Annabelle Heckler, Finding Moranda. Moranda Smith (1915-1950) was the first Black woman elected to national trade union leadership in the United States. Annabelle Heckler draws comics at the Graduate Center, CUNY, often at intersections of queer and labor justice, uplifting solidarity as our superpower. Annabelle is creating a graphic story of her search for Smith’s love story. See her work at @annabelleheckler or at http://cuny.is/annabelle.

Jahyeon Kwon, “Choi Eunhee: A Life at the Crossroads of War, Cinema, and Abduction.” Jahyeon Kwon is a Ph.D. student in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY.  Jahyeon’s project examines South Korean actress Choi Eunhee’s (1926-2018) life, filmography, and memoir against the backdrop of the Korean War, the postwar South Korea-North Korea-US geopolitics, the evolution of Korean cinema, and the emerging politics of art-making in capitalist and socialist societies of the time. 

Adrianna Ríos, The First Five: Reimagining Early Puerto Rican Women Novelists. Adrianna Ríos is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is researching and writing the first cultural group biography of Josefa Martínez, Ana Roqué, Manuelita Fernández, Carmela Eulate and Eulalia Matos, five women who were instrumental in shaping discourse about gender and feminism in Puerto Rico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Julia Flynn Siler, Dark Season, a biography of Louise Arner Boyd (1887-1972), a polar explorer who led seven expeditions to the Artic Circle in the mid-twentieth century.  Julia Flynn Siler is a journalist and award-winning author of three nonfiction books. She is currently a Visiting Scholar (January-June 2025) at Oxford University in the Oxford New Horizons Program.

Kate Singh, “From Martha Ballard to Mary Hobart: Shifts in the Social Models of Care in Childbirth,” a Digital Interactive Timeline. Kate Singh is a graduate student in the Biography and Memoir Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her project aims to visually capture the shifting social modes of care between two generations of women who dedicated their professional and personal lives to caring for others in the domain of childbirth.

Maxine Wagenhoffer, From American Girl to Celebrity Conservative Columnist: Alice Roosevelt Longworth and American Celebrity Culture, 1901-1945. Maxine Wagenhoffer is Director of the Hankey Center for the History of Women’s Education and Assistant Professor of History at Wilson College. Maxine’s study uses the public life of Alice Roosevelt Longworth (ARL) as a lens to examine the intersections of celebrity culture, gender, and politics in American history.