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Luke Waltzer / History

Graduate Student Researcher
1999 – 2002

Luke Waltzer

I entered the CUNY Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in History in Fall, 1999, focusing on modern American history. My interests are in the ways that visions of community are expressed both by creative people within groups and in the political relationships that evolve out of social movements; I’d like to explore how this expression has helped shape modern American culture.I first explored these interests as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, from which I graduated in 1997 with a degree in American Studies. I wrote a senior thesis on the integration of baseball, looking at the role played by black and leftist sportswriters in campaigning for integration throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In college I also worked as a research assistant for the author Alex Kotlowitz on his book The Other Side of the River, and as a researcher on a CD-ROM about American immigration around the turn of the century. After I graduated, I moved to New York, and worked as a temp while looking for something less mind-numbing. I found that when I was offered a great opportunity to build on my interests in both history and new media with Clio, Inc., Visualizing History, a small boutique company that specializes in presenting historical materials in various formats (web, film, CD-ROM). I worked for Clio as a web production assistant and researcher for a year before entering CUNY and joining the New Media Lab to work on the Durst project and Virtual New York. I enjoy working the New Media Lab immensely, and look forward to continuing to develop the skills to present history in new, exciting, and dynamic ways.