College of Arts and Sciences

Education:

• PhD, University of Delaware
• MA, History, Villanova University
• BA, English and Psychology, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa

Curriculum Vitae:

Research Interests:

• Atlantic World
• Jewish Migration and Diaspora
• Economic Culture
• Trade Networks
• Colonial American History

Bio:

I am an assistant teaching professor of History at Drexel University. I teach courses in American history and Jewish history and culture.

I am currently working on a manuscript that examines Philadelphia’s earliest Jewish merchants and traders, in the late colonial, revolutionary and early national periods. I look at the ways they, as newcomers, established their business and how they sustained them as they sought out new opportunities locally and further afield. I also explore the ways they built economic networks. Merchants and traders depended on associates to conduct trade, and I trace the kinship, ethnic, and cross-cultural networks, analyzing the complicated dynamics that that facilitated — and sometimes undermined – commerce.

I also work on a project that gathers material on Jamaica’s Jewish history, including cataloging and conserving cemeteries and archival collections.

Selected Publications:

• “Separated from us as far as West is from East: Eighteenth-Century Ashkenazi Immigrants in the Atlantic World.” American Jewish History, Vol. 102, No. 2 (April 2018)
• “Commerce and Community: Philadelphia’s Early Jewish Settlers, 1740-1776.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 140, no. 3 (Oct., 2016)