Ari Forsyth (they/them)

I study race, gender, and disability in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States.

Methodologically, I analyze colonial, capitalist, and cultural systems of domination by focusing on everyday social interactions, cultural performances, and spatial encounters.

My research investigates how ordinary Jewish women and girls engage social welfare systems and scientific technologies to negotiate the changing political, economic, and social orders of the early twentieth-century United States.

Research and teaching interests include:

19th- and 20th-century United States; modern Jewish migration and racialization; American Jewish identity; US imperialism and nation-building; Progressive social reform; social work and the welfare state; urban policing; juvenile delinquency; disability history (especially intellectual and developmental disability (IDD); criminalized sexualities; the American eugenics movement; urban history; history of science / STS studies.

My dissertation, A History of Jewish Social Work in the United States, 1880-1940, is the first sustained history of Jewish social work in the United States. It investigates how race, gender, and (dis)ability were produced, policed, and transformed within American Jewish communities between 1880 and 1940 by centering everyday encounters between Jewish social workers and the women and girls they supervised. By reading Jewish social welfare archives with and against the grain, my dissertation excavates two intertwined social histories: aspiring middle-class Jewish women who became professional social workers, and poor and working-class Jewish women and girls classified as “deviant,” “defective,” or “delinquent.” I analyze how Jewish social workers crafted and enforced new classifications of whiteness, womanhood, and cognitive disability, lingering on the practices and technologies that constructed them and the bodies and behaviors that refused to conform.

When I'm not working, I love reading speculative fiction, making zines and linocuts, two-stepping to fast drums, and riding public transportation. I believe that historical research is not only a life-saving and politically essential tool for understanding systems of power that shape our lives but also, frankly, an incredibly fun way to spend a Saturday night. I serve UW students and local community members and welcome requests for insight, support, or advocacy.