Rachel Kaufman

Rachel Kaufman is a poet, historian, and teacher pursuing a PhD in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA. Her poetic and historical work explore diasporic memory and the ways in which literary and historical works transmit the past, and her dissertation focuses on the Mexican Inquisition and cross-ethnic networks of female religious ritual. Her first poetry book, Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021) enters the archive’s unconscious to unravel the histories of New Mexican crypto-Jews and the Mexican Inquisition alongside the poet’s own family histories. Her chapbook, And after the fire, won the 2020 JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize and is grounded in the language and myth of the Talmud. Her poetry has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Southwestern American Literature, Western Humanities Review, JuxtaProse, and elsewhere, and her prose has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, The Yale Historical Review, Diagram, and Comedia Performance: Journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater.

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English and Spanish.

Website: rachel-kaufman.com

Recent Publications:

Poetry Collection: Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021): https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/many-to-remember-by-rachel-kaufman/#:~:text=In%20her%20debut%20poetry%20collection,the%20poet’s%20own%20family%20histories.
Translating History” in Rethinking History: https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2020.1793529
“Sound and Sense: Poetic Form and Translating Sor Juana’s Amor es más laberinto” in Comedia Performance: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/comedia-performance/article-abstract/20/1/118/351309/Sound-and-Sense-Poetic-Form-and-Translating-Sor?redirectedFrom=fulltext
“Historical Traces in Archival Poetry,” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog: https://jhiblog.org/2021/05/12/archival-poetry/
“The Myth of la Llave in crypto-Jewish Poetry,” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog: https://jhiblog.org/2019/11/27/the-myth-of-la-llave-in-crypto-jewish-poetry-and-spanish-memory/

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.

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