Magdalene Zier

Magdalene Zier, from New York, New York, is pursuing a PhD in history at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, and a JD at Stanford Law School. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature. Named a John Harvard Scholar, Magdalene won the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for outstanding undergraduate scholarly work and the Elizabeth Maguire Memorial Prize for excellence in the study of African-American literature. Magdalene was a fellow at the Gate Theatre and the American Repertory Theater and the president of Harvard's student theater organization. After college, Magdalene worked at the NAACP’s national headquarters as a public policy fellow and communications analyst, supporting the organization's president in the wake of the 2016 election. At Stanford, her research focuses on efforts to combat racial and gender inequity in the early-twentieth-century United States. She won the inaugural Stanford Law School Legal History Prize for her paper on anti-lynching legislation in the 1920s. She has spent her graduate school summers working for the Brennan Center for Justice's Democracy Program and Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP.