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Francesca J. Gamber

Biography

Francesca writes, "I live my life on a series of borders." She was born and attended high school in Baltimore, but lived most of her life in southern Pennsylvania. Her father is ethnically Italian and her mother is African-American. "Straddling the line between races and regions, I felt in myself a little bit of everything-black and white, Northern and Southern, Marylander and Pennsylvanian."

During college, she discovered that "living on borders allows me to see not only where the lines that divide race and region run and which classes of people are included and excluded in those lines, but also where those lines intersect, when the lines become flexible or fuzzy, and of what the lines are made."

Francesca plans to teach high school history. She questions the selective construction of historical memory and believes that this approach will enable her to impart a critical perspective to future students, "one that acknowledges the carefully constructed nature of our most basic assumptions about who we are and where we live." She decided to teach, she recalls, because she values social responsiveness. She wants to "work to reduce the gap in the quality of education received by public and private school students."

Francesca is a playwright and director and producer of her own work. She was a staff writer for a Harvard publication on diversity, was an editorial intern for an official publication of the NAACP, and a contributor to the Anthology of Interracial Literature.

Her public service work includes helping high school students with the college application and financial aid process through a Harvard program. She also taught at an after-school program for middle school students. Her honors include the Elizabeth Wilder Prize from the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Detur Book Prize, and an honorary John Harvard Scholarship for academic excellence.

At Harvard, Francesca was a research assistant to three professors and an historian. While in those positions, she performed research for a book project on slave insurrection, helped research projects on education policy and racial politics, and helped President Clinton's personal historian research a book project on Clinton's relationship with the African-American community.

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