T H E   T E A M

Our Staff

Charles Thomas Long, Ph.D.
Academic Director

​Tom Long conducts research on the military and legal interactions between Britain and America through 1815. He is currently investigating the activities and influence of Admiral George Montagu, Sir Andrew Snape Hamond, and James and Richard Barron during the American Revolution through their participation in the naval campaign in the Chesapeake. He also continues to investigate the impact of federalism on American life through the federal regulation of economic activity. In 2017, he was selected by students of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences to be a faculty speaker at commencement, and that same year he received the 41st annual George Washington University Faculty Award for outstanding contributions to the university.
Tom also serves as advisor to the GW chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the National History Honor Society, and has served as Academic Director for the Albert H. Small Student/Teacher Institute - Normandy: Sacrifice for Freedom in 2011 and 2012. He also teaches the Price of Freedom: Normandy, 1944 undergraduate course at GW.

Denver Brunsman
Deputy Academic Director

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​Denver Brunsman writes on the politics and social history of the American Revolution, early American republic, and British Atlantic world. His courses include “George Washington and His World,” taught annually at Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. His book, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (University of Virginia Press, 2013), received the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work in eighteenth-century studies in the Americas and Atlantic world. A retired staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserves, his honors include the Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Prize for Teaching Excellence and induction into the George Washington University Academy of Distinguished Teachers as well as research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Newberry Library, Chicago; the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, University of Michigan; the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania; and the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.

Eric Arnesen
Deputy Academic Director

​Eric Arnesen is the James R. Hoffa Teamsters Professor of Modern American Labor History and Vice Dean for Faculty and Administration in GW's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.  His scholarly work focuses on issues of race, labor, politics, and civil rights. In his book, Brotherhoods of Color, he explored traditions of black trade unionism and labor activism, white union racial ideologies and practices, and workplace race relations. In various essays, he has debated the uses of the concept of “whiteness” in American history, the character of black anti-communism, and the utility of the “long civil rights movement” framework. His current project is a political biography of the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph. A former president of The Historical Society, Professor Arnesen teaches courses on modern US history, American labor history, and race and public policy. His reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe and his review essays have appeared in The New Republic, Dissent, and Historically Speaking. In 2006, he held the Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the Swedish Institute for North American Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden and in 2011-2012 he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  He is currently co-chair of the Washington History Seminar at the Wilson Center.

Adam Bieniek

Staff Director

Adam Bieniek is a graduate from George Washington University, where he studied International Relations with a minor in history. He is an alumnus of the Price of Freedom: Normandy 1944, where he researched the life and death of Flight Officer Steve C. Baran, currently buried in Plot A, Row 7, Grave 25 at Colleville-Sur-Mer. In 2017, he was awarded the Gardiner G. Hubbard Memorial Prize for Excellence in American History by the George Washington University History Department.