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Toni Pitock, PhD

Toni Pitock, PhD

Assistant Teaching Professor of History
Department of History
Center for Interdisciplinary Study
Jewish Studies
Office: 5022 MacAlister
tfp47@drexel.edu
Phone: 215.895.2463
Fax: 215.895.1333

Education:

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

Curriculum Vitae:

Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

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)