About Cassie

Cassie Tanks is a public historian and community archivist whose work starts from a simple premise: the people history happens to should have a hand in how it gets kept. She is a PhD candidate in World History at Northeastern University and holds an MA in Public History (Northeastern) and an MSLS (UNC Chapel Hill).

Much of her public work happens outside the university. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, she and Isabel Martínez run community-engaged projects with Central American immigrant youth. Caminos de Esperanza brought eleven Guatemalan young people together to make digital testimonios. Their co-authored article, “Digital Desahogo: Creating Infrastructures of Care for Guatemalan Youth Wound Release” (AMAE Journal, 2026), describes what that work takes: trauma-informed facilitation, aliases, encrypted connections, metadata stripped from every file, and a hand-lettered sign taped to a rental truck so neighbors wouldn’t mistake the team for ICE. That work continues in Jóvenes de Justicia, a bilingual workshop series that trains youth as community researchers by pairing research ethics with the history of who gets documented and why.

Her curatorial and archival work spans continents. She designed the metadata schema for Apartheid Heritage(s), a digital project documenting the spatial history of South Africa’s townships, where description itself is an act of repair. She co-curated and coordinated Amandla is Unity! at The College of New Jersey, an exhibit built on the principle that amandla is unity. She also managed the UNC Story Archive from concept to launch and did metadata work for the Carl Reiner Archives at the National Comedy Center, because comedy deserves a finding aid too.

Her dissertation, and first book project, argues that mobility produced political consciousness in the Depression-era West. It follows people and the machines built to sort them: the debt ledger, the border line at Nogales, the cotton camp, and the archive box where Sanora and Dorothy Babb’s field notes now live. Its original framework, biomobilities, reads movement as physical, political, archival, and embodied all at once.

A proud first-generation college student and community college alumna, Cassie taught in public schools before graduate school. She now teaches Digital Humanities and Archival Design at UC Berkeley and works in both English and Spanish. As a Garden Club of America Scholar, she spent summer 2026 driving Highway 99 from San Diego to the Bancroft Library. Sometimes the best way to read a road is to drive it.

Selected publication
Cassie Tanks and Isabel Martínez. 2026. “Digital Desahogo: Creating Infrastructures of Care for Guatemalan Youth Wound Release.” AMAE Journal 20 (4): 143–63. https://doi.org/10.24974/amae.20.4.578