Current Students

Jonathan Brooks is a Ph.D. candidate in History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He received his B.A. in History from Michigan State University and his M.S. Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania, where his research included the intersection of school desegregation policy and the democratic purposes of schooling. Jonathan is a National Board Certified educator who teaches AP U.S. History in Brooklyn, NY. Jonathan’s research interests include school desegregation, education policy, teacher education, and social studies education. 

Lee Bynum is a Ph.D. student in the History and Education program.  He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in African American studies from Columbia University.  Lee’s research has been published by the university presses of Oxford, Columbia, New York University, University College Cork, and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, as well as presented at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, and the University of Birmingham in England.  Since 2011, Lee has been with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where he currently serves as associate director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and as program associate for Diversity Initiatives and Historically Black Colleges and Universities.  Previously, he was the program associate for Scholarly Communications and Information Technology at Mellon, assistant director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia, and visiting scholar at Caritas in Hong Kong.  Lee was the founding artistic director of the Harmony Theatre Company in New York, and is active with The BLK Projek, a Bronx-based urban agriculture non-profit.   

Sherika Campbell is a M.A. student in the History and Education program. A native of Queens, NY, she earned her Bachelor’s in Sociology with minors in Urban Studies and PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Sherika is an Advancement Administrator for Blue School, an independent lab school. Through professional work and lived experiences as an alumna of the Prep for Prep program, Sherika has become deeply passionate about independent school inclusion and equity practices. Her interests are around: racial identity, diversity, and school exclusivity.

Dayna-Joy Chin is a first year Ph.D. student in the History and Education Program at Teachers College. Her research interests include histories of Black oral traditions, Afrodiasporic storytelling, ethnography, and historical studies of pedagogical practices that successfully engage Black students. Dayna-Joy is a native New Yorker who currently works as an education consultant to create experiences centering Africana studies, history, culturally responsive teaching, and participatory evaluation methods in a variety of contexts. She has 12 years of experience in education having worked in roles such as a social studies teacher, instructional coach, facilitator and as an equity professional development specialist.  Dayna-Joy graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Africana Studies and B.A. in Human Development in Education, and holds a Masters in Teaching in Social Studies Education from Georgia State University. 

Rachel Klepper is a PhD candidate in History and Education.  She received a B.A. from Boston University and majored in History and Anthropology.  After graduation, she worked at a youth development organization in Washington DC that partners with public school teachers to lead after-school and summer programs in arts, athletics, and service learning.  While experiencing both the significance of after-school opportunities for children and families as well as the challenges that many after-school programs face, she was motivated to learn more about their history.  Her dissertation explores the history of after-school programs in New York City in the mid-twentieth century, and how ideas about childhood, philanthropy, social welfare, and education shaped the varied opportunities available to children.

Lisa A. Monroe is a doctoral student in the History and Education Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. In her primary field of nineteenth-century U.S. history, she seeks to understand whether competing ideas about national identity residing in both America’s common school curricula and in the public arena, ironically, have been indispensable to sustaining pluralistic perspectives essential to our democracy. She asks how efforts to impose a unified state-sponsored curricula—an official American narrative in antebellum America—might have played a role in proliferating divisions among religious, racial, and ethnic populations during the early national period. She considers whether currents of those early divisions persist today in sustaining the prolonged reckoning that America has yet to make with its past.   

In her primary occupation, Lisa is on staff at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) at the MacMillan Center at Yale University, where she is a project manager for the GLC’s participation in the project, “Legacies of American Slavery: Reckoning with the Past,” a Mellon Foundation funded collaborative initiative directed by the Council on Independent Colleges. Prior to her doctoral study, her career in public service as a writer for elected officials in Baltimore, Maryland and Hartford, Connecticut.

Lisa earned a B.A. in English from Towson University and a M.L.A. in the History of Ideas Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

As a Ph.D. student working at the intersection of history, philosophy, and education, Eric’s dissertation addresses the development of the German University model in the United States during the Age of the University, with particular attention to the seminar as pedagogy and locus of institutional reform.  Eric is also interested in methodological change in the digital humanities, and is at work on a book chapter featuring quantitative analysis of early Republican educational writing.  When not working, he teaches chess to 2nd & 4th graders and raises vegetables. 

GeColby Youngblood is a first-year student in the Ph.D. in History and Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research interests include the founding and early histories of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, U.S. Reconstruction, and the Redemption of the U.S. South. GeColby, a Mississippi-native, has also accumulated over 12 years of experience as an educator, in both higher education and K-12, where he specializes in student retention issues and developing sense of belonging. He earned a B.A. in English Literature from Alcorn State University and an M.Ed. in Higher Education from the University of North Texas. Currently, he is completing his master’s thesis on Hiram Revels and his role as the founder and first president of Alcorn State University from 1871-1874 at North Carolina Central University.