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Cecilia Elizabeth O' Leary Phone: (831) 582-3861 Academic Credentials: Dr. Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary is Assistant Professor of History and Co-director of the Oral History and Community Memory Institute and Archive at CSU Monterey Bay. Her background includes being a Smithsonian Fellow and a Landmarks Scholar at the National Museum of American History. Her area of expertise is U.S. cultural history, public history and California history. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Princeton University Press published her book, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism in 1999. The book explores the period between the Civil War and World War I when men and women, reactionaries and reformers, whites and blacks, statesmen and petty entrepreneurs struggled to define the meaning of national identity and loyalty. This interdisciplinary study focuses on the conflict over what events and icons would be inscribed into national memory, what traditions would be invented to establish continuity with a "suitable past," who would be seen as heroes, and whether ethnic, regional and other identities would be allowed to coexist with loyalty to the nation. The subtitle of the book grew out of the recognition that American identity and loyalty are historically steeped in contradictory patterns and ambivalent relationships. Deep discrepancies always have existed between the nation’s political ideals and its everyday practices. The contradictions of American nationalism remain with us today. In 1999, she received a Huntington Fellowship to begin research on her next book project, the "Construction of Western Americanism at the Borders of Empire." At CSU Monterey Bay, Professor O’Leary developed the first New Media Classroom course on U.S. multicultural history and is currently creating a New Media Classroom course on the histories of California, which will bring a historical perspective to contemporary issues of race relations, immigration and the environment. She teaches two additional courses on "History According to the Movies" and "Whose America? Contested Memories in Public History." Professor O’Leary is also the chair of the US Histories University Learning Requirement. Professor O’Leary is the organizer of a lecture series on multicultural issues that has featured speakers such as Troy Duster, Dolores Huerta, Howard Zinn, Richard Griswold del Castillo, John Kuo Wei Tchen, and Elizabeth Martinez. In 1998, she was Project Co-Director for the successful AOF grant program, "Transforming Humanities Pedagogy through Technology," and in 1999 is currently Co-Director for the AOF program, "New Media at the Crossroads." Links Courses: |
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