My name’s Tad Suiter. I currently reside in Athens, Ohio, with my spouse and my daughter. I work as an adjunct professor at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, teaching an assortment of classes in communications and history.
I have a PhD in US History from George Mason University. My primary research interest is the convergence of media, communication, technology, and culture in 19th and 20th century America, and how understanding that convergence can give a more nuanced understanding of bigger issues of power and politics. I also completed a minor field in History and New Media, and was lucky enough to work for a year and a half at George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.
My dissertation, “Vulgarizing American Children”: Navigating Respectability and Commercial Appeal in Early Newspaper Comics deals with the cultural context and history of the first few decades of the newspaper comics pages. Drawing on the theory of Pierre Bourdieu, I look at the way that publishers, editors, cartoonists, and the reading public navigated questions related to cultural and economic capital with regard to strip cartoonists.
It was a really fun project and I got to read old comic strips and magazines and call it “research.”
While working on my doctorate, I began a somewhat erratic but very satisfying career in Public History. (Sometimes Digital, and sometimes not.) I worked as an Assistant Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum and as a Digital Project Specialist at the Center for Local History, housed in the Arlington Public Library in Arlington, Virginia. A decent sampling of my work can be found by clicking on “My Work” in the menu above.
After the birth of my kid, in need of childcare and at the end of a contract at a museum in Boston, I chose to take some time to be a full-time stay-at-home parent, and eventually found a path into adjuncting. I love teaching at a school like CUNY SPS, with a community-oriented mission and a strong emphasis on first-gen and non-traditional students.
Other than my professional interests, I love cooking, making bad art, playing music poorly, and antiquing.
My partner is an archivist at Ohio University. We are blessed to both do things we love, and to have similar enough interests that “talking with your spouse about their job” is always thought-provoking and interesting.
Our daughter, born just a couple years before COVID, has become a total iPad kid (though we’re an Android family), and is very interested in gaming and computers. She is teaching herself to read so that we can start to learn to code together.
This is a weird blog, with some academic stuff, some personal stuff, and a lot of stuff that is sort of both. I know nobody blogs anymore, but with the landscape of social media, I want somewhere that I own to share my thoughts. Which is how I ended up landing back on blogging after several years of dormancy.
