BIOGRAPHY AND C.V.

Carla Gerona

Did I work on Pee Wee’s Playhouse or climb Mount Kilamanjaro?

I have never climbed Mount Kilamanjaro, and I doubt I ever will. I do like to hike (or at least try to keep up with my husband on our walks through the woods). Some of my more difficult climbs have include Siete Picos outside Madrid, Spain — but even such easy summits can lead me to have freak out moments where I want to call in the helicopters!

I was the prop-master on season one of Pee Wee’s Playhouse. My early work in art and film — before I decided I wanted to be a historian — inspires me to think about different ways of doing history.

Brief Professional Biography (from the Georgia Tech website):

Carla Gerona (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins) is an Associate Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of History and Sociology, and her areas of interest include Early American, Atlantic, and Borderlands history. Her first book, Night Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Transatlantic Quaker Culture (2004), traced the ways in which a dissenting group interpreted their dreams to shape their world in innovative ways. Dr. Gerona is currently working on “More than Six Flags in the East Texas Pineywoods: Visualizing Borderlands History in a Digital Age.” This is a study of multiethnic east Texas before Texas’s annexation to the United States. The work-in-progress draws on Spanish, French, English, and Native American source materials and uses interdisciplinary methods to explore the ways in which different people interacted on the borderlands. Gerona has written numerous articles on the borderlands and her article, “With a Song in Their Hands: Incendiary Décimas from the Texas and Louisiana Borderlands during a Revolutionary Age,” was awarded the 2015 Bolton-Cutter Prize for the best article on any phase of the history of the Borderlands. Gerona has received prestigious awards for her work including a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship and a Newberry Library Fellowships. Dr. Gerona is also interested in public history and teaches classes on Museum Studies and Digital History. At Georgia Tech she was awarded the Provost Teaching and Learning Fellowship for 2018-2020.

When I am not at my desk or in my classroom: I currently live in Decatur, Georgia, and I am married and have two boys in college — and a dog, Striker. For fun, I like to spend time with my family. I enjoy gardening, traveling, camping, cooking, reading, films, museums, and going to baseball games.

On a more serious note, I care a great deal about human rights, and volunteer with the hospitality house called, El Refugio. We visit detainees held in Lumpkin, and offer visiting families a place to stop in or stay the night.