Selected Presentations
Guides Association of New York City (GANYC), GANYC Membership Meeting: “Escalators: a Hidden History, Moving the City.”
Metropolitan Chapter, Victorian Society of America: Emerging Scholars, 2024: “Emerging Scholars:
Gilded Age Escalators, Windows, and Women on the Rise“
Presentation: “Escalators: elevating communities from Colombia to Taiwan, since 1892,” Second International Congress on Industrial Heritage, July 2025 (in review)
Lecture Topics
- Escalator History 101 (Beginner Level)- interactive/discussion-based
- Will it Eat Me? Escalator Safety (Ages 5 to 10)
- Moving Staircase, Inclined Elevator, Motorstairs, Escalator: the Race to Market Saturation
- Up, Up, and Away: How the Escalator Changed Retail and Transportation (and the modern world)
- ‘Women Want Moving Stairs’: Nineteenth Century’s Unsung Heroines of Escalator Use
- Innovators, Engineers, and Opportunists: the men Behind the Escalator
- Escalators as Agents of Access and Discrimination
- Rising Modern: When the Gilded Age Met Technological Innovation
- Powering the Rise: a Look at Escalator Engineering
- Women Who Make Books: from Publishers’ Bindings to Artists’ Books
- The Afterlife of Collections: Library Life in Post-custodial Times
- Untold Stories: Using Local Histories, Newspapers, and Maps to Reveal Environmental Shift
- Futurama: Visions of Transportation and the Specter of Climate Change in Three American-Based World’s Fairs
Research for Books and Media
My research has appeared in biographies, television, and media projects, including:
- Freakonomics Radio (Stitcher)
- The Hustle
- Editor-in-Chief for RBM: a Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 2023-Present
- The Squirrel Census (Central Park), 2019
- Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (PBS), season 4, 2017
- Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920, by Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, published by NYU Press, 2013
Image credit
“Women want moving stairs: Appear at Service Commission’s Hearing on Interborough Improvement, The New York Times, 9 Nov. 1911.
Diane Dias DeFazio. 