PROJECT DIRECTORS
Deborah Mutnick
Deborah Mutnick is professor of English at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus. She is author of No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright (University of North Carolina Press 2025) as well as Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education (Boynton/Cook 1996); co-editor with Shannon Carter, Stephen Parks, and Jessica Pauszek of Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era (Routledge 2019); and co-editor with Margaret Cuonzo, Carole Griffiths, Timothy Leslie, and Jay Shuttleworth of The City Is an Ecosystem: Sustainable Education, Policy, and Practice (Routledge 2023). Her work has appeared in scholarly journals, including College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and Community Literacy Journal, as well as numerous edited collections. She is the recipient of a 2021 Summer Institute for College and University Teachers on the New Deal Era’s Federal Writers’ Project. She is also the founder and director of the Voices of Lefferts Community History Project and the editor of Voices of Lefferts: The Flatbush-PLG Community Writing Journal.
Sara Rutkowski
Sara Rutkowski is associate professor of English at the City University of New York: Kingsborough Community College. Her research focuses on Depression-era and postwar American writers and the cultural and political contexts of twentieth century global literature. She is the editor of Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (UMass Press, 2022), and the author of Literary Legacies of the Federal Writers’ Project: Voices of the Depression in the American Postwar Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Her work has appeared in scholarly journals, including American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, African American Review, and Studies in American Naturalism, as well as numerous edited collections. She is the recipient of a 2022 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship.
FACULTY
Juan Rodriguez Barrera
Juan Rodriguez Barrera received his PhD in American Culture at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (2023). He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University. His scholarship has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Science & Society and the African American Review. His most recent publication was a chapter in the edited volume Langston Hughes in Context (Cambridge UP, 2022). He is at work on his first book, which will be an exploration of literary realism in the Black Chicago Renaissance of the 1930s and 1940s.
Scott Borchert
Scott Borchert is the author of Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America, winner of the New Deal Book Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Humanities, and other publications.
Betsy A. Bowen
Betsy A. Bowen is Professor of English at Fairfield University (CT) where she teaches courses on writing, literacy, and the teaching of English. Her current research examines literacy and access to education as described by those interviewed in the FWP’s Ex-Slave Project. Her research project has involved undergraduate students, helping them learn to deal with the complexities of archival material about race and racism as they examine how literacy was sought, restricted, and sometimes attained by the last generation of Americans who were enslaved. This research has been presented at national conferences, as well as in the website, Reading Slavery, Writing Freedom. In 2010, Bowen was named Connecticut Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
J.J. Butts
J.J. Butts is a Professor of English at Simpson College, where he has worked since 2011, following full-time appointments at Wartburg College and CUNY Hunter College. He has published articles on modernism, African American literature, and the Federal Writers’ Project in The Space Between, American Studies, African American Review, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, as well as the Cambridge African American Literature in Transition series. Ohio State University Press published his book Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers’ Project in 2021. Dark Mirror explores the ways that Black FWP writers assisted in the New Deal’s redefinition of the nation and contested its terms of inclusion. He is currently working on literary and documentary accounts of urban uprisings and the FWP subprojects on Black social history.
Wilson Chen
Wilson Chen is a Professor of English Language and Literature at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois, in the western suburbs of Chicago, where he teaches courses in African American literature, US literature, and writing/composition. His research has most recently focused on 1930s US literature, and he co-authored, with Maggie Morris Davis, the essay, Recovering the Worker in Meridel Le Sueur’s Worker Writers (1939/1982) in Resources for American Literary Study (2024). He is currently completing an essay on Hurston’s writings in the 1930s about African American labor, which allows him to revisit the historical debate between Hurston and figures like Richard Wright. One of his ongoing interests is recent Afro-Caribbean American women’s fiction; he has published several essays over the years on Haitian American diasporic writer Edwidge Danticat.
Maureen Curtin
Maureen Curtin is an Associate Professor in the English and Creative Writing Department at the State University of New York in Oswego. She is co-editing a volume of essays with Michele Fazio, Working through the Federal Writers’ Project: Labor, Place, Archive, and Representation. Her work on Jack Conroy’s working-class writing and his absence from the Irish American literary canon led her to the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) where Conroy’s ideas about oral history and labor organizing found a home. She is currently writing about the way the FWP mythologized the Irish and the Irish in America in unpublished manuscripts produced under the aegis of the FWP’s Racial Series. Her FWP research has also proven invaluable for reframing the onset of radical politics in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. Curtin was recently invited to join the board of Radical Teacher.
Benji de la Piedra
Benji de la Piedra is an independent humanities scholar based in his hometown of Washington DC. He holds a B.A. in American Studies and M.A. in Oral History, both from Columbia University. His master’s thesis, “That Something Else: B.A. Botkin, Alessandro Portelli, and Ralph Ellison on Democratic Pluralism and the Dialogical Encounter,” received Columbia’s 2016 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Thesis Prize. Benji has directed, worked for, and consulted on many different types of oral history projects throughout the United States. He has taught oral history courses and workshops at the graduate, undergraduate, high school, elementary school, community-based, and lifelong-learning levels. He co-chaired the 2022 virtual symposium on Race & Power in Oral History and the 2023 Oral History Association annual meeting on Oral History As/And Education. He is co-chair of the OHA’s Indigenous Caucus. The main genre within which Benji works is intellectual biography, revolving in particular around life histories of the 20th century, African-American people and culture, United States journalism, the US history profession, and music and art in the Western world.
Susan Rubenstein Demasi
Susan Rubenstein Demasi is a writer, researcher, and historian with a focus on social justice and 20th century American history. Her first book, Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (McFarland & Co., 2016), told the story of the visionary director of the Federal Writers’ Project. She also contributed to the anthology, Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (University of Massachusetts, 2022) and has presented on New Deal topics at the Library of Congress, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, and other venues. In 2021, she hosted a National Archives webcast and served as a mentor for an NEH institute. She is an advisor to Spark Media’s People’s Recorder Podcast and a Research Associate for the Living New Deal, a group devoted to documenting the New Deal’s legacy. She is currently at work on a biography of John G. Winant, the first chair of Social Security and the Ambassador to England during WWII. She taught journalism at Hofstra University, and screenwriting and research at Suffolk County Community College, where she was a library professor. She is an active member of Biographers International Organization.
Jerrold Hirsch
Jerrold Hirsch, professor emeritus of history at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri, is the author of Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), co-editor (with Larry Rogers) of America’s Folklorist: B. A. Botkin and American Culture (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010) and co-editor (with Tom Terrill) of Such As: Southern Voices of the Thirties (University of North Carolina Press, 1978), a collection of previously unpublished Federal Writers’ Project southern life histories. He has published numerous articles on the FWP, the history of American folklore studies, oral history, and disability history in journals, edited books, and as introductions to books. He is currently working on a study of the creative folklore and writing projects of the FWP and on a biography of B. A. Botkin.
Anna F. Kaplan
Anna F. Kaplan, PhD, is the Director of the Public History Program and a Professorial Lecturer of History at American University. She studies 20th and 21st Century US history and public history with a focus on memory and the uses of public narratives about race and gender. She has worked on oral history projects with communities in the DMV, Smithsonian Institution museums, the US State Department, and others. Anna is the President of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region. The Oral History Association awarded her article A Black Woman’s Practice: Oral History from Fisk University’s Ex-Slave Narratives and the Black Women Oral History Project a 2025 Honorable Mention Article Award. She is working on a manuscript that centers community and student oral histories about the University of Mississippi’s desegregation and reframes the public narrative about integration being achieved in 1962 as an ongoing contestation over race, memory, and public space.
Phyllis M. May-Machunda
Phyllis M. May-Machunda, PhD, is a folklorist/ethnomusicologist and Professor Emerita of American Multicultural Studies at Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM). A Fellow of the American Folklore Society, she graduated from University of Iowa (Music) and Indiana University Bloomington (Folklore/Ethnomusicology/African American Studies). A participant in the 2021 NEH Federal Writer’s Project summer institute, she also earned an Arts Management Fellowship from National Endowment for the Arts, and research fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Archibald Bush Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. Prior to teaching for 30 years and serving as founding chair of the American Multicultural Studies department at MSUM, she was employed at Smithsonian Institution as a contract researcher for the Program in Black American Culture, and as a folklorist/curator in Folklife Programs. May-Machunda is the author of numerous articles and curator of several multicultural exhibitions. She is the lead curator for the American Folklore Society’s Notable Folklorists of Color online exhibits, featuring the contributions of BIPOC ancestors to folklore studies, including during the Federal Writer’s Project.
Maiko Mine
Dr. Maiko Mine is an Associate Professor at Chuogakuin University in Japan and a part-time lecturer in American Studies and Literature at International Christian University (ICU). She is a Fulbright Scholar (2025–26) affiliated with Columbia University. Her work centers on the interviews with formerly enslaved people collected in the 1930s under the Federal Writers’ Project, a corpus that initially drew her interest through Black gospel music and the conversion narratives she encountered in church communities. This interdisciplinary path led to her award-winning solo-authored book in Japanese, which received the 2018 Japan Comparative Civilization Association Prize, as well as contributions to more than ten edited volumes.
Maggie E. Morris Davis
Maggie E. Morris Davis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University. Her research focuses on class and childhood/youth and how, as social constructions, representations of these concepts enter not only our language, culture, and literatures, but also shape our classrooms, curricula, and pedagogy. Her work most recently has been published in the journals Children’s Literature, American Quarterly, and Resources for American Literary Study. As a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress (2023-2024), she researched representations of young people in the Federal Writers’ Project archives.
Michele Fazio
Michele Fazio is Professor of English at UNC Pembroke. She co-edited the Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies and has served as past-president of the Working-Class Studies Association. She directs the Pembroke Mellon REACH Program—an undergraduate research program that focuses on the study of race, ethnicity, and labor in the Federal Writers’ Project and the Farm Security Administration and includes a multi-year oral history project with the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina—and is currently co-editing the book, Working through the Federal Writers’ Project: Labor, Place, Archive, and Representation with Maureen Curtin. Through the support of a BMI Woody Guthrie Research Fellowship and a Massachusetts Historical Society Fellowship, she is writing a manuscript on the cultural legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti. She also produces and hosts, Folk Matters: A Podcast about Music and Activism, created by the Teaching Woody Guthrie Collective of which she is a founding member.
Michelle Renee Jackson
Michelle Renee Jackson, MDiv, is an artist-educator with expertise in transforming how audiences engage with the history of slavery through film. Her work relies on the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans, bringing these voices to life for contemporary audiences. She is the creator and host of Black Philanthropy: Our Stories, a podcast that celebrates Black leaders in the field of philanthropy. Jackson wrote and directed Another Slave Narrative, the first film to use a multiracial cast to relay the original transcripts of the Federal Writers’ Project interviews of formerly enslaved African Americans in the first person. Regarding her work as a filmmaker, Jackson has guest lectured at universities including Georgetown University, Occidental College, and the University of Virginia, as well as high schools such as Episcopal High School and Providence High School. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in the Study of Religion from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Master of Divinity from Harvard University.
Diana Noreen Rivera
Diana Noreen Rivera is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her research prioritizes Mexican American cultural producers, merging interdisciplinary frameworks with traditional and digital methods. Some of her journal articles and essays have appeared in Aztlán, Chicana/Latina Studies, Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project, and Scholars in COVID Times. Her digital humanities projects include an institutional partnership with the University of Texas at Austin’s Voces Oral History Center to create community-engaged oral histories centering the lives of Latinos impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Her second project “Advancing Américo Paredes with Twenty-First-Century DH Tools: Mapping George Washington Gómez with ArcGIS StoryMaps,” was featured by Northeastern University’s Digital Humanities Now! “Editors’ Choice” and the US Latino Digital Humanities Center. Her journal article, “Towards a South Texas Borderlands Mexican American Arboreal Literary Culture: Américo Paredes, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the Mesquite Tree,” is forthcoming in Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture. Presently, she is working on a critical edition titled The Far East Notebooks and Other Early Cold War Era Writing by Américo Paredes, 1946-1956.
Greg Robinson
Greg Robinson is Professor of History at l’Université du Québec À Montréal. He is the author of several books. His first book, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard UP 2001) uncovers President Franklin Roosevelt’s central involvement in the wartime confinement of 120,000 Japanese Americans. His book, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (Columbia UP, 2009), winner of the 2009 History book prize of the Association for Asian American Studies, studies the mass confinement of ethnic Japanese in a transnational context. His third book, After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (UC Press, 2012), which won the Caroline Bancroft History Prize, centers on postwar resettlement and coalitions between Japanese Americans and other minorities. He the coeditor of John Okada, (UW Press, 2018) winner of a 2019 American Book Award, Pacific Citizens: Larry and Guyo Tajiri and Japanese American Journalism in the World War II Era (U Illinois Press, 2012) a study of two pioneering Nisei journalists, and Miné Okubo: Following Her Own Road(UW Press, 2009) on the famed Nisei artist and writer. He writes regularly for the San Francisco Nichi Bei and the blog Discover Nikkei.
Catherine A. Stewart
Catherine A. Stewart is Professor of History at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where she teaches courses in late nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. social and cultural history. Her first book, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine and has been written about in The Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, and Columbia Review of Journalism. She has been a guest on C-SPAN 3, the New Books Network podcast, and the Center for Brooklyn History Talks. Her work has been published in the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, and Civil War History. She is currently completing a book on African Americans and household labor during the Great Depression, for which she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
James Sun
James Sun, historian, educator, research analyst, and contributor with Greg Robinson to Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project, is a Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, focusing on Asian American environmental history. They primarily research the history of Asian rice in the U.S., including how rice came to the U.S., the communities and inter-ethnic relations that formed around growing, cooking, and eating rice, and the environmental impact of growing rice in the U.S. James also researches Asian Americans in the Federal Writers’ Project and was invited to present on the topic by the Library of Congress and many conferences. After graduating from Yale University with a degree in Statistics and a degree in Global Affairs, James taught on a Fulbright Fellowship in South Korea and worked at an environmental nonprofit before starting their Ph.D. They are excited to combine their environmental work and statistical analysis skills with their interest in Asian American history.
David Taylor
David Taylor is lead writer and a producer for The People’s Recorder podcast, about the Federal Writers’ Project, which was nominated for Best Indie series in the 2025 Ambie Awards. He was also the lead writer and a co-producer for an earlier award-winning book and documentary on the Writers’ Project called Soul of a People, which was an Amazon pick of the month. His freelance writing appears in Scientific American, the Washington Post, Smithsonian magazine and The American Scholar. His other books include Ginseng, the Divine Root (Algonquin) about a medicinal plant’s odyssey; andCork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II (Johns Hopkins Press), which received an Independent Publisher Book Award for world history. He has led discussions about New Deal programs in public forums, classrooms and walking tours, and teaches in the Johns Hopkins graduate science writing program. He was a 2025 Fulbright U.S. Scholar.
John Edgar Tidwell
John Edgar Tidwell is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas. In his research into African American and American literatures, he has written widely on authors Sterling A. Brown and Langston Hughes and on the periods Harlem Renaissance and the 1930s. Among his edited and coedited books are After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown, Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown’s A Negro Looks at the South, and My Dear Boy: Carrie Hughes’s Letters to Langston Hughes, 1926-1938. His essays, book reviews, literary dictionary entries, interviews, and bibliographies have appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, Journal of American History, the Langston Hughes Review, among many other publications.
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