Spanish Paleography Tool Development Team Members’ Bios
Sarah Aponte, M.L.S., M.S.Ed., is Chief Librarian of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Library at The City College of New York. She is the only librarian in the United States specialized in bibliographical resources about Dominicans. As such, and as Assistant Professor at The City College Libraries, she regularly assists scholars and students conducting research on Dominican issues. She is the author of Dominican Migration to the United States 1970-1997: An Annotated Bibliography (1999), the first annotated bibliography ever of sources on Dominicans in the United States, as well as (in collaboration with Dr. Franklin Gutiérrez) the upcoming Autores dominicanos de la diáspora: apuntes bio-bibliográficos (1902-2012) (Santo Domingo, República Dominicana: Biblioteca Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña, forthcoming, 2013).
Dr. Pennee Bender is the Associate Director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning and on the faculty of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She has worked in educational media for thirty years as a multimedia and video producer, director and editor. She has a Ph.D. in U.S. History from New York University, and teaches U.S. foreign policy, labor, and women¹s history.
Dr. Marithelma Costa is Professor of Medieval Spanish & Modern Latin American Literature at the Department of Romance Languages, Hunter College, and City University of New York. She is the author of monographs on Spanish Medieval texts and editor and annotator of the works of several medieval and modern authors. Her latest publication is Medievalia Humanistica. Estudios sobre literatura española. Homenaje ofrecido por sus amigos y colegas de Ottavio Di Camillo, co-edited with Dr. Isaías Lerner (Salamanca: Seminario de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas, 2009).
Idilio Gracia Peña is the founding Archivist and Current Chief Archivist of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Archives at The City College of New York, City University of New York, home of CUNYDSI’s Dominican Colonial Documents Collection. Mr.Gracia Peña is a career archivist with a lifetime of experience in archival management. Before joining the CUNYDSI he was the Archivist of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños Archives at Hunter College, and before that he was New York City’s Commissioner of Records and Director of the Archives of the City of New York.
Dr. Ramona Hernández is the Director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute at The City College of New York—City University of New York. She is also a Professor at the Sociology Department of The City College. She is the author of The Mobility of Workers Under Advanced Capitalism: Dominican Migration to the United States (2002), named Outstanding Academic Title by Choice in 2002, and co-author of The Dominican Americans (1998), and of numerous journal articles on Dominican immigration in the United States. Under her leadership the CUNY DSI acquired its Dominican Colonial Documents Collection, consisting of more than 103,000 sheets of sixteenth-century documents in microfilm.
Colin Lange is a professional web-developer and Partner at Monaco Lange, a full-service digital programming and design company in New York City. He is the constructor of the new website of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and CUNYDSI’s First Blacks in the Americas website, an educational project devoted to a multimedia divulgation of the history of the first permanent Black population of the Americas, formed by the free and mostly enslaved Africans that settled in Hispaniola-Santo Domingo during the 16th century.
Dr. John O’Neill is the Head of Library and Curator of the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books of The Hispanic Society of America in New York City, one of the oldest institutions in the United States devoted to the preservation and study of Hispanic cultures. He is also the Director of the Dictionary of Old Spanish Language Project. He has contributed approximately fifteen transcriptions to the DOSL and ADMYTE projects, two pioneering electronic transcription projects in the field of Hispanomedievalism. He is a Doctoral Professor at the Department of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures of The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he teaches a course on Editing the Spanish Text.
Anthony Stevens-Acevedo, M.A., is Assistant Director at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute at The City College of New York. A doctoral student at the History Department of The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he earned a B.A. in History of the Americas at the University of Seville and an M.A. in History at The City College of New York. He has a long research experience working on 16th and 17th-century manuscripts from Hispaniola and has produced more than 2,000 pages of transcriptions of archival documents from that period.
Cynthia Tobar is a cross-disciplinary metadata specialist/archivist experienced in digital project planning and implementation, including the development of metadata best practices, controlled vocabularies and taxonomies aimed at improving and maximizing information retrieval for digital content. Previously, she was a Metadata Librarian and Assistant Professor at The Mina Rees Library of The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, where in addition to cataloging special collections, she participated in digital project planning and implementation, including the development of metadata standards and best practices. Prior to her time at the Graduate Center, she was Senior Metadata Creator for the Museum of the City of New York and a cataloger, archivist, and metadata creator at the New York Public Library.
Andrea Ades Vásquez is Associate Director of the American Social History Project/Center for media and Learning and Managing Director of the Graduate Center’s New Media Lab. She joined ASHP/CML in 1989 as an artist, designer, and producer of multimedia materials and has continued to develop online materials for high school and college level classes. Since the inception of the New Media Lab in 2000, she has run a collaborative, interdisciplinary Lab as a space for doctoral students and faculty to develop digital research and projects related to their academic research.