Hinda Mandell
Associate Professor
Hinda Mandell
Associate Professor
Education
BA, Brandeis University; MA, Harvard University; Ph.D., Syracuse University
Bio
Hinda Mandell is an associate professor in the School of Communication, which she joined in 2011. She conducts research at the intersection of sensational events with private lives. Since 2018, her research has focused on the intersection of craft and political events, examining craft as a gendered, communication tool that can subvert the social order.
She is editor of Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats(Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); co-curator and co-editor of Crafting Democracy: Fiber Arts and Activism(RIT Press, 2019, with the exhibition touring in the U.S. in 2019-2020); a co-editor of Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election(University of Rochester Press, 2018); the author of Sex Scandals, Gender and Power in Contemporary American Politics(Praeger, 2017) and co-editor of Scandal in a Digital Age(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Mandell’s website is omghinda.com, and she’s on Instagram: @crochetactivism.
Mandell is passionate about organizing crowd-created yarn installations in public spaces connected to the history of a region's social-reform movements.
Her journal articles have been published in such venues as Women's Studies in Communication, Visual Communication Quarterly, Media Ecology and Journal of Feminist Scholarship.
A recipient of international fellowships, including the American Council on Germany's McCloy Journalism Fellowship and the Museum of Jewish Heritage's Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, Hinda has reported from Germany, Poland, China, Dublin and Jerusalem. She is a former correspondent for the Boston Globe, where she wrote on suburban life and religious affairs.
Her op-eds have appeared in USA Today, Politico, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald, LA Times, the Guardian.com, Palm Beach Post, Oregonian, [Minneapolis] Star-Tribune, Star-Ledger and the Florida Sun-Sentinel. She blogs for the Huffington Post and Cognoscenti, the commentary site for Boston's NPR station. In 2018 she reported on "The Babies of the Trump Election" for Politico.
Mandell's award-winning documentary, 'The Upside Down Book,' chronicled her investigation into the origins of a Mein Kampf that her great uncle, a Jewish-American soldier, brought home from fighting overseas during WWII.
Select Scholarship
Currently Teaching
In the News
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November 30, 2020
First-time voters in greater Rochester reflect on 2020 election experience
The Democrat and Chronicle partners with Associate Professor Hinda Mandell's News Editing class on a project to talk to first-time voters.
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November 13, 2020
Anna Murray Douglass art installation to be unveiled Friday
An art installation depicting Anna Murray Douglass, the first wife of famed social reformer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, will be unveiled today at the site of where the couple lived at 297 Alexander St. in Rochester from 1848 to 1851. The piece was funded by RIT.
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October 22, 2020
First-time voters in greater Rochester share hopes, views
The Democrat and Chronicle partners with Associate Professor Hinda Mandell's News Editing class on a project to talk to first-time voters.
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September 11, 2020
In a hectic time, some journalists reflect on covering the news
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August 6, 2019
'Crafting Democracy' fights fire with fiber
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July 17, 2019
Using yarn installation to create a thread to Rochester's social activism past