Graduate Research

Graduate Researchers

Stephanie De Paola

Stephanie De Paola is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Fordham. She concentrates on twentieth-century Italian history and is interested in themes of race, gender and historical memory. She received her M.A. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2010 and her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence in 2008. She is the BAAHP's graduate assistant for 2012-13.

Noel Wolfe

Noël Wolfe is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Fordham University, where she teaches courses on race, law, American history and European history. She joined the Bronx African American History Project in 2010 and worked as a graduate assistant for the project through 2011. She has also conducted interviews for the BAAHP. Her dissertation examines the crack epidemic in the Bronx from a community perspective and the interviews she conducts as part of her dissertation research will eventually be donated to the BAAHP. Prior to attending graduate school, she was a practicing attorney for nearly ten years. She holds a B.A. in history from Franklin and Marshall College and a J.D. from Tulane University Law School, where she was the editor-in-chief of Tulane’s Journal of Law and Sexuality.

Kristina Graaf

Kristina Graaff is a Doctoral Fellow at the Transatlantic Graduate Research Program Berlin – New York at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin, Germany. Her dissertation examines the popular African American literary genre known as Urban Fiction or Street Literature. Focusing on the urban streets and the local jails and federal prisons that not only represent the novels’ main narrative spaces but also their spaces of production, distribution and consumption, her work combines literary criticism with ethnographic research. During the fall semesters of 2008 and 2009 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Bronx African American History Project and the Department of African American Studies at Fordham University, where she was also co-teaching the course Hip Hop Street Literature Narratives in the MA Urban Studies Program, together with Mark Naison. She is the author of several articles on Street Literature, urban segregation processes and the U.S. prison system and the editor of the upcoming anthology Urban Street Vending: A Global Perspective on the Practices and Policies of a Marginalized Economy.

Michael Partis

Michael Partis is a Graduate Researcher for the Bronx African American History Project, where he conducts ethnographic research on South Bronx public housing residents. He is also a doctoral student in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and Research Associate at the Howard Samuels State Management and Policy Center. Michael has been involved in grassroots activism around Hurricane Katrina recovery in New Orleans, community organizing on issues with education in New York City, and youth work through numerous workshops and speaking engagements for Black and Latino urban teens. He is the co-founder and co-director of The Bronx Brotherhood Project: a community based youth program designed to provide college awareness and adult male mentorship for poor and low-income Bronx Black and Latino high school males.  