Ari Forsyth (they/them)

My research explores Jewish migration, racialization, gender normativity, and disability in US imperial regimes in the modern era. My recent studies have increasingly concentrated on urban history, the history of social science, and Jewish women's experiences of liberal citizenship in the Progressive Era (1880-1920).

My dissertation explores Jewish women as social workers and social subjects in American cities at the turn of the twentieth century. As social workers, some Jewish women produced and policed Jewish claims to American liberal citizenship, whiteness, property, and propriety and claimed power as white women and modern professionals. Other Jewish women became primary subjects of early twentieth-century social work because their practices of labor and sexuality were deemed deviant. In my work, I excavate this struggle. First, by analyzing the discourses of social science and professionalism that constructed and enforced race, gender, and disability as components of white liberal citizenship. Second, by analyzing actual social and spatial (inter)actions in urban space.

I believe history is a powerful tool for connecting me to the needs of my community, understanding relationships to power, and denaturalizing present hierarchies and seemingly "self-apparent” systems of knowledge. I serve UW students and community members and welcome requests for insight, support, or advocacy.