"Best Place To Take Out Of Town Guests" - The Village Voice, 2014
"Great way to experience the city" - TripAdvisor Review, May 2016
"Best Place To Take Out Of Town Guests" - The Village Voice, 2014
"Great way to experience the city" - TripAdvisor Review, May 2016
Big Onion has the finest group of tour guides in the city. Most of us are full-time graduate students researching and writing doctoral dissertations in history or a related field. Big Onion guides have high school or college teaching experience and are quite often researching topics relevant to the tours they are leading.
All our guides work exclusively for Big Onion and have completed our rigorous in-house training program and are licensed by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs. Our guides are passionate about the history, architecture and people of New York. We have been called “brilliant”, “hilarious”, “outstanding”, and “irreverent”. Most of our guides, upon completion of studies, move on to successful teaching careers.
President & co-founder of Big Onion Walking Tours and Director of Big Onion Historical Consulting. A former “ABD” graduate student, he returned to Columbia University in 2023 to write his dissertation, entitled “New York and Barbados 1650-1775: Colonial Interdependence and Contemporary Linkages.” He holds advanced degrees in American History from Columbia University and a BA in Social Thought & Political Economy from University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Seth is proud to be a Fellow of the New York Academy of History. He has been a consultant on a variety of historical tourism projects including Governors Island, The Presidio, Atlantic City, The Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia and ethnic New Orleans. Seth has appeared on numerous television networks, including BBC, PBS, History Channel, Travel Channel, Arte Television, CBS, and ABC. Former on-camera Historian on, and a Producer of, the Emmy Award winning (13 nominations & one win) series “Toni On! New York”. When not walking the city he can be found walking in the Catskills woods where cell phones don’t work. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Traci & black Labs Genevieve and Tokaji.
Adam Kocurek is a Ph.D. candidate in History at The CUNY Graduate Center. His research lies at the intersections of LGBT history, labor history, and the history of higher education. He works as an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College and has been an employee with Big Onion since 2018.
Alice is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She specializes in 19th-century art from the United States and Europe, and her dissertation explores the intersection of gender, labor, and art in the late 19th century through a comparison of the visual depiction of exploited female garment workers in Britain, France, and the United States. She holds a B.A. in English and Art History from the University of Kansas (Rock Chalk, Jayhawk!) and a M.Phil. in Art History from the Graduate Center, CUNY. Originally from Oklahoma, she has happily called New York home since 2008, and has lived in three out of the five boroughs of the city. She currently resides in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Andrew is a historian of print media, humor, and visual culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He received his PhD in Modern European History and the History of Popular Culture from the Graduate Center, CUNY in 2022. His research and teaching interests lie in the history of comics, cartoons, and laughter in the shaping of mass culture, identity, language, and political and social mores in Europe and the Americas. When not giving tours or teaching classes in European, American, or world history, or the history of media and comics, Andrew lives in Brooklyn and enjoys South Florida sports, reading comics voraciously, visiting New York’s art museums he’s already explored hundreds of times, European soccer, pub trivia, and playing old-time banjo music.
Caroline is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she studies nineteenth-century art of the U.S. and Latin America. She received her B.A. in History and Art History from Mount Holyoke College in 2008. Proud to call herself a native New Yorker, Caroline grew up in both New York City and the Hudson Valley and currently resides in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea. In addition to leading tours with Big Onion, she also teaches art history courses at York College (Queens) and City Tech (Brooklyn).
Christine teaches American History courses at Fordham University where she completed her PhD in History in 2019 and is also a staff member at The Ursuline School in New Rochelle, New York. She specializes in race, gender, and culture in American life amid the social transformations of the 1960s era, including the role that the American folk music revival played in buttressing second wave feminist activism. She previously served in student support offices at Fordham University and Johns Hopkins University.
Drew received his Ph.D. in European History from New York University. Using concepts of youth and generational difference as an interpretive frame, his dissertation explored France’s social and economic transformation and its sometimes-fraught encounters with American cultural and business influence during the Cold War. He previously attended the University of Central Florida, earning both a B.A. with honors distinction and an M.A. in History. At the college level, he has taught upper-level courses on urban history (including a comparative history of New York and Paris) as well as postwar youth culture. He has also taught survey courses on World and American history. A New Englander by birth and Francophile by inclination, Drew nevertheless believes there’s no place quite like New York City. He currently lives in South Slope, Brooklyn.
Fiona is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at The City University of New York’s Graduate Center, specializing in the history of philosophy. Fiona focuses primarily on topics within moral psychology and ethics, especially as they relate to questions in applied ethics. Fiona also recently accepted a teaching assignment at Hunter College. When not preparing for classes or leading tours, Fiona is usually bouldering or hunting down all of NYC’s cheap vegan eats.
Born and raised in Flushing, Jim received his Ph.D. in Geography from University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Jim takes a broadly cross-disciplinary view of critical human geography, examining the social lives of place, space, and geopolitics through spatial ethnography and visual methods. Jim has published articles on the role of visual storytelling in craft beer branding, the social-material production of the contemporary skyline of London, and the right to the city in Thessaloniki, Greece. Jim is an alumnus of two Critical Language Scholarship programs and has studied abroad in Baku, Azerbaijan and Kharkiv, Ukraine. Jim works as a developmental editor with Epilogue Editing and has worked extensively with international students and scholars as an ESL instructor, immigration advisor, and naturalization test instructor; he has also taught undergraduate courses on World Regional Geography and European Cultures and Landscapes. Having lived in Florida, Boston, and Nebraska, Jim now calls Bensonhurst home – an ideal launchpad for exploring the myriad cuisines of South Brooklyn!
Justine (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and also holds a Doctoral Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies, a Master’s of International Human Rights from the University of Denver, and a B.A. in Political Science and Human Rights from Barnard College. She teaches undergraduate courses in sociology at Queens College, is an occasional election day worker, has worked and volunteered in various roles in the nonprofit world, and is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. In addition to fielding history questions on her tours, Justine is always happy to recommend used bookstores and vegan snacks around NYC. When not at work, she can be found in one of the city’s live music venues, or at home with her cat.
Kaden Russek is an incoming doctoral student in European History at NYU, and holds a B.A. in Classical Studies from Temple University and an M.A. in European History, Politics, and Society from Columbia University. His research centers on the overlapping histories of the nascent social sciences, colonization, and political philosophy in the nineteenth century British Empire. He also holds special interest in histories of gender and sexuality. Kaden loves weightlifting, graphic novels, and discovering new bookstores and cafes.
Kelly Hacker Jones teaches U.S. History at an independent high school on the Upper East Side. She holds a PhD in History from Stony Brook University.
Melanie is a History Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests lie at the intersections of race, gender, and law in early nineteenth-century New York, with a focus on gradual emancipation. She received her B.A. in History and Politics with a minor in Legal Studies from Brandeis University, and is currently teaching American History at Lehman College.
Natalia Shevin is a doctoral candidate at New York University in history and Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She has research and teaching interests in American Jewish history, labor, housing, social movements, and New York City in the twentieth century.
