Alaya Associates cultural RESOURCE Consulting
Bridgeton, New Jersey home of New Jersey’s largest historic district
Flavia Alaya of Alaya Associates Cultural Consulting graduated from New York's High School of Music & Art (now LaGuardia High School), and has her BA from Barnard College and MA and PhD from Columbia University. She studied at the University of Padua in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar and did postgraduate work at Oxford as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. She has received special certification as an urban preservation specialist via ICCROM (UNESCO) in Rome.
Dr Alaya was recently part of an environmental study team under the leadership of Dr. Michael Edelstein, an expert in ecological disasters around the world. Via a grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding, their mission was to explore the slow, apparently inexorable desiccation of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, one of the great water-loss disasters of modern times. Dr. Alaya’s role was to engage with local scholars and cultural resource specialists in defining the impact of this disaster on World Heritage and other Uzbek cultural sites. Her essay on this experience forms a contribution to the collection: Disaster by Design: The Aral Sea and its Lessons for Sustainability (edd. Michael Edelstein, Astrid Cerny & Abror Gadaev. Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, Vol. 20. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, Ltd, 2012).
A well-published teaching scholar, she has served on the faculties of the University of North Carolina, Hunter College (CUNY), New York University, The New School University, Seton Hall University, and Rowan University. For most of her teaching career she has been a Full Professor (now Professor Emerita) of Literature and Cultural History at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where she was also founding dean of the School of Intercultural Studies.
Her career in public history began in Paterson, New Jersey, with the Passaic County Historical Society, where she tapped into her lifelong love for researching and preserving social history and interpreting it in place. She was an early supporter of the Botto House American Labor Museum in Haledon, which landmarked the site of worker meetings in support of Paterson’s pivotal 1913 Silk Strike. As an academic she worked in collaboration with independent scholars and cultural activists, both as a member (and president) of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association and Advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. As chair of Paterson’s Historic Preservation Commission through the 1990s she sat on the committee for the federally-funded Urban History Initiative, which provided on-the-ground financial support for cultural work in Paterson’s National Landmark HIstoric District, and helped save the Gun Mill site that has since become the lauded centerpiece of the newly-declared Great Falls National Historical Park.
Moving to Bridgeton in 2006, she was appointed a member of the Historic District Commission, and served five years, four of them as chair, in its struggle to protect and develop the largest Registered historic district in New Jersey. In 2009 she became founder, with architects Thomas D’Arrigo and Maria Cerda-Moreno, of Bridgeton’s newest preservationist non-profit, the Center for Historic American Building Arts (or CHABA): see www.historicbuildingarts.org .
She has been a member of the State of New Jersey Historic Sites Council since 1998.
Dr Alaya has organized numerous arts, history and preservation-related conferences and published many biographical, cultural and historical books and monographs, including the story of the siting of an Underground Railroad station and the National Register Nomination for Paterson's historic Negro Leagues ballfield, Hinchliffe Stadium. The stadium received the honor this year (2013) of becoming the first National Historic Landmark to memorialize national Negro Leagues baseball.
She speaks fluent Italian and is competent in French and Spanish.
FELLOWSHIPS & AWARDS:
Fulbright & Italian Government Awards
Guggenheim Foundation Fellow
National Endowment for the Humanities Award
Geraldine R Dodge Foundation Fellow
Kress Foundation Fellow
Paterson, NJ: Heritage Citizenship Award
Paterson, NJ: Good Graces Award
New Jersey Historic Preservation Office: Historic Preservation Award (shared)
Listed: Who’s Who in America
Currently:
Center for Historic American Building Arts: Bridgeton,NJ (Co-founder & CEO)
National Landmarks Alliance (Board Member)
New Jersey Historic Sites Council (Member)
Friends of Hinchliffe Stadium: Paterson, NJ (Cofounder & Vice Pres.)
Bridgeton Main Street (Promotions chairperson, founder: FoodFilmFest; cofounder: CohanseyRiverFest )
Bridge Street to Freedom: Landmarking a Station on the Underground Railroad (Paterson, NJ): Co-author & supervising editor, historical monograph pursuant to municipal landmarking.
Published by Ramapo College of New Jersey & the Ciy of Paterson, NJ, Historic Preservation Commission
Web design by FiveRedDoors, Bridgeton, NJ
all photos: Flavia Alaya, unless otherwise attributed
New Sweden Colonial Farmstead Museum & Living History Center at Bridgeton
website: www.newswedenfarmstead.org