S3E5 Allison Finkelstein - Arlington National Cemetery

Today’s guest is historian and ballet dancer Allison Finkelstein. Allison is Senior Historian at Arlington National Cemetery. She is an alumna of the College of William and Mary and earned her PhD in History at the University of Maryland at College Park. Allison previously worked as a historian for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services History Office & Library and as a Historical Consultant for the American Battle Monuments Commission and the US Vietnam War Commemoration Office. From 2017-2018, she served as the Chair of the Arlington World War I Commemoration Task Force. In 2020, The National Alliance of Preservation Commissions (NAPC) recognized her work on the Clarendon War Memorial with the Excellence Award in Best Practices: Public Outreach/Advocacy.

Allison is the author of Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials: How American Women Commemorated the Great War, 1917-1945, which is part of GFOP Steve Trout’s War, Memory, and Culture Series at the University of Alabama Press. The book won the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference’s 2022 Arline Custer Memorial Award for the best book written in the Mid-Atlantic region. Her articles have been published in Buildings & Landscapes: The Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum and World War I Remembered, the National Park Service’s book of essays on the First World War. Allison and her work have been featured in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and she has appeared on several media outlets.

Join us for a feel-good chat with Allison as we discuss growing up visiting battlefields in Virginia, public history, Gilbert & Sullivan, being in the recent Kennedy Center production of Giselle, and a singer-to-listen-to-for-the-rest-of-your-life choice that caused Brian and Bill to fall out of their chairs! Shoutout to Rocklands BBQ in Alexandria and Pierce's BBQ in Williamsburg!

Rec.: 02/16/2023