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 roles that women staff played in the rescue effort. Here is an example of a blog post I created for the FDR library about Henrietta Stein Klotz, secretary to Henry Morgenthau Jr. A chapter I wrote about Henrietta Klotz is forthcoming (2022) in an edited collection called Jewish Studies in the Digital Age #DHJewish published by De Gruyter.

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 an article based on this exit paper in History and Anthropology.

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, History and Education. I was also a clinical supervisor for student teaching interns in the Social Studies Education program at FIU.

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