Julia Guarneri

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I study U.S. culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I am currently finishing my dissertation, titled “Making Metropolitans: Newspapers and the Urbanization of Americans, 1880-1930.”  Most historians of journalism have focused on newspapers’ editorials and front page news.  I am instead studying the portions of the newspaper beyond the front pages, such as the Sunday magazine, the women’s pages, sports articles, and advice columns. These articles spoke directly to the issues of urban readers’ everyday lives, and I argue that they created and then taught a new kind of urban culture to the millions of people moving to cities in this era.  I move through a series of case studies of particular cities (Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee) to highlight newspapers’ role in teaching urban codes of behavior, shaping urban community, developing metropolitan regions, and forging a national identity.  Professor Glenda Gilmore is my advisor; she and Professors Seth Fein, Matthew Jacobson, and Mary Lui make up my dissertation committee.

This year (2011-2012), I am teaching the U.S. history survey course at City College in Manhattan, and I am also working as a guide for Big Onion historical walking tours in New York City.  At Yale, I founded and ran an interdisciplinary urban history working group for graduate students and faculty, and trained new teaching assistants as a fellow at the Graduate Teaching Center.  I designed and taught a course, “The American City,” for Yale’s summer session in 2010, and I served as a teaching assistant in a range of courses on United States history and on Chinese history.  My fields of study for oral exams were U.S. social and cultural history from 1865 to the present with Professors Gilmore and Jacobson, and East Asian history with Jonathan Spence.