Dana Y. Rabin

Dana Rabin is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in the history of eighteenth-century Britain with a focus on law, gender, and race. Her first book, Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave, 2004), examined the language of mental states in the English courtroom. Her recent book Britain and its Internal Outsiders 1750-1800: Under Rule of Law (Manchester University Press, 2017, paperback, 2022) analyzed the intersection of metropole and colony through a study of legal scandals involving Jews, Romani, enslaved people, Catholics, and Irish who claimed the rights of English men. Rabin’s current project examines Jewish civil rights throughout the British Empire between passage of the Naturalization Act (or Plantation Act) in 1740 and “Jewish Emancipation” 1858. This multi-sited project takes note of the Empire’s metropole and its colonial spaces, plantation societies and settler colonies, to study how definitions of race and religion shaped the lives of Jews and definitions of Jewishness and whiteness.

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

CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sbj_uUTHb9aKxd9Wnh1hKQJEb-Oc4Ov4/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

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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