Isabel Frey Ribeiro

Isabel Frey Ribeiro entered the History PhD program in 2025. She specializes in Modern Europe and the US and is especially interested in the constraints on speech imposed within liberal societies. She explores the ways censorship, education, and democracy intersected in an international context after the Second World War—especially in terms of book bans and the culture that surrounded them.

Isabel graduated from Williams College with a BA in history and French. At Williams, she wrote a cultural history thesis on the postwar identity of the BBC and its national gentrifying power in Britain, through the lens of one strange and strangely resilient radio program, Desert Island Discs. After Williams, Isabel organized with the nonprofit organization Busload of Books and spent two years working in editorial at Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House.