Fellows

Conrad Allen, George L. Mosse European Cultural History Fellow

Conrad Allen is a doctoral student in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his M.A. from UW in 2018 and holds a B.A. in history from the Ohio State University. His research focuses on the relationship between class, gender, and war in Europe during the twentieth century. In his M.A. thesis he looked at how aristocratic ideas of manliness shaped British army tactics during the world wars, particularly within the cavalry. He is currently planning his dissertation research, in which he hopes to examine how the memory of the First World War was shaped throughout Western Europe.

Mingcong Bai, Mosse Peer Advisor

Currently a senior, Mingcong Bai is a double major in History and Russian Language. Mingcong has a strong interest in personal perspectives and oral histories of social, political, and economic reforms in Socialist countries in the 1980s – especially in the cases of former Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Outside of history, he also participates in free and open source software development, translates software applications and lyrics, and preparing food with friends. Mingcong plans to further focus his studies in graduate school.

Joe Banin, George L. Mosse Modern Jewish History Fellow

Joe Banin is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He completed his BSc in Government and History at the London School of Economics in 2010, and his MPhil in American History at the University of Cambridge in 2016. For his MPhil research, he examined the response of the American media to the Holocaust through the eyes of the liberal weekly newspaper, the Nation. His current research interests include American Jewish history, U.S. foreign policy, Zionism, and Neoconservatism.

Barak Ben-Aroia, PhD Candidate at HUJI

Barak Ben-Aroia is currently finishing his M.A at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he also completed his B.A studies in history. His main field of interest is the cultural history of twentieth-century Germany. In his M.A, he examines the changing meaning of the perception of Heimat in twentieth-century German culture through its imagination and expression in several versions of the same Heimatfilm. His Ph.D. project considers various remakes of German films and analyzes their discussion of several key concepts of the modern German identity discourse. Through a close reading of the repetitions and changes of these “keywords” in different contexts – the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and the two German states during the Cold War – this project seeks to offer a new perception of the development of German nationality and its negotiation in popular culture.

Boaz Berger, Exchange Fellow (2019-2020)

Boaz Berger is currently finishing his M.A at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he also completed his B.A studies in history. His main field of interest is British cultural history during the long 18th century. In his M.A research he examines how the War of American Independence was visually depicted in England. In his PhD he will examine how British politicians embraced a modern visual representation of "chivalry" in order to cope with the crisis at the turn of the 19th century.

Tobias Bitterli, Exchange Fellow (2017-2018)

Tobias Bitterli is a PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he also completed his B.A and M.A studies in history. He is the 2017-2018 George L. Mosse Fellow to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his dissertation, he examines how aristocratic and bourgeois collectors of cabinets of curiosities in the 16th and 17th century used their collections to produce, disseminate, and organize knowledge. During his stay at the University of Wisconsin-Madison he hopes to deepen his knowledge of history of science and is looking forward to using the various special collections the library at UW has to offer, especially the collection about the history of science and the history of the book.

Amos Bitzan, Mosse Faculty Exchange Fellow (2019-2020)

Amos Bitzan is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Center for Jewish Studies at UW-Madison. He teaches courses in modern Jewish history, the history of antisemitism and anti-Judaism, and the history of the Holocaust. His first book project is entitled Discipline in the Age of Pleasure: The Origins of Jewish Studies in Nineteenth-Century Germany. It points to the rise of new reading practices among Jewish men and women in the late 1700s and early 1800s as an origin point for the academic field of Wissenschaft des Judentums, arguing that the field’s founders envisioned it as a solution to the problems they saw in both the state of rabbinic study and in the novel reading modes linked to the growth of Yiddish and German imaginative literature and pleasure reading in Ashkenaz.

Michal Friedman, George L. Mosse HUJI Coordinator

Michal Friedman is the 2018-2019 George L. Mosse Fellow to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently working on her M.A at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also completed her B.A studies in history and received the Dean's and Rector's Awards in the Humanities graduating summa cum laude. Her main field of interest is European cultural history, and most especially the history of food. Her paper on the rise and fall of the peacock as food in Europe from a cultural, religious and economical perspectives won the Hed Award for excellent papers focusing on the early modern period.

Yuval Gabay, HUJI MA student (2019-2021)

Yuval Gabay is currently working toward obtaining his B.A. in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In autumn 2019, he is going to start his M.A. at the same university, where he will focus on the Middle Ages in Europe. He is the 2019-2020 George L. Mosse Fellow to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For two years, he has been serving as an editor for the students’ journal of Institution of History’s, Hayo Haya (Once Upon a Time). He is interested particularly in religious history, and in how a growing society has a bigger appetite for spiritual food, as well as for actual food.

Ezra Gerard, George L. Mosse LGBTQ History Fellow

Ezra Gerard received his BA in history from the University of Michigan in 2014. He is now a first year PhD student in History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Broadly speaking, his research concerns transgender history in the United States and Germany in the mid-twentieth century. Ezra is particularly interested in examining the prominence of the “wrong body” narrative in mass media representations of trans identity and in the role of personal narrative and memory in the construction of trans histories.

Ethell Gershengorin, George L. Mosse Modern Jewish History Fellow

Ethell Gershengorin is a first-year Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her B.A. in International Relations at Boston University. Her primary area of interest is the intersection of class, religion and gender identities under the Soviet regime and the ways in which everyday Soviet citizens, especially Jewish women, adapted to and confronted policies. Her research will examine Jewish women’s resistance to and disruption of Soviet policies and norms through art and material culture.

Chad S.A. Gibbs, George L. Mosse Modern Jewish History Fellow

Chad S.A. Gibbs is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He completed an MA in history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 2016 and his BA in history at the University of Wyoming in 2013. His dissertation research uses testimonial sources to explore spatial and social networks of resistance between prisoners inside the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka. He is particularly interested in how inmates used preexisting relationships as well as new bonds formed on work details in order to build trust, gain access to space, and conceal their plans for revolt.

Claire Hitter, George L. Mosse Program Undergraduate Intern (2018-2020)

Claire Hitter is currently working on her B.A. in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Having recently studied European Jewish history she has developed an interest in the cultural expressions of Judaism. She is especially fascinated by individual stories and has enjoyed the opportunity to write biographical essays for classes. Claire has received Dean’s List recognition for three consecutive semesters and is excited to develop her interests and uncover fascinating stories in her position as the George L. Mosse Department of History Undergraduate Intern.

Svea Larson, George L. Mosse European Cultural History Fellow

Svea Larson is a first-year Ph.D. student in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her B.A. in History and French at Pacific University in Oregon. Her research interests focus on immigration, gender, and material transfer in the early half of the Twentieth century, and is interested in Northern Europe and France. She has previously completed research at Uppsala University in Sweden on immigration and return migration to and from the United States.

Abigail Lewis, George L. Mosse European Cultural History Fellow

Abigail Lewis is a PhD candidate in European History at UW-Madison. She completed her M.A in History at UW in 2014. She received her BA in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012. She is the 2018-2019 recipient of the JB and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her work combines political and cultural history with visual studies, art, and public history. She is currently completing her dissertation, entitled “The Collaborationist Eye” which tells the history of photographic production, circulation, and display during the Nazi occupation of France and under the Vichy Regime. She is currently expanding this research to consider the relationship between images and antisemitism and the role of photography in constituting collective memories of the Holocaust in France. In 2018, she taught a course as the George L Mosse Teaching Fellow, called “Picturing History: Visual Culture and Memory in Modern Europe.”

Aly Long, Mosse Peer Advisor

Aly Long is one of our undergraduate program’s Mosse Peer Advisors. She is a senior majoring in History with certificates in French and European Studies. Her research centers on Eastern Europe in the early 20th century with a strong interest in the Baltic Region, specifically interwar independent and Soviet-occupied Lithuania. Besides history, Aly has a passion for international culture and travel, having recently returned from London where she worked as an intern for the Polish Cultural Institute. She also enjoys freelance writing and going on road trips with her friends.

Alice Coulter Main, George L. Mosse European Cultural History Fellow

Alice Coulter Main is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She received her M.A. in History from UW Madison in 2018; her thesis was entitled “Sexing the Terror: The Jeunesse Dorée and the Fall of the Parisian Jacobin Club (1794)”. She holds a B.A. from the University of California Berkeley in History and French. Her work focuses on the French Revolution, particularly the role of gender and sexuality in counter-revolutionary critiques of republicanism. She also writes about representations of the Revolution in nineteenth-century Academic art and art institutions. Her adviser is Prof. Suzanne Desan.

David Milne, Mosse-Friends of UW Libraries Fellow (2019-2020)

David Milne is a historian based at the University of East Anglia in the UK. His first two books, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (NY: Hill and Wang, 2008) and Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) together constitute an intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy from 1898 to 2016. He is also an editor of the two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History.

While in Madison Dr. Milne will conduct research at the Wisconsin Historical Society for his third book: Witness to Catastrophe: A Life of Sigrid Schultz. A full-scale study of Sigrid Schultz, the first woman to become bureau chief for a major U.S. newspaper (the Chicago Tribune), the book will examine Schultz’s astute and far-sighted reporting, from her Berlin vantage-point, on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Working for an isolationist newspaper in a totalitarian state to illuminate the workings and world ambitions of a brutal regime, Schultz's achievements as a journalist were remarkable.

Nick O'Connell, George L. Mosse Program Undergraduate Intern (2019-2020)

Nick is currently working on his B.A. in History and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Born and raised in Italy, Nick developed an interest for 20th Century European History and is particularly fascinated by the rise of Italian Fascism and the insurgency campaigns of Italian partisans. This fall, he will work on his senior thesis with Professor Patrick Iber, focusing on the methodology of analyzing current events in an historical perspective. As a member of the George L. Mosse Program, Nick is thrilled to further explore European modern history.

Kayci Olson Harris, Mosse Teaching Fellow

Kayci Olson Harris is a Ph.D. Candidate in European History at UW-Madison. She received her M.A. in History from UW in 2015 and an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2013. She completed her B.A. in History and French at the University of Georgia in 2012. Her work examines the Cold War through shifting cultural and political relations between France and the Soviet Union. She is currently writing her dissertation, “Pas de deux: Ballet exchanges and Franco-Soviet cultural interaction in the 1950s-70s,” which explores how notions of gender, aesthetics, consumer culture, and ideology shaped Cold War divisions. Her work seeks to integrate a grassroots perspective into transnational history by analyzing how French and Soviet journalists, performers, audience members, and others made sense of renewed cultural interaction in 1953.

Ofer Pogorelsky, PhD Candidate at HUJI

Ofer Pogorelsky is a PhD student in the department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI). He completed an MA in history and a BA in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE integrated program), both from HUJI. He was a fellow of the program for the study of Late Antiquity and his MA thesis dealt with pilgrimage in the Negev desert. In his PhD research he examines the history of the Nabatean realm, a territory encompassing roughly the Negev desert, the Sinai Peninsula and southern Transjordan, in late antiquity (300-700 CE). He explores the development of this region and its inhabitants in several aspects: Hellenization, Christianization and urbanization. His work draws primarily upon documentary evidence such as inscriptions and papyri. His is also a research assistant at the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae, a joint project of HUJI and the University of Cologne.

Omri Shafer Raviv, Hebrew University Mosse Coordinator

Omri Shafer Raviv is currently a PhD candidate in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His dissertation, "Land, Demography and Labor in the Early Years of the Israeli Occupation," is a study of the Israeli policies regarding the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 1967–73. His last article "Studying an Occupied Society: Social Research, Modernization Theory and the Early Israeli Occupation, 1967–8" was published in Journal of Contemporary History (2018).

James Ungureanu, George L. Mosse Digital Archivist

James C. Ungureanu is an intellectual historian with a particular interest in the history of religious thought. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland and in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Queensland, an M.A. in the History of Christianity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and a double B.A. in Religious Studies and Philosophy from the University of California-Davis. He also teaches broadly, from introductory courses to the Bible to the history of science and religion. His first book, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, traces the origins, development, and popularization of the “conflict thesis,” the idea that science and religion are irrevocably at odds.