Mira-Briana Haydu

Mira-Briana Haydu is a University of California Riverside Honors and Sigma Cum Laude B.A. graduate in Hispanic Literature. She completed her Master of Arts in Spanish at KU in 2019 and is currently working on her doctoral dissertation in the same field. She has been teaching Spanish at KU since 2017 and hopes to expand her teaching repertoire to include Portuguese. Her research is focused on post-expulsion Sephardic Jewry in New Spain and Brazil during the 15th - 17th centuries. She is interested in the ways in which religion continued to function as a racial marker outside of the Iberian Peninsula after 1492. Her research specifically explores how Jews fit into evolving “modern” understandings of race in the aforementioned colonies, and the role of crypto-Jews in these colonial hierarchies.