Dr. Lauren Lefty, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History and History Education, Northern Arizona University, Former Postdoctoral Fellow, CDF Freedom Schools® program
Dr. Lauren Lefty is an assistant professor of history at Northern Arizona and director of the NAU Secondary History Education program. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Education from New York University with research specialties in the history of education, urban history, decolonial and culturally relevant pedagogies, teacher education, and public humanities. She possesses a wide range of professional experiences in K–12, higher education, museum, policy-making, and community-based settings. Dr. Lefty formerly served as a Mellon/ACLS Leading Edge Fellow with the CDF Freedom SchoolsⓇ program, where she helped build teacher education curriculum and outreach activities. Before coming to CDF, she worked as a Mellon Predoctoral Fellow in History Education at the Museum of the City of New York and taught classes at New York University and Columbia Teachers College. Her dissertation and first book project, Seize the Schools, Que Viva Puerto Rico Libre: Cold War Education Politics in New York and San Juan, 1948-1975, brings a transnational Latinx and (de)colonial lens to histories of postwar urban education. Along with James Fraser, Dr. Lefty is also the co-author of Teaching Teachers: Changing Paths and Enduring Debates (Johns Hopkins, 2018) and co-editor of Teaching the Worlds’ Teachers (Johns Hopkins, 2020).
Dr. Lefty is a former National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellow. Before beginning her doctoral work, she served as a middle and high school teacher and policymaker for the New York City Department of Education.