Dr. Maria Theresia (Maresi) Starzmann is the Water Justice Fellow with LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute. Her research focuses on how lack of access to clean and affordable water negatively impacts the health, wealth, and quality of life of Black households and communities.
Dr. Starzmann was previously a principal research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, where she was conducting community-engaged research on prosecutorial reform. Prior to joining LDF, she was a project manager in the New York office of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, where she implemented public programming on women’s rights, climate justice, and monitoring far-right extremism. Before that, she was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal and Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology at Free University in Berlin, where her research and teaching focused on cultural heritage, de-/colonization, memory, and historical justice. In 2016, she served as co-editor of the volume Excavating Memory: Sites of Remembering and Forgetting, which brought together interdisciplinary scholars from across the globe.
Dr. Starzmann received her PhD in Anthropology from Binghamton University and her MPhil in Ancient Middle Eastern Languages and Archaeology from Vienna University in Austria. She also holds a Professional Certificate in Restorative Justice from Vermont Law and Graduate School.
