Graduate Students
Rafael studies twentieth-century United States social and legal history. His upcoming dissertation is titled “‘Why Not Return To Him The Whole United States?’: Native American Land Claims and the Cultural Contexts of Aboriginal Title, 1918-1939.” Rafael researches the power of resource extraction industries and Native art marketplaces in the American West, and their influence on the U.S. government’s adjudication of Native land claims. Rafael also teaches a University Writing Seminar for first-year undergraduate students on Autobiographical Comics.
Inna studies Middle East and Russian history and is particularly interested in the social and legal history of the North Caucasus Muslims. She plans to focus her research on Islamic law and legal courts in 20th-century Dagestan while examining the gap between the written law and the law in action.
Sarah Beth studies the American Revolution in New England, with specific interests in the concept of neutrality in war, civilian experience in war and the redistribution of wealth in New England communities after the expulsion of loyalists. Side interests include literary culture and literature produced during wartime, collaboration in war and war-related reprisals.
Lianne (she/her) is a second year doctoral student engaged in the interdisciplinary field of Critical Adoption Studies. She plans to trace the history of transracial adoption from China to the United States from the Hong Kong Project to the One Child Policy in her dissertation. Her research complicates the culturally dominant narratives surrounding Chinese adoption in which adoptees become gendered and racialized objects constructed by the white American imagination. She is also interested in the nexus between adoptee activism and existing sociopolitical movements such as immigration and reproductive justice. Currently, she is working on a few different projects including historical newspaper analysis, an oral history project, and archival research at the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota.
Geshnizjani is a PhD student in history at Brandeis University. He holds a PhD in political sociology from Tarbiat Modares University. In his first book, Victory and Defeat of the Islamists: A Comparative Analysis of Iran and Egypt (in Persian), Kamran conducted a comparative-historical analysis of the Iranian (1978–79) and Egyptian (2011–2013) revolutions, aiming to examine the historical conditions that impact the dominance of Islamist movements during revolutionary situations. He is interested in the modern history of Middle Eastern and North African countries, primarily focusing on revolutionary and protest movements within the region.
Kerry Jo studies 19th-century American women and their experiences. She is interested in comparative analyses of women's experiences across cultures in the nineteenth century, particularly of motherhood and work, and is dedicated to the fields of historical pedagogy and public history. She is the co-leader of the Mandel Center for the Humanities reading group "Developing Your Teaching Persona," a BOLLI Study Group Leader and has served as both a union steward and a graduate department representative. She is currently at work on her dissertation, tentatively entitled "Industrial Motherhood: The Women of the Allegheny and Watertown Arsenals."
Yanlee studies twentieth-century Chinese and Russian history, with a focus on the comparative impact of World War II and the Cold War on the textile and fashion industries in the Soviet Union, China, and the United States. Yanlee’s research particularly examines the shift from Parisian influence toward the development of distinct national styles within each country.
Fangchao studies Chinese history and Southeast Asian history. His research focuses on the history of overseas Chinese communities under British and Dutch colonial governances in the Java Sea region in the 18th and 19th centuries. His research interests include European imperial history in East and Southeast Asia, Chinese maritime expansions, and global maritime trade in the early modern period.
Joey studies early modern Europe and Asia, particularly France and Ming-Qing China, with a focus on state formation and social and cultural history. His research interests include global frontier-state interactions, gunpowder technology and socioeconomic patterns in global history.
Cat studies 20th century political and social history. Her work focuses on the relationship between social movements, college students, political identity, and gender, particularly how social reform, birth control, and abortion movements allowed college women to develop political and activist identities at colleges and universities in Massachusetts.
Tugba studies urbanity and city borders in the early modern Ottoman Empire. Her current research focuses on the Ottoman capital of Konstantiniyye in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the units that form the city, as well as the physical borders such as city walls.
Elizabeth studies 20th-century African American history. Her research focuses on the social and political impacts of World War II and the immediate post-World War II era on the actions and ideologies of the Civil Rights Movement.
Alexandra studies 20th-century European history and is particularly interested in the medical histories of Jewish and Roma communities. Her dissertation focuses on Hungarian Jewish and Romani men’s and women’s experiences of sterilization and castration in Nazi camps and how the mass experiments affected their reproductive and personal lives later. She was the recipient of the EHRI Kristel Fellowship in 2020/21, the inaugural Strauss Fellowship at Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2022/23, and the Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at USC Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2023/24. Alexandra has won the graduate research awards of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry in 2022, as well as the 2019 early-career ISCH Essay Prize for Cultural Historians. (ORCID 0000-0001-6270-3391)
Danielle studies Soviet and Russian History with a specific interest in the History of Science. Her research focuses on the emergence of Soviet Computer Science and Programming throughout the Soviet Republics with an emphasis on Computing Centers and Computer Scientists outside of Moscow during the period of the 1950s to the 1980s.
Joseph Weisberg is working on a dissertation provisionally entitled “How Slavery and Jewish Life Shaped Each Other: Understanding the Lopez Family and Their Multigenerational Legacies of Slavery and Jewishness.” The project uses the experiences of a prominent Jewish mercantile family to challenge long standing assumptions about Jews’ relationship to slavery in North America. His work has been supported by a broad range of institutions, including the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, American Jewish Archives, Southern Jewish Historical Society, and Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture. He also serves as an Associate Research Fellow at the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Project and has worked in various instructional, research, and public-facing roles since he came to Brandeis. He graduated summa cum laude from Haverford College with bachelor’s degrees in Spanish and history in 2021.
Colin primarily studies US Gilded Age and Progressive Era History with a specific focus in labor and cultural history. He also has an interest in African-American History. He plans to focus his thesis on the African-American working class in early twentieth century Harlem and its role in the neighborhood’s development.
