School of Humanities

Laura Cresté is the author of In the Good Years (Four Way Books) and You Should Feel Bad, winner of a 2019 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. She holds an MFA from New York University and has received fellowships and other support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Community of Writers, Monson Arts, and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Cortland Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in western Massachusetts.

What happens when we place commerce at the center of American Jewish immigration history?

Honoring our students academic achievements.

NEVER ALONE tells the gripping story of Jewish refugees seeking safety in Finland during WWII. 

Why did renowned Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski steal tens of thousands of archival documents from France—and why did libraries in the U.S. and Israel accept them? In this gripping talk based on her award-winning book The Archive Thief, Prof. Lisa Leff uncovers the complex story of a scholar whose illicit actions helped preserve a vital Jewish past. Through Szajkowski’s life, Leff explores urgent questions of memory, ownership, and the legacy of Holocaust-era archives.