I was a graduate student in 1988. I was also a college radio DJ and I had been publishing the small "fanzine" Incite! (ten sheets of letter-sized paper, folded over, stapled, and duplicated at the local print shop: what blogs were before blogs) since 1985. The latter made me think that it must be relatively easy to run your own record label, because so many people I knew were doing it. (I would soon find out how wrong I was; and my respect for how much work everyone involved contributed to my music scene would soon grow by leaps and bounds). So I contacted five bands I knew, they each gave me two songs, and the result was "Harmony in My Head," a poorly-recorded cassette tape compilation that was the prelude to Harriet Records, which I started the next year. The tape was named after a song by the Buzzcocks; the label was inspired by a record label from Bristol, UK, called Sarah Records, and the children's book Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. I released no-frills music by bands that toured (now and then), got radio airplay (on low-frequency college stations), and were mostly much better-educated and less pretentious than most rock musicians out there. (Back to my home page).
Faculty: Timothy Alborn
I've been at Lehman since 1999, when I joined the History Department. I became chair of that department in July 2005, then served as Dean of Arts and Humanities from July 2009 through July 2012; now I'm back to teaching in History and serving as academic director of the MA Program in Liberal Studies. I also teach in the History Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Before I came to Lehman, I taught for eight years in the History and Social Studies Departments at Harvard (with a brief sojourn at the University of Puget Sound in the Fall of 1998); my BA and Ph.D. are also from Harvard, in the History of Science Department.
I've been at Lehman since 1999, when I joined the History Department. I became chair of that department in July 2005, then served as Dean of Arts and Humanities from July 2009 through July 2012; now I'm back to teaching in History and serving as academic director of the MA Program in Liberal Studies. I also teach in the History Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Before I came to Lehman, I taught for eight years in the History and Social Studies Departments at Harvard (with a brief sojourn at the University of Puget Sound in the Fall of 1998); my BA and Ph.D. are also from Harvard, in the History of Science Department.
I've published widely on British history, with a focus on the intersection of big business and culture in the nineteenth century. My first book, Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (Routledge, 1998) compared banks and railways by focusing on their status as quasi-political institutions in the nineteenth century: I consider topics like shareholder participation in corporate governance, government regulation, and companies as providers of public goods. My second book, Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800-1914 (University of Toronto Press, 2009), describes the rise of the life insurance industry as a complicated instance of modernity. I argue that several distinct, and often competing, meanings of modern life emerged in tandem with the business of life insurance, including melodrama, medicine, statistics, and commodification; and the process of folding these different meanings into a single business strategy was usually much more complicated than most theorists of modernity have assumed. I also co-edited a collection of primary sources on life insurance in Britain and the United States, published by Pickering and Chatto in 2013. In 2019 I published All That Glittered: Britain's Most Precious Metal from Adam Smith to the Gold Rush, which connects gold's cultural and economic functions in Britain between 1780 and 1850. My most recent book is on the changing character of misers in British religion, literature, theatre, and economics; this was published by Routledge in 2022 as Misers: British Responses to Extreme Saving, 1700-1860. Besides these books, I've published articles on such topics as the Indian census, national health insurance, bank failures, gold coins, an Irish gold mine, and tuberculosis.
My teaching at Lehman and the Graduate Center has mainly focused on Modern European History. I've taught various courses on modern British history, as well as courses on 20th-century Europe, European imperialism, science and society, popular music in Britain and North America, and American business history. Besides being department chair and dean, my administrative experience at Lehman includes the chairmanship of the Senate Graduate Studies Committee (2007-2009), and membership on committees relating to the bell schedule, student evaluation of teaching, the General Education program, campus life, and Reassessing Access and Excellence at Lehman. My first year as chair I also participated in the inaugural year of the Bridging the Colleges program, which brought together faculty from Lehman, Hostos, and Bronx Community Colleges.
Although my scholarly and administrative work has kept me busy, in less stressful days I did manage to have a life outside of academia. Between 1989 and 1998 I ran a small record label, Harriet Records, which promoted bands of the slightly quieter than punk rock variety from the Boston area and around the world; and since a few years before that until 1998, a fanzine called Incite!, which was mainly about what the kids used to call indie pop. From 2004 through 2007 I was an active contributor to the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form (OEDILF), for which I wrote over a thousand limericks describing and/or illustrating the use of words from the letter A through C (My Greatest Hits). Now, I read a lot about misers, listen to a lot of music, and watch a lot of TV iin Port Jefferson, where I live with my wife Alix Cooper (an historian at Stony Brook) and our cats Victoria and Albert.
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HARMONIES IN MY HEAD
My youthful stab at patronizing the arts ... by Tim Alborn
