People
- Directors
Wendy Z. Goldman
Carngie Mellon University, Professor of History
Wendy Z. Goldman, professor in the History Department of Carnegie Mellon University, is a social and political historian of Russia. Her early work, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia Women (Cambridge University Press, 2002) focused on family policy, women's emancipation, and industrialization. More recently, she has written about Stalinist repression in Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2011.) Her latest work, (co edited with Donald Filtzer,) Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union During World War II (Indiana University Press, 2014) examines conditions and food policy at the front and in the rear. She is currently at work on a book about the Soviet home front during WW II.
Joe William Trotter, Jr.
Carnegie Mellon University, Giant Eagle Professor of History & Social Justice
Joe William Trotter, Jr. is Giant Eagle Professor of History and Social Justice at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. He is also Director of the University’s Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE). His publications include Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II (with Jared Day, University of Pittsburgh Press); River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (University Press of Kentucky); and The African American Experience (Houghton Mifflin). He is currently completing a book on African American urban history since the Atlantic slave trade.- Post-Doctoral Fellow
Gali Tibon
Gali Tibon is a former high school principal and since 2008 been running national programs in the field of education. CEO of a new wide enterprise: "The institute for excellence in the humanities" a foundation for the promotion of the humanities in the Israeli school system in accordance with liberal-humanistic views. She has M.A. in Management of Educational Systems and Jewish History from Haifa University, M.A Thesis :“Women and Teenage Girls in the Holocaust of the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina.” PhD. dissertation: The Jewish Leadership of the South Bukovina Communities in the Ghettoes in the Mogilev Region in Transnistria, and its Dealings with the Romanian Regime (1941-1944). Tel Aviv University. She is currently the head of the education board of "Lochamei Hagetaot" Ghetto fighters' museum.- Presenters (in alphabetical order)
Tobias Brinkmann
Tobias Brinkmann is the Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Penn State University, University Park, PA. He is currently working on a study about Jewish migration from Eastern Europe between 1860 and 1950. Recent book publications: Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2012) – Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award; Points of Passage: Jewish Transmigrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880-1914 (New York: Berghahn, 2013).
Mhoze Chikowero
Mhoze Chikowero is Assistant Professor of African History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He did Ph.D. at Dalhousie University and took a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University. His first book: African Music, Power and Being: Colonial Zimbabwe is under review. He is currently an ACLS Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand working on his second major project: a history of colonial broadcasting in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi (1920s-1980). He has published book chapters in edited volumes and articles in the Journal of Southern African Studies and in Muziki: Journal of Music Studies in Africa.
Tim Cole
Tim Cole is Professor of Social History at the department of Historical studies at the university of Bristol, and currently departmental chair. He is the author of Images of the Holocaust/Images of the Holocaust (1999), Holocaust City (2003) and Traces of the Holocaust (2011) and a co-editor of Militarized Landscapes (2010) and Geographies of the Holocaust (2014). He is currently writing a book on Holocaust Landscapes.
Bernard Cooperman
Professor Bernard Dov Cooperman currently holds the Louis L. Kaplan Chair of Jewish History at the University of Maryland and is director of its Miller Center for Historical Study. His research focuses on the Jews of the Italian peninsula. Using archival, legal, rabbinic, and literary sources, he looks for the ways in which economic, social and spatial realities shape cultural interaction, noting that rhetorical conventions often lead us to oversimplify the complexity of everyday life. His two most recent articles are “Organizing Knowledge for the Jewish Market. An Editor/Printer in Sixteenth-Century Rome.” Peggy Pearlstein, ed..,Perpectives on the Hebraic Book. The Myron M. Weinstein Memorial Lectures at the Library of Congress, (Washington, DC: 2012) and “Amsterdam from an International Perspective: Tolerance and Kehilla in the Portuguese Diaspora,” in Yosef Kaplan, ed., The Dutch Intersection. The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History. Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium on the History of Dutch Jewry, November 21–24, 2004. (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
Dawne Y. Curry
Dawne Y. Curry is an Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her publications include, Apartheid on a Black Isle: Removal and Resistance in Alexandra, South Africa and an edited volume entitled, Extending the Diaspora: New Histories of Black People. Her new project explores the history of African women's intellectualism from the eve of apartheid in the 1940s to South Africa becoming a Republic in the 1960s. In this work, Curry will analyze the ways in which African women responded to forced removals, the carrying of identity passes, patriarchal constraints, internationalism, and nationhood among other topics.
Zvi Gitelman
Zvi Gitelman is professor of political science and Preston Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Author or editor of 16 books, the most recent being Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: an Uncertain Ethnicity (Cambridge University Press, 2012). His current research is on World War Two and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. His A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union (2001) has been translated into Japanese and Russian. In 1997, he edited and contributed to Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Indiana University Press).
Jeffrey Gonda
Jeffrey D. Gonda is an Assistant Professor of American History in the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a Faculty Associate in the Alan K. Campbell Public Affairs Institute. He received his Ph.D. in History and African American Studies from Yale University in 2012. His research, writing, and teaching focus on the intersections of race, law, and politics in the 20th Century and he is currently completing a manuscript entitled Home Front: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement.
Samuel Gruber
Samuel D. Gruber (B.A., Medieval Studies, Princeton University; Ph.D., Architectural History, Columbia University) has been Lecturer in the Jewish Studies at Syracuse University since 1994, and has frequently taught elsewhere. Since 2006 he has studied Jewish settlement patterns in pre-modern Europe. Gruber is author of American Synagogues: A Century of Architecture and Jewish Community (2003) and Synagogues (1999) and reports and articles on art, architecture, and urbanism.
Alex Lichtenstein
Alex Lichtenstein, author of Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South, is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University and Associate Editor of the American Historical Review. His articles on prison history, US labor and civil rights activism, and South African trade unions have appeared in Labor, Journal of African History, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of Peasant Studies, International Review of Social History, and the LA Review of Books. Most recently he co-edited an issue of Radical History Review devoted to the history of the global anti-apartheid movement. He is currently researching a history of South African industrial relations under apartheid.
Martin Modlinger
Martin Modlinger is Scientific Director at the Renewable Freedom Foundation, an organization dedicated to civil liberties, digital freedom, and open access to knowledge. Until 2014, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Comparative Literature and Culture at the University of Bremen (Germany). His PhD in German Studies at the University of Cambridge examined ‘The Theresienstadt Ghetto in History and Literature’. Modlinger's academic interests and projects include the globalization of memory, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, as well as modern and contemporary English and German literature and culture, literary historiography, and literary anthropology.
Brian Purnell
Brian Purnell is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Bowdoin College. He is the author of Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (University Press of Kentucky, 2013), which won the New York Historical Association best manuscript prize. His current research project is a history of Black ghettos in the US. He lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Leana Amaez, and their four children.
Benjamin Ravid
Benjamin Ravid is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, which he chaired from 1989-1992. He specializes in the history of the Jews of Venice and their ghetto. His publications include Economics and Toleration in Seventeenth Century Venice (1978) and over fifty articles on Venetian Jewry, nine of which were photo-reproduced in Studies on the Jews of Venice, 1382-1797 (2003). He also co-edited The Jews of Early Modern Venice (2001) and is currently working on a history of the Jews of Venice to 1797.
Stephen Robertson
Stephen Robertson is Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and Professor in the Department of History and Art History, at George Mason University. He is author of Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960, co-author of Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars, and one of the creators of the web site, Digital Harlem, which won the AHA’s inaugural Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History and the ALA’s ABC-CLIO Digital History Prize in 2010. Robertson is currently completing a project on undercover investigators in American life from the Civil War to WW2, and, with Shane White and Stephen Garton, working on a spatial history of the 1935 Harlem riot.
Helene Sinnreich
Helene J. Sinnreich is Director of the Center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies and Professor of History at Youngstown State University and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Jewish Identities. Her research focuses on Holocaust victim experience, particularly ghettoization, hunger, and sexual abuse. She is currently working on a book about the Krakow Ghetto. She was a fellow at Yad Vashem (2009) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2007). Her forthcoming book A Story of Survival: The Lodz Ghetto Diary of Heinek Fogel will be published by Yad Vashem..
Gavin Steingo
Gavin Steingo is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include African music (particularly southern Africa), music and materialism, labor and performance, and the anthropology of sound and listening. Dr. Steingo has published papers in numerous journals and edited collections and is currently completing two projects: a monograph on music, technology, and aesthetics in post-apartheid South Africa, and an edited collection (with Jairo Moreno) on sound and value.
Kenneth Stow
Kenneth Stow is Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at the University of Haifa, Israel, and has been a visiting professor at, among others, Yale, Michigan, Smith College, and the Pontifical Gregorian University. He has been a Fellow at the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University. He founded the journal Jewish History and served as its Editor for twenty-five years until 2012. He is the author of: Passage to Equality: The Diary of Anna del Monte; Jewish Dogs, An Image and Its Interpreters: Continuity in the Jewish-Catholic Encounter. Stanford University Press, 2006; Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century, University of Washington Press: Seattle, 2001; and Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe. Harvard, Cambridge, 1992; as well as articles in the American Historical Review, Speculum, and Renaissance Quarterly. Current research is on the effects of legal change on de-confessionalization and Jewish emancipation in the early modern and modern periods.
Anika Walke
Anika Walke was educated at the University of Oldenburg, Germany and the State University of St. Petersburg, Russia. She completed her graduate career at University of California-Santa Cruz. In 2010, she was a Research Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and maintains an active research agenda in countries of the former Soviet Union. As of July 2014, she is Assistant Professor of Russian History at Washington University in St. Louis. Anika's forthcoming book, Pioneers and Partisans: Soviet Jewish Youth Confront the Nazi-Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2015), weaves together oral histories, video testimonies, and memoirs produced in the former Soviet Union to show how the first generation of Soviet Jews, born after the foundation of the USSR, experienced the Nazi genocide and how they remember it after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Lenore Weitzman
Lenore J. Weitzman has been a professor at the University of California, Stanford University, and Harvard University -- where she received Harvard’s “Phi Beta Kappa Distinguished Teaching Award.” She is currently the Robinson Professor of Sociology and Law (emeritus) at George Mason University. Her earlier work, in family law, included the award-winning The Divorce Revolution: the Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America (1985), which focused national attention on the economic hardships that no-fault divorce laws created for women and children. Her current work focuses on the Holocaust. She co-edited Women in the Holocaust, (Yale, 1999) with Dalia Ofer, a finalist for two Jewish Book Awards, and is now writing a book on the “Kashariyot”, the young women who were secret "couriers" for the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. In 2011 she was invited to give the keynote address to the United Nations General Assembly on the International Day of Holocaust Remembrance. Her other honors include a Guggenheim fellowship; membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; and a Fulbright Fellowship in Israel.- Core Participants
Caroline Acker - acker@andrew.cmu.edu
Shawn Alfonso-Wells - shawna@andrew.cmu.edu
Jay Aronson - aronson@andrew.cmu.edu
Stephen Brockmann - smb@andrew.cmu.edu
Bill Chase - wchase@pitt.edu
Allyson Creasman - acreasman@cmu.edu
Seymour Drescher - syd@pitt.edu
Michal Friedman - mrf25@andrew.cmu.edu
Maurine Greenwald - greenwal@pitt.edu
Emanuela Grama - egrama@andrew.cmu.edu
Donna Harsch - dh44@andrew.cmu.edu
Kwame Holmes - kwameh@andrew.cmu.edu
Louise Lippincott - lippincottl@carnegiemuseums.org
Andrew Masich - aemasich@heinzhistorycenter.org
David Miller - dwmiller@andrew.cmu.edu
Mame-Fatou Niang - mniang@andrew.cmu.edu
Afeworki Paulos - apaulos2@andrew.cmu.edu
Steven Schlossman - sls@cmu.edu
Adam Shear - ashear@pitt.edu
Donald Sutton - ds27@andrew.cmu.edu
- Pre-Doctoral Fellows
Alissa Bellotti
Alissa Bellotti is a PhD candidate in modern German history at Carnegie Mellon University. Her primary research interests include the social and cultural history of divided Germany, the politics of youth and youth cultures, German (re)unification, and oral history. She received her MA in history from the University of Connecticut and her BA in economics and international affairs from the George Washington University.
Susan Grunewald
Susan Grunewald is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on the reconstruction of the Soviet economy and German prisoners of war from 1945 to 1956. She works with Professor Wendy Goldman.
Cassie Miller
Cassie Miller is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research examines the urban crisis in Brooklyn and Queens through the lens of the Catholic Church and its parishioners. Her work illustrates how changes at the parish level contributed to a growing divide between liberal and conservative Catholics in the postwar period. Her research inserts religion and religious organizations into the story of the urban crisis and grassroots conservatism, while also recasting the narrative of the urban crisis as one not simply of decline, but of local activism and the utilization of private institutions to support economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Avigail Oren
Avigail Oren is a graduate student a Carnegie Mellon University working under the supervision of Caroline J. Acker, Joe W. Trotter, and Rachel Kranson (University of Pittsburgh). Her research focuses on 20th c. U.S. urban history, specifically on the development of public health and social welfare programs and infrastructure. She has just begun work on her dissertation, which examines the evolving sectarian commitment of postwar Jewish Community Centers (JCCs) in the U.S. during the urban crisis.- Administrative Assistant
Hikari Aday
Program Coordinator for CAUSE, Carnegie Mellon University