Peter Gansevoort Lecture Series Bios

Russell Shorto was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He has three children (Anna, Eva, and Anthony) and three step-children (Reinier, Hector, and Benjamin). He writes books of narrative history; he believes history is most meaningful to us when it manifests itself through individuals in conflict. His books have been published in fourteen languages and have won numerous awards. He is senior scholar at the New Netherland Institute and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. His interests include the past, the present and the future, not necessarily in that order.

Wim Klooster is Professor of History at Clark University in the United States, where he has taught since 2003. After earning his doctorate at the University of Leiden (the Netherlands), he has been a Fulbright fellow, an Alexander Vietor Memorial Fellow and an Inter-Americas Mellon Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library, a Charles Warren Fellow at Harvard University, a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Atlantic History at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in Wassenaar. His work has a strong comparative dimension and focuses on revolt and revolution, maritime illegality, the Dutch empire, and Jewish trade and migration. Klooster is the author of dozens of articles and nine monographs and edited books, including The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (2016), Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (2009), and Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648-1795 (1998). Klooster has been co-editor of Brill's Atlantic World series since 2001.

William A. Starna is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, State University of New York College at Oneonta; NEH Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities, Hartwick College. A longtime student of the Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples of eastern North America, Starna is the recipient of a Senior Fellowship at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and the Donald M. Blinken Fellowship in Academic Administration at SUNY. He is the author of From Homeland to New Land: A History of the Mahican Indians, 1600-1830 and co-editor--with Charles Gehring-- of A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634-1635: The Journal of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert.

Amy Ransford is a historian of early America and a Ph.D. candidate in history at Indiana University. Her dissertation, "Trading Women: Patriarchy and Colonialism in the Hudson River Valley, 1600-1790," analyzes entangled kinship and trade networks throughout the Hudson and Mohawk River Valleys over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is especially interested in the experiences of Native and European women whose commercial and productive activities were central to the long process of colonization. She was the New Netherland Institute's Student Scholar in Residence (2017-2018) and currently holds Indiana University's Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship. She recently taught a course on Revolutionary America and served for 3 years as an Editorial Assistant at the American Historical Review. She is a native Hoosier and lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with her daughter and wild little dog.

Michael J. Douma is an assistant research professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, where he is the Director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. He is a graduate of Hope College and Florida State University. He also studied for a year in Leiden, the Netherlands, and was a Fulbright Scholar for a year in Amsterdam. He is the author of 4 books, with a few more on the way. These include Veneklasen Brick: A Family, a Company, and Unique Nineteenth Century Dutch Architectural Movement in Michigan (Eerdmans, 2005), How Dutch Americans Stayed Dutch (Univ of Amsterdam, 2014), and Creative Historical Thinking (Routledge, 2018). Forthcoming with Leiden University Press is his book The Colonization of Freed African Americans in Suriname.

Stephen McErleane is director of the New Netherland Institute and a doctoral candidate in history at the State University of New York at Albany, where he is currently writing a dissertation on the seventeenth-century Dutch colony of New Netherland in history & memory. He also holds a master's in information science (archives) from SUNY Albany. He is from Stony Point, NY and currently lives in Troy, NY.

Maeve Kane is Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Albany. Her research focuses on the social and economic history of gender, race and culture contact in early America and the early modern Atlantic world, with a focus on clothing as a site of conflict over religion, sovereignty and political economy. Her current project, Shirts Powdered Red, examines Iroquois women's labor and consumer choices from first contact through the reservation period of the mid-nineteenth century. Her work is interdisciplinary and draws on material culture, archaeology, art and digital methods to examine economic change and consumer agency. As an extension of her interest in material culture and consumerism, she is also interested in the construction of race and authenticity in public history through historical reenactments and hobbyist living history.

Andrea Mosterman is associate professor in Atlantic History at the University of New Orleans. In her work, she explores the multi-faceted dimensions of slavery, slave trade, and cross-cultural contact in the Dutch Atlantic and Early America with special emphasis on Early New York. She has published articles on topics ranging from slavery and race in an eighteenth-century Brooklyn Dutch Reformed Church to Dutch diplomacy in precolonial Kongo. She also curated the digital exhibit Slavery in New Netherland for the New Netherland Institute. Currently, she is completing her manuscript on slavery and space in early New York's Dutch communities, under contract with Cornell University Press.

Bill Brandow is a native of Albany, who has worked for John G. Waite Associates, Architects since 1997. JGWA is a nationally recognized firm in the field of preservation architecture. Between 2001 and 2004 Bill served as Historic Albany Foundation's first Director of Preservation Services. He subsequently served for nine years on HAF board, including three years as its President. He has a lifelong interest in the history of Albany and its architecture.

Ian Stewart has been working the preservation trades field for over a decade. He is a rare combination of tradesperson and academic. Dedicated to the furtherance of the traditional trades and crafts in America, Ian was the President of the Board of Directors of the Preservation Trades Network, is a member of the Timber Framer's Guild, and is a member of the Traditional Timber Frame Research Advisory Group (TTRAG). Ian holds a Master's degree in Preservation Studies at Boston University's School of American and New England Studies. His thesis focused on Anglo Dutch houses of the Hudson Valley, particularly those built prior to 1830. Ian's primary area of research has been the buildings constructed by Netherlandish immigrants to the United States, as well as the origins of those styles in Belgium and the Netherlands. His work in this field was recently recognized by the New Netherland Institute, who awarded him the Alice P. Kenney award in 2018. Ian constantly strives to bring attention to this unique style of construction, which has been greatly overlooked, despite its influence in American architecture.

Len Tantillo is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and a licensed architect who left the field of architecture in 1986 to pursue a career in the fine art of historical and marine painting. Since that time, his work has appeared internationally in exhibitions, publications and film documentaries. He is the author of four books, and the recipient of two honorary degrees. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists. His work is included in the collections of the Fenimore Art Museum, the Minnesota Museum of Marine Art, numerous historical societies, and corporate and private collections in the USA and abroad. In 2004 he was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create a painting depicting the Daniel Winne house as it may have appeared in 1755. He has produced over 300 paintings and drawings of New York State history. In 2016 he was elected a Fellow of the New York Academy of History.