Dr. Michael Nash is co-director of the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center and director of New York University’s Tamiment Library. He is author of Conflict and Accommodation: Coal Miners, Steel Workers and Socialism and co-editor of The Good Fight Continues: World War II Letters from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Dr. Nash is a certified archivist and has written about the relationship between contemporary scholarship and archival practice. He has been published in The American Archivist, Labor History, The Journal of Social History, American Communist History, and The Business History Review. Dr. Nash teaches in the NYU History Department. With more than 30 years of archival experience and having supervised numerous survey projects, Dr. Nash served as project director for this survey.
Dr. John Kuo Wei (Jack) Tchen is a co-founder of the New York Chinatown History Project (now the Museum of Chinese in America), the Founding Director of the Asian/Pacific/American (A/P/A) Studies Program and Institute at New York University, and an Associate Professor of the Gallatin School for Individualized Study and the History Department of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at NYU. A recognized historian, curator, and cultural activist, for the past thirty years, Dr. Tchen has been helping to give voice to individuals and communities of the past and the present who have been largely absent from American public history. He has authored the award-winning publications New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 and Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown and has written and spoken extensively on museums, immigration, race relations, New York City, and cross-cultural studies. Dr. Tchen has provided the project with overall direction and scholarly expertise on New York A/PA history and community.
Laura Chen-Schultz, a native New Yorker, received a B.A. in Psychology from the State University of New York at Binghamton and an M.A. in Public Administration from the New York University Wagner School for Public Service. She is currently the Deputy Director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute. Her work with the A/P/A Institute focuses on helping to bridge communities, preserve and share their knowledge and histories, and nurture the production of new work that helps produce a more educated society. Laura Chen-Schultz’s extensive contact network within the A/PA community has been invaluable to the success of community outreach for this project.
Dr. Gail Malmgreen is Associate Head for Archival Collections at New York University’s Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. She received a B.A. in Classics from Swarthmore College, an M.A. in Modern British History from the University of Rhode Island, a Ph.D. in Modern British History from Indiana University, Bloomington, and an M.L.S. from Columbia University’s School of Library Service. She has written and presented extensively on religion in the lives of women in Britain, the American Jewish Labor Movement and Holocaust archives. Dr. Malmgreen, who has worked at the Tamiment Library for nearly 20 years and for the past eight years has supervised the archival processing unit, supervised the graduate students’ day-to-day archival work.
From September 2008-May 2009, the surveying of collections and writing up of survey reports have been conducted by three NYU graduate students, Hillel Arnold, I-Ting Emily Chu, and Y.H. Nancy Ng Tam. Beginning in 2009, Amita Manghnani will join Y.H. Nancy Ng Tam on continuing the survey project.
Y.H. Nancy Ng Tam is currently an M.A. student in the New York University Archives and Public History Program. She received her B.A. in History and Women’s Studies from Colgate University, where she advocated for the inclusion of Asian American Studies in the curriculum. She loves working on the survey project because it allows her to practice activism in archiving and to work with A/PA community organizations and individuals she admires. She will continue work on the project through Spring 2010.
Amita Manghnani will receive an M.A. in Archives and Public History from New York University in May 2011. She holds a B.A. in American Civilization with a focus on race and identity from Brown University. Her senior honors thesis, a multimedia exhibition, focused on the empowering and problematic nature of South Asian American campus culture shows. Before joining the Asian/Pacific American Archival Survey Project as a graduate scholar, Amita worked at the Feminist Press at CUNY. She was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi.
Hillel Arnold (2008-2009) holds a Masters in Library and Information Science from the Palmer School, and graduated with a Masters degree in History focusing on Archival Management in May 2009. He is currently employed at NYU’s Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, where he coordinates EAD production and worked on the Asian/Pacific American Archival Survey project. Since October 2007, he has also worked as the Digital Projects Manager for the Foundation for Landscape Studies, developing and implementing a digital library of cultural landscape images in collaboration with the Society of Architectural Historians and ArtStor. Hillel also worked as the Archives Assistant at the Woody Guthrie Archives from 2005-2007.
I-Ting Emily Chu (2008-2009) was raised in California and came to the East Coast for the first time in 2007 to join the A/P/A Institute as the Graduate Assistant in Archives. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Davis in Asian American Studies and Women and Gender Studies. She graduated from the History program with a focus on Archival Management in May 2009. As the Graduate Assistant in Archives and through this survey, she hoped to help build the collective Asian/Pacific American memory.
