I am currently at work on a multi-media book project titled, Archives and Autoethnography: Jewish women, Black women and intersubjective anthropology. Though feminist anthropologists write about their relationships with their participants, known as “reflexivity,” this sort of approach is almost completely absent from historical and biographical accounts. Archives and Autoethnography operates from the conviction that nonhuman things – historical materials and the ancestors who made them – exert influence in knowledge production through their relationships with human researchers (Bennett, Hodder, Latour). It explores what happens when researchers become more conscious of their unconscious reactions to archival materials and ethnographic objects. It articulates the necessity for anthropologists in the archives and historians to reflect on our intersubjective experiences as we write reflexive historical ethnographies and women’s histories.

To achieve this end, this book uses comparative psychobiography and autoethnography of the archives to explore my conflicted relationships with two other Jewish women anthropologists, one of Eastern European descent, Ruth Landes (1908–1991), and one of Central European descent, Ellen Hellmann (1908-1982). It is organized into three acts, each focusing on a central life-cycle theme: (I.) fathers, mothers, and daughters, (II.) sex and relationships and (III.) social death and suicide. Each “act” revolves around significant memories in my life that were triggered by my work with the archival materials of these two women including correspondence, photographs, and artifacts. It includes polyvocal dialogues, poems, and prose (inspired by Amia Lieblich), that shift in narrative point of view between the three main characters (Ellen, Ruth and me).

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From September 2019-December 2021, I was the Morgenthau Scholar-in-Residence at the FDR Library and Museum in Hyde Park, NY. In this role, I developed digital humanities tools to raise awareness about the Holocaust related collections at the library, focusing on the under-explored roles of women staff in the rescue effort. I wrote blogs for the FDR library such as this one, about Henrietta Stein Klotz, secretary to Henry Morgenthau Jr. Two different chapters I wrote about Henrietta Klotz came out in 2022-2023 in Jewish Studies in the Digital Age #DHJewish and in New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust, both published by De Gruyter. In the first chapter, I explore Klotz’s influence on the Secretary of the Treasury’s positions in response to the Holocaust and his post-war fundraising for the State of Israel. Though women in secretarial positions are not typically depicted as wielding political power, nodegoat, a web-based, data management, network analysis, and visualization environment, reveals how women in secretarial roles, like Henrietta Klotz, exerted political influence through their ethnic, religious, and interpersonal networks. A handwritten letter from Morgenthau Jr. to Mrs. Klotz, after their tenure at Treasury ended in 1945, is the centerpiece of the second chapter, a “microhistory.” In this letter, he called her the “watchdog of the Secretary of the Treasury” and proclaimed: “whatever credit I deserve” for helping to save Jewish refugees, “I want to share it equally with you.”

I earned my PhD in Global and Socio-cultural Studies (GSS)  at Florida International University in April 2018. I also earned an M.A. in African and African Diaspora Studies as part of the combined program with GSS in May 2015. I received a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the FIU Graduate School for the 2017-2018 school year. My dissertation “Jewish women’s transracial epistemological networks: Representations of Black women in the African diaspora, 1930-1980” used historical social network analysis to consider how Jewish women social scientists’ networks across racial, national, and disciplinary boundaries impacted their theorizing about black women’s sexualities in Brazil, the UK, the Caribbean, South Africa and the U.S.

I received a series of Ruth Landes Memorial Fund grants through The Reed Foundation in order to complete archival data collection in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Johannesburg, South Africa with the papers of Jewish social scientists: Vera D. Rubin, Hilda Kuper, Ruth Landes, and Ellen Hellmann.

Previously, I received a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship through the Latin American and Caribbean Center at FIU, which supported  fieldwork in Brazil. I investigated the contemporary impact of the 1938-1939 research of Jewish American anthropologist Ruth Landes. She argued that Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian, Yoruba-based, spirit-possession religion, was matriarchal. I wrote my M.A. exit paper on this topic: “Placing Ruth Landes within Afro-Brazilian Studies: The Debates about ‘Black Matriarchy’ 1930-1950 and Contemporary Critiques,” arguing that Ruth Landes’ specific Jewish background influenced her arguments and position within these debates as well as her treatment by men (some Jewish) within the disciplines of anthropology and sociology. I published a peer reviewed article based on this exit paper in History and Anthropology in 2019.

From 2016-2019, I served as co-chair for the Jewish caucus within the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA); in this role I organized five panels for the 2018 conference emphasizing the experiences of Jewish women of color. In 2019, I presented about the transracial and transnational collaboration between Fatima Meer and Hilda Kuper (see “All projects”). In 2017 and 2019 I created and led a feminist Shabbat service at the NWSA conference.

From 2011-2013 I worked as a New York City Teaching Fellow (a public high school teacher) and completed a M.S. in Teaching Urban Adolescents with Disabilities at Long Island University in Brooklyn. During my master’s program, I completed several qualitative research studies that investigated how NYC public school environments perpetuate race and gender oppression and restrict teachers’ abilities to create spaces for student voice/agency.

Earlier in my time in New York, I worked as a Jewish educator, Kaplan private tutor and adjunct instructor in Sociology and Psychology. Before moving to New York, I completed an M.A. in Women’s Studies from San Diego State (graduated May 2008) and worked as a Graduate Teaching Associate. In this position I designed and led my own introductory Women’s Studies course. My master’s thesis focused on the “borderland” experiences of Afro-Jewish women in Brazil.

From 2018 I have served as an adjunct lecturer at Florida International University in the departments of Global and Socio-cultural studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, History and Education. I was a clinical supervisor for student teaching interns in the Social Studies Education program at FIU. I am currently advising a MA student project about the influence of Yoruba orixás (orishas) on the self-perceptions of African American women.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

1. Photo shared with me by Dame Ruth Runciman, DBE ↩︎
2. Louise Nocktonick was one of Ruth Landes’ informants during her 1935 and 1936 fieldwork among the Prairie Potawatomi in Mayetta, Kansas, See landes_photo_ruth_landes_15, Box 63, Ruth Landes Papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Handwritten on verso of this photograph by Landes: “30 yrs later. July 1964. (Potawatomi) Pow-wow on Fair Grounds on Pot. reservation, Mayetta, Kansas. taken by Jas A. Clifton, Anthro Dept, Univ. of Kans. Louise Nocktonick, Ruth Landes (great hair). IV” ↩︎