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Associate Professor
Division of Nursing Science
Newark
ACK 256
Dr. Birnbaum teaches in the division of Nursing Science. She is an ethnographer, educational theorist, editor, and psychiatric nurse. Her interests are in the areas of education and child development and in the intersection of nursing with the humanities and social sciences. Her first book, Law and Order and School (Temple University Press, 2001) was an ethnography of interpersonal dynamics in an educational program for justice-involved teenagers. It was named a Chicago Humanities Festival “Good Read” in 2004. Her second book, Therapeutic Communication in Mental Health Nursing: Aesthetic and Metaphoric Processes in the Engagement with Challenging Patients (Routledge, 2017), was a series of case studies examining phenomenological aspects of nursing communication with psychiatric inpatients. It was AJN Book of the Year in 2017. Her third book, Trauma and Resilience in Holocaust Memoir (Lexington Books/Bloomsbury, published in 2020 and re-released in paperback in 2022), explored the politics of memory. It was a narrative analysis of the memoirs of child survivors of World War II. A forthcoming book about the practice of qualitative inquiry will be published by Elsevier in 2028. Dr. Birnbaum has lectured on the subject of how nurses acquire interpretive depth in the practice of qualitative research. She serves as a peer reviewer for multiple nursing journals and is on the editorial board of Nursing Inquiry.
Dr. Birnbaum graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College, Columbia University, where she earned Distinction in Anthropology and minored in Biology. At New York University, where she completed a Master’s degree, she held a national fellowship in science, health, and environmental writing. During her PhD work in Educational Foundations and Policy Studies at Florida State University, specializing in Sociology of Education, she conducted research on the learning experiences of incarcerated women and adolescents. She has also completed several years of post-graduate courses in psychoanalytic theory.
Dr. Birnbaum teaches four courses in the Division of Nursing Science: Academic Writing for Nurse Scientists, Introduction to Qualitative Research, Advanced Qualitative Research Methods, and Curriculum Design and Instruction. In addition to teaching and doctoral advising, she provides support for scholarly writing skills development for School of Nursing doctoral students and faculty.
Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/citations?user=xddkwTcAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Orcid ID: 0000-0002-8666-6166