Jacob S. Dorman

Jacob S. Dorman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his B.A. with highest honors from Stanford University in 1996 and his Ph.D. in United States History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. He is the author of many articles in venues such as American Jewish History and The Journal of African American History. He also wrote the prize-winning histories Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (Oxford 2013), and The Princess and the Prophet: Magic, Race, and Black Muslims in America (Beacon 2020). Dorman’s work has been supported by funders including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Laura Leibman

Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her work focuses on religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America, and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She is the author of "The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects" (BGC 2020), "Indian Converts" (UMass Press, 2008) and "Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), which won a National Jewish Book Award, a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and was selected as one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. Laura has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, Utrecht University, the University of Panama, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center. Laura, who earned her PhD from UCLA, is currently at work on a book that uses material culture to trace the history of members of a multiracial family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean but became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York.

Order Now!