Gary Giddins
Executive Director

Gary Giddins, a member of the Graduate School faculty in American Studies, is an eminent music critic and the prize-winning author of twelve books, including biographies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. He is currently working on the second volume of his definitive biography of Bing Crosby. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award for his Visions of Jazz, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Journalists Association, a Peabody Award, a Grammy, and an unmatched six Deems Taylor Awards for Excellence in Music Criticism. His most recent book, Warning Shadows: Home Alone with Classic Cinema, was published by Norton in 2010.

John Matteson
Deputy Director

John Matteson is a full professor of English and legal writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has written articles for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New England Quarterly, Streams of William James, and Leviathan. He is a former treasurer of the Melville Society and is a member of the Louisa May Alcott Society's Advisory Board. He was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his first book, Eden's Outcast: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. His new book, The Lives of Margaret Fuller, was published by Norton in January 2012.

David Nasaw
Chair of the Advisory Board
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History

David Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Professor Nasaw's most recent publication is Andrew Carnegie (Penguin Press, 2006). Andrew Carnegie was awarded the 2007 New York Historical Society Prize in American History and chosen as a "notable" book of 2006 by the New York Times and a "best" book of the year by the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Business Week, and Library Journal. Nasaw is also the author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (2000). Other publications include Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling, Children of the City: At Work and At Play, and Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. Professor Nasaw has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, served as a Fulbright Professor of American Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is on the Board of Directors of the New York Council for the Humanities.

Michael Gately
Program Director

Michael Gately studied philosophy and politics at Princeton University, and is currently a nonfiction fellow of the Writers' Institute at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has worked as a research assistant at the Open Society Institute and Soros Foundations; as an English and history teacher, debate coach, and student publications advisor at the Collegiate School; and as a ghost writer to the founding partner of a large New York law firm. He is an avid cyclist.