Hinda Mandell
Professor
Hinda Mandell
Professor
Education
BA, Brandeis University; MA, Harvard University; Ph.D., Syracuse University
Bio
Hinda Mandell is a professor in the School of Communication, which she joined in 2011. She conducts research at the intersection of sensational events with private lives. Since 2016, 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. As a craft convener she has worked with thousands of makers on craft interventions engaging issues of place and social reform.
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.
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, and she completed a follow-up feature in 2020, “How Trump Changed Childhood.”
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. The film originated as a three-part series for the Boston Globe.
Select Scholarship
Currently Teaching
In the News
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September 1, 2022
Rochester area to host Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Celebration
RIT is among the sponsors for the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Celebration that takes place in September and October.
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August 19, 2022
Crafting is my pedagogical love language — and it works wonders in the college classroom
Essay written by Hinda Mandell, professor in the School of Communication, published by The Boston Globe.
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February 14, 2022
Creating a free speech campus culture
After the contested 2020 presidential election, the tumult of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and the national protests following the killing of George Floyd, RIT looked inward to see how to address the political climate with the student body. The result is an increased effort to create a campus culture of free speech and to give students the skills to participate in civil discourse respectfully and productively long after they graduate.
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January 23, 2023
Mandell gives artist talk
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October 24, 2022
Mandell leads ‘Peace Patch’ event
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July 21, 2022
Mandell presents on craft activism
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March 4, 2022
Mandell presents on ‘critical crafting’