Rebecca Brenner Graham is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University, coordinating Brown 2026, a university-wide initiative engaging the fullest histories of the American Revolution and its legacies. She teaches a first-year seminar titled American Revolution in Popular Culture. She is writing a book on the same topic, where the American Girl doll universe meets the 1776 to Liberty’s Kids to Hamilton pipeline.

Rebecca is author of Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Kensington, Jan. 2025). Dear Miss Perkins has been positively reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, excerpted in Slate, and profiled in Smithsonian Magazine, among other places. It has taken her to book talks in eight states and counting. In 2023, Rebecca was awarded a Cokie Roberts Fellowship from the National Archives Foundation and a Rubenstein Center Research Fellowship from the White House Historical Association.

Prior to Brown, Rebecca was a History Teacher at the Madeira School and a Lecturer at American University. She has a PhD in history and MA in public history from American University and a BA in history and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College. Her essays and reviews have been published in Time, Slate, Ms., The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Despite being from and living in Rhode Island, she also calls Washington, DC, “home.”