Amy Sodaro
Professor
Deputy Chairperson
Social Sciences, Human Services and Criminal Justice
EMAIL: asodaro@bmcc.cuny.edu
Office: N-668
Office Hours: Mon. 1-2pm on Zoom: https://bmcc-cuny.zoom.us/j/83026053609
Phone: +1 (212) 776-6988
Amy Sodaro received her PhD in Sociology from the New School for Social Research, with a focus on cultural sociology and memory studies. She holds an MA from the New School in Liberal Studies and a BA from Tufts University in Drama and Classics and has taught sociology, cultural studies and genocide studies at the New School and at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Her research focuses on memory and memorialization of violence and atrocity. She has published chapters and articles on memorial museums, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the House of Terror in Budapest, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Rwanda, the 9/11 Museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Montgomery Alabama’s Legacy Museum and Greenwood Rising in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is co-editor of Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), a special issue of WSQ “At Sea,” Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Memory, Politics and Human Rights (Routledge, 2019), and Museums and Mass Violence (Routledge, forthcoming). She is author of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (Rutgers University Press, 2018) and Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race and Slavery in US Museums (Rutgers University Press, 2025).
Expertise
Sociology, memory studies, museum studies, Holocaust and genocide studies
Degrees
- B.A. Tufts University, Classics and Drama,1997
- M.A. New School for Social Research, Liberal Studies,2004
- Ph.D. New School for Social Research, Sociology, 2011
Courses Taught
- This course studies the social world and how it has evolved over time, as well as how individuals are influenced and structured by social interactions in small groups and by larger social forces. The course covers major sociological theories and research methods, and key concepts such as culture, socialization, social class, race/ethnicity, gender, technology, social inequality, and social change.
- A close relationship exists between the social problems and the values and structures regarded by society as normal and stable. In this course, students apply sociological principles, theory, methods, and research toward an understanding of social problems. Prerequisite: SOC 100
Research and Projects
- Editor and Book Review Editor of Sage journal Memory Studies
- Co-chair of Memory Studies Association Museums and Memory Working Group
Publications
Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race and Slavery in US Museums, Rutgers University Press, 2025.
Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence, Rutgers University Press, 2018.
Museums and Mass Violence, co-edited with Paul Morrow and Leora Kahn, Routledge, 2025.
Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights, co-edited with Joyce Apsel, Routledge, 2019.
Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Culture, co-edited with Yifat Gutman and Adam Brown, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Articles and Chapters
“Nunca Mas: Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights,” The Holocaust, Human Rights and the Museum, eds. Avril Alba, Dirk Moses and Jennifer Barrett, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.
“’Feeling Truth’: Objects, Embodiment and Temporality in the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Legacy Museum,” in Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories: Narrating the Past for Present and Future, eds. Stephan Jaeger and Kerstin Barndt, DeGruyter, 2024.
“Race, Memory and Implication in Tulsa’s Greenwood Rising,” Memory Studies 15(6), 2022.
*Winner of Ohio University’s Zumkehr Prize for Scholarship in Public Memory, 2023.
“Contentious Pasts, Contentious Futures: Race, Memory and Politics in Montgomery’s Legacy Museum,” in Interpreting Contentious Memory: Countermemories and Conflicts over the Past, eds. Thomas DeGloma and Janet Jacobs, Bristol University Press, 2023.
“Museums and the Memory of Genocide,” in The Handbook of Genocide Studies, eds. David J. Simon and Leora Kahn, Edward Elgar Press, 2023.
“Memory Activism in Memorial Museums,” The Handbook of Memory Activism, eds. Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg, Routledge, 2023.
“’Bring Your Kleenex and Plan Something Fun for Later…’ Social Media Reviews of the 9/11 Museum,” The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age, ed. Victoria Walden, REFRAME, 2022.
“Transnational Memory Movements in the 9/11 Memorial Museum,” in Agency in Transnational Memory Politics, eds by Jenny Wustenberg and Aline Sierp. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020.
“Prosthetic Trauma and Politics in the National September 11 Memorial Museum,” Memory Studies 12(2), 2019.
“Performativity, Affect and Politics in the 9/11 Museum,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies special issue: “Performative Commemoration of Painful Pasts” 14(3), 2018.
“Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum,” in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 26(1), pp 77-91. March 2013
Honors, Awards and Affiliations
Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellow, 2022-2023
