Stony Brook Experts

April Masten, a Professor of American History at Stony Brook University, specializes in the labor history of the arts. She is the author of Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York (Penn Press, 2008), which recovers the experiences and aspirations of the thousands of young women who managed to study the visual arts at New York’s Cooper Union and become professional artists in an emerging industrial society that extolled masculine genius and exploited women’s labor. She has also published essays on genre painter Lilly Martin Spencer, the overlooked contributions of artists’ models, and the joys of teaching history through dance. In 2021 and 2022, she won the American Historical Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching for her unique research seminar in which students learn to waltz, ring shout, swing, jig, and salsa to complement their archival study of the people, places, and periods that produced these dances. Her recently published dual biography Diamond and Juba: The Raucous World of 19^th-Century Challenge Dancing (University of Illinois Press, Dec. 9, 2025) won the Victorian Society of New York's 2025 Book Prize and was named Finalist for the 2025 SHEAR (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) James Bradford Best Biography Prize.