Phil Brown is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute and is on the Executive Committee of the Jewish Studies Program. For 13 years, Brown ran an annual History of the Catskills Conference, and he is founder and President of the Catskills Institute: an organization that holds the world’s largest archive of Catskills items and records Catskills history through conferences, public speaking, and scholarly research. He has written: Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat’s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area; In the Catskills: A Century of The Jewish Experience In “The Mountains” (editor), and Summer Haven: The Catskills, the Holocaust, and the Literary Imagination (co-editor with Holli Levitsky).