Rachel is a third-year PhD candidate in the department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. She received her BS in Commerce & Business Administration and her BA in Foreign Languages and Literature from the University of Alabama in May 2017. She then spent a year abroad in Augsburg, Germany before returning to the University of Alabama to earn her MA in Germanic Studies in May 2020. She moved to Minneapolis in August 2020 in pursuit of her PhD in Germanic Studies with a minor in Moving Image Studies.

Her dissertation research analyzes the remediation of documentary footage and photographs from the Holocaust in literary and media projects made in the United States, Germany, Austria, and Israel from the late 1980s to today. She analyzes these projects as interventions in contemporary conversations surrounding the Holocaust, specifically in terms of memorializing and reviving narratives from the past. She also explores how these remediations have the ability to negotiate questions of voice and witnessing in the 21st century both on an individual and global scale, allowing for transnational discourses that broaden the efforts to create an effective framework for discussing other political and historical issues in the past, present, and future.

In addition to her dissertation research, Rachel is interested in representations of minorities in German-language cinema, as well as the documentation (or lack thereof) of issues surrounding German colonialism, specifically in the context of present-day Namibia.

In the spring semester of 2023, she is working as an RA for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Nathan and Theresa Berman Upper Midwest Jewish Archives on their ongoing project to highlight and present in-depth stories of Holocaust survivors settling in Minnesota.