Jessie Stoolman

Jessie Stoolman is a postdoctoral researcher focusing on how notions of Blackness developed among Jewish and Muslim communities in early modern Iberia for UAB’s ERC-funded project, BADEMS.

Most recently, she received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also completed her M.A. (in anthropology). Her doctoral dissertation investigates the role that archives, alongside other sites of memory such as museums and cemeteries, in Spain and Morocco have played in shaping notions of Jewishness in the Western Mediterranean across time. She also holds a BA in Middle Eastern and North African Studies as well as Romance Literature and Languages (Spanish) from the University of Michigan.

Jessie’s academic publications are reflective of her interdisciplinary research. They include published and forthcoming pieces on the history and politics of Jewish heritage preservation in Morocco as well as two published articles on the relationship of the discipline of anthropology to colonialism and the construction of race. Additionally, she has published translations from Arabic, North African Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, and French into English for both academic and non-academic publications.

Jessie has been invited to and presented her work at academic conferences in the U.S., Morocco, Tunisia, and the U.A.E. She is currently the Managing Editor for the multilingual, interdisciplinary journal Souffles/’Anfās al-‘Ālam.