Throughout my time at Indiana University Bloomington, I have also been fortunate to receive robust support for research and professional development. Upon entering the program, I was awarded a Renaissance Studies Fellowship, and during the same academic year, I served as a research assistant to Professor Olimpia Rosenthal for the Lilly Library’s exhibition on global slaveries for the Sawyer Seminar. In this role, I was responsible for selecting and organizing materials from the archive, conducting research on the chosen objects, and writing the exhibition labels, an experience that deepened my engagement with archival methods and public scholarship.

During the 2023-2024 academic year, I was selected to participate in the Newberry Library’s Dissertation Seminar, which focused on pre-modern critical race studies. As part of this cohort, I had the opportunity to collaborate with peers from across the country, conduct archival research, and deepen my training in working with pre-modern sources and repositories. Alongside my role as an associate instructor, I also participated in a language immersion program with the Army National Guard in both Spring 2024 and 2025, providing deploying service members with intensive instruction in basic Spanish communication. Additionally, I serve as a translator for American Religion, with my first contribution published in Spring 2025.

My dissertation, Specters of Difference: Understanding the Racialization of Sephardic Jews Through Modes of Power and Aufhebung, explores how legal, political, and religious systems in medieval and early modern Iberia worked together to racialize Sephardic Jews. Using theorists such as Hegel, Butler, Foucault, and Mbembe, I examine how power shaped Jewish identity both within Iberia and in diaspora- revealing how Jews were cast not just as religious outsiders, but as a distinct race, through systems of regulation, exclusion, and violence whose legacies still resonate. This year, I’m participating in the department’s exchange program with the University of Seville, where I’ll be teaching in the Department of Philology and continuing my dissertation research. With direct access to archives like the Archivo de Indias and the Cathedral Archives of Seville, I’ll be able to trace how Sephardic identity was inscribed, contested, and reshaped across Iberia and its colonial worlds, reading history not just in texts but in the spaces that held them.

I am so deeply appreciative of the guidance and support afforded to me by Professors Olimpia Rosenthal, Ryan Giles, Melissa Dinverno, as well as Sarah Imhoff and Michael Weinman (both in Jewish Studies). Your enthusiasm and belief in my project, together with your intensive inquiries and endless fonts of knowledge have not only reignited my passion for my research but also have pushed me to be a better scholar. I also want to extend a special thanks to Anne-Sophie Stringer, you have gone above and beyond helping me through these past few years and I am forever grateful. To all of my colleagues in the department, thank you for making such an outstanding community in which everyone feels welcome and appreciated- it is one I am proud to be a part of.