Abigail Jean Kahn (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Education. Her research examines the history of schooling across race and ethnicity in the United States, with particular attention to how educational spaces acquire multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings.
Her dissertation, Blackboards and Barbed Wire: The Contested Meanings of Schooling in a Japanese American Concentration Camp, 1942–1945, is a study of the schools at Minidoka. Drawing on archival records, student work, and oral histories, the project investigates how educational theorists, bureaucrats, teachers, and students understood and negotiated the purposes of schooling under incarceration. By tracing these overlapping perspectives, her work highlights the complex roles schools played: as sites where incarceration was legitimized and normalized; where teachers pursued an agenda of social refashioning, seeking to mold students according to their own ideals; and where students created moments of joy, agency, and normalcy outside the goals imagined by administrators and teachers. Through this lens, her research considers what the Minidoka case reveals about the broader challenges of interpreting American schooling historically.
Abigail is originally from St. Louis, Missouri. She received her B.A. in History from Vanderbilt University in 2019 and her M.Ed. from Southern Methodist University in 2021. Her work is also supported by research grants from the Asian American Research Center at Stanford (AARCS) and the American Historical Association (AHA).