Email: brittney.lewer@nyu.edu
Program: History of Education
Research Interests: 20th century U.S. history, urban history, comparative race and ethnicity, education activism and policy, pedagogy of history
Principal Advisor(s): Jonathan Zimmerman, James Fraser, Martha Hodes
Dissertation Title: Elusive Equalities: Educational Activism in New York City, 1968-2014
Research Description/Bio:
Brittney Lewer is a doctoral candidate in the History of Education at NYU. Her research focuses on educational activism in late twentieth-century New York City, investigating how parents' interactions with the education system shaped ideas about race, rights, and representation. Her dissertation examines how activists leveraged the status of “parent” and how their activism impacted resource distribution, representation, and rights for parents and children in urban schools and beyond. While this research focuses on K-12 education, Brittney’s commitment to equitable and effective education also motivates her collegiate teaching. She chairs the ASH Doctoral Forum's Teaching Committee, has served as a teaching assistant for multiple undergraduate courses, and has assisted in curriculum development for doctoral coursework related to multifaith college chaplaincy. She has served as a research assistant for Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation president Arthur Levine and NYU professor James Fraser, and has developed content for the Harlem Education History Project. She was selected as an inaugural NYU Urban Doctoral Fellow in 2018.
Prior to enrolling at NYU, Brittney taught U.S. history to high school students through the Penn Residency Master's in Teaching program. She earned her bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard College as a first-generation college student.