Julia Guarneri
I study U.S. culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and my dissertation is a history of mainstream daily newspapers from 1880 to 1930. Historians of journalism primarily have studied the political news of the day. I am instead studying the contents of the newspaper beyond the front pages, such as the Sunday magazine, the women's pages, sports articles, and advice columns. My work looks at how newspapers 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 (New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Milwaukee) to highlight newspapers' role in shaping urban community, defining class boundaries, developing the suburbs, 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.
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 Professor Jonathan Spence. I have been a teaching fellow in the following courses: U.S. Political History, 1900-1945; The History of China, 1600-2008; The Cold War; and An International History of the United States. I founded and now run an interdisciplinary urban history working group for graduate students and faculty.
After graduating from Cornell University, I spent three years
working: first at a deli in my hometown of Oakland, California; then teaching English in Kyongju, South Korea; and lastly at StoryCorps, a national oral history project.
