Dr. Samuel Finesurrey serves as an Assistant Professor of History at Guttman Community College, City University of New York where he has taught since Fall 2018. Dr. Finesurrey earned his Ph.D. in Cuban History at the University of North Carolina in 2018. In 2020 Dr. Finesurrey was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Mellon Community College Fellowship to develop, with undergraduates, an archive of student-conducted oral histories producing and preserving contemporary immigrant and activist narratives in New York City. With more than 200 oral histories gathered over six years and in six languages, Voices from the Heart of Gotham: The Undergraduate Scholars Oral History Collection at Guttman Community College houses student-designed and produced interviews that elevate rich, complex, and buried counter-narratives about the past and present focusing largely on immigrant experiences in NYC. By designing oral history projects with undergraduates that explore students’ respective communities, this project has unlocked a history that is only accessible by tapping into the knowledge and networks of CUNY’s incredibly diverse student body. Dr. Finesurrey has published extensively with student and alumni researchers about the echoes of historic and contemporary violence against immigrant and activist populations in NYC and the transformative power of public facing student-led oral history projects.

Finesurrey also serves as director of CUNY-School in the Square Intergenerational Participatory Research Collective, a longitudinal inquiry that began in 2019 tracking 96 then-eighth graders, mostly of Dominican descent, navigating NYC’s public schools. Additionally, since 2021 Dr. Finesurrey has trained young people at a middle school in Washington Heights on the method of oral history so they can trace their peers and their own Social-Emotional Learning growth throughout middle school in a project titled Elevating Student Voices: Building a Youth-Led Oral History Project on Socio-Emotional Well-Being. Finally, beginning in 2024 Dr. Finesurrey inbedded oral history into the new S2 high school where every ninth grader was trained in becoming an oral historian. This resulted in the ongoing project, Uptown Voices: The Student-Led Community Oral History Archive at School in the Square.

In 2021 Finesurrey led the research component of the Juneteenth Youth Housing Summit 2021 which culminated in the report “Dreaming of Home: Youth Researchers of Color Address NYC’s Housing Crisis,” co-authored by youth and housing organizers from Washington Heights, Harlem, and the South Bronx. “Dreaming of Home” captures the experiences of young people in New York City, caught in various enactments of the housing crisis, centering issues the youth housing fellows considered most important. 

Finesurrey developed the My Brother’s Keeper Oral History Archive: Testimonies of a Transformative Intergenerational Movement for and by Young Men of Color. The oral history project of New York State’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative took place between June 2022 and January 2023.  

At Guttman, Finesurrey founded an educational initiative titled A People’s History of New York City and co-authored a textbook titled U.S. Government and Politics in Principle and Practice: Democracy, Rights, Freedoms and Empire. Finesurrey serves as the faculty co-advisor to Phi Theta Kappa Honors Society, the Director of the Guttman Open Educational Resource initiative, and Guttman’s CUNY Campus Liaison for a university-wide Collaborative Online International Learning consortium. Finally, Finesurrey was the 2021-22 recipient of the Award for Excellence for Part-Time Faculty.