QNOHP Team
Staff
Mary Rizzo is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. She also consults with nonprofit history and cultural organizations, including the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the Tuckerton Seaport, and the NJ State Museum. She comes to this position after a decade of working in public history and the public humanities in New Jersey. Her primary motivation has been helping small and medium-sized history, humanities, and cultural organizations build their capacity and professionalize so they can tell more inclusive stories that fully represent our communities. Projects along these lines include the Public History Boot Camp series at MARCH, the Telling Untold Histories unconference, and the Queer Newark Oral History Project to document the history of the LGBT community in Newark.
Co-Director Kristyn Scorsone (they/them) is a lecturer in the History department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Newark and a public historian with the Queer Newark Oral History Project and the Humanities Action Lab. They received their PhD in American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Their dissertation, A Way Out of No Way: The Labor and Activism of Black Queer and Transgender People in Newark, New Jersey, 1970s to the present is an interdisciplinary work centered on Black feminisms, LGBTQ+ studies, labor studies, cultural history, urban history, and studies of capitalism.
Since joining the Queer Newark Oral History Project in 2015 they have conducted over forty oral histories, given numerous talks, workshops, interviews, and presentations, designed and led Queer Newark walking tours, co-curated the 2017 traveling exhibit, At Home in Newark: Stories from the Queer Newark Oral History Project, and produced and hosted the Queer Newark podcast. Their writing has appeared in The Public Historian, The Journal of the History of Sexuality, The Star-Ledger, History@ Work, Notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality, OutHistory, and Out in New Jersey. They also have a chapter in the award winning book, Queer Newark: Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community edited by Dr. Whitney Strub. For more info, check out their website: kristynscorsone.com
Timothy Stewart-Winter is an associate professor of U.S. history. His first book, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Penn, 2016; paperback, August 2017), won the 2017 John Boswell Prize for the outstanding book in the field of LGBT history, awarded by the American Historical Association Committee on LGBT History. He is now working on the first book-length study of the scandal surrounding the 1964 arrest of White House aide Walter Jenkins on disorderly conduct charges. In 2017-2018, he is a visiting fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. He co-directs the Queer Newark Oral History Project.
Stewart-Winter's work has appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, Gender & History, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. His essay “The Gay Rights President” is forthcoming in The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment, edited by Julian Zelizer (Princeton, March 2018).
He also writes regularly about LGBTQ politics and history for a wider audience, including op-eds in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Star-Ledger (N.J.), and commentaries in Dissent and Slate. He has appeared on “All Things Considered" (NPR), and was interviewed about Queer Clout on “Chicago Tonight” (WTTW television) and “Morning Drive” (WBEZ radio).
Stewart-Winter received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago and his B.A. in history from Swarthmore College, and has received support from the Jacob K. Javits fellowship, the ACLS/Mellon foundation, the James C. Hormel fellowship, and the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.
Follow him on Twitter: @timothysw
Christina R. Strasburger (she/her) is an administrative and academic professional with over two decades of experience. As Department Administrator for History and Africana Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, she provides a range of education, information, and advocacy services for students, faculty, staff, and community.
She is co-founder of the award-winning Queer Newark Oral History Project, a community-directed initiative dedicated to recording and preserving the history of LGBTQ+ people in and of Newark, New Jersey. She has conducted oral history interviews; facilitated oral history workshops; hosted public programs with community partners; co-led Queer Newark walking tours; drafted grant proposals, and consulted on the traveling exhibit, At Home in Newark: Stories from the Queer Newark Oral History Project.
Christina’s work to ensure that marginalized people are respected and valued, and the bridges she builds between communities within Rutgers and between Rutgers and the city of Newark was recognized with an inaugural 2022 Rutgers Beloved Community Award. In recent years, she has also received the JanHerman Veenker Circle of Friends Award, a Black Organization of Students’ Betty Shabazz Certificate of Education, an Advising Matters’ Student Advising Award, a Women’s History Month Committee’s “Sheroe” of Newark Award, Rutgers College Class of ’62 Presidential Public Service Award, Staff Excellence Award, and the President’s Recognition Award for outstanding service and contribution to the university community.
Whitney Strub is Associate Professor of History and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. His first book, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right, was published by Columbia University Press in 2010. His second book, Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression was published in 2013 by the University Press of Kansas. His articles on obscenity, pornography, and sexual politics have appeared in American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Journal of Women's History, Salon, and Temple of Schlock, and he blogs about films shot in Newark and sexual politics at https://strublog.wordpress.com.
Volunteers
Mi Hyun Yoon (she/her) is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Mi Hyun's research looks at the history of the Korean diaspora in the United States through the transnational context of Asian America and Korea.
Aaron Frazier is a poet and writer. He self-published two chap books and writes for La Raine Magazine and several other local and national publications. He holds a BS in Urban Studies Policy from Saint Peters College in Jersey City and an Associates in Liberal Arts-Social Sciences from Essex County College. He is a community activist, the Mother of the House of Divine of Greater Newark, a volunteer for the Newark LBGTQ Community Center, a previous Coordinator of Project Fire II of El Club Del Barrio, and an active member of Hyacinth Cab and Thrive Role Model Story, a long term non progressor study participant with the National Institute for Health, and community activist.
Esperanza O. Santos is a PhD Candidate in the American Studies Program at Rutgers University-Newark as a Presidential Graduate Fellow. Her topics of interest include: women of color feminisms, social movements, critical pedagogy, phenomenology, & decoloniality.
Erica Fugger (she/her) is an oral historian and peace educator based in the New York City area. She actively works with organizations, communities, and families to implement historical documentation and dialogue initiatives.
Erica previously managed Columbia University’s Center for Oral History Archives and Oral History MA program, and served as an Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. She also recently directed Washington College’s World War II public memory program, the National Home Front Project, which collaborates with communities across the United States to document and preserve civilian experiences of the war.
Erica is continuing to explore the lasting impact of World War II through doctoral work in Rutgers University-Newark’s American Studies PhD program. Her research builds upon foundations established through her MA degree in Oral History from Columbia University and her BA in History & German from Union College. Deepening her community-engaged practice, Erica currently serves as a graduate assistant for the Queer Newark Oral History Project.
Moira Armstrong Moira Armstrong is a PhD student in American Studies at Rutgers University - Newark. They received a BA in English and history with a minor in LGBTQ studies from Kent State University in 2022 and an MA in gender, sexuality, and culture from Birkbeck, University of London in 2023. Additionally, for the past two years, they worked as a research assistant for Queer Pandemic, an oral history project collecting the stories of queer people in the United Kingdom during COVID-19. Their research interests include queer and disability studies, oral and public history, the COVID-19 pandemic, and asexuality and aromanticism.