About Me
I am an independent scholar and nonprofit communications professional with a Ph.D. in the humanities. As a proponent of the public humanities, I believe that critical scholarship can be combined with accessible writing to spark informed public dialogue. My work aims to fuse literature, history, and criticism in a way that speaks to present-day debates regarding politics and ideology. I have written for publications such as Synapsis, Jacobin, Boston Review, Majority Post, Tribune, and the Gotham blog, and I have presented at numerous scholarly conferences and colloquia.
I have extensive experience working in communications for nonprofit institutions and publications. Until its closure by the Wenner-Gren Foundation in December 2025, I worked as a digital editor at SAPIENS Anthropology Magazine, where I managed the magazine’s social media accounts, produced its weekly email newsletter, and served as its art editor. Prior to joining the SAPIENS team, I was the audience engagement editor at Boston Review, where I curated a themed weekly reading list on a wide range of topics in art, literature, philosophy, history, economics, sociology, and politics. Before that, I was a communications assistant at the Modern Language Association, where I produced the MLA Style Center’s bimonthly email newsletter and contributed to the association’s quarterly print newsletter, among other duties.
I am currently pursuing two public humanities research projects focused on Chicago’s Jewish history, drawing on my knowledge of Yiddish language, literature, and culture. The first project for the Newberry Library explores the influence of Chicago’s legendary Maxwell Street on 1960s American counterculture, focusing on music and the neighborhood’s Jewish and African American history. The second project for the Goethe Institute of Chicago, undertaken with collaborator Matthew Schlerf, is a historical walking tour of Chicago’s German-Jewish Labor history that uses the infamous Haymarket affair of 1886 as a jumping off point to explore the city’s rich German-Jewish history.
I am a board member and Programs Chair of the Chicago YIVO Society, an affiliate of the YIVO Institute for Jewish research.
I received my Ph.D. in comparative literary studies from Northwestern University in 2019.