received her MA and PhD in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in New York City. Her teaching career has taken her to Poland from 1996 to 2001, and her professional experience includes many years in the nonprofit social change sector. She is founder of Global Women of Baltimore, a community-based nonprofit human rights network. Her research and teaching interests span sociology of culture and political sociology—and include immigration, political transformations to democracy, cultural change, collective memory, gender, and race. She is concerned particularly with the experiences of marginality and the practice of human rights. Her dissertation research, Africans on This Soil: The Counter-Amnesia of the New York African Burial Ground, was an ethnography of a social movement to protect an historic site as it confronted questions of national collective memory. Her current research agenda includes an investigation of the experience of domestic violence among immigrant women in Baltimore, Maryland; the collective memory of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and a book that profiles immigrant women in the United States.