Rai Terry

FELLOW AT THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SLAVERY AND JUSTICE, Brown University

I am interested in engaging the spaces, both physical and digital, that Black queer people occupy and adorn as reclamations of life and freedom. I have a decade of experience doing photography and filmmaking and earned my BA in African and African American Studies with a concentration in Arts from Brandeis University. Currently, I have a fellowship with the Association of Moving Image Archivists and an internship with the Rhode Island Historical Society, as well as serving on the Student Advisory Board of ProjectSTAND. I hope to use my time at Brown continuing to locate, create and preserve spaces of Black queer agency and joy within the archive, and to utilize alternative histories for a truer public education. Email: rai_terry@brown.edu.

WINNER - 2025 LIBRARY RESEARCH EXCELLENCE PRIZE!

“Presence and Labeling of Queer AFAB Identities in the 1920-30’s” 

“Spike adroitly situated Rorabacher and Maegle’s experiences within larger historical patterns of queer existence, demonstrating how self-definition was shaped by both resistance to and partial acceptance of imposed labels. They contextualized the ways in which queer AFAB (Assigned Female At Birth) individuals found both community and concealment.” 

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Spike King is a Junior at Brandeis studying English, History, and Women's Gender and Sexuality studies with a focus in queer history and queer law. Currently, Spike is focusing on activism, community work and sharing histories of trans visibility and acceptance.

Kerry Jo Green

PhD Candidate

I study the lives of American women in the nineteenth century, particularly mothers. My focus is on the racialization of American motherhood, and the formation of white American motherhood as a political and social force. My research project builds on scholarship that frames the woman-as-mother idea alongside the man-as-soldier. Other interests include urban history, women's work in the Civil War, and the roles of masculinity and femininity in the formation and evolution of American paradigms (the president, the soldier, the teacher, etc). I am also very invested in the role of the historian as teacher, and am interested in the field of history pedagogy as a whole.

Parker Thompson

My name is Parker Thompson. I’ve been studying history almost all my time at Brandeis, and my work has been recently exhibited in Always Been: Celebrating Black Life in Photographs at the Griffin Museum in Winchester, Massachusetts. I am currently an intern at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C., which I blog about here. 

Casey Bachman

Higher Education Development

I currently serve as the External Relations Coordinator at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Prior to this role I worked in various higher education administration spaces at Brandeis University and Yale Law School for the past 3. I graduated from Queen's University Belfast with an MA in Conflict Transformation and Social Justice. My master's thesis: Articulating the Impact of Northern Irish Theatre: Kabosh Theatre Company as a Case Study focused on how to measure the impact theater can have as a tool for social justice using the theatrical reconciliation efforts between the ethno-religious divide in Northern Ireland as a case study. My undergraduate thesis: Disconnecting the Dots Judaism and Israel focused on how to use theater as a communication tool surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

Michael Atkins

Law Student, Georgetown University

Former Senior Thesis Student

*Winner of the Lester Martin Foundation Award in Legal Studies*

My thesis examines the intersection between disability and incarceration through the lens of solitary confinement. By examining the history of solitary confinement and its disproportionate use on people with disabilities, I hope to asses the relationship between punishment and disability. I plan to examine this intersection of history and policy through a disability rights and social construct of disability framework to exemplify the pernicious ways in which American carceral  policy and practices impactour view of disability and the notion of the prisoner. 

Rebekah Kristal

MA-PhD student, UMASS-Amherst

B.S., Applied Mathematics & History
Chemistry minor

Winner, Brandeis Research Excellence Prize, 2022 

For research on antiracism

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Read her award-winning essay, published in Historia Nova: The Duke Historical Review

"Black Intellectuality: Challenging Conventions of Belonging in STEM"

STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), starting with the way that children are taught, are mired in convention and their histories, which presents uncomfortable tension in the future of each of these fields: how can we open up STEM fields to new voices and questions  while maintaining academic rigor and qualifications? What happens when new data come to light that does not fit into what we already know? More specifically, how do we as scholars and professionals balance the conventions of the past with the change that the future requires? And most relevantly for this paper, how do we apply this balance between convention and curiosity to the systems of inequality in STEM? This paper will use the lens of respectability—not in the economic sense but in the sense of othering versus belonging—in order to interrogate why and how Black scholars have been systemically excluded, especially in STEM.

Sonia Findling

Graduate Student, NYU Steinhardt School of Education

Former History Research Project Student

My research is on Virginia maroon communities in antebellum America. I examined why enslaved people became maroons and how they built community outside of the dominant culture. I analyze how the Civil War affected maroon communities and what it meant for them to come out of hiding. 

Madeline Toombs

Law School Student

Madeline Toombs is a dedicated professional with a background in African and African American Studies and a strong commitment to racial equity. Currently working as a Program Assistant at National Medical Fellowships, she supports outreach initiatives that advance diversity in medicine. She previously served as the Reclaiming My Time Programming Assistant Intern at a museum, where she developed public programs highlighting Black designers and cultural narratives. She also interned at the Library of Congress, working with the Mary Church Terrell papers to help make historical records more accessible. She will soon begin law school, focusing on estate planning for Black communities and the impact of eminent domain on urban redevelopment.

Joe Weisberg

PhD Candidate

Joseph studies American Jewish history. His research interests include African American-Jewish relations and Southern Jewish history as well as broader questions about race and ethnicity in America, archival representation, and public-facing scholarship. He is currently working on a long-term project that seeks to reinterpret the relationship between Black and Jewish Southerners by introducing sources traditionally associated with African American history.

Hannah Jung

Assistant Professor, University of Alabama

Dissertation Defended, July 2023!

"Hidden Lives, Secret Wives: Secrecy, Policing, and the Unmaking of Mormon Polygamy, 1880s-1910s"

Community secrets are fraught historical landscapes. Take Mattie Cannon. Utah's first female state senator exposed her baby bump from her polygamous marriage and was forced to resign. Take Maggie Geddes. She was a  plural wife who testified against the state to protect her husband then testified for the state to get her son's rightful inheritance from her husband's estate. The story of how monogamy became the mandated norm of the U.S. nation-state is littered with untold secrets. This is a ripe ground for doing the history of how polygamous communities transitioning to monogamy built social worlds of secrecy and surveillance. My research project investigates secrecy as a cultural phenomenon that shaped the lives of Mormon polygamous families at the turn of the twentieth century. Foregrounding the experiences of women, I examine the practices of secrecy evolved in relation to the surveillance norms of church and state.

Rafael Abrahams

PhD Candidate

“Why Not Return to Him the Whole United States?”: Restorative Compensation Claims Among Black & Indigenous Americans, 1918-1939

I study Indigenous Americans' restorative compensation claims of the federal government. “Restorative compensation” means “claims made of the government by historically oppressed groups for compensation in land or money in order to rectify past wrongs." It’s not obvious that marginalized people would view the federal government as an ally toward the pursuit of justice. By studying those who do, I ask a set of questions unanswered by extant historiography: Why did Black and Indigenous Americans make claims of the government in the 1920-30s toward restorative compensation in land and money? I synthesize theoretical frameworks around governmentality, Black reparations, Native American treaty accountability, and the Hawaiian notion of ʻāina to inform a historical study designed to serve ongoing conversations surrounding land loss and restorative justice in the United States today.

Isaiah Johnson

Program Director and Educator at The New Democracy Coalition

Researcher with specialty in Africa & Diaspora, Latin America and the Caribbean - Central research is in Cuban History, Political Economy and Society

Politically minded with experience in diplomacy, community organizing, and campaign building.

Isaiah is currently working for Upward Bound in Massachusetts. 

Danielle Malka

I am a Biology/Chemical Biology and Art History student intending to pursue a PhD in Organic Chemistry. While taking Prof. Cooper's "Social History of the Confederacy" course, I connected strongly with engaging Black historical testimonies that had not been part of my education before. As an intern, Prof. Cooper and I work to develop stronger bridges between racial justice histories and non-specialist students, especially in STEM. 

Marisa Carey

MA Graduate in History
Teacher & Program Director,
Newark Public Schools

I examine Black queer communal traditions in New York from the Great Migration to Gay Liberation. I focus specifically on "found families"--the practice that emerged out of drag ball culture in which Black queer and trans  people ostracized from biological families form new households with each other, adopting roles of "parents" and "children" of traditional family structures. My work investigates gender performance and celebrations of encouraged subversiveness.

Alviena Rahman

Former Teaching Assistant

J.D. Candidate at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Alviena Rahman starts her first year of law school at Northwestern University after a transformational career at Brandeis. Rahman has been honored to be a Prelaw Scholar at Sidley Austin, LLC--the firm behind such landmark social justice reparations decisions as the Bruce Beach case of Summer 2022. She served as a TA for Dr. Cooper as an advanced undergraduate, sharing and leading discussion not only on the material on the history of racism in America but also on the transformations that had occurred in a real-time racial reckoning from 2020 to 2023. Together, Rahman and Cooper made the allyship of white and POC people against anti-Black racism a priority. They made a commitment to ensure every student walked away with a firm grasp of how America's racial past is a necessary keystone to urgent repair. Rahman has worked as an events coordinator, a fundraising supervisor, and an HR manager--among other employment leadership jobs. In this next phase, Rahman and Cooper continue their commitment to communicate post-diploma, to mark the steps for making the collegiate study of social history an applied science for today's deeply unfinished racial reckoning. 

Caleb Smith

Visiting Assistant Professor, Hamilton College 

PhD, 2025

How did a generation of Civil Rights pioneers and Black Power activists come to espouse neoliberal policy agendas that undervalued and underserved Black communities? This question drives my political history of key Black Chicago officials from the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to the signing of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Examining the decisions of Black elected officials at the levels of city council, the mayor's office, and the Illinois 1st congressional district, I investigate how their political ideologies on American democracy evolved over the course of three decades. I track the rise of neoliberalism—the political ideology that theorizes that the free market provides best for the welfare of citizens when it is not hindered by government regulation—as the dominant political approach of Chicago Black elected officials during the 1970s and the decades that followed. 

Logan Shanks

PhD Student, African Diaspora Studies

My research and work centers Black Feminist Thought and Queer/Sexuality Studies. Through my art and research project, “Playing in Excess,” I am exploring how Black women express subjectivity and interiority through their aesthetics and bodily capital. My work enhances the places where Black people spend most of their time and energy by creating authentic spaces for community members to engage with their histories, cultural nuance, and aesthetics through more intentional means. I define myself as a “Black feminist artist and curator” who demystifies traditional “academic” understandings of blackness by pairing Black theoretical knowledge with everyday, familiar encounters of Black culture and art to create spaces where Black ways of knowing are validated and elevated. See Logan Shanks' recently published article in Crossings.

Andrew Evans

PhD Candidate

My research focuses on the experience of black communities in New England in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Particular interest is taken in the intersections of memory, black military service and American citizenship. My current project investigates how black communities remembered their Civil War, and intends to place within broader understandings of Reconstruction-era black experience an exploration of what the war meant to black citizens and veterans in New England.

A Bronx native, Zayquan Lewis is currently a tutor working with The Petey Greene Program, which  supports the academic goals of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Zayquan studied Black women's historical efforts to gain voting rights amidst their struggles with Black men within African American Civil Rights movements and their struggles with White women within Women's Suffrage movements.  He is currently studying for the LSAT exam in pursuit of his future application to law school.  

Kaleigh Mency

MA in History Graduate

MA in Transitional Justice Graduate (Heller)

Grants Program Officer, Pride Foundation

Reimagining Transitional Justice in the United States:  Truth-Telling and Reconstruction (Masters Thesis)

My thesis project interrogated Black testimony in the transcripts of 1870s Joint Committee hearings (sometimes referred to as the "Klan hearings") from a Transitional Justice perspective. I demonstrated the efforts that everyday people made to tell their truths to a government commission. I analyzed strategies that white supremacists used to undermine Black testimony, and I showed how witnesses strategized and persisted despite those efforts. In another project, I examined the peace process after the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921.  The humanitarian aid process for Black Tulsans has not yet been viewed from the perspective of the refugee camps where displaced residents dwelled after the massacre. I examined their rebuilding efforts in conjunction with the Red Cross in the 1920s, and I traced Oklahoma remembrance and reconciliation up to and in the wake of the 2001 Tulsa Truth Commission. 

Ryan Shaffer

Law Student, NYU

Staff Editor, NYU Law Review

Summer Associate (2023), Beldock, Levine & Hoffman

Former Senior Thesis Student

*WINNER of the DORIS BREWER COHEN THESIS PRIZE*

"The Chase and Waite Courts: Hindering Racial Equality during Reconstruction through a Legal Lens" -- A study of the decisions and impact of the US Supreme Court directly following the conclusion of the US Civil War through the stages of Reconstruction 

Read a profile on Ryan Shaffer in The Justice.

Valerie Achille

Attorney, Children's Rights

Graduate, Columbia University Law School 2021

Valerie Achille is an attorney at Children's Rights, a non-profit organization that grew out of a project of the American Civil Liberties Union. They have won landmark legal victories for the way child welfare is practiced in the United States.  You can see Children's Rights 2022 Impact Report here.  She comes to Children's Rights after working for the international law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell.

Valerie served as a lead research assistant to Professor Abigail Cooper as well as as serving as a lead research assistant to author Burton Kaufman in the writing of his biography of Barack Obama. 

Jake Haveles

PhD student, USC

I am a PhD student at the University of Southern California. My thesis project, Solidarity and Rupture in the Black International, explored the revolutionary, global diasporic networks produced by Afro-American, Afro-Cuban, and other Afro-Caribbean communists in the early twentieth century. By focusing on both solidarity and rupture between Black communists, it interrogates how these figures navigated and reconciled divergent claims about Blackness, colonialism, the Comintern, race, racism, and ultimately: revolution.