Jackie Ranston

Jackie Ranston is a Jamaican researcher-writer. Her latest published work, Masonic Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, in two volumes, includes character-driven narratives of Jewish Freemasons in Jamaica under the English Constitution from 1739 to 2021. Her detailed study of the Jewish artist, Isaac Mendes Belisario and his family, won the Book Industry Association of Jamaica’s Awards for Best Academic Book, and Best Adult Non-Fiction in 2008. Her published conference papers on Belisario and Jamaican Freemasonry can be found respectively in The Jews in the Caribbean (Jane S. Gerber, ed. Littman Library of Jewish Civilization) and Freemasons in the Transatlantic World, (Dr John Wade, ed., Lewis Masonic.) Together with her husband, a graphic designer and book illustrator, Jackie runs a small publishing company focusing on Early Childhood Education and heritage studies. For ‘dedicated service to the research and recording of Jamaica’s national history’ she was awarded the Order of Distinction (OD) by the Government of Jamaica in 2016.

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

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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