Gerald Zahavi:
CLASS OF 1969
White Plains High SchoolClass of 1969
White plains, NY
Gerald's Story
I'm a professor of History and Director of the Documentary Studies Program at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where I have been since 1985. I completed my undergraduate education at Cornell (with a BA in European Intellectual History), and received my MA (in European Cultural History) and Ph.D. from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University (the latter with a specialization in modern U.S. economic, social, and labor history).
From a fairly young age, while attending White Plains High School, I became interested in audio, radio, multimedia, and film production – including 16mm filmmaking, concert recording, sound and slide shows, and theatrical soundcraft (in fact, I headed my High School theater department's sound crew). While I put these interests aside as I worked toward my doctorate in history, they never left me. In 1996, perhaps reflecting my long-term interest in the use of media – old and new – to communicate history to a wide audience (I was very frustrated by how insular my field had become, with professors essentially writing for other professors), I founded Talking History, an aural history production center with a weekly FM radio program that was broadcast over the Internet for almost two decades (till 2016). A year later, in 1997, I co-founded the Journal for MultiMedia History, and in 2006 – after close to three years of effort – I helped establish an interdisciplinary Documentary Studies Program at the University at Albany, a program which I now direct. I also helped inaugurate, in 2009, an innovative History and Media M.A. track within our History department that offered research and production training for history graduate students interested in cutting-edge work in history and hypermedia authoring, photography and photoanalysis, documentary video/filmmaking, oral/video history, and aural history and audio documentary production; that track has since been incorporated into our broader Public History Program.
At the University at Albany, I teach courses in U.S. social and economic history, American labor and modern U.S. business history, U.S. local and regional history, and a number of general American. history courses.-- as well as documentary studies, oral/video history, public history, quantitative methods for historians, historical radio/audio documentary production, and film/video documentary production.
My academic research interests are diverse. The...Expand for more
y focus on such topics as: welfare capitalism; the history of General Electric (projects include an oral history of the corporation and the GE Research Laboratory, as well as a documentary on the history of GE); labor and political radicalism in modern America; Cold War science and politics; and oral/aural history.
I'm the author of Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoemakers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890-1950 (University of Illinois Press, 1988) and a number of articles on the history of labor and radicalism – as well as the producer and audio engineer of a 2-CD oral history of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. I've also been heavily involved in several document and media preservation and publication projects, serving as the editor of over half-a-dozen labor and business history related microform publications. I'm nearing the completion of another book on the local and regional history of American communism titled Embers on the Land; several chapters have already been published as articles ( one was the cover article of an issue of The Journal of American History and a second won the Frederick C. Luebke Award for the best article of the year published in The Great Plains Quarterly as well as the Western History Association's Ray Allen Billington Award for best article of the year on Western history). As a media producer for over twenty years, I was engaged weekly in the production of broadcast content – including radio segments of Talking History. I now consult for North Country Public Radio. Most recently -- since 2016 -- I have been heavily involved in museum work as a member of the Executive Committee of the Essex County Historical Society & Adirondack History Museum -- working as co-curator on a variety of museum exhibits, as media consultant, and as oral/video history project director.
I currently live on my 220 acre family homestead in the Adirondack Mountains of NY -- near Elizabethtown, New York. During the academic year, I commute to my teaching job in Albany. At my home I have a studio and library, a carpentry shop, a sawmill, as well as a recording studio/production center (where I work on various non-academic and academic projects). My hobbies include carpentry, electronics – including building and repairing computers, painting, guitar, poetry/song writing, photography and cinematography, kayaking, sailing, fly fishing and fly tying, and hiking.
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