Submissions for the Melting Metropolis Project

The Melting Metropolis research team is interested in what people in the past and present think and feel about high temperatures in cities. We have partnered with the Queens Memory Project to organize our outreach and programming. Please share your stories and photos here and Melting Metropolis will archive them in the Queens Public Library's collections and use them to inform the public programming and projects we develop. 

https://airtable.com/shrcUTq29ZoBqwAMT

Kara Schlichting and the Melting Metropolis Project

In fall 2023 Associate Professor of History Kara Schlichting received, as part of a UK-based research team, a Wellcome Discovery Award. The five-year project is entitled “Melting Metropolis: Everyday Histories of Health and Heat in London, New York, and Paris since 1945.” It examines the effect of extreme heat in three major cities, London, Paris, and New York, in the post-war era. Schlichting and her collaborators are studying how Londoners, New Yorkers and Parisians have experienced heat and sought to mitigate its impact on their health and well-being. The project considers people’s lived experience alongside the actions of urban authorities and planners. Melting Metropolis integrates archival research, oral history, ethnography, and community engagement to investigate the challenging interaction between the climate crisis, health, and cities.

 

In July 2023 Schlichting and the project’s Research Artist, Bryony Benge-Abbott ran a New York City pilot program in Queens. Events included two “Handling the Heat” craft table and community surveys at Queens Central Library and 34th Avenue Open Streets, Jackson Heights; a photography exhibit 'Handling the Heat: How we do summer in Queens” at Queens Central Library; two "Drawing Heat" sensory art walks in Jamaica; and an "Open Newsroom" event “Preparing for Climate Change in NYC” with local digital nonprofit newspaper The City on August 3 at Queens Central Library.

https://www.meltingmetropolis.com/ 

 https://twitter.com/MeltingMetrop

Mellon Mays Fellow

Fidel Tavarez will be spending the Fall 2023 semester as a Mellon Mays Career Enhancement Fellow. His work has already taken him this year to Trier, Germany and this fall he’ll be working in Seville, Spain and the Huntington Library in California. Congratulations, Fidel!

In Memoriam of Jon Peterson

The History Department mourns the passing of our colleague Professor Jon Peterson, who died of cancer on July 1. Jon retired from Queens in 2005 after a nearly forty-year career. He was a specialist in US urban history, best known for his award-winning book The Birth of City Planning in the United States 1840-1917 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). He was also a beloved teacher whose courses included the history of New York City and the history of the borough of Queens. Born in Ohio, Jon came to Queens College in 1966 after earning a BA at Swarthmore College, an MA at Ohio State, and a Ph.D. from Harvard. At Queens, he was a key member of the History department who served as chair from 1991 and 1995, as well as many other committees. He also performed an unsung but vital service to the college during the renovation of Powdermaker Hall in the early 2000s. When the original blueprints called for a more corporate layout, Jon applied his architectural expertise and, as former chair Frank Warren put it, “in his quiet and efficient way” humanized the plans to make them more academically friendly. That sense of humaneness and decency is how those of us who knew him will remember Jon.

New History Department Faculty

The department is excited to welcome some new members this year. Andrew Amstutz joins us as our new Assistant Professor in Islamic History, with a specialization in South Asia. Lisa Betty joins us as a Lecturer in African American History. And Nourit Zimerman is a visiting scholar for the year from Sapir College in Israel, where she is a professor of legal history. You can find out more about them by clicking the link to People.

Alumni Chris Bendall's article published in Archival Outlook

We would like to congratulate recent MLS/MA graduate Chris Bendall for having his first article published in Archival Outlook, “Death and Community: Cemeteries as Community Archives”. The article is " is an amalgamation of his history and archives capstones, with a focus on preserving burial markers as records of community histories.

More can be found on his website Records of the Dead.

Julia Sneeringer Gives Witmer Lecture at Hunter High School

On January 12, Professor Sneeringer gave the annual Helen Witmer lecture at Hunter College High School in Manhattan. She spoke to some 200 tenth and eleventh graders about her recent book on the early history of rock ’n’ roll in Germany. She also spoke with students and faculty afterward about the joys of doing history and studying abroad.

 

Sneeringer has also given talks in recent months on her book at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Regensburg. During her sabbatical, she’s been researching the history of a notorious Hamburg nightclub from the Weimar Republic through Nazism and its aftermath. She’s also writing a short guide on the history of West Germany for Bloomsbury Academic Press.”