Frances Levine

Dr. Frances Levine has served as the Interim Executive Director of the Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum since September 2022. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology with a specialty in historical archaeology and ethnohistory from Southern Methodist University. She was chief executive of the New Mexico History Museum Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe from 2002 until 2014 and was the President and CEO of the Missouri Historical Society and Missouri History Museum from spring 2014 until summer 2022. Dr. Levine is the author, co-editor or contributor to several award-winning books with a focus on ethnohistory and archaeology of the Southwest, and the topic of conversos.

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

Recent Publications:

2016 Doña Teresa Aguilera Y Roche Confronts the Spanish Inquisition: A Seventeenth Century New Mexican Drama. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
2016 “Two Women Before the Inquisition,” IN Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition and New World Identities, Roger Martinez, Ron Duncan Hart and Josef Diaz, editors. New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe.
2012 “So Dreadful a Crime.” El Palacio 117(4):52–59.

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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