Hana Cervinkova (Ph.D. Anthropology, New School for Social Research) is Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology at Maynooth University. Previously, she has held a number of academic and public sector leadership positions in Poland and the Czech Republic. An educational and urban anthropologist, Cervinkova’s research focuses on nationalism, citizenship, memory and belonging as they emerge in the everyday life of Central/East European societies. The politics of memory and history figure prominently in her urban-based research, dedicated to exploring and making public the hidden and silenced memories of the formerly multicultural societies of Central Europe. Cervinkova has led award-winning international programs of study in partnership with North American universities for which she and J.D. Golden received the 2016 Award for Excellence in Curriculum Design by the Forum on Education Abroad. The presentation in this conference draws on Cervinkova’s public sector work in restoring Centennial Hall, a 20th century modernist architectural masterpiece and UNESCO World Heritage Site in Wroclaw, Poland.

Juliet D. Golden holds a Ph.D. in International Education and is the Director of the Syracuse University Special Program in Central Europe. Golden has designed and taught innovative courses about memory and diversity in Central Europe. She is the recipient (together with Hana Cervinkova) of the 2016 Award for Excellence in Curriculum Design by the Forum on Education Abroad -  the most prestigious pedagogical award in international education and the 2020 Teaching Recognition Award by Syracuse University. In her research and teaching, Dr. Golden focuses on the politics of memory, citizenship and public space as they relate to the history of Central Europe under Nazi occupation and Communism. 

Elzbieta Matynia is Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, and director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at the New School for Social Research. Her recent publications include “Is Liberal Democracy Already History?” (East European Politics & Societies and Cultures, August 2020), and “A Halloween Uprising: Poland’s General Strike Over Abortion” (Public Seminar, November 2020).

William Hirst is Malcolm B. Smith Chair & Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research.

Concentrations: Cognitive science; social aspects of cognition and memory.

Anna Sheftel is an Associate Professor of Conflict Studies at Saint Paul University. She is an expert on oral history, Holocaust testimony and memory of genocide. Her article, “Talking and Not Talking about Violence: Challenges in Interviewing Survivors of Atrocity as Whole People,”  won the 2019 Oral History Association (OHA) article award and her recently completed audio tour about Holocaust survivors’ arrival and integration in Montreal, “Refugee Boulevard: Making Montreal Home after the Holocaust,” won both the 2020 OHA and Canadian Historical Association (CHA) Digital and Public History prizes. She has three children.

Tracy Adams, PhD, is a postdoc researcher at the Department of Political Studies, Bar Ilan University. Her PhD, from the department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, focuses on 'traveling’ collective memory and the many ways in which memory is mobilized in political rhetoric. Her research interests include the intersection of memory, conflict and politics, and how meaning is constructed through interactive processes of negotiation. She has been published in high-ranking journals such as Memory Studies, The Sociological Quarterly, and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.

Mykola Balaban is a Ph.D. student in History and Lecturer at Ukrainian Catholic University Lviv. He has researched the mass violence in the city of Lviv during summer 1941. After his service at the Ukrainian Army in 2014 - 2015, he studied Russian military aggression in Eastern Ukraine. Mr. Balaban co-authored a book „Donbas in Flames: a guide to a conflict zone” (2017). In April 2018, he published an article, „The face of ‘post-truth politics: Observations from the trenches,” which was an attempt to bring together his front-line recollections and theoretical background.

Juliana Beecher finished her M.A. in Anthropology at NSSR in May 2020. She is currently following interests in legacy pollution, waste, environmental racism, soil health, and microscopic monsters through freelance work at non-profits and experiments in her home garden.

Lee Brando is a Ph.D. student in the department of anthropology at The New School. Their interests are in the mediation of politics through techno-social infrastructures, namely chronic pain management through a telehealth network based in the Pacific Northwest. Lee also teaches at Stuyvesant High School, mainly United States History, Government, and Politics.

Alvin Bui is a Ph.D. student in modern Southeast and East Asian history at the University of Washington, Seattle, with interests in Cold War Asia, migration and diaspora studies. His research contextualizes the experiences of the ethnic Chinese in the Republic of Vietnam to their interactions with the RVN state and the Republic of China/Taiwan as well as the wider region of “Free Asia.” Alvin graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from UCLA in History, Asian American and Vietnamese language studies after which he spent the majority of his post-baccalaureate life living and working in Vietnam.

Monica Ciobanu holds a PhD in sociology from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and is Professor of Criminal Justice at Plattsburgh State University of New York. Dr. Ciobanu has published about democratization, memory, truth, and justice in post-communism and especially in Romania. Her book Repression, Resistance and Collaboration is Stalinist Romania 1944-1964: Post-Communist Remembering was published in October 2020 by Routledge Press.  She has also co-edited (with Mihaela Åžerban) a special issue on Law, History and Justice published by the Journal of Romanian Studies (October 2020).

Sarah Fissmer studied Educational Science as well as English and American Studies. After working for two years in an international academic setting (among others at the Academy for International Education in Bonn) she rejoined the University of Bonn as a doctoral research associate and a PhD candidate at the University’s Department of English, American and Celtic Studies where she currently teaches BA and MA students, mostly on Great War remembrance, memory studies and on Shakespearean theatre. Her doctoral thesis addresses the role reconciliation plays in today’s British commemoration of the First World War.

Joanne Lipson Freed is Associate Professor of English at Oakland University, where she teaches courses on U.S. ethnic literature, postcolonial literature, and narrative theory. She is the author of Haunting Encounters: The Ethics of Reading across Boundaries of Difference (Cornell UP 2017), and her articles have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, African American Review, ARIEL, and Narrative. Her current book project, “The Novel of Formation in the Era of the Algorithm,” explores the overlap between contemporary coming-of-age-novels and elements of digital culture. She currently serves as Provost Fellow for Faculty Diversity, and is the mother of a preschooler.

Jessica Ghilani is an Associate Professor of Communication at Pitt Greensburg where she researches and teaches about media history, technology, and culture. Her recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, American Journalism: A Journal of Media History, Historiography in Mass Communication, and Minerva Journal of Women and War. Her research has been recognized with grant funding from the NEH, the Smithsonian Institution, and the AAUW. She is a mother of two children and has worked full time with part time childcare since their births. Even so, the pandemic has derailed her progress to full professor considerably.

Henry (Hank) Greenspan is a playwright, essayist, and psychologist emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  His play, REMNANTS, has been presented on NPR and staged at over 300 venues worldwide. He is the author of On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony.

Margo Shea is Associate Professor of History at Salem State University, where she teaches public history, Irish history and world history, oversees a public history certificate program and supervises internships for History majors. She is the author of Derry City: Memory and Political Struggle in Northern Ireland and several articles and chapters in anthologies on heritage, memory and collaborative practice. At the heart of her work is a commitment to sharing the tools of public history in ways that center listening in our explorations of the past and do not ignore the larger structures around which memory and identity take and change shape. 

Sonia Yuhui Zhang is a Ph.D. student at the department of anthropology at the New School. She is interested in studying the relationship between loneliness and technology, with a focus on social robotics in Japan’s engagement with loneliness both as a social problem and a space of creative practice.

 Andrea Simpson is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Richmond.  She spent her first eleven years in the academy at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics section of the American Political Science Associated named her first book, The Tie that Binds (New York University Press, 1998), the “Best Book of 1998 on Racial Identity.”  In 2009, the Women’s Caucus of the American Political Science Association awarded her the “Woman of Color Professional Achievement Award.”  Simpson has published work in environmental justice and  is currently completing a book on intersectionality and activism.

Marthe-Siobhán Hecke read Philosophy, German Literature, Educational Sciences, English Studies, and Celtic Studies at Bonn University and received a Master of Arts, a Master of Education, and an additional Bachelor of Arts. She is a doctoral research associate and her PhD project is dealing with Memory Studies in connection to National Identity, Literature, and Scotland: “(Re-)Writing and (Re-)Constructing Scottish Identities: the Literary Heritage of Nan Shepherd” (working title). She has taught classes on Speculative Fiction, Queer Theory, Shakespeare, the former Celtic Nations, and Young Adult Literature.

Sara Kopelman, PhD student, the Department of Communications and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her PhD research, under the supervision of Prof. Paul Frosh, focuses on the temporality of the GIF and the cultural significance of digital looped videos which are a common feature of social media, personal and professional photography. Her M.A thesis focused on photography of iconic victorious moments, specifically, how visual rhetoric is used to enhance political power regimes and shape collective memory.

Marjana Krajac is a choreographic researcher from Zagreb and a Ph.D. Fellow in Dance Studies at The Ohio State University. The nexus of her research is the contemporaneity, formalism, and emancipatory potentials of dance and its practice. She has received multiple awards for her choreographic work and was selected as Choreoroam Europe Artist in 2011. Her essays were recently published as a book titled Choreographic Journal: seeing/vidjeti. She graduated from State Conservatory for Dance Ana Maletic in Zagreb, from the Academy of Performing Arts in Berlin, and has studied theology and history at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Vaida Norvilaite is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of anthropology at the New School. She is interested in epistemologies of religion, processes of secularization, and history and practices of positivism as both a philosophy of science and religious practice. She is currently at her fieldwork in Brazil researching Positivist Churches in Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro.

Badri Okujava is studying for a Master's degree in Political Science at Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia. He is also a researcher at the Soviet Past Research Laboratory, a non-governmental research organization that has been operating in Tbilisi since 2010. His research interests include nineteenth-century Georgian nationalism and its representation during the late Soviet period. He is currently working on various research projects focused  on the political elites of the late Soviet period and their role in exploring the processes of building an independent state.

Eric W. Ross is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at George Mason University, his research interests include: Museum studies, memory studies, political subjectivity, and cultural policy. 

Mihaela Şerban is Associate Professor of Law and Society at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Her teaching and publications are in the areas of law and society, human rights, the rule of law, and Romanian Studies. Her book Subverting Communism in Romania: Law and Private Property: 1945-1965 was published in July 2019 by Lexington Books/ Rowman and Littlefield. She has also co-edited (with Monica Ciobanu) a special issue on Law, History and Justice published by the Journal of Romanian Studies (October 2020).

Indira K. Skoric holds a Ph.D. in Human Development from Fielding Graduate University (Oral History Narratives of Survivors of Sexual Violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo) and two master's degrees (International Relations; Gender Studies). Indira has extensive survivors-centered experience  to address violence against women (establishing Trauma Centers in the region; radio and TV documentaries) and trauma of war and violence in the Balkans, and has worked with large organizations (such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent) and co-founder a number of community based groups and organizations (Reconciliation and Culture Cooperative Network, Women in Black).

In New York City where she works in the CUNY's schools, she has launched the Immigration HUB, started an immigrant women's support group,  founded our Immigration Day events and participated in Brooklyn Public Scholars Project (2012-2014).  Her scholar-practitioner work has been recognized through awards and fellowships: 1994-95 New School University; a Revson Fellowship (Columbia University), the Union Square Award for Organizing in NYC, and an AAUW Fellowship. In 2013, she was awarded The U.S. President's Voluntary Service Award by President Barack Obama. Indira is working on two book projects: one on Gender and Sexual Violence in War and another on women and immigration. She is a mother of 17 year old musician; a frame drummer and a snowboard teacher.

Amy Sodaro is Associate Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York/Borough of Manhattan Community College. She is author of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (Rutgers University Press 2018) and co-editor of Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Memory, Politics and Human Rights (Routledge 2019) and Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2010). Her new project focuses on museums and the memory of race in the US.

Hannibal Travis teaches cyberlaw, human rights, copyright, and related subjects at FIU College of Law. He is the author of Copyright Class Struggle: Creative Economies in a Social Media Age, and editor of Cyberspace Law: Censorship and Regulation of the Internet.

Zurab Tsurtsumia is a Ph.D. student of the interdisciplinary doctoral program of social and humanitarian sciences at Ilia State University (Tbilisi, Georgia). He holds MA degree in Middle Ages Studies from the same university and BA in political science from the Tbilisi State University. His current research focuses on the establishment of early medieval political entities on the territory of modern Georgia from the perspective of the global middle ages.

In addition Zurab has ten years of experience in media analysis and currently assists the UN, conducting research of Abkhazia/S.Ossetian conflict related media and social media platforms.

Malkhaz Toria is a graduate student of sociology and coordinator of the Memory Studies Group at The New School. He is also an associate professor of history and head of the Memory Studies Center at the Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Jonathan Bach is professor of global studies in the Global Studies Program, and faculty affiliate in the Anthropology Department at The New School. His recent work explores social change through the politics of memory, material culture, and urban space, with an emphasis on transitions in Germany and China. He is the author most recently of What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany (Columbia University Press, 2017), and co-editor of Re-Centring the City: Urban Mutations, Socialist Afterlives, and the Global East (UCL Press, 2020) with Michal Murawski, and co-editor of Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (University of Chicago Press, 2017) with Mary Ann O'Donnell and Winnie Wong. His articles have appeared, inter alia, in Memory Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Politics, Public Culture, Theory, Culture and Society, and Philosophy and Social Science. His earlier book Between Sovereignty and Integration: German Foreign Policy and National Identity after 1989 (St. Martin’s Press) examined questions of normalcy and responsibility in Germany during the early years after unification. 

He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and has held post-doctoral fellowships at Columbia University (ISERP) and Harvard University (Center for European Studies). Bach was a visiting professor at Brown University’s Watson Institute, and a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Harriman Institute and Sociology department, Humboldt University, Berlin (Centre for the Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage), the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in Berlin, and the Institute for Peace Research and Security Studies at the University of Hamburg. He is a faculty affiliate at Columbia University's Center on Organizational Innovation. He served on the inaugural Executive Committee of the Memory Studies Association. At The New School he was the founding chair of the Global Studies Program and served as the associate director of the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs.

Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs / Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Portland. Her expertise lies in migration, gender, and human rights. As a scholar, educator, activist, and migrant woman, Golesorkhi’s work is concerned with migration-gender relations in a global context. Golesorkhi is the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Migration, Gender, and Justice, a non-profit NGO that addresses human rights at the intersection of migration and gender.

Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.

He also runs the Democracy Seminar, a worldwide committee of scholars, journalists, activists, and citizens who seek to understand the origins of the threats, to analyze their dimensions and, most importantly, to exchange ideas and experiences about how to oppose them.

 Ellen Freeberg serves as Associate Dean at The New School for Social Research and is Affiliated Faculty in Politics. Her publications and teaching have focused on political and social theory, American politics, public law, and feminist theory. 

Layla Zami (Paris, 1985) is Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY and a former Co-Chair of Black Lives Matter Pratt. She is the author of Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing through Spacetime, Historical Trauma, and Diaspora in the 21st Century (transcript Verlag / Columbia University Press, 2020). She holds a PhD and a Faculty Teaching Quality Prize from Humboldt University. Zami was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, and a Doctoral Fellow in the Jewish Talents Program (ELES/BMBF). She tours internationally as an Interdisciplinary Artist-in-Residence with Oxana Chi Dance & Art. Website: www.laylazami.net.

In 2017, Daniela founded No Ficción along with Elena Fortes and Cinépolis, an independent media company devoted to producing non-fiction content for multiple platforms, with an emphasis on high profile, social-issue driven documentaries for wide theatrical release. Her producer credits with No Ficción include a series of documentary shorts for Netflix produced between 2018 and 2019 (A Tale of Two Kitchens, directed by Trisha Ziff; A Three Minute Hug, directed by Everardo González; Birders directed by Otilia Portillo; Lorena, Light Footed Woman, directed by Juan Carlos Rulfo; and After the Raid, directed by Rodrigo Reyes), an op-doc for the New York Times Ruptured City (2018) directed by Diego Rabasa and Santiago Arau, and the feature documentaries Midnight Family (2019) directed by Luke Lorentzen, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it obtained the jury award for best Cinematography in the US Documentary Competition, Vivos (2019, as associate producer) directed by Ai Weiwei, and Users (2021, as co-producer) directed by Natalia Almada. 

She is part of the board of trustees of the Ambulante Film Festival in Mexico and was part of the Flaherty Film Seminar board in New York for 4 years. She has been an advisor of the Mexican Institute of Cinematography and PROIMAGENES Colombia, and juror of the Guadalajara International Film Festival, the Durango Film Festival, the Ambulante Documentary Post Production Grant, the Cinema Tropical Awards, the Palm Springs International Film Festival and Documenta Madrid. Daniela was one of the mentors of Docunexión program, a project of IMCINE, the British Council, Ambulante, DocsDF and Sheffield. She has been a fellow of the Sundance Editing, Music and Creative Producing Labs, and the Flaherty Film Seminar. 

Daniela produced the Morelia International Film Festival and was the head of the Documentary Programming Committee for ten years. She is also the producer of El General (2009, directed by Natalia Almada), ¡De Panzazo! (2012, directed by Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Loret de Mola), El Ingeniero (2012, directed by Alejandro Lubezki), and the NYT OpDocs Unsilenced (2016 directed by Betzabé García). She holds an MFA in Documentary Film from the School of Visual Arts in NY.

Retreat which received a special mention from the jury and the Ambulante Film Festival prize at the XVII Morelia International Film Festival is her first feature documentary as a director. She is also the co-director of Fragments, a short film about and done during the pandemic that had its premiere at the Morelia Film Festival in 2020.

Benjamin Nienass is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Law.

His research on the politics of memory has appeared in The Review of Politics, Politics and Society, the German Studies Review, Globalizations, the Latin American Research Review, and many other journals, as well as in several edited volumes. He is also the co-editor of "Silence, Screen, and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information" (Berghahn, 2014; paperback in 2017) and of special issues in the journals German Politics and Society, Memory Studies, Social Research, and the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society.

Dr. Nienass received his PhD from the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research in New York and has received fellowships from the Collège d'études mondiales in Paris and the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester. He previously served as co-chair of the memory studies network in the German Studies Association.

Alexandra Délano Alonso is Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies at The New School and the current holder of the Eugene M. Lang Professorship for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring. She received her doctorate in International Relations from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on diaspora policies, the transnational relationships between states and migrants, migration in the Central America-Mexico-US corridor, sanctuary, and the politics of memory in relation to borders, violence and migration. Her work is driven by a concern with the inequalities underlying forced migration, the structures that lead to the marginalization of undocumented migrants in the public sphere, and the practices of resistance and solidarity focused on migrants' acces to rights, from a transnational perspective.

She is co-founder and former co-director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility with Miriam Ticktin, as well as a member of The New School's Sanctuary Working Group and faculty advisor to La Xente student organization.

Professor Délano Alonso's current research focuses on transformative practices of solidarity across the Central America-Mexico-US migration corridor.

Born and raised in Mexico, her experience living across borders and her mixed origins as the granddaughter of immigrants have deeply shaped her research, teaching, mentoring, university service and activism.

Ana Villarreal’s research interests lie in the intersections of criminal violence, urban inequality, and the histories of global drugs. Her book manuscript The Armored City: Violence and Seclusion in the Mexican Metropolis reveals how increased violent crime prompts the concentration of urban wealth and public security at the city level to the detriment of larger metropolitan areas. More broadly, this book theorizes violence not only as an outcome of inequality but as a powerful factor contributing to the reproduction and aggravation of existing inequalities. Her next project Cocaine Cities bridges urban sociology and histories of global cocaine to examine the transnational impact of cocaine route restructuring on violent crime in Latin American cities over the past four decades. A second line of research on worker struggles within the labor process is grounded in an ethnography of bus driving in Monterrey, Mexico.

Her work has been funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Association of University Women, the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States, the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology, the BU Initiative on Cities, the BU Pardee School for Global Studies, and the BU Center for the Humanities.

Professor Villarreal teaches social theory, urban inequality, and social problems with an emphasis on global cocaine, crack cocaine, and the divergent trajectories of violent crime in American versus Latin American cities.

Adam Brown is Associate Professor of Psychology and Vice Provost for Research. He is a clinical psychologist whose research focuses on identifying psychological and biological factors that contribute to negative mental health outcomes following exposure to traumatic stress and developing interventions guided by advances in cognitive neuroscience. A focus of this research is the use of behavioral and brain-imaging techniques to examine the role of memory and self-appraisals in the onset and treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Dr. Brown is a member of the Human Rights Resilience Project, an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners carrying out research and creating tools to improve resilience and well-being in the human rights community.

In the Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab, he partners with researchers around the world to assess and develop novel mental health treatments for refugees in diverse contexts.   

Prior to joining the faculty at NSSR, he was a member of the psychology faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, where he held the Sara Yates Exley Chair in Teaching Excellence from 2017-2018. He holds an academic appointment as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine and completed a two-year NIH funded postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry, Weill Medical College of Cornell University. 

He is the recipient of grants from the National Institute of Health, the Department of Defense, Fulbright, and private foundations. 

Robert Kirkbride is Dean of Parsons' School of Constructed Environments and Professor of Architecture and Product Design. Dr. Kirkbride has directed studio ‘patafisico since 1991, and is also Spokesperson and a founding Trustee for PreservationWorks, a non-profit organization for the adaptive reuse of Kirkbride Plan Psychiatric Hospitals. Robert’s work integrates scholarship and practice, exploring forms of knowledge and know-how that don’t quite fit; things that have been lost or overlooked, including the impressions of memory and habits on the built environment. Robert designed the Morbid Anatomy Museum, in Brooklyn, NY, with collaborator Anthony Cohn, and authored the award-winning multimedia online book, Architecture and Memory, which focuses on two Renaissance memory chambers. Dean Kirkbride has been a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and architect-in-residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Italy. At Parsons/The New School, where he received the University Distinguished Teaching Award, Dr. Kirkbride established the Giuseppe Zambonini Archive at the Kellen Design Archives, and is an ongoing contributor to the Memory Studies Group. Robert received his Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University, and a Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Arts in Design of the Environment from the University of Pennsylvania.

Robert's website may be visited at http://robertkirkbride.com. 

Rachel Berger is a queer Femme, a parent of twins, a historian of the body, and a lover of walks living and teaching in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Canada. She is Associate Professor of History and fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University, where her academic work takes up the history of indigenous medicine in modern South Asia, the history of reproductive rights and technologies in Empire, and is most recently focused on the history of nutrition and the origins processed foods in twentieth century India, as well as a geo-mapping of South Asian foodscapes in Montreal. The rest of her academic work focuses on the changing scope of queer kinship in the time of Assisted Reproductive Technologies, which includes the collection of oral histories of queer family-making across Canada. She writes about these topics, intergenerational trauma and holocaust memories, critical Jewish parenthood and queer life in academic and non-academic venues. Come find her on twitter @slantgirl or on instagram @rachel_of_montreal.