Hannah Waits

As the Postdoctoral Fellow in Civil Discourse, Hannah works with faculty and teaching fellows to cultivate classroom communities of intellectual generosity, curiosity, courage, and humility. Drawing on team-based and community-based learning methods for seminars, discussion sections, labs, and team projects, she offers workshops and consultations that equip faculty and teaching fellows with practices that build trust, creativity, perseverance, and cooperation among students.

In her own courses, she focuses on creating generative classroom coalitions that explore themes of empire, civil rights and social movements, NGOs and humanitarianism, and religion and politics. She has covered many challenging topics amid difficult contexts in 13 years of university teaching, and has won five awards for her teaching in US History, Latin American History, and Ethnic Studies.

Before joining the Bok Center, Hannah was a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard, a Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy at Dartmouth, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global American Studies at the Harvard Warren Center. She received her PhD in American History from UC Berkeley, with secondary concentrations in Latin American Studies and Anthropology.