Graduate Students
Rafael studies twentieth-century United States social and legal history. He is interested in the relationship between subjects and states, and researches how Black and Indigenous Americans articulated their citizenship by petitioning the U.S. federal government for compensation in land and money in order to rectify past wrongs. 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.
David studies the American socialist movement at the turn of the twentieth century. He is interested in how socialists impacted policy and public opinion from the fringes of the American political scene, and the extent to which socialism intersected and diverged with progressivism. His thesis work explores how socialists interacted with law and the courts, examining how socialist lawyers managed to operate within the legal system while also objecting to the form it had taken under capitalism. He has also researched the socialist movement in Massachusetts which produced the country's first socialist mayor in 1898.
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 studies transracial adoption from China to the United States during the One Child Policy. She is currently working on a historiographical dissertation that recognizes Chinese adoptees as gendered and racialized subjects in the white American imagination. She plans to explore how media representations of transracial adoption from Asia both reflect and reify problematic tropes such as the China Doll, the War Orphan, and other white savior narratives. She is also interested in the intersection between adoptee activism and existing sociopolitical movements such as immigration and reproductive justice.
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 He studies Chinese history and Eastern Asian history. She is profoundly invested in the geopolitical examination of China. Her research concentrates on the pivotal shifts that occurred in Northeast and Southwest China, shaped by diplomatic engagements among the United States, China, the Soviet Union, and Japan from the 1930s to the 1970s. Her distinctive perspective is enriched by focusing on the lived experiences of foreign servicemen stationed in China during this era of transformation.
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.
Alaa studies the modern history of the Middle East. Her current research focuses on the transition away from traditional Islamic historiography in the 19th-century Levant and the historiography of the nahḍa in relation to historical fiction.
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.
Caleb studies 20th century United States political history. His work concentrates on how Black Americans in the northern U.S. conceptualized, practiced, and expanded multiracial democracy from the post-New Negro movement of the 1930s through the Civil Rights Movement to the aftermath of the Black Power Movement of the 1980s. His current dissertation research focuses on Chicago, Black politics, and neoliberalism during the 1940s to 1990s.
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)
Susann studies modern European history, more specifically the post-World War II period. Her research focuses on the role of education and history textbooks in the development of national identity.
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 studies American Jewish history and is particularly interested in Jews' relationship to slavery. His dissertation will investigate the ways that Jews' ethnic or religious identities may have influenced their interactions with slavery in North America. More broadly, his research interests include the history of slavery, Southern Jewish history, and African American-Jewish relations. Joseph also values making his scholarship accessible to the general public and is active as a public scholar. He has appeared in a documentary film, co-authored a project on the history of a local public library, and is currently an Associate Research Fellow with the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Project.
Joseph studies American environmental history with a focus on New England. His primary interest is in forestry and perceptions of the natural world, connecting his work to investigations of science, technology, and capitalism. He is also passionate about community-held knowledge of historical events and has recently conducted research on Eastern Wabanaki land management methods and plantation ecology in 17th- and 18th-century southeastern Rhode Island.
