditional weight-training magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, many of which continued well into the 1960s and beyond, physique magazines tended to offer images of beautiful young men with only a minimal amount of pretext of offering much else. To a certain degree, of course, pretext became compulsory because such publications obviously appealed to homosexuals, a group that was strictly marginalized and sometimes terrorized by wide range of institutions. Dr. Krauss's study seeks to return to the photographs and texts and to the pretexts of physique magazines in order to understand the images of masculinity being portrayed and purveyed through them.

Jannette L. Swanson (send an email)
Instructor, Sociology Department

Jannette Swanson graduated Suma Cum Laude from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota with a double major in Sociology and Political Science (with an emphasis on Public Service) in 2001. Currently she is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University at Albany. She began teaching at The College of Saint Rose as an adjunct in 2005 and joined the Sociology Department as a full-time instructor in Fall 2007. Her areas of specialization are Race/Ethnicity and Urban Communities. She has taught a wide variety of undergraduate sociology courses (Introduction to Sociology, Social Problems, Social Research, Race and Minorities, Community and Urban Sociology, and Sports and Society) at both The College of Saint Rose and the University at Albany. Additionally, she recently taught a graduate-level Urban Community Development course for the Planning Department at the University at Albany.

The quality of her teaching was initially recognized at the University at Albany where she was the recipient of the Sociology Department's 2006 Paul Meadows Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in 2007 she was nominated for and received a university-wide Excellence in Teaching Award. While remaining committed to teaching, she is hopeful the CREST Residential Fellowship will assist her in simultaneously developing a sustained commitment to research and scholarly endeavors.

Swanson's current research focuses on incorporating Latinos into the broader literature on race-based wealth inequality in the United States. Traditionally research on wealth inequality in the United States has focused near-exclusively on the black-white racial divide, but her research contends that given the rising demographic importance of Latinos in the United States it is growing increasingly important to understand their life chances and how they are situated within the existing racial-ethnic hierarchy in the United States when it comes to wealth inequality. In short, Swanson*s work seeks to understand how Hispanic wealth compares to Non-Hispanic White and Non-Hispanic Black wealth, and it also seeks to investigate whether and in what ways there are variations amongst Hispanic groups when it comes to wealth outcomes. Great attention will be paid to the ways in which race, ethnicity, and immigration interact in generating Hispanic wealth outcomes in the United States.

During Fall 2008, she intends to further refine her existing literature review and begin getting her data set up for analysis that will then begin in Spring 2008. Her primary goal in Spring 2008 is to complete one of her dissertation chapters, "The Importance of Race and Ethnicity: Within-Group Distribution of Wealth Amongst Hispanics." This chapter will investigate the variation found amongst Hispanic groups (by country of origin) in relation to wealth outcomes and to examine whether and to what extent wealth outcomes different amongst Hispanic groups when their racial-identification is factored into the analysis.

In addition to Latino wealth, Swanson holds many other academic interests including research related to social mobility, fringe banking, residential integration, and gender and sports participation. When she is not teaching or working on her dissertation she can often be found playing Scrabble with friends, watching hockey, or running as she is currently training to complete her third half marathon in Fall 2008.

Staff
John Williams-Searle, Ph.D. (send an email)
CREST Director

John Williams-Searle earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Iowa and his B.A. from Oberlin College. An U. S. social and labor historian, he has most recently (2005-2006) served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi. Both his teaching and research interests are very consistent with the CREST mission. His work emphasizes the interconnectedness of class, race, and gender in defining civic power and meaning. He is currently revising his manuscript, "Broken Brothers and Soldiers of Capital: Disability, Manliness, and Safety on the Rails, 1863-1908," for publication.

Syed Hasan Mehdi
CREST Graduate Assistant

Syed Mehdi received his Bachelors Degree in Economics, with a minor in Business Administration, from the University at Albany. He then pursued a Masters Degree in International Economics and Finance. In addition to his thesis paper, entitled "Economic Reforms in Third World Countries," he has also extensively researched the trade situations between the United States and underdeveloped nations. While perusing his degrees Syed Mehdi worked for General Electric Silicon as a Quality Intern, where he analyzed chemical and export data using econometric techniques. Currently, Syed Mehdi is pursuing his MBA from the College of St. Rose, with a concentration in Finance and Audit Assurance.

Nathaniel J. Jenkins (send an email)
CREST Graduate Assistant

Nathaniel Jenkins graduated from Siena College in Loudonville, New York with a BA in history and a minor in classics in 2007. He served as assistant editor of The Promethean, Siena College's student newspaper, for five consecutive semesters. Nathaniel was also a co-founder of the Siena Democrats student club. While at Siena, he completed a field course in historical archaeology and interned at a private archaeological consulting firm. After graduating, Nathaniel worked as an historical research associate at a privately-owned publishing company in Albany. There, he completed several historical and genealogical research projects and served as an editorial associate on a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Nathaniel is currently enrolled as a full-time graduate student in the MS Ed. program in adolescence education at the College of Saint Rose. He is also involved in the NYGearUp program at the college in conjunction with Albany High School.

Executive Committee Members, 2006-2008
Gariba Abdul-Korah, Ph.D. (send an email)
Department of History and Political Science

Catherine Cavanaugh, Ph.D. (send an email)
English Department

Benjamin Clansy, Ph.D. (send an email)
Department of History and Political Science

Jenise DePinto, Ph.D. (send an email)
Department of History and Political Science

Keith Haynes, Ph.D. (send an email)
Department of History and Political Science

Membership
Any faculty member from any department at the College of Saint Rose with interests, as well as a research agenda that helps to further CREST's goals is welcome and encouraged to become a member of CREST. CREST members have access to a Blackboard site that will help to develop a focused scholarly community by posting working papers, member research interests and ongoing projects, upcoming events, and other news. In these foundational years of CREST, members will also be involved in helping to shape CREST's overall mission.