Participants
Name: Gabe Atkinson
Position: Senior at Appalachian State University
Gabe Atkinson is a senior at Appalachian State University, majoring in History with a concentration in education and a minor in Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies. Gabe is planning on going into the Park Service when he graduates from App State, but also wants to become involved with museum work, focused on Polish Jewry. He studies Polish-Jewish relations in the modern-era with two papers focused on this topic: one on Jewish immigration and the other on the Armia Krajowa. Gabe would like to continue studying this topic and eventually write a publication about tracing the historic roots of Polish antisemitism.
Contact: atkinsongh@appstate.edu
Name: Klaus E. Becker
Position: Founder, Owner, President and CEO of Nirosteel LLC; Chairman, N.C. Zeitgeist Foundation
Study of Protestant Theology and Jewish Studies in Tübingen, Heidelberg and Jerusalem; Klaus Becker was born in Marburg in 1953, grew up in Germany where he studied business and national economics and has a master degree from Ruhr-Universität in Bochum. Since 1979, he has lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he is entrepreneurially active in the international steel trade for the past 40 years. He presided over the Charlotte World Trade Association in the mid-nineties and was President of the German-American Chamber of Commerce in North Carolina for seven years. In January of 2014, he was appointed Honorary of the Federal Republic of Germany for western North Carolina (a position he held until 2021). In this function, he founded The N.C. Zeitgeist Foundation which coordinates his consular activities. It is one goal of the Foundation to put Charlotte and surroundings on the political maps of the German institutions in Washington, Berlin and the German States. Further, the Foundation offers a wide array of aspects of German life to Charlotte and the region in artistic and cultural, journalistic and political, as well as historic and sports-related aspects (Bayern München and Borussia Dortmund played in Charlotte solely upon invitation of The N.C. Zeitgeist Foundation).
Contact: klaus.becker@nirosteel.com
Name: Prof. Ruth von Bernuth
Position: Seymour & Carol Levin Distinguished Term Professor, Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, UNC Chapel Hill
Since 2008, Ruth von Bernuth has taught Medieval and early modern German and Yiddish literature and culture in the department of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures at UNC Chapel Hill. She has served as director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies since 2013. She has published on disability history, early modern and Yiddish literature, and she is author of Wunder, Spott und Prophetie: Natürliche Narrheit in den “Historien von Claus Narren” (Max Niemeyer, 2009) and How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2016). In addition, she co-edited Nexus 5: Essays in German Jewish Studies (Camden House, 2021), which features essays written in the memory of Jonathan M. Hess.
Contact: rvb@email.unc.edu
Name: Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming
Position: Adjunct Professor, Center for Jewish Civilization, Georgetown University; Head of the USHMM Mandel Center's International Academic Programs Division
Dr. Brown-Fleming joined the Museum in 2001 and oversees its International Academic Programs Division, which ensures that the field of Holocaust studies remains vital and vibrant around the world.
Dr. Brown-Fleming's work has been featured in the Catholic News Service, Catholic News Agency, and The Catholic Virginian. She has appeared on CNN, EWTN Global Catholic Television Network, and in several documentaries, including Holy Silence (2020). Dr. Brown-Fleming is a 2021–22 Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History’s Center for Holocaust Studies in Munich and Berlin.
Her current research project, Il Papa Tedesco (The German Pope): Eugenio Pacelli and Germany, 1917–1958, is a study of Pope Pius XII’s relationship to Germany and its bishops, leaders, and people during the Weimar era, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Another current project, “Opa War Ein Nazi (Grandpa Was a Nazi): Eduard Geist and the Crimes of the Third Reich,” is Dr. Brown-Fleming’s first attempt to research and write as both a decades-long scholar of the Holocaust and the granddaughter of a devout and locally prominent Nazi.
Contact: sb2032@georgetown.edu or sbrown-fleming@ushmm.org
Name: Mara Cayarga
Position: PhD student at the Department of Philosophy, Emory University
Mara Cayarga is a first-year doctoral student in philosophy at Emory University. Her research is centered on German idealism, psychoanalysis, and critical black and Caribbean thought. Her most recent work is on Haiti and the Anthropocene where she examines the racial history underlying questions of ecological debt and the limits of post-humanist discourses. At the Southeast German Jewish Studies Workshop, she will be focusing on contemporary debates within Hegel scholarship to understand the onto-genetic emergence of subjectivity from a transcendental materialist lens
Contact: mara.cayarga@emory.edu
Name: Brian Craft, MA
Position: Alumni Relations and Annual Fund Program Coordinator, American Friends of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Brian Craft joined American Friends in January 2020 as Alumni Relations and Annual Fund Program Coordinator. He completed his MA at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in German and European Studies in Spring 2019. His research focused on the emerging challenges at the intersection of economics and national security facing the transatlantic community. Before joining American Friends, Brian worked for some years in the legal industry. In 2014, Brian received his BA in history with minors in political science and German at the University of Michigan, where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity and the Order of Omega, as well as a James B. Angell Scholar. Brian speaks German and elementary Dutch and is a native of Michigan.
Contact: bcraft@americanfriendsofavh.org
Name: Professor Shmuel Feiner
Position: Professorship in Modern Jewish History and Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Prussia, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
In addition to his appointments at Bar-Ilan University, Prof. Feiner is currently the Chairman of The Historical Society of Israel and editor of Zion, A Quarterly for Research in Jewish History. He is the past Chairman of the Jerusalem Leo Baeck Institute (2007-2019) and the Vice President of the International Leo Baeck Institute. He served as Visiting Professor at Yale University (2011) and the Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main (2012). Among his many awards and fellowships are an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award, 2012. Prof. Feiner is the author and/or editor of many influential books, including Haskalah and History. The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (Hebrew 1995; English, by the Littman Library, 2002), The Jewish Enlightenment(Hebrew, 2002; English, by The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award; German, by Olms, 2007, winner of the Meyer-Struckmann-Preis, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf), Moses Mendelssohn (Hebrew, 2005; German, by Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 2009; English, by Yale University Press, 2010; Chinese by Showwe Information Co, Taipei, 2014), The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth Century Europe (Hebrew, 2010, winner of the Shazar Prize in Jewish History; English, by The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); The Jewish Eighteenth Century, A European Biography 1700-1750, Hebrew 2017; English, by Indiana University Press, 2020); The Jewish Eighteenth Century, A European Biography 1750-1800 (Hebrew 2021).
Contact: feiners@gmail.com
Name: Dr. Bryan Ganaway
Position: Associate Dean of the Honors College at the College of Charleston
Bryan Ganaway received his Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Illinois in 2003. He is currently the Associate Dean of the Honors College at the College of Charleston. His book Toys, Consumption, and Middle-class Childhood in Imperial Germany came out in 2010. Ganaway is completing an article on how the University of Berlin shaped the intellectual trajectory of W.E.B. Du Bois as part of an edited Volume called Teaching to Transgress.
Contact: GanawayB@cofc.edu
Name: Eric Grube, MA
Position: PhD candidate in the Department of History at Boston College
Eric Grube received his BA in History at the University of Virginia in 2014 and his MA in History at Boston College in 2017. His research focuses on the intersections of regionalism and German nationalism, which drove forward years of fascist cooperation and infighting across the Austro-Bavarian border in the interwar years. He has conducted archival research throughout Germany and Austria and has received stipendia from the DAAD. He taught for a year at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt before returning to Boston College to teach and to finish his dissertation.
Contact: eric.grube@bc.edu
Name: Prof. Malachi Haim Hacohen
Position: Professor of History, Jewish Studies, and Religion and Director of the Religions and Public Life Program at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke
Malachi Haim Hacohen is Professor of History, Jewish Studies, and Religion at Duke University, and Director of the Religions and Public Life Program at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. His research interests focus on Central Europe and include social theory, political philosophy, and rabbinic culture. His Karl Popper – The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge, 2000) won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the AHA and the Victor Adler State Prize. His Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire (Cambridge, 2019) won the Center for Austrian Studies Biannual Book Prize. He has published essays on the European Jewish intelligentsia, Cold War liberalism, and cosmopolitanism and Jewish identity in The Journal of Modern History, The Journal of the History of Ideas, History and Theory, History of Political Economy, Jewish Social Studies, and other journals and collections. He has been a recipient of the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the ACLS, as well as of Fulbright, Mellon, and Whiting fellowships and a number of teaching awards. He was a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the IFK (Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften) in Vienna, and will be offering a lecture series at EHESS this coming May.
Contact: mhacohen@duke.edu
Name: Dr. J. Laurence Hare
Position: J. Laurence Hare is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Arkansas. HeholdsaPhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the author of Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums, and the German-Danish Borderlands (University of Toronto Press) and Essential Skills for Historians: A Practical Guide to Researching the Past, co-authored with Jack Wells and Bruce E. Baker (Bloomsbury). His current research concerns the impact of German cultural and intellectual exchange with Scandinavia and the evolution of German Nordicist thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Contact: (479) 575-5890, lhare@uark.edu
Name: Rhiannon Hein, MA
Position: PhD candidate in Modern German History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rhiannon Hein was born and raised in Honolulu, HI and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Alabama in 2018 with a BA in History and English. Supported in part by the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, her work at the University of Illinois has won the Joseph Ward Swan Prize for outstanding seminar paper and an Honorable Mention for the Humanities Research Institute's Prize for Research.
With the support of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Hein is now conducting research for her dissertation, “The Provincial Globe: German Universities Making Modernity, 1776-1848.” Her project investigates the interplay between regionalism, nationalism, and globalism in the towns and gowns of Göttingen and Jena, two of the leading universities in the late Enlightenment and early Romantic German lands. Framing the towns as spaces of transit and exchange embedded in foreign imperial networks, her research explores the transcultural nature of German identity and belonging at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Contact: rhein2@illinois.edu
Name: Naama Jager-Fluss, MA
Position: Ph.D. candidate in the department of Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University
Naama Jager-Fluss is a ph.d candidate in the department of Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her main fields of interest are modern German-Jewish History, especially the Haskalah in the early nineteenth century, the beginning of the reform movement in Judaism, and the Temple in Hamburg. She works with her supervisor, Prof. Shmuel Feiner, in "The Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Germany", and is involved in several research projects.
Contact: naamajag@gmail.com
Name: Dr. Molly Wilkinson Johnson
Position: Associate professor of history at the University of Alabama in Huntsville
Dr. Molly Wilkinson Johnson is an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she teaches German and European history. She received her PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her book, Training Socialist Citizens: Sports and the State in East Germany (Brill, 2008), explores the political, social, and cultural role of mass sports in communist East Germany. Her current research examines athletic mega-events, urban planning, and social protest in the reunification and post-reunification eras in Germany through Berlin’s failed bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games, with an article recently published in Central European History and another forthcoming in German History. She is currently working on a co-edited essay collection along with Dr. Heather Dichter, with the working title of Berlin Sports: Mega-Events, Media, and Recreation in the Global Metropolis.Her next project explores “Civic Identity, Athletic Mega Events, and Post-Socialism: Leipzig’s 2012 Olympic Bid.”
Contact: molly.johnson@uah.edu
Name: Naomi Keren
Position: PhD student at the Department of Jewish History, Bar Ilan University, Israel.
Naomi Keren's PhD research entitled Modern Jewish Identities in Denmark as Reflected in Ego-Documents (1770-1870) is a joint research project of Bar Ilan University, Israel, and Copenhagen University, Denmark. Ms. Keren has been a journalist for over 20 years acting as an anchorwoman of the main evening news show on Channel 1 Israeli TV and headed news editorial boards on TV and radio channels. In 2013 she published a historical novel about the life & times of Dona Gracia Mendes Nasi entitled La Señora [Hebrew], Tel Aviv: Kinneret, Zemora-Bitan, Dvir Publishing House Ltd. Naomi Keren holds a B.A. in History from Tel Aviv university, Israel, and an M.A. in Jewish Studies from Schechter Institute, Jerusalem, Israel.
Contact: naomikrn@netvision.net.il or naomi.keren1@biu.ac.i
Name: Professor Sarah Koellner
Position: Assistant Professor of German at the College of Charleston
Sarah Koellner received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 2018. As a scholar she is particularly interested in two interdisciplinary strands of research: the literary, filmic, theatrical, and artistic engagement with surveillance and privacy; and migration narratives and cultural (post)memory in literature, film, new media, and the arts. Her work has been published in journals such as Seminar,Gegenwartsliteratur, Variations, and Surveillance & Society.
Contact: koellnersk@cofc.edu
Name: Professor Melissa Kravetz
Position: Associate Professor of History and Co-Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Longwood University, VA
Melissa Kravetz is an Associate Professor of History and Co-Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Longwood University in central Virginia. She teaches courses in European and German history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in May 2011. Her book, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics, and Professional Identity, came out in April 2019 with the University of Toronto Press. This research is part of a larger work-in-progress, The Life of Elisabeth Seger: Nazi Resister, Hostage, Wife, and Mother, the memoir of Elisabeth Seger that Melissa is editing alongside with Gerhart and Elisabeth Seger’s grandchildren.
Contact: kravetzml@longwood.edu
Name: Dr. Eric Kurlander
Position: Dr. Eric Kurlander is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Stetson University. Kurlander earned his BA at Bowdoin College and his MA and PhD at Harvard University, and offers courses on Modern German, European, and World History. His books include Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (Yale, 2017; paperback 2018), Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (Yale, 2009), The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898-1933 (Berghahn, 2006) and two co-edited volumes, Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’: Histories, Realities, Legacies (Camden House, 2015) and Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Routledge, 2014). He has held research and writing fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the German Historical Institute; the German Academic Exchange Service; the Krupp Foundation; and Harvard University's Program for the Study of Germany and Europe. He is currently working on a co-written textbook titled Modern Germany: A Global History (Oxford, 2022) and a monograph, Before the Final Solution: A Global History of the Nazi “Jewish Question” 1919-1941.
Contact: ekurland@stetson.edu
Name: Dr. Birgit Maier-Katkin
Position: Birgit Maier-KatkinisAssociate Professor of German at Florida State University. Her research centers on 20th and 21st German literature with a special focus on exile writers, cross-cultural topics, as well as memory and border studies. She has published numerous articles among them essays on Anna Seghers, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Yoko Tawada. Her book Silence and Acts of Memory examines literature’s contribution to historical memory as well as its impact on cultural identity. In addition to language courses, she teaches seminars on German literature and culture with a special focus on Human Rights and transcultural themes.
Contact: bmaierkatkin@fsu.edu
Name: Prof. Priscilla Layne
Position: Associate Professor of German, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Priscilla Layne is Associate Professor of German and Adjunct Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, was published in 2018 by the University of Michigan Press. She has also published essays on Turkish German culture, translation, punk and film. She recently translated Olivia Wenzel's debut novel, 1000 Serpentinen Angst, which will be out in June. And she is currently finishing a manuscript on Afro German Afrofuturism and a critical guide to Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun.
Contact: playne@email.unc.edu
Name: Caleb Longacre
Position: M.A. student in European History, Louisiana State University
Caleb Longacre graduated from Hillsdale College in 2021 with a major in History and dual minors in Art and German. Currently, he is working towards his M.A. in European History at Louisiana State University, where he has had the opportunity to pursue his interest in eighteenth-century Germany, while complaining about the tropical weather. Though still in its early stages, his thesis focuses on the Pantheismusstreit of the 1780s, and incorporates the themes and methodologies of intellectual, cultural, and conceptual history. His wider interests include alternative conceptions of modernity and challenges to Cartesian philosophy, religious mysticism and its historical legacies, and the intersections of art, literature, and philosophy.
Contact: clonga1@lsu.edu
Name: Prof. Suzanne Marchand
Position: LSU Systems Boyd (University) Professor of European Intellectual History at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
Suzanne Marchand obtained her BA from UC Berkeley in 1984, and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992. She served as assistant and then associate professor at Princeton University before moving to LSU in 1999. She is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1870 (1996) and German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship (2009), which won the George Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association, and most recently, Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (2020); this book was awarded the Ralph Gomory Prize from the Business History Conference. She is also the coauthor of two textbooks: Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (5th ed., 2017) and Many Europes (2013), and a board member of the Global Architectural Teaching Collaborative (gahtc.org). Between 2012 and 2014 she served as President of the German Studies Association. At present she is writing a history of Herodotus reception since 1700, tentatively titled: “Herodotus and the Instabilities of Western Civilization.”
Contact: smarch1@lsu.ed
Name: Dr. Verena Kasper-Marienberg
Position: Assistant Professor in History at North Carolina State University
Verena Kasper-Marienberg is an assistant professor in History at North Carolina State University. She serves as the co-director of the Jewish Studies Program at NCSU and co-coordinator of the NC Jewish Studies Seminar. She earned her MA in Rhetoric and History at the University of Tübingen and her PhD in History and Museum Studies at the University of Graz. She was a post-doc fellow at the Frankel Institute of Advanced Judaic Studies in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Israel Institute of Advances Studies in Jerusalem, Israel. She held fellowships from Leo Baeck Institute New York/Jerusalem, Yad Hanadiv Foundation, Gerda Henkel Foundation, EURIAS/Marie Curie program, and the Center for Jewish History, New York.
Verena Kasper-Marienberg’s research focuses on the intersection of Jewish and Christian communities in the early modern period in Europe. She is especially interested in questions of legal practice, gender relations, and socio-economic structures in early modern societies. She has published on a wide range of topics like Jewish female litigation, criminal history, Jewish-Christian shared spaces, and Bohemian Jewish history. Her first book examines Jewish litigation at the Imperial Supreme Court in Vienna during the 18th century. Currently she works on a micro-historical study of the early modern Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt and on a case study about the representation of Jewish law in early modern non-Jewish court rooms and legal education. In her teaching, she focuses on medieval and early modern European history, Jewish religion and culture, minority and migration history, public and legal history.
Contact: vikasper@ncsu.edu
Name: Dr. David Meola
Position: David Meola is the Bert & Fanny Meisler Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of South Alabama. He received his M.A. in European Studies and Ph.D. in History from the University of British Columbia - Vancouver, and his research focuses on German-Jewish life during the Vormaerz. His first manuscript and published articles mainly focus on Jews' participation in local, German newsprint during the 1840s. He has articles in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, Antisemitism Studies, and in edited volumes related to German publishing and the German-Jewish press. His next project--for which he has earned a J. William Fulbright US Scholar Grant--will interrogate the involvement of Jews in the democratic and liberal movements during the Vormaerz and the revolutions of 1848, as well as German-Jewish exiles' involvement in the US abolitionist movement and the Civil War.
Contact: dameola@southalabama.edu
Name: PD Dr. Elke Morlok
Position: Guest Professor, Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Heidelberg
Study of Protestant Theology and Jewish Studies in Tübingen, Heidelberg and Jerusalem; 2008 PhD Hebrew University Jerusalem on “Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Hermeneutics” under the supervision of Moshe Idel, published 2011 with Mohr Siebeck; postdoc- and teaching-positions in Halle, Heidelberg, Mainz, Frankfurt, Salzburg, Basel and Tübingen; 2017 habilitation Frankfurt University on “Haskalah and Kabbalah – Isaac ben Moshe Halevi Satanow (1732-1804)”, published 2022 with De Gruyter.
Research interests: Jewish mysticism and hasidism, Christian Kabbalah, Haskalah in Eastern and Western Europe, interreligious and intercultural transformation and transfer, gender aspects in religious texts.
Contact: elke.morlok@me.com
Name: Dr. Beverly Moser
Position: Dr. Beverly MoserisProfessor of German in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. A linguist by training, she teaches all levels of German. With respect to Holocaust studies, she engages German students in project-based learning, where they read culturally authentic texts on the Holocaust, biographies of Sophie Scholl and others working in the resistance, and youth literature, to gain reading skills in German. Dr. Moser is an avid supporter of all languages within her department and is helps German students find cross-disciplinary connections between German and all other fields of study.
Contact: moserba@appstate.edu
Name: Lea Neufeld
Position: Undergraduate student in the Honors College at the College of Charleston
Lea Neufeld is an undergraduate student in the Honors College at the College of Charleston, SC, graduating in May 2023. She is a Political Science, International Studies, and French triple major interested in forced migration. In 2020/2021 she was a student fellow in the Global Ambassadors Program at the College of Charleston under the guidance of Ambassador Jim Melville Jr. She is currently an intern at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre.
Contact: neufeldl@g.cofc.edu
Name: Dr. Folarin Oguntoyinbo
Position: Associate Professor of Fermentation Science at the A.R. Smith Department of Chemistry and Fermentation Sciences, Appalachian State University.
Prof. Oguntoyinbo is an Associate Professor of Fermentation Science at the A.R. Smith Department of Chemistry and Fermentation Sciences, Appalachian State University, Boone. He was a Georg Forster Experienced Researcher of the Alexander von Humboldt at the Max Rubner-Institut, Institut für Microbiologie und Biotechnologie, Kiel, Germany as well as Newton International Fellow of the Royal Society, UK at the Institute of Food Research, Norwich, UK, now Quadram Institute Bioscience. His teaching and research focus on fermentation microbiology and its industrial applications.
Contact: oguntoyinbofa@appstate.edu
Name: Dr. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan
Position: Leon Levine Distinguished Professor of Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies, Director, Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies, Professor of History
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan is the Leon Levine Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies as well as a professor of history at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Prior to coming to ASU, Pegelow Kaplan taught at Grinnell College, Davidson College and De La Salle University in Manila, Philippines. Pegelow Kaplan’s research focuses on histories of violence, language, and culture of Nazi Germany and the 1960s global youth revolts. He has been a research fellow at – among others – the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem; the Simon-Dubnow-Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University, the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin, and the German Historical Institute, Washington. Pegelow Kaplan is the author of The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry (2011) and Taking the Transnational Turn: The German-Jewish Press and Journalism Beyond Borders, 1933-1943 (forthcoming with Yad Vashem Publications in Hebrew, 2022) and co-editor of Beyond ‘Ordinary Men’: Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography (2019; with Juergen Matthaeus) and Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust (2020; with Wolf Gruner).
Contact: Appalachian State University P.O. Box 32146 Edwin Duncan Hall, Room 102B Boone, NC 28608 USA; Ph.: +1-828-262-6118 (Office) Email: thomaspegelowkaplan@appstate.edu
Name: Prof. Doria Killian
Position: Assistant Professor of German, Department of Languages and Literatures; Director, the Center for Jewish Studies at UNC-Asheville
Doria Killian receivd her Ph.D. in German Studies from Georgetown University in 2019, after which she joined the faculty of UNC Asheville. She currently serves as assistant professor of German and the director of UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies. Her research focuses on contemporary German-Jewish literature, autofiction, narrative theory, and second language acquisition pedagogy. Her most recent article analyzes fan interactions with the television series Babylon Berlin on the website TV Tropes as instances of pop narratology.
Contact: dkillian@unca.edu
Name: Prof. Heather R. Perry
Position: Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Prof. Perry’s research focuses on the social, cultural, and medical history of the World Wars, with special attention to Germany and Europe. She earned her Ph.D. in History from Indiana University, where she also worked as an editorial assistant at the American Historical Review. She has published on the histories of war and medicine; technology and the body; disability studies; museum studies; John Dillinger; and most recently food and nutrition on the German WWI homefront. Her first book was Recycling the Disabled: Army, Medicine, and Modernity in WWI Germany (Manchester University Press, 2014) and most recently she has published the co-edited volumes: Food, Culture, and Identity in Germany’s Century of War (Palgrave, 2019) and The Central Powers in Russia’s Great War and Revolution: Enemy Visions and Encounters, 1914-1922 (Slavica, 2020). She is currently serving as Editor -in-Chief of the journal, First World War Studies – and is one of the co-editors of German Studies Collaboratory – an online hub for teaching and learning about German culture, language, history, and society. She is currently working on several projects including Carolina in the Trenches – a digital humanities project focused on North Carolina’s experiences during the Great War (launched July 2021) and Feeding War: Food, Health, and National Belonging in Germany, 1914-1924-- a book-length examination of food and nutrition on the German homefront. In 2021, she began a four-year term on the Society for Military History's Teaching and Professional Development Committee and a three-year term on the Southern Historical Association's European History Section's (EHS) Program Committee.
Contact: hrperry@uncc.edu and https://pages.charlotte.edu/heather-perry/
Name: Dr. Jared Poley
Position: Jared Poley is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Georgia State University. He is the author of the books The Devil’s Riches: A Modern History of Greed (2016) and Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (2005), and a coeditor of the collections Money in the German-speakingLands (2017); Migrations in the German Lands, 1500–2000 (2016); Kinship, Community, and Self (2015); and Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany (2012). He is currently working on a history of gambling in nineteenth-century Europe.
Contact: jpoley@gsu.edu
Name: Anke Popper
Position: Head of Cultural Affairs, Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, Washington, DC.
Former Deputy Director, German Information Center, Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, Washington, DC
Contact: ku-1@wash.diplo.de
https://www.germany.info/ - Allgemeine Botschaftsseite
http://germanyinusa.com/ - Blog der Botschaft
Name: Dr. Daniel Riches
Position: Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at the University of Alabama
Daniel Riches is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at the University of Alabama, where he has worked since receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2007. His research centers on the role of intellectual, cultural, and religious forces on the politics and diplomacy of early modern Europe, especially in its German- and Scandinavian-speaking regions. He is the author of Protestant Cosmopolitanism and Diplomatic Culture: Brandenburg-Swedish Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2013), as well as a number of articles, essays, and reviews on various aspects of early modern history.
Contact: dlriches@as.ua.edu
Name: Dr. Alexandria Ruble
Position: Assistant Professor, Department of History, Spring Hill College, AL
Alexandria Ruble is an Assistant Professor of European History at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, where she teaches courses on modern European and global history. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Protecting Families, Dividing States: The Struggle to Reform Civil Law in Cold War Germany. She is beginning a second project on female political dissidents in Germany between 1878 and 1990. She is also a board member and educator for the Gulf Coast Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education.
Contact: aruble@shc.edu
Name: Yoav Schaefer, MA
Position: PhD candidate in Religion at Princeton University
Prior to arriving at Princeton, Yoav earned a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University and studied Jewish philosophy and history at Tel Aviv University. His research interests include political and critical theory, philosophy, and modern Jewish thought and intellectual history. Yoav’s dissertation focuses on the early Jewish reception of Kantian philosophy.
Contact: yoavs@princeton.edu
Name: Everet Smith
Position: Graduate student at Emory University
Contact: everet.smith@emory.edu
Everet smith is a graduate student at Emory University. They earned their BA in Philosophy at Appalachian State University in 2018, and their MA in Ethics & Applied Philosophy at UNC Charlotte in 2021. Their philosophical work deals primarily with Latin American and Chicana philosophy, with their current work exploring the relationship between Chicana feminism and the work of Frankfurt School critical theorists like Walter Benjamin. Their broader interests include Indigenous philosophy, phenomenology of illness, ecocriticism, and aesthetics.
Name: Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, PhD
Position: Professor of German and Global Studies at Appalachian State University
Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand received her PhD in German from the Pennsylvania State University. She is Professor of German and Global Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Having served as chair of the Department of Languages and Literatures and as director of the Global Studies program, she has since recovered from those assignments. In addition to her book on Topographies of Gender in Middle High German Arthurian Romance (Garland, 2001), she has published widely on medieval German literature. Other areas of research and teaching interest include Arthurian literature and medievalisms, as well as advocacy for medieval studies in the Humanities. Recently, she co-authored with Evelyn Meyer a short history of Arthurian scholarship by women in German Studies for JIAS 7.1 in 2019. Her monograph Medieval Literature on Display: Heritage and Culture in Modern Germany (Bloomsbury) was published in 2020. In spring 2020, at least for a short time, she was the Fulbright Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Graz to work on a corollary project to explore Austrian identity at the intersection of medieval literature and modern monuments. This is a monograph entitled Recontextualizing Medieval Heritage and Identity in Contemporary Austria in progress with ARC Humanities Press.
Contact: hellenbranda@appstate.edu
Name: Evan Thomas, BA
Position: International Relations MA student in spe
Evan Thomas graduated summa cum laude from Appalachian State University in the fall of 2021 with a BA in Languages, Literatures & Cultures with a concentration in German, as well as a minor in philosophy. Evan has been fascinated by the German language and culture ever since he began his study of the language in high school, and he hopes that both areas remain important focal points in his future career plans. Research areas that particularly interest Evan include the German philosophical traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as the interwar period in Germany and Europe at large. Evan is planning on pursuing a master’s degree in international relations in the near future
Contact: evanthomas485@gmail.com
Name: Shir Twerski
Position: PhD Candidate, Department of Jewish Thought, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Shir Twerski is a PhD candidate in the Jewish thought department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shir’s MA thesis, written at the Hebrew University as well, focused on Emanuel Levinas’ notion of translation, demonstrating that -- for Levinas -- translation can be an expression of transcendence in immanence and thus playing a central role in his philosophy. Shir is currently working on her PhD under the supervision of Professor Benjamin Pollok from the Hebrew University, writing about the political thought of modern German Jewish thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. A recipient of the Bahana Award for excellence in research at the Department of Jewish Thought, over the last four years, Shir has also served as a research assistant at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University.
Contact: shir.twerski@gmail.com
Name: Dr. Didem Uca
Position: Assistant Professor of German Studies, Emory University
Dr. Didem Uca (she/her) is Assistant Professor of German Studies and Associated Faculty in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. Her work focuses on cultural production that centers the experiences of post/migrant, racialized, and minoritized individuals and communities within an intersectional framework and has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Seminar, Monatshefte, Die Unterrichtspraxis, TRANSIT, and Gegenwartsliteratur. A recipient of the Goethe-Institut/American Association of Teachers of German Certificate of Merit in 2020, Dr. Uca is co-editor of Turkish-German Studies Yearbook and active within the Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum Collective, the Coalition of Women in German, and the Modern Language Association.
Contact: didem.uca@emory.edu
Name: Dr. Teresa Walch
Position: Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of North Carolina at Greensbo
Teresa Walch is an assistant professor of modern European history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research examines the politics of space and place in modern Germany. Her book current book manuscript investigates the relationship between Nazi ideology and spatial practices between 1933-1945. She has published articles in Naharaim, German History, and in the edited volume Theresienstadt – Filmfragmente und Zeitzeugenberichte: Historiographie und soziologische Analysen. She is also co-editing a volume with Sagi Schaefer and Galili Shahar entitled Räume der deutschen Geschichte, set to appear with Wallstein Verlag in 2022.
Contact: tmwalch@uncg.edu
Name: Joseph Weiss, PhD
Position: Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Appalachian State University
Joseph Weiss is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Appalachian State University, where he teaches social and political theory, continental philosophy, and aesthetics. His research attempts to think the intersections between each of these areas of study, with a particular focus on how the Frankfurt School can help us understand both the history of philosophy and the present political conjuncture. He has published widely on the works of T.W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, including his recent book, The Dialectics of Music: Adorno, Benjamin, and Deleuze.
Contact: weissjm1@appstate.edu
Name: Prof. Helga A. Welsh
Position: Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University, NC
Helga A. Welsh’s publications have focused on the history and politics of the former East Germany, German unification, transitional justice, the reform of higher education in Germany, and democratization processes in Central and Eastern Europe. She has published a book on denazification in the former East Germany and co-edited a book on German unification. Her most recent book (co-authored with Christiane Lemke) is Germany Today. German Politics and Policies in a Changing World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Comparative Politics, European Journal of Education, Europe-Asia Studies, German Politics, German Politics and Society, and West European Politics. She is one of the editors of “German History in Documents and Images,” a project administered by the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC.
Contact: welsh@wfu.edu
Name: Prof. Jason White
Position: Associate Professor and Assistant Chair, Department of History, Appalachian State University
Contact: whitejc3@appstate.edu
Name: Dr. Jonathan Wiesen
Position: Jonathan Wiesen is Professor of History and Department Chair at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He did his undergraduate work in history at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Sussex, and he received his Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 1998. Before coming to UAB, he was visiting assistant professor at Colgate UniversityandDistinguished professor and chair at Southern Illinois University. He is the author of West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 (Chapel Hill, 2001), which won a book prize from the Hagley Museum and Library and the Business History Conference. He is also co-editor with Pamela Swett and Jonathan Zatlin of Selling Modernity: AdvertisinginTwentieth Century Germany (Durham, 2007) and author of Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2011). He has written articles on historical memory, transatlantic relations, racism and the Holocaust, and anti-Semitism in Modern Germany. His work has appeared in a number of scholarly journals, including Central European History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, and the German Studies Review, and he has received research fellowships from the German Academic Exchange, The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, among others. He is currently writing a book on U.S. anti-Back racism in the German imagination from 1918-1968 and is most recently the author of “American Lynching in the Nazi Imagination: Race and Extra-Legal Violence in 1930s Germany,” German History 36: 1 (February 2018): 38–59, which won the 2020 Hans Rosenberg article prize.
Contact: jwiesen@uab.edu
Name: Prof. George S. Williamson
Position: Associate Professor of History, Florida State University
George Williamson is Associate Professor of History at Florida State University. He earned his AB in Religious Studies at Brown University and his PhD in History at Yale University. He taught from 1997 to 2010 at the University of Alabama before joining the faculty at FSU. He is the author of The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and has published essays and articles on the assassination of August von Kotzebue and its aftermath, Schelling’s philosophy of mythology, nineteenth-century theories of race, modern German religious history, Schubert’s Winterreise,and the early twentieth-century debate over the historicity of Jesus. He is a winner of the CEHS’s Annelise Thimme Article Prize (2000) and the DAAD/GSA Article Prize (2016). His current book project is entitled The Age of Kotzebue (1761-1819): Theater, Nation, Assassination.
Contact: gwilliamson@fsu.edu