Meet our Spring 2021 author, Ellie Kleiman

Photo of author Ellie Kleiman

Ellie (she/they) is a soon-to-be graduate from Brandeis University with a double major in Anthropology and International & Global Studies and minors in Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies and Asian American Pacific Islander studies. They began organizing at Brandeis in their first year with the Brandeis Asian American Task Force (BAATF) towards establishing (and winning) an AAPI studies minor program. She has since been involved with student organizing around labor/food justice and anti-militarism on campus with Brandeis chapters of Uprooted & Rising and Dissenters Movement. In fall 2020, Ellie became a co-president of the Brandeis Asian American Students Association (BAASA) and while building community spaces for all AAPI students on campus, they began researching the long history of AAPI students at Brandeis and of BAASA, as the group was established over fifty years ago in 1971. Informed by the brilliant work of the Brandeis BLK Archives Collective, and by the events/classes offered around the 50th anniversary of Ford Hall and the AAAS department in 2019, Ellie began conducting their own archival research on AAPI students and coalitional multi-racial student organizing, by investigating the online newspaper archive, the Brandeis Archives, and conducting oral history interviews with AAPI alumni who graduated within the last fifty years. Throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ellie has been working virtually with Maggie McNeely to add some of her work and findings on Brandeis’s underrepresented People of Color histories to the Black Space Portal.