Dawniell Black, Executive Director. Dawniell joined CHSSP as Executive Director in August of 2024. Prior to her CHSSP appointment, Dawniell worked at the Elk Grove Unified School District for 20 years, first as a History-Social science (HSS) teacher and then as a Program Specialist in HSS and Physical Education. In addition to her work in Elk Grove, she has served as a teacher leader consultant for CHSSP, most recently supporting programs focused on inquiry, equity, and Ethnic Studies. In 2023-24, she served as President of the California Council for the Social Studies, and continues to serve on the Executive Board. Dawniell holds a BA in Public Administration and African-American Studies from CSU Fresno, a teaching credential from CSU Sacramento, an Administrative Services Credential from the Sacramento COE Leadership Institute, and an MA in Teaching from National University.
Kate Bowen, Elementary Consultant. Kate is a retired elementary teacher with over 35 years of classroom experience. Kate develops both in-person and virtual workshops for teachers throughout California and designs TK-6th grade integrated curriculum aligned with the California History-Social Science Framework. A love of picture books, Kate also serves on the California Department of Education Recommended Literature List Committee and is a contributor to the California Global Education Project Global Book List.
Shelley Brooks, Program Coordinator. Shelley Brooks completed her Ph.D. in United States History at UC Davis in 2011, where she studied California environmental history. She sits on the statewide California Environmental Literacy Initiative to help integrate environmental literacy in the K-12 history-social science classroom, writes the Current Context installments, the Teach the Election series, and edits the CHSSP's quarterly magazine, The Source. She teaches U.S. History courses at UC Davis. Her book, Big Sur: The Making of a Prized California Landscape, won the 2018 Weyerhaeuser Book Award for conservation history.
Katharine Cortes, Program Coordinator. Katharine Cortes earned her Ph.D in US history from the University of California Davis with an emphasis in Women and Gender studies. Since 2009, Cortes has worked as part of the CHSSP network crafting curriculum, professional development, and primary source sets for TK-12 teachers across the country. She also currently serves as the Director of the Area 3 Writing Project at UC Davis, a sister program to CHSSP focused on writing instruction. In both organizations she works closely with classroom teachers to create diverse, inquiry based, and culturally sustaining resources for students.
Nina Gonzalez, Marchand Public Engagement Intern. Nina is a fourth-year history PhD student at the University of California, Davis from El Paso, Texas. Her research focuses include U.S. conservatism, radical and extremist groups, immigration restriction, conspiracy theories, and the history and legacy of white supremacy in the late 19th and 20th century United States. As a Latina student with learning disabilities, Nina is especially passionate about finding innovative ways to make public education more inclusive and accessible to all types of learners.
Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, Statewide Faculty Advisor and Member of the CHSSP Advisory Board. Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor is associate professor of history at the University of California at Davis, where she teaches courses on gender, American social and cultural history, and the histories of colonialism and capitalism. She is the author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (U Penn, 2009), co-author of Global Americans (Cengage 2017), a college textbook on American history in global context, and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History (OUP, 2018), in addition to articles on gender and economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is currently completing America Under the Hammer, a history of auctioning and market culture in early America. Hartigan-O’Connor has been an elected Trustee of the Business History Conference, is a Founding and Standing Editor of Oxford Bibliographies Online—Atlantic History, and a board member of Women and Social Movements. Since 2018, she has served as Associate Dean for Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Scholars at UC Davis. Her previous work with K-12 teachers included leading over a dozen Teaching American History talks and serving as scholarly reviewer on source sets.
Shennan Hutton, World History Specialist. Shennan Hutton taught world history in high school for 15 years, before entering the graduate program at UC Davis. She earned a Ph.D. in medieval European history in 2006. She teaches medieval, European, and world history at various colleges and universities, as well as promoting K-16 collaboration at the California History-Social Science Project. She is one of the lead authors of California’s History-Social Science Framework, which guides K-12 history-social science instruction in the state. She is also the author of Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent along with several articles on that topic.
Beth Slutsky, Deputy Director. Beth Slutsky earned her Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), where she focused her study on the U.S. during the Cold War and Women’s history. Slutsky has teaching experience at both the secondary and post-secondary levels, and has worked extensively with teachers as part of the UC Davis CHSSP professional learning team. She is one of the lead authors of California’s History-Social Science Framework, which guides K-12 history-social science instruction in the state. She is also author of Gendering Radicalism: Women and Communism in Twentieth-Century California along with several articles. Slutsky also works closely with the Marchand Public Engagement Initiative. Finally, she serves as a lead California Subject Matter Project (CSMP) representative to the 21st Century School Leadership Academy (21CSLA) State Center, headquartered in the School of Education at UC Berkeley.
Tuyen Tran, Assistant Director. Tuyen Tran received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) in 2007. Tran’s fields of interest are twentieth century United States history and Asian American history, particularly Southeast Asian American. She has taught at UC Berkeley, Saint Mary’s College, and Laney College. As a graduate student researcher and teacher coach, Tran worked with the UC Berkeley California History-Social Science Project from 2002 - 2006. In addition, Tran authored “The Newly Uprooted: Southeast Asians in California,” a fifteen lesson history unit for Oakland Unified School District. She joined the CHSSP Statewide Office in August 2008.
Cecilia Tsu, Faculty Advisor. Cecilia Tsu is a U.S. historian specializing in Asian American history, immigration, race and ethnicity, rural and agricultural history, and refugee resettlement. She completed her B.A. at Swarthmore College, M.A. at Brown University, and Ph.D. in history at Stanford University. Professor Tsu's current book project is titled Starting Over: Hmong Refugees and the Politics of Resettlement in Modern America. It examines the evolution of Southeast Asia refuggee resettlement policy and its intersection with the rise of American conservatism from 1975-2000. This research brings the history of Hmong refugees into the central narrative of modern United States history, showing that a small etnic minority group most Americans know little about today played a distinctive and important role in late-twentieth century debates about government responsibility, the welfare state, and how the U.S. should handle the larges influx of refugees in its history.
Dominique Williams, Ethnic Studies Coordinator. Dominique Williams is the Ethnic Studies Coordinator at the UC Davis History Project. Dominique taught at C.K. McClatchy and Luther Burbank High Schools in Sacramento City Unified School District. Dominique piloted Ethnic Studies in SCUSD shortly after supporting the student-led effort to implement Ethnic Studies as a graduation requirement. With Ethnic Studies Now-Sacramento, she advocated for the passage of Assembly Bill 2016, which authorized the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. Dominique has served as a teacher leader for both the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project and the History Project at UC Davis. She has been an active educator in the Black Parallel School Board in Sacramento, Teachers for Social Justice, the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum and the Education for Liberation Network. She has a BA in African American Studies and History, her secondary teaching credential, and is currently pursuing her Administrative Services Credential. During the shelter-in-place directive, our state office, the California History-Social Science Project featured her in a teacher spotlight. Read her teacher spotlight, here. Her writing is featured in Rethinking Ethnic Studies.