““What we laugh at during any period is a soulprint of the age.””
Mariana E. Brandman received her Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago in 2023. Her work focuses on the history of feminism and comedy in the United States. Her general research interests include U.S. social and cultural history, women's and gender history, LGBTQ+ history, the study of race and ethnicity, popular entertainment, and public history. Currently, she is a historian and curator for the Massachusetts Women’s History Center.
Her dissertation, "Take Back the Mic: The Rise of Feminist Stand-Up Comedy in American Culture," is the first historical study of modern feminist comedy. It uncovers how comedy has come to serve as a language for contemporary feminism. The dissertation traces the emergence of feminist stand-up comics from the women's liberation movement through the 1990s. These performers gave rise to a feminist comic tradition, one that both stood apart from the mainstream and one that influenced popular American comedy in the latter decades of the twentieth century. The project draws on recorded performances, archival records, and oral histories in a historical analysis that brings together issues of gender, sexuality, race, politics, and public performance in the twentieth-century United States.
Mariana received her B.A. with Distinction in History from Yale University and her M.A. from the University of Chicago. She is the recipient of fellowships from the University of Chicago's Department of History, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and D'Angelo Law Library. While at the University of Chicago, she served as a Bessie Pierce Prize Preceptor, a teaching assistant in the College, and the coordinator of the U.S. History Workshop. A dedicated public historian, she has worked as a researcher and archivist at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, the Chicago History Museum, the Newberry Library, the Oak Park Public Library, the University of Chicago's Special Collections Research Center, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Library of Congress. She served as the 2020-2022 Predoctoral Fellow in Women's History at the National Women's History Museum.