I am a PhD candidate in American Legal History at Stony Book University, a freelance writer, political activist, and cofounder of the intersectional think tank All Women’s Progress.

My academic research is concerned with the construction of race, ethnicity, and gender through the legal system in the United States.

My dissertation, The Murdered Jewess and the Problem of Citizenship in 1876 New York City, uses a murder trial to examine the ways in which an inability to access criminal procedure rights resulted in discriminatory treatment for Pesach Rubenstein, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant tried and convicted for killing his cousin, Sarah Alexander. The murder trial illuminates the difficulties for people outside the law’s assumed white, able-bodied, Christian male citizen to avail themselves of their supposedly guaranteed rights. I examine the legal and cultural status of Jewish immigrants in 1870s America at a time when citizenship was changing and uncertain. Building on Critical Race Theory, Whiteness Studies, American Jewish historiography, and legal citizenship scholarship, this thesis argues that criminal trials, and the surrounding societal and press reaction to them, are an important site of citizenship performance and the discriminatory impact of laws that lack in access guarantees. As I show, press coverage, and the narratives of cultural inclusion it promotes, impact a criminal defendant’s ability to access rights as well as the ability of a murder victim to achieve justice through a trial within a biased society. I also examine the inability of Sarah Alexander and other murdered women to achieve justice based on patriarchal societal concerns and gendered legal assumptions. Finally, I use legal records and newspaper accounts to show how legal discrimination against Jewish immigrants developed based on stereotypes and criminalization of the community, arguing against the accepted understanding of American Jewish exceptionlism.

Read a small portion published for the Gotham New York City History Blog: “Ten Thousand Bigamists In New York”: The Criminalization Of Jewish Immigrants Using White Slavery Panics

Watch my discussion of Critical Race Theory with Professor Roderick Graham

Courses

Mia Brett has far ranging teaching experience in American history and has created her own syllabi in courses on the legal construction of race, gender, and sexuality. She gives lectures on the importance of legal history as well as race and gender in law.

Fall 2020: US History to 1877 (Queens College); US History to 1877 (Bard Early College Program)

Spring 2020: Black History 1865-Present (Adelphi)

Fall 2019: Social Movements; American Peoples II (Old Westbury), US History to 1877 (CUNY Queens College)

Spring 2019: The Legal Construction of Race in US History (Adelphi)

Fall 2018: Black History until 1865; The Civil Rights Movement (Adelphi)

Fall 2017: The Legal Construction of Race in US History (Adelphi)

Winter 2017: 19th Century Scandals (SUNY Stony Brook)

Winter 2016: Sexuality and the Law in 20th Century US History (SUNY Stony Brook)