Board of Advisors and Friends
Ruth Abram
President and Founder, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New York, NY.
Since it’s inception, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum has gained recognition as an authoritative voice on immigrant experiences on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Ruth Abram is currently organizing the Coalition of International Site Museums of Conscience, which presently includes as its members The Gulag Museum in Russia, The Famine Museum in Ireland, The Goree Slave House in Senegal, The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and Terezin Camp in the Czech Republic.
Elizabeth Blackmar, Ph.D.
Professor of History, Columbia University
Dr. Blackmar specializes in social and urban history. Her publications include Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850, which was awarded the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s Abbott Lowell Cummings Award, and The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, co-authored with Roy Rosenzweig. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled Properties of the American Landscape. She received her B.A. from Smith in 1972 and her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1981.
George Chauncey, Ph.D.
Professor of History, University of Chicago
Dr. Chauncey’s research and lectures focus on urbanism, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, and social movements in twentieth-century United States. He is the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historians, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. He is currently working on The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Stonewall Era. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1989.
Patricia Cline Cohen, Ph.D.
Professor of History, University of California at Santa Barbara
Dr. Cohen specializes in 19th century American social and women’s history. Her publications include The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York and A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America. She has recently received fellowships from the University of California and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She received her B.A. from the University of Bristol (UK) in 1968 and her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1977.
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of History, Loyola University, Chicago
Dr. Gilfoyle teaches American urban and social history. He is the author of City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 which was awarded the Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians. He has been a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, a Senior Fellow at the Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution and a N.E.H./Lloyd Lewis Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. He is currently completing a book on crime in the late nineteenth-century American city. Gilfoyle received both his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1979 and 1987, respectively.
Joan Nestle
Co-founder, Lesbian Herstory Archives (1973)
Ms. Nestle housed the Lesbian Herstory Archives in her Upper West Side apartment for the first twenty years of its existence. She is the author of A Restricted Country and A Fragile Union, editor of the anthology Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, and co-editor of five other books. She taught writing in the SEEK program of Queens College for twenty-nine years, until cancer forced her to retire in 1995.
Jan Seidler Ramirez, Ph.D.
Vice President of the Museum, The New-York Historical Society
Dr. Ramirez has curated many exhibitions regarding the history of New York City, including Greenwich Village and the local traditions of cityscape painting. Her publications include Painting the Town: Cityscapes of New York (Paintings from the Museum of the City of New York), coauthored with Michele Bogart and Will Traylor; and American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, coauthored with Kathryn Greenthal and Paula M. Kozol. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University in 1985.
June M. Reinisch, Ph.D.
Director Emeritus, The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction
Dr. Reinisch served as director of The Kinsey Institute and professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Indiana University from 1982-1993. Upon retirement, she was named Director Emeritus and a member of The Kinsey Institute Board of Trustees. She is now President of R2 Science Communications, Inc., consulting to business, media, academia, and the legal profession. Her public education publications include the thrice-weekly newspaper column “The Kinsey Report”, syndicated internationally for nine years by United Feature/United Media; and The Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex, a lay-person’s encyclopedia answering frequently-asked questions about sex, gender and reproduction.
Luc Sante
Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography, Bard College
Mr. Sante is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and Bookforum. He is the author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and Walker Evans. He has received a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Grammy, for album notes. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he attended, but did not graduate from, Columbia College.
Michael Sappol, Ph.D.
Curator-Historian, The National Library of Medicine
Dr. Sappol’s specialty is the history of the body, medicine, science and sexuality. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th-Century America. His dissertation, which was an earlier version of the book, made him a finalist for the Bancroft Dissertation Award and a winner of the Whiting Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Award. He holds a Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University.
Andrea Tone, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of History, Georgia Institute of Technology
Andrea Tone is a specialist in U.S. social, industrial, and gender history. Her publications include the recently released Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, The Business of Benevolence: Industrial Paternalism in Progressive America, and Controlling Reproduction; An American History, which she edited. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She received her Ph.D. from Emory University in 1992.
Mike Wallace, Ph.D.
Director, Gotham Center and Professor of History, John Jay College, City University of New York
Dr. Wallace has served as a senior historical consultant and talking head for Ric Burns’ PBS Special, New York: A Documentary Film; he has advised many local museums, notably the New York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York; and he has lectured on historical issues in many parts of the country and around the world. Most notably, he is the co-author of Gotham: A History of the City to 1898, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for History. He is now working independently on the second volume of Gotham: A History of New York City, which will carry the story up through the 20th Century. He obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Suzanne Wasserman, Ph.D.
Associate Director, The Gotham Center
Dr. Wasserman has taught courses in museum studies, women’s studies, and urban studies and continues to write and lecture about urban and cultural history. In her many publications she has written about the Great Depression, Jewish nostalgia, housing, restaurant culture, tourism, pushcart peddling, the Jewish silent screen actress Theda Bara and 19th century saloons. Wasserman has worked as a public historian on projects for the Jewish Museum, City Lore, the Tenement Museum, Henry Street Settlement, Clio, Inc. and Steeplechase Films. Currently she is directing and producing a film about her cousin, Janet Jagan, who was elected President of Guyana in South America in 1997. She received her Ph.D. from New York University in 1990.
Craig Steven Wilder, Ph.D.
Professor of History, Dartmouth College
Dr. Wilder specializes in urban history, race, and religion. He has consulted on and contributed to numerous public history projects for museums, historical societies, and televised documentaries. In 1998-1999, Dr. Wilder was a Ford Fellow with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He is the author of two books: A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn and In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1994.
Betty Dodson, Ph.D.
Artist, Author and Sex Educator.
Betty Dodson achieved international recognition with several ground-breaking erotic art exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s before leaving the art world to become a feminist sex teacher. She designed and facilitated workshops that taught masturbation skills so women could explore their own sexual pleasure. In 1974 she self-published her first book, Liberating Masturbation. Her book Sex for One was published in 1986, and became a Paperback Classic when it was revised in 1996. Sex for Two will be published in the fall of 2002. She received a PhD in sexology in 1992 and has produced three videotapes that document her pioneering teaching methods. Dr. Dodson has a private practice in New York City and maintains an active website, www.bettydodson.com
Robert T. Francoeur, Ph.D.
Professor of Human Sexuality and Embryology, Fairleigh Dickenson University.
Robert T. Francoeur is a widely published writer on today’s sexual issues. He is author and editor of the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Sexuality, which documents human sexuality in 32 countries; The Complete Dictionary of Sexuality and several college text books including Becoming a Sexual Person and Taking Sides: Controversial Issues in Human Sexuality. He writes a monthly column, “Future Sex,” in the Encyclopedia of the Future, and has recently written The Scent of Eros: Mysteries of Odor in Human Sexuality.
Mel Gordon, Ph.D.
Author, Professor of Dramatic Art , University of California, Berkeley
Mel Gordon is the author of Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, and Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant. Gordon teaches Yiddish film and theater, and courses on acting in theater, film and television. He has taught professional acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Institute of Acting, Michael Chekhov Studio, Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in New York, and master sessions at the International Stanislavsky Symposia in Paris and Moscow. Gordon received his Ph.D. from New York University.
Ted McIlvenna, Ph.D.
Founder and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, San Francisco, CA
Ted McIlvenna is the founder and director of The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (IASHS) in San Francisco, CA, a fully accredited graduate school offering both a master’s and doctoral program in sexual studies. An ordained Methodist elder, he pioneered the first ministry to the city’s gay population in the mid-1960s, and in 1976 founded The IASHS with Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, biographer and associate of Alfred Kinsey, as its first dean. Now semi-retired, Dr. McIlvenna is devoting his energies to archiving, cataloguing, and preserving the institute’s vast collection of erotica, widely regarded as the world’s largest.
Barney Rosset
Editor-in-Chief, Evergreen Review, Founder Grove Press.
Barney Rosset founded Grove Press in 1951, where he helped establish writers such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and David Mamet. As part of his campaign against censorship, he published D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and commited himself to their respective legal battles. Grove produced a magazine, Evergreen Review, introducing Jack Kerouac, Margurite Duras, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Mr. Rosset founded Blue Moon Books in 1987 and most recently was instrumental in obtaining publishing rights for a sequel to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
Candida Royalle
Filmmaker, Civil Liberties Advocate.
Candida Royalle is the founder and President of Femme Productions Inc., creators of the acclaimed line of erotic films catered to women. She is a founding board member of Feminists for Free Expression and on the board of The Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sex as well as a member of The American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. She lectures frequently about female empowerment through erotic expression.
Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D.
Performance Artist, Author
Annie Sprinkle Ph.D. is the prostitute/porn star turned performance artist/sexologist. She has passionately explored sexuality for thirty years, all the while sharing her experiences through mutli-media; making her own unique brand of feminist sex films, writing books and articles, theater performances, and teaching. Annie has consistently championed sex worker rights and health care. She is the first porn star to earn her Ph.D., which is in Human Sexuality. Annie is presently a popular college lecturer. Her first book, Post Porn Modernist is a sex book classic, and her most recent book, Hardcore from the Heart won the Firecracker Award for best sex book of the year. She was the subject of four segments on HBO’s Real Sex.
Len Steinbach
Veronica Vera
Actress, Activist
Veronica Vera is the creator and founder of Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls in New York City. She is a sex rights activist and has authored hundreds of articles on human sexuality, performed internationally, lectured at Yale and Dartmouth, and testified for freedom of expression in Washington, D.C.