Julie Golia is a historian of media and gender, an acclaimed curator, and an award-winning educator. She aims to break down walls between the practices of academic and public history and to make critical themes of the field accessible and relevant to diverse audiences. Currently, she is the Associate Director of Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books and Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscripts at The New York Public Library (NYPL).
Julie is the author of Newspaper Confessions: A History of Advice Columns in a Pre-Internet Age, published in May 2021 by Oxford University Press.
Since arriving at NYPL in February 2020, Julie has led several important collecting and outreach initiatives. These include Pandemic Diaries, which collected almost 300 audio recordings of people’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic to become part of the Library’s research collections, and Doc Chat, a weekly 30-minute virtual program that hosts lively conversations about NYPL’s most interesting and quirky collections.
Julie was formerly Vice President for Curatorial Affairs and Collections at Brooklyn Historical Society (now the Center for Brooklyn History at the Brooklyn Public Library). There, she curated several major exhibitions, most recently “Taking Care of Brooklyn: Stories of Sickness and Health” (2019) and "Waterfront" (2018), which covered 20,000 years of history along Brooklyn's coastline.
Julie was the co-host and co-producer of BHS's podcast Flatbush + Main. She has spearheaded important digital projects, including An American Family Grows in Brooklyn: The Lefferts Family Papers, and Brooklyn Waterfront History, a partnership with Brooklyn Bridge Park. Julie has also helped produce documentary films, including the 2003 Peabody Award-winning film “Tupperware!”
From 2011 to 2014, Julie co-directed Students and Faculty in the Archives (SAFA), a U.S. Department of Education-funded post-secondary educational program that has introduced document analysis and archival research to over 1,100 first-year students from local universities. She is the co-founder and editor of TeachArchives.org, a robust educational website that brings innovative teaching exercises and articles on pedagogy to a national audience.
Julie received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2010.