Associate Professor of History

Year Joined RCNJ: 2010

Contact Information

• Phone: (201) 684-7735
• Email: staranto@ramapo.edu
• Office: A-211
• Office Hours: On Sabbatical for Spring 2024

Education:

• A.B. Duke University
• A.M. Brown University
• Ph.D. Brown University
• CV

Courses Offered:

• HIST 102: Modern America Since 1865
• HIST 216: Abortion in American History
• HIST 226: The 1960s, America in Transition
• HIST 231: Women and Gender in American History
• HIST 316: A History of Women in American Politics
• HIST 323: New Directions: America Since 1945
• HIST 410: Capstone: Historical Research
• First-year Seminar in the Humanities
  • The History of America’s Modern Culture Wars (first-year seminar)
  • The History of Politics in the Era of Trump (first-year seminar)

Teaching Interests:

• Post-1945 U.S. History
• U.S. Women’s History

Research Interests:

• Post-1945 U.S. Political History
• The New Right
• Feminism
• Gender and the Family

Scholarly Activity:

• Associate Editor, Made By History, The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/

Books

• Suffrage at 100: Women and American Politics Since 1920, co-editor (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).
• Kitchen-Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, Politics and Culture in Modern America Series, 2017).

Articles

• Goodbye to the Party of Rockefeller: A Case Study of How the GOP Abandoned Feminist Goals in the 1970s.” in The Silent Majority: A Transatlantic Perspective, ed. Anna von der Goltz and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson (Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 317-338.

•  “Defending ‘Women Who Stand By the Sink’: Suburban Homemakers and Anti-ERA Activism in New York State,” in Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America eds. John Archer, Paul J. P. Sandul, Katherine Solomonson (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p.36-50.

•  “Ellen McCormack for President: Politics and an Improbable Path to Passing Anti-Abortion Policy,” Journal of Policy History 24, No. 2, Spring 2012.
•  “The Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act and Its Reception in Rhode Island,” Rhode Island History 66, No. 1, Winter/Spring 2008.

Dissertation

• “Defending ‘Family Values’: Women’s Grassroots Politics and the Republican Right, 1970-1980” (Brown University, 2010).