Debra Renee Kaufman is an emeritus professor of sociology, a Matthews Distinguished University Professor, and the founding director of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University. She helped to establish the Jewish Studies Program and was its director for eight years.

She is an editorial board member of several journals, including Nashim: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues and Contemporary Jewry. She is an active participant in the Boston academic community: as a member of the Graduate Consortium for Women’s Studies at MIT where she has developed and taught courses on feminist methodology, and as a reviewer for the Boston Jewish Film Festival Annual Catalogue of Reviews of the World’s Best Contemporary Films on Jewish Themes. She is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of The Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women at Brandeis University and a member of the International Academic Advisory Board of the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Center for the Study of Women in Judaism at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

She has lectured extensively in both the United States and Europe where she has most recently been conducting seminars on post-Holocaust identity narratives among young adults in the United States and Israel.