Dr. Rebecca Friedman
Dr. Rebecca Friedman is the Founding Director of the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) and a Professor of History at Florida International University. Friedman has been a leader at FIU in several capacities. She served as the Director of the European Union Center of Excellence/European and Eurasian Studies for over eight years and served as the Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Provost from 2012-2022. In 2018, she was named the Founding Director of the WPHL. Rebecca has collaboratively secured over 10 million dollars in research and institution-building grants for the university. She is a leading point of contact for the university in Miami's arts and cultural communities. Her community-facing projects include Mellon-Funded Community Data Curation and Mellon-funded Commons for Justice: Race, Risk Resilience. She has also worked with Florida Humanities on their inaugural Humanities Festival (2024). She has co-curated I Am Little Haiti at Green Space Miami and Bold. Black. Baldwin. at IPC ArtSpace in Little Haiti.
Friedman is the Director of Research for FIU’s iWitness: IPC Institute for Visual Journalism. In this capacity, she oversees research projects on topics including immigration and climate change in Latin America and the Caribbean and global diasporas. The Institute is building a think tank, curriculum, archive and public-facing activations.
Her doctorate was in the history and culture of modern Russia. Her monographs include Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Modern Russia: Time at Home (Bloomsbury, 2020) and her 2006 book on the history of masculinity in Russia — Masculinity, Autocracy and the Russian University, 1804-1863. As a leader in her field, she edited (with Barbara Clements and Dan Healy) Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, which is the first volume in English to focus on the growing field of Russian masculinity studies. She edited (with Markus Thiel), European Identity and Culture: Narratives of Transnational Belonging (Routledge, 2012). She is currently co-editing a Cambridge University Press series on Elements in Soviet and Post-Soviet History.