Staff Leaders

During Goodheart’s tenure, the Starr Center was awarded a $2.5 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the largest federal grant in Washington College’s history. He forged partnerships with the Smithsonian on the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series and with the New York Times on the “Historically Corrected” series of columns, created in collaboration with Washington College students. New annual writing fellowships bring nationally distinguished authors to live in Chestertown and teach at the College. Starr Center student fellowships at leading museums, libraries, and cultural institutions – across the U.S. and overseas – award fully paid summer positions to outstanding Washington College undergraduates in many different fields.

A 1992 graduate of Harvard, he was a founder and senior editor of Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress, which won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in its first year of publication. He has contributed frequent essays and reviews to the New York Times (where he also served as deputy editor of the Op-Ed page), National Geographic, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, the American Scholar, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He is a regular writer for the New York Times’ acclaimed online Civil War series, “Disunion.” His broadcast appearances include CNN, C-SPAN, and National Public Radio (“Fresh Air,” “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered”). Goodheart is a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. He was elected this year to the Society of American Historians which honors leading members of the profession “based on their demonstrated commitment to literary distinction in the writing and presentation of history and biography.”

Over the past ten years, Nugent has taught and designed courses for the English Department at Brooklyn College and the Department of American Studies at George Washington University. Courses include “Ecology in American Literature and Politics,” “Ethnicity and Identity in New York City Literature,” “American Architecture, 1860-Present,” and “America in the 1960s.” For a number of these courses, he has guided students on historical tours designed to illuminate class concepts through local explorations. Such tours have included “Landscape, Monuments, and Memory on the National Mall,” “African-American Migrations in the Nation’s Capital,” and “Ecological Landscapes in the Big Apple.” He welcomes students, citizens, staff, and faculty alike to join him in similar explorations of Chestertown and the surrounding Eastern Shore. Give him a ring or email at the Custom House and he will be happy to arrange a tour – whether by bike, kayak, or foot.

Cameron is co-founder of the Okinawa Memories Initiative, a historical dialogue and peace-building project. In 2017, he was the co-director of the Summer Institute for Oral History at Columbia and the co-chair of the Oral History & The City Conference. He is co-editor of a new oral history of UC Santa Cruz, slated for publication in 2020.

Cameron holds an MA in oral history from Columbia University and two BAs from UC Santa Cruz. He is co-directing a documentary about the intersection of jazz and veterans’ stories in Harlem.