About

I am a teacher, oral historian, and an interdisciplinary scholar. My academic work engages with questions of queer relationality, intergenerational memory transmission, and historical method. I am interested in how oral history, archives, and visual objects carry and collect the past. I specialize in women’s, gender, and sexuality history in the 20th century.

I am currently working on my first book project, Nobody’s Baby: Queer Intergenerational Memory and Methods. The manuscript, adapted from my dissertation, is an interdisciplinary and personal inquiry into the workings of intergenerational transmission of memory in the context of queer family. Studying visual art, oral history, and collaborative archival engagement, I utilize my family tree and an autobiographical approach to examine kinship, loss, home, Jewish experience, lesbian feminist history, and third generation Holocaust memory. The project contributes original research in LGBTQ historiography and complicates paradigms of generation in memory studies. Drawing on my experience as queer and the child of lesbian mothers with a known donor, the project uses queer bonds of biological and non-biological relation to disrupt existing notions of intergenerational memory. My dissertation research received support from the Schlesinger Library and Royster Fellowship. It was one of six projects short-listed in 2018 for the American Studies Association’s Ralph A. Gabriel Dissertation Prize.

My newest projects continue themes of memory and forgetting through visual culture, archival sources, and oral history. I am currently writing an article-length project on representational/commemorative artwork of Samia Halaby and continuing my research into the effects of FBI surveillance on lesbian activism of the 1970s in the US South.

In addition to individual research, I have participated in public scholarship building on my prior skills in oral history and audio production. My documentary work has been featured on Feminist Magazine (KPFK), Radio Unidad (WPEB), Making Contact (national programming), and at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. I have also written for OutHistory.