Rebecca Brenner Graham is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University, where she coordinates Brown 2026, manages an oral history project about the bicentennial, and teaches a first-year seminar called American Revolution in Popular Culture. She is writing a book on the same topic as the class, including American Girl dolls, Liberty’s Kids, and Hamilton.

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 taken her to over forty book talks in seventeen states. 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 teacher at the Madeira School and a lecturer at American University, where she earned her PhD in history in 2021. Her essays and reviews have been published in Smithsonian Magazine, Politico Magazine, Time, Slate, Ms., The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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